Streets of terror: marginalization, criminalization, and authoritarian renewal.

• Date: 22 March 2004
• Author: Scraton, Phil
• Published date: 22 March 2004
• Author: Scraton, Phil

Introduction

... the language of law and order is sustained by moralisms ... where the great syntax of "good" versus "evil," of civilised and uncivilised standards, of the choice between anarchy and order constantly divides the world up and classifies it into its appointed stations (Hall, 1979: 19).

AT THE MOMENT STUART HALL CHRONICLED THE "DRIFT" INTO A "LAW AND order society," Margaret Thatcher's first New Right administration was elected to power. By invoking "inherent" social values and an overarching moral imperative, law-and-order rhetoric appealed to a collective common sense, "welding people to that 'need for authority' ... so significant for the Right in the construction of consent to its authoritarian programme." Authoritarian populism was not merely a "rhetorical device," it operated and exploited "genuine contradictions," reflecting a "rational and material core" (Ibid.: 20).

The "drive" toward a "more disciplinary, authoritarian kind of society" was "no short-term affair." It embodied a regression to a "stone-age morality" promoted by politicians alongside, in popular discourse, "a blind spasm of control: the feeling that the only remedy for a society which is declared to be 'ungovernable' is the imposition of order, through a disciplinary use of law by the state" (Hall, 1980: 3). The "shift 'from above' [was] pioneered by, harnessed to, and, to some extent, legitimated by a popular groundswell below" (Hall, 1985: 116).

Hall and his colleagues (Hall et al., 1978) drew criticism for overemphasizing the significance of ideology while subordinating the structural relations of political economy (see Jessop et al., 1988). Yet for Hall (1985: 120) it was "impossible to conceptualise or achieve" hegemony without accepting the economy as the "decisive nucleus" around which civil society was consolidated. As Poulantzas (1978: 203-204) argued, "authoritarian statism ... intensified state control over every sphere of socioeconomic life, combined with radical decline of the institutions of political democracy and with draconian and multiform curtailment of so-called 'formal' liberties."

For Poulantzas, the strength and effectiveness of authoritarian interventions within advanced democracies was not attained through the direct deployment of state-sanctioned force, but by "mechanisms of fear." The New Right understood that if the free-market agenda was to succeed, the battle for "hearts and minds" had to be engaged and won. Today, over two decades later, the pillars on which the authoritarian mantle was laid are well established and rarely contested: the "power of the unions," the "overindulgence" in welfare, the acceptance of "permissiveness," the "lawlessness of the streets," the "leniency" of the courts, and the "softening" of punishment. Thatcher's first administration set its sights: welfare claimants and benefit fraud, local government and public housing, young offenders and the "short, sharp shock" of military-style detention centers, and so on. A second term was won on the battlefields of the Malvinas/Falklands; a third-term secured in the coalfields of Britain. These were resounding defeats for the "enemy without" and the "enemy within." Each authoritarian intervention provided clear evidence of political-economic objectives realized through ideological endeavor (see Scraton, 2002a).

As this unprecedented regulatory agenda rolled out, the New Right--without a hint of irony--espoused "Victorian Values." Later there followed a similar representation of a mythical "golden age" of social stability and moral purpose under the slogan "Back to Basics." As with most moral proclamations, rhetoric dominated substance. Critical academics, including Stuart Hall, were keen to emphasize that authoritarianism generated resistance, that people were not mere "dupes," yet the populist appeal for tough legislation, hard-line policing, heavy sentences, and uncompromising punishment regimes was fulfilled.

The inevitable consequence of authoritarianism was, and remains, the net-widening process of criminalization. In a variation on Howard Becker's (1971: 341) assertion that the "act's deviant character lies in the way it is defined in the public mind," Nils Christie (1998: 121) makes the point that crime "does not exist," it "is created." "First," he states, "there are acts. Then follows the long process of giving meaning to those acts." Central to the process are ideological constructions underpinning the "meaning" of everyday life that are deeply institutionalized and provide "the ready justification for the marginalisation, differential policing and punishment of identifiable groups" (Scraton and Chadwick, 1987: 213). In this context, criminalization occurs when a "criminal label" is applied "to a particular social category," its success depending on "how certain acts are labeled and on who is doing the labeling" (Hall and Scraton, 1981: 488).

The focus on violence, often exaggerated through sensationalist media reporting, "makes it easier to mobilize popular measures of support for containment." Consequently, but not necessarily consciously, criminalization "can be employed to underpin the repressive or control functions of the state ..." (Ibid.: 490). Christie's assertion is that criminalization does not happen in a vacuum. Each definitional moment in the roll call of acts ascribed meaning as crimes has to be interpreted and analyzed in its historical, social, political, and economic context. Thus, criminalization "is influenced by contemporary politics, economic conditions, and dominant ideologies," reflecting and responding to "the determining contexts of social class, gender, sexuality, 'race,' and age" (Chadwick and Scraton, 2001: 69).

Shackling the American Dream

It is, of course, a tactical absolute of "anti-terrorism"--whether practiced in Belfast, Jerusalem, or Los Angeles--to deny terrorism a public voice (Davis, 1990: 300). In his definitive analysis of structural and social inequality in contemporary Los Angeles, Mike Davis records the sequence of events preceding the institutionalization of "Kafkaesque class justice" (Ibid.: 288) through which the police "now have virtually unlimited discretion, day or night to target 'undesirables,' especially youth" (Ibid.: 286). Neither denying nor underestimating the extent of inter-gang violence, Davis notes how gang leaders identify "jobs, housing, better schools, recreation facilities, and community control of institutions" as being central to the marginalization, disaffection, and criminalization of children and young people. "[H]owever trapped in their own delusionary spirals of vendetta and self-destruction," those directly responsible for inter-gang violence "clearly understood that they were the children of deferred dreams and defeated equality" (Ibid.: 300).

Yet the proclaimed "spiral of violence" within U.S. inner-city, working-class neighborhoods has been matched by a spiral of aggressive laws and their uncompromising enforcement. As Elliott Currie (1998: 185) observes, in the late 1960s the U.S. "stood at a crossroads" in its "response to urban violence." Two studies, the President's 1967 Crime Commission and the Kerner Commission on urban disorders, "reflected a remarkable degree of consensus about urban violence and its remedies." That consensus called for a "balanced approach to crime." Though a well-resourced and effective criminal justice system was considered a priority, both commissions "insisted that we could never imprison our way out of America's violent crime problem...." The key long-term issue--"attacking crime"--could only be achieved through "attacking social exclusion--reducing poverty, creating opportunities for sustaining work, supporting besieged families and the marginalized young."

According to Currie, the alternative "road" emphasized incarceration. Politicians and media commentators characterized the United States as being "insufficiently punitive." Its "rehabilitative efforts were useless" and "social conditions," portrayed as "breeding grounds for violence," were represented as being irrelevant to explaining the rise in violent crime (Ibid.: 186). He continues:

At the extreme it was argued that the rather timid programs launched in the 1960s against poverty, joblessness, and racial discrimination were part of the problem, not part of the solution. We had coddled criminals, weakened the resolve of the poor to better themselves, spawned a climate of permissiveness, and provided excuses for crime (Ibid.: 186). And so the U.S. chose the authoritarian road. Neither prophet nor criminologist was required to predict the outcome: "bursting prisons, devastated cities, and a violent crime rate ... unmatched in the developed world." Social justice, the antidote to structural, determining inequalities, was sacrificed on the multi-billion-dollar, increasingly privatized altar of criminal justice. In this vicious, fundamentalist and absolutist climate of crime as sin and punishment as retribution, the complexity of context was lost to the simplicity of cause. The dominant rhetoric echoed and fuelled popular assumptions of individual and social pathology.

Pinpointing the precise political and ideological moments that contextualized and shaped increasingly draconian laws and criminal justice policies throughout the U.S., Parenti (1999) exposes the punitive and corrupt practices of policing and incarceration and the overt targeting of "problem populations," specifically Black and Hispanic communities. As authoritarian policing expanded--in reach and severity--the military-corporate model alone could not deliver a politics of obedience within communities. In imposing the harsh regulatory functions of law enforcement against black and working-class youth, the processes of managerialism, training, and police-community relations were "spun" politically through public relations exercises directed to winning not just "heart and minds," but...