chlamor
10-13-2007, 07:46 PM
Crime As Social Control
IS CRIME PROTO-REVOLUTIONARY - A PRE-POLITICAL FORM OF REBELLION? OR IS crime a form of social control? Is it the "auto-repression" of communities that have throughout history rebelled in organized and unorganized ways? It is often alleged that during the late 1960s and early 1970s, many on the Left romanticized "street crime" as proto-revolutionary rebellion. To some extent this position had currency among elements of the white ultra-Left. However, mainstream criminologists and historians of the 1960s have overemphasized this (Cummins, 1994).
To the extent that there was romanticization of crime, it was based, in part, on a warped reading of Fanon's ideas about the psychologically salubrious and politically heuristic effects of revolutionary violence and his casting of the lumpen classes in colonial towns as potential militants, rather than as the declasse and dangerous dross white Marxists often took them to be. Yet, to be fair, left valorization of crime as proto-political was neither common nor even very important in shaping left politics around criminal justice; any back issue of this journal's earliest incarnations will attest to that.
So what is a radical reading of crime? By crime, I mostly mean the "index offenses" or interpersonal violence, such as murder, rape, and assault, along with noncorporat
e theft like burglary and strong-arm robbery. To some extent, however, we can throw in the violence associated with addiction and street-level narcocapitalism.
A look at the real impacts of street crime begins to reveal that crime and the fear of crime are forms of social control. Strong-arm robbery, rape, homicide, and general thuggery in poor communities leave people scared, divided, cynical, and politically confused; ultimately these acts drive the victims of capitalism, racism, and sexism into the arms of a racist, probusiness, sexist state. In short, crime justifies state violence and even creates popular demand for state repression. Thus, it helps to liquidate or at least neutralize a whole class of potential rebels. Crime also short-circuits the social cohesion necessary for radical mobilization.
<snip>
http://s31.photobucket.com/albums/c395/chlamor/panopticon.jpg
As one community organizer in San Francisco put it: "How do you think they get all the police in here? Without bad guys, there's no so-called good guys." 1 Foucault recognized this point in Discipline and Punish. Commenting on the politics of crime in France at the end of the 18th century, Foucault summed up the political benefits of crime -- then and now -- as follows:
Crime was too useful for them [the authorities] to dream of anything as crazy -- or ultimately as dangerous -- as a society without crime. No crime means no police. What makes the presence and control of the police tolerable for the population, if not fear of the criminal? This institution of the police, which is so recent and so oppressive, is only justified by that fear. If we accept the presence in our midst of these uniformed men, who have exclusive right to carry arms, who demand our papers, who come and prowl on our doorsteps, how would any of this be possible if there were no criminals? And if there weren't articles every day in the newspaper telling us how numerous and dangerous our criminals are (Foucault, 1980: 47)?
How, then, does crime function as social control in the U.S. today? A comparison of crime with the most extreme example of state terrorism, death squads, is instructive. What were the hallmarks and political impacts of state terror in Central America in the 1980s? State violence against popular movements was systematic, but also deliberately random and spectacularly arbitrary -- all of which helped to spread ubiquitous fear. People simply "disappeared" forever or, after being captured, showed up on public roads mutilated, their corpses serving as political advertisements. Such tactics caused thousands of activists to give up on politics completely and to retreat into their private lives. Other comrades, particularly survivors of torture, often became pathological and difficult to work with. Most destructive of all, though, was the fact that the best and the brightest were just gone -- dead.
As a result, many potential activists were simply too scared to attend meetings or read radical literature or go to demonstrations. State terror, most graphically embodied in the death squads, scrambled the everyday patterns upon which organizing depended. Street crime in America does the same.
<snip>
http://www.historyisaweapon.org/defcon1 ... ntrol.html (http://www.historyisaweapon.org/defcon1/crimecontrol.html)
http://s31.photobucket.com/albums/c395/chlamor/mikegerman.jpg
IS CRIME PROTO-REVOLUTIONARY - A PRE-POLITICAL FORM OF REBELLION? OR IS crime a form of social control? Is it the "auto-repression" of communities that have throughout history rebelled in organized and unorganized ways? It is often alleged that during the late 1960s and early 1970s, many on the Left romanticized "street crime" as proto-revolutionary rebellion. To some extent this position had currency among elements of the white ultra-Left. However, mainstream criminologists and historians of the 1960s have overemphasized this (Cummins, 1994).
To the extent that there was romanticization of crime, it was based, in part, on a warped reading of Fanon's ideas about the psychologically salubrious and politically heuristic effects of revolutionary violence and his casting of the lumpen classes in colonial towns as potential militants, rather than as the declasse and dangerous dross white Marxists often took them to be. Yet, to be fair, left valorization of crime as proto-political was neither common nor even very important in shaping left politics around criminal justice; any back issue of this journal's earliest incarnations will attest to that.
So what is a radical reading of crime? By crime, I mostly mean the "index offenses" or interpersonal violence, such as murder, rape, and assault, along with noncorporat
e theft like burglary and strong-arm robbery. To some extent, however, we can throw in the violence associated with addiction and street-level narcocapitalism.
A look at the real impacts of street crime begins to reveal that crime and the fear of crime are forms of social control. Strong-arm robbery, rape, homicide, and general thuggery in poor communities leave people scared, divided, cynical, and politically confused; ultimately these acts drive the victims of capitalism, racism, and sexism into the arms of a racist, probusiness, sexist state. In short, crime justifies state violence and even creates popular demand for state repression. Thus, it helps to liquidate or at least neutralize a whole class of potential rebels. Crime also short-circuits the social cohesion necessary for radical mobilization.
<snip>
http://s31.photobucket.com/albums/c395/chlamor/panopticon.jpg
As one community organizer in San Francisco put it: "How do you think they get all the police in here? Without bad guys, there's no so-called good guys." 1 Foucault recognized this point in Discipline and Punish. Commenting on the politics of crime in France at the end of the 18th century, Foucault summed up the political benefits of crime -- then and now -- as follows:
Crime was too useful for them [the authorities] to dream of anything as crazy -- or ultimately as dangerous -- as a society without crime. No crime means no police. What makes the presence and control of the police tolerable for the population, if not fear of the criminal? This institution of the police, which is so recent and so oppressive, is only justified by that fear. If we accept the presence in our midst of these uniformed men, who have exclusive right to carry arms, who demand our papers, who come and prowl on our doorsteps, how would any of this be possible if there were no criminals? And if there weren't articles every day in the newspaper telling us how numerous and dangerous our criminals are (Foucault, 1980: 47)?
How, then, does crime function as social control in the U.S. today? A comparison of crime with the most extreme example of state terrorism, death squads, is instructive. What were the hallmarks and political impacts of state terror in Central America in the 1980s? State violence against popular movements was systematic, but also deliberately random and spectacularly arbitrary -- all of which helped to spread ubiquitous fear. People simply "disappeared" forever or, after being captured, showed up on public roads mutilated, their corpses serving as political advertisements. Such tactics caused thousands of activists to give up on politics completely and to retreat into their private lives. Other comrades, particularly survivors of torture, often became pathological and difficult to work with. Most destructive of all, though, was the fact that the best and the brightest were just gone -- dead.
As a result, many potential activists were simply too scared to attend meetings or read radical literature or go to demonstrations. State terror, most graphically embodied in the death squads, scrambled the everyday patterns upon which organizing depended. Street crime in America does the same.
<snip>
http://www.historyisaweapon.org/defcon1 ... ntrol.html (http://www.historyisaweapon.org/defcon1/crimecontrol.html)
http://s31.photobucket.com/albums/c395/chlamor/mikegerman.jpg