AGGRESSIVE BEHAVIOR Volume 12, pages 149-153

Book Review

Crime, Capitalism and Community: Three Essays in Socialist Criminology, by Ian Taylor. Toronto: Butterworth & Co, 1983. 156 pp.

If Marx was correct in his assertion that progress depends upon thesis, antithesis, synthesis, then Ian Taylor has made a major contribution to the second, if not the third, stage of knowledge. The general appeal of the book must be limited by its specific consideration of the Canadian scene and in its use of pre-1980 data (when the original versions of the essays were written) but his criticism of both right wing and liberal analyses of the crime “problem” is applicable to most advanced capitalist societies. In offering an outsider’s view of the “routine” problems of crime and society, Taylor leaves us in no doubt of his mastery of the ideologies of both capitalism and socialism, but throughout the book there is a refusal to acknowledge the available empirical work (some of it from liberal criminologists) that would support his position and even extend it. There is a pervasive sense that good research must be equated with politically “correct” research, and thus Taylor ignores large bodies of established work of which, as a critic, he should be aware even if only to refute it.

Taylor’s opening section deals with a broad comparison of the British and Canadian political scene concentrating on the hegemonic crisis faced by the British Labor government during the 1970s. This crisis resulted in the advent of Thatcherism wherein crime was seen as symptomatic of a country in moral crisis and in which wide popular support was achieved for tough law-and-order approaches to the crime problem. By contrast, Canada (at the time of Taylor’s writing, prior to the return of a conservative party) had faced no such crisis of confidence, and the electorate, together with the government, viewed crime as a technical and managerial problem ultimately soluble through the implementation of “scientifically based” treatment and management. While attempting to reassure the populace that crime is under control, Taylor argues that the state has begun to employ wide surveillance techniques and to use law and policing as means of controlling and suppressing dissident movements.

Taylor sets out to offer a blueprint for socialist reform in the justice system. As a believer in democratic socialism, he describes the criminologists’ role:

By virtue of an honest attempt to discard a utopian and purist commitment to “revolution,” a generation of committed socialists has begun to construct a broad series of transitional, reformist programs across the wide range of popular concerns vis-a-vis social and economic policy (p 36).

0 1986 Alan R. Liss, Inc.

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Lest some of his suggestions fall into the wrong hands and get picked up by the soft machine of capitalism, he tells us in the italics to which he so frequently resorts that “there can be no socialist criminology that does not depend in the$rst instance on authentically socialist economic policies ” (p 36).

With this caveat, the reader is eager to learn of the blueprint for reform and no wonder. Taylor et a1 [1973] in “The New Criminology: For a Social Theory of Deviance” promised by that title at least to describe the true causes of crime in capitalist society and its solutions through a new Marxist interpretation. But what the book in fact represented was a scholarly, eloquent, and detailed critique of epistemol- ogy, capitalism, and the errors of liberalism. Its great value lay in its capacity to make us rethink many of the taken-for-granted axioms of Western criminology: our faith in empiricism, our assumption that crime was personally dysfunctional, our belief in piecemeal amelioration of the system, our preoccupation with blue-collar crime. Alas, it did not offer a coherent alternative position. (This seems to be the fate of much paradigm shifting in the social sciences of late. HarrC and Secord [1972] and other ethogeneticists also promised more than just criticism of traditional social psychology but failed to deliver.) I trust I will not do undue disservice to Taylor’s thesis by summarizing his blueprint for reform. His treatment of the police is composed of an extensive documenting of the RCMP’s excesses against QuCbCcois separatists and the brutality of Toronto police toward gays and blacks. To reduce the abuse he suggests democratic representation at complaints bureaus, a return to old- style community policing, and increased involvement of the community in determin- ing local policing policies. To avoid the use of police for political purposes and to curb brutality, the solution is to “democratize” the police. A similar solution is offered to the prison problem: “Juries and sentencing panels composed of an offend- er’s peers to adjudicate on troublesome, predatory or dangerous offenders in a direct unmystified and human manner” will ultimately lead to a “significant reduction in the size of the prison population” (p 59). Local citizenry should sit on prison boards of management, and both prisoners and guards should have power over individual programs.

Such remedies seem inadequate indeed after the listing of the political abuses, personal suffering, economic exploitation, and increasing government intervention into routine “noncriminal” misbehavior. Nor are such suggestions unusual or even particularly radical. Community courts and neighborhood policing have been imple- mented in many countries, and lay people have served on a number of decision- making bodies in prisons and in the community (although admittedly on nothing like a representative basis). Stranger yet is the absence from Taylor’s thesis of a compar- ison of his position with the solutions offered by writers of different political leanings. Why not campaign for the replacement of prisons by community-service orders (an old “liberal” suggestion)? What of the arguments offered in favor of determinate sentencing and their extension-ie, that prejudice and bias can exist equally among lay people as among judges and that the offender has a right to a fair and unbiased sentence? Why does he disregard treatment approaches (in which I include vocational training, rather than merely the Skinnerian “personality modification” which he decries)? What of legal reform and the decriminalization of offenses?

Taylor’s continued acceptance of the role of both police and prisons seems to spring from an unresolved tension in his position. On the one hand he acknowledges the rights of “local women’s groups” who “want to see [measures] taken against recal-

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citrant or troublesome individuals” (p 63) and he admits that the traditional worlung class have “come to declare their support for particular forms of policing and indeed for an increased police presence in the community” (p 38). On the other hand, he deplores the inhumane and brutalizing effects of prison on the offender. This tension cannot be resolved by “democratizing” the criminal justice system. He himself admits the success of the soft machine of bourgeois ideology in convincing the working class of the need for “law and order.” Why then should representatives of the people behave in a compassionate or fair manner? Taylor cannot unburden himself of his ideological discomfort by dumping it on the shoulders of democracy.

Taylor’s analysis of homicide and violence fulfills its title chapter of being “some reflections” rather than an integrated socialist analysis. He notes that the news media frequently mislead the public into the belief that murder is an unpredictable, stranger- on-stranger crime perpetrated by motives of sexual or economic gain upon unsuspect- ing civilians. This view of the murderer stresses underlying pathology and gives disproportionate attention to serial and multiple murderers. The truth of the matter is that about 70% of murders occur between relatives or friends, and, taking this as his cue, he itemizes some social structural factors which may be relevant to the changing murder rate. He discusses the entry of women to the labor force and the state’s refusal to accommodate this basic change in family structure as well as the effects of unemployment, inflation, and increased service industry employment. He contends that the structural relationships of classes, ethnic groups, age groups, and sexes have been radically altered and have changed individuals’ willingness to resort to violence. He notes also the importance of ecological “social space” factors and the slowing down of the “revolution of rising expectations.” Criminologists perusing such an inclusive listing of homicide correlates will find little that is not familiar, which is why one feels frustrated by Taylor’s cry: “We repeat that in our view relationships of this kind need to be theorized in more detail with some attempt to spell out causal links betwen these economic, ecological and material changes.” The fact is that there have been numerous attempts to examine empirically the effects of rapid economic shifts (eg Merton’s [ 19631 theory of anomie), family reorganization [Loeber and Dishion, 19831, age and ethnicity [Wolfgang et al, 19721, density and crowding [eg, Laub, 1983), and expectations of opportunity [Short and Strodtbeck, 19651. None of these suggestions are new. To incorporate them into a grand theory of homicide would certainly be an advance, but this Taylor does not do. His insistence upon rejecting any psychological analysis as reductionist (I presume he refers to the narrow area of clinical psychology) means that the interpretation, attribution, and impact of these external factors on the world view of the individual actor are ignored. Yet murders are committed not by aggregate group minds or by disembodied social forces but by people. His unwillingness to assume the person as a unit of analysis seems to spring from some anachronistic belief that this will necessarily evoke a pathological explanation and from his belief that studying people’s processes of attribution will reduce “objective” economic conditions to nothing more than the figments of a deranged imagination.

Taylor holds a highly ambivalent position toward criminological data that can become self-serving. Frequently he casts doubt upon the validity of official figures, correctly pointing out that apparent fluctuations often reflect changes in recording techniques by police or special prosecutorial initiatives. At times he rejects statistical analyses completely: “We can say with certainty that the comparison between rates

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of crimes of violence in 1975 and 1982 or between such rates in Canada and in other societies has no clear ‘factual’ relationship to real behavior” (p 26). However, he notes in the next sentence that “recitation of statistics notwithstanding, real collapses may still have occurred in the degree of hope and trust people have with respect to their own community or Canadian society in general” (emphasis his). Subsequently he adds that “the fact remains that the statistics do portray a continuing increase in crime.” In one paragraph, Taylor queries, rejects, and accepts the same statistical data depending on his argument. Furthermore, he is happy to accept a “real” decline in hope-a variable that one suspects must be considerably harder to measure than the existence of a homicide. This ambivalence pervades the book. In malung the case for our inattention to forms of death resulting from industrial and vehicular accidents, he accepts the statistics on such deaths without proviso, and one is left with the impression that rather than data informing his position, he finds selective data that selectively suit his purpose. This cafeteria approach to statistics seems to be a perennial hazard for those working from an already established ideological position. Taylor’s argument would be more compelling and consistent if he made a case for the rejection or acceptance of official figures and then continued his case from that point.

Taylor’s examination of the death penalty centers chiefly on the public’s view of capital punishment as a metaphor for the need for authority and discipline-a need that is felt strongly by those living in the insecurity engendered by a competitive and privatized capitalist society and fed by sensationalist news media. Why the media should choose to misrepresent murder (which they certainly do) is an interesting issue not explored by Taylor but one which suggests the inappropriateness of the argument of the media as “in the pocket” of capitalists. The most important section of the essay is in fact a postscript added to the original work indicating that murders declined between 1976 and 1979 following the abolition of the death penalty. Taylor does not dwell long on this fact (presumably because such a decrease casts doubt on the utility of his earlier etiological factors), but it provides useful ammunition for those who are fighting the reintroduction of effective capital punishment in many American states.

In his final chapter, Taylor deals with the issues of the role of government welfare in a capitalist society. The argument clearly has more to say to economists (and I am not among them) than to sociologists. Broadly, Taylor argues that government acts to provide the best environment in which capitalism can flourish, while at the same time seeking to remove itself publicly from overt conspiracy with capitalists. While liberals explain the continued rate of welfare spending in terms of creating employment in the public sector, Taylor’s analysis, drawing strongly from Claus Offe’s, argues that welfare and crime control measures pacify the citizenry and maintain social order in a time when booms and slumps (engendered by a free-market economy) threaten it. The loss of informal social controls also stems from the high mobility, density, and living conditions resulting from capitalism which have usurped the formation of communities and forced reliance on external law-and-order agents. Such an analysis has been offered by Wenger and Bonomo [ 19811, who go on to maintain that the ever- increasing costs of criminal justice and welfare may ultimately lead to the demise of contemporary capitalism. Furthermore, they offer data to support their argument. It is surprising that Taylor ignores their work, which in spirit is so close to (even an extension of) his own.

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It remains mysterious as to why Taylor should have put “Crime” in first place on the title page. This book is really a study of capitalism and its effect on public spending and social relations in society. To a socialist this is obviously a correct emphasis, but for criminologists it leaves an abiding sense of frustration. It is hard to find a responsive human being described in the pages of this book. Yet it is clear from the passion with which he writes that it is the individual quality of lives as they are lived that profoundly matters to Taylor. Surely we can humanize criminal action without being branded as liberals or reductionists.

REFERENCES

Harre R, Secord, P (1972): “The Explanation of Social Behavior.” Oxford: Blackwell.

Laub J (1983): Urbanism, race and crime. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 20: 183- 193.

Loeber R, Dishion T (1983): Early predictors of male delinquency: A review. Psychological Bulletin 94:68-99.

Merton R (1963): “Social Theory and Social Structure.” New York: Free Press.

Short J, Strodtbeck F (1965): “Group Process and Gang Delinquency.” Chicago: University Press.

Anne Campbell School of Criminal Justice Rutgers-The State University

Taylor I, Walton P, Young, J (1973): “The New Criminology: For a Social Theory of Devi- ance.” London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Wenger M, Bonomo T (1981): Crime, the crisis of capitalism and social revolution. In Greenberg DF (ed): “Crime and Capitalism.” Palo Alto, California: Mayfield.

Wolfgang M, Figlio R, and Sellin T (1972): “De- linquency in a Birth Cohort.” Chicago: Uni- versity of Chicago Press.