Imagining the crime victim: the rhetoric of victimhood as a source of oppression.

• Date: 22 March 2005
• Author: Walklate, Sandra
• Published date: 22 March 2005
• Author: Walklate, Sandra

Introduction

IT IS NOW COMMONPLACE TO DISCUSS THE CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL CONDITION BY reference to the risk society thesis. In the view of some commentators, the contemporary condition transcends questions of risk in favor of a discourse that embraces questions of morality and precaution (see, for example, Ericson and Doyle, 2003). Yet much remains to be understood about the nature and impact of the risk society thesis, not only as it permeates public understandings, but also as it infiltrates public policy. Of course, much has been made of the differential impact of the risk society in relation to crime in contemporary life. Young (1999, 2003a), for example, talks of the move from the inclusive to the exclusive society and the concomitant rise in vindictiveness. Garland (2001) tells us about the embeddedness of risk-associated ideas in relation to criminal justice policy through the vehicle of the "culture of control." Both analyses (among others) take as given the importance of the crime victim as a dominant and symbolic reference point for government policy (qua Garland and Sparks, 2000). Arguably, however, analyses such as these do not delve deeply enough into the mechanisms underlying these processes or their impact. The purpose of this article is to explore a deeper analysis and to offer an understanding of the current imagining of the crime victim as a source of citizenship (Young, A., and Rush, 1994) and of oppressive citizenship. To achieve this level of understanding, this article falls into three parts. The first offers a critical review of contemporary analyses of criminal justice policy, with particular reference to the culture of control. The second considers this critical review and the questions it raises in the context of the crime victim. In the light of these considerations, the third section offers some thoughts on how to further develop our understanding of the "culture of control."

Control, Vindictiveness, and Regulation

Following what might be called the "Foucauldian" tradition, Garland (1985, 1990, 2001) has been concerned to trace a genealogy of contemporary criminal justice policy in the United Kingdom and the United States, with a particular emphasis on penal policy. Garland's problematic in the "culture of control" is to trace the development, growth, and impact of crime control strategies in those two countries. In the background of his analysis is his understanding of the transformations of late modern society: the enterprise culture, spatial mobility, individualism, and changes in the labor market and family structure. In the foreground are the concepts used to link these transformations with the contemporary nature of crime control strategies: responsiblization, new managerialism, adaptation to failure, and punitiveness, all of which comprise the culture of control. The cumulative effect of this has been the normalization of crime and an increasing awareness of the limits of the state to solve the crime problem. Much of this is very familiar to us, as is the elegance and incisiveness of Garland's argument. However, Young (2003b), Feeley (2003), and Braithwaite (2003) have subjected Garland's thesis to critical scrutiny. To develop this article, I shall review and address their concerns (and some of my own) under five headings, some of which are found in Young (2003b) and Feeley (2003): the problem of method, the problem of policy and politics, the problem of narrative, the problem of criminology, and the problem of political economy.

All three of Garland's critics address the problem of method. Young and Feeley speak to Garland's preoccupation with comparing the U.S. and the U.K. Young's position is that Garland pays too much attention to the similarities between these two jurisdictions and Feeley suggests that both are only useful as "outliers," that is, as the deviant cases that might be usefully revealing about the norm with which Garland is not concerned. Both critics pointedly state that Currie (1997) starts with a similar problematic, but reaches a different conclusion by looking at other examples. Specifically, it is possible to identify societies with a greater government commitment to a social safety net, resulting in a lower crime rate and less harsh penal institutions, i.e., there is no inevitability about the culture of control.

Braithwaite's methodological concerns are generally applicable to the followers of Foucauldian methodology. He points out that Garland's analysis is "both magisterial and myopic." The myopia is most troublesome for Braithwaite given Garland's absence of methodological explicitness. In other words, Garland fails to clarify the basis for his choice of examples for analysis, and we are thus left uncertain as to why one line of analysis is pursued, possibly at the expense of others that might be equally fruitful. Due to this methodological myopia, Braithwaite argues, Garland becomes preoccupied with a sociology of punishment that neglects the wider world of regulation, particularly that of business regulation. He connects this shortsightedness generally to criminology's widespread "forgetting" of Sutherland's work; Garland's work thus tells us a story of "the punishment of the poor," when there might be other stories to tell. This is an issue to which we shall return.

The problem of method connects with the second problem, that of politics and policy. To summarize, perhaps unfairly, the critical comments cited here (including my own), Garland's genealogy reveals an understanding of changing political and policy rhetoric, rather than of reality. As Braithwaite (2003) and Jones and Newburn (2002) show, the zero tolerance story in the U.S. and the U.K. is not a straightforward process of policy convergence between the two jurisdictions. Moreover, the story is not the simple success story we have been led to believe it is in New York. Examined in its detail rather than its rhetoric, the picture is more complex. The success of the rhetoric is, of course, interesting in itself, but there is arguably also a need to understand the reality of the policy process. This leads us to consider the quite complex way in which policy may or may not be embraced and implemented and who or what might be the driving force underpinning such change. For example, Jones and Newburn (2002) talk of the importance of policy processes and levels, while Ryan et al. (2001) point to the need for a much more refined understanding of policy networks. All of this might look different in distinctive policy arenas. Garland acknowledges that this is a complex process riddled with...