Critical criminologists
October 19, 2025
Love as a Crime
October 19, 2025
Crime Prevention Policy: A Critical Perspective
A Critical Perspective
If the social structure is an important constraint on the behaviour of individuals and institutions, then there are limits to the change that is possible to induce in individuals or institutions without changing the social structure. Vocational training for prisoners for instance, will not eradicate unemployment or do away with low wage industries.
Even when individuals can be helped the larger problem remains. To deal with crime by “treating” individuals is like trying to empty the ocean with a bucket (Greenberg, 1981:18).
prevention of traditional street crime, is both real and important. For too long, critical criminologists have not addressed themselves seriously to the problem of street crime, and the fears and anxieties it produces for people in their everyday lives. Furthermore, the victims of such crime are disproportionately members of the working classes in late capitalist societies.
The victimization and demoralization of working-class neighbourhoods and popular anxieties about crime within society must be a major concern of critical criminology. Second, this paper has argued that most traditional crime control policies and programs, based on individualistic perspectives on crime, are doomed to failure.
Approaches to crime prevention which attempt to punish or treat individual actors cannot succeed, in the long run, in reducing criminal behaviour. This is because criminal behaviour is rooted in the fundamental structural features of a society, especially in the political and economic structure of late capitalist societies.
This point leads to a third element of the paper’s argument. There is now developing a critical theory of traditional crime which advances considerably our understanding of this kind of crime. A rough outline of this theory was sketched out above and the empirical research lending support to it (not all of it by critical criminologists to be sure) was reviewed.
The question that now needs to be addressed is what implications does such a theory have for crime prevention policy? Although space limitations prevent an extended discussion, several crime prevention strategies that flow from the critical theory outlined above are presented.
Two distinct levels are addressed. First, a broad societal level which concerns major changes in the political and economic organization of late capitalist societies is discussed.
Economic democracy
The essence of economic democracy is to transfer economic decision-making from the few to the many; from private groups to public councils; from the corporate elite to workers, consumers, and local communities Economic democracy, thus, requires, “the shift of investment control from corporate domination to the, public; and the reconstruction of economic decision making through democratic worker – and worker/consumer – controlled production” (Carnoy and Shearer, 1980:4).
The state itself, according to Taylor, will have to be democratized from within. This would include such things as the democratization of policing, of the staffing of correctional centres, and even of the judiciary.
Repeatedly, Taylor stresses the importance of the state in the reconstruction of socialist policy. He is aware of the Dangers of reformism, but he underlines (1982: xviii) “…the importance of creating a set of demands for alternative and socialist arrangements in every area in which the state imposes itself on the citizens of our unequal class society.”
The reconstruction of socialist policy as outlined by Taylor is an important source of ideas about what kind of socialist society might replace late capitalism and even welfare state capitalism.
These ideas and others must now be worked over, developed, and linked to a viable political strategy if we are serious about creating a new social order in which there will be far less crime (and far fewer social pathologies in general) then we currently experience under the political economy of capitalism.
As Taylor (1982:13) points out, however, this will take a lot of hard work to accomplish: A vast amount of work needs to be done on the reconstruction of orthodox socialist policy. But the required features of any reconstructed social democracy are clear: the fragmented working class will only be mobilized when it sees an economic and social strategy which transparently (and therefore democratically) fulfils its immediate, pressing social needs.
The socialism which does this must’ obviously be clearly distinguishable from the authoritarian state form or “social democracy” of the earlier period, constructed in defence of an allegedly equal partnership of capital and labour. …
A popular desire for such a socialism may emerge out of the process of community dislocation, which is now in full flow in capitalist societies, but it will require socialists working in political parties and engaging openly and publicly in ideological struggles against the Right to sustain and advance it. Specific Pol _qtr._ _get Crime While the reconstruction of socialist policy in the west is critically important, it is only one level at which work must go on.
If we are truly concerned about reducing the amount of traditional crime that plagues our societies and alleviating the victimization of working-class neighbourhoods, we must formulate and fight for specific policies that will operate right now, within the structure of the existing political economy.
These policies will hopefully be, in Taylor’s (1982) words, “prefigurative socialist programs,” but the criterion by which we should judge them is whether they will reduce crime. The specific recommendations to be presented here, are derived primarily from a recent article by American criminologist Elliot Currie (1982).
Capitalist societies
He lists three key areas of intervention which recent evidence point to as likely to have the greatest effect on crime rates. These areas of intervention are the labour market, the family, and the network of community supports. Each Will be discussed in turn.
The first and most important recommendation that can be made to reduce existing capitalist societies is to recommend the adoption of a full employment policy.
As Currie (1982:21) notes concerning the situation in the United States, “It’s hardly accidental that every advanced society with a lower level of violent crime than ours has also historically had a much more effective and humane employment policy providing better cushions against the disintegrative and degrading effects of ‘market’ forces.”
Attaining a full employment economy is not only a major step toward a less crime ridden society, it is, as Michael Harrington (1980:82) has pointed out, the “precondition” of any progressive solution to the problems which confront late capitalist society.
The central importance of a full employment policy in reducing crime appears to be well understood in the west. Yet there is little movement toward such a policy, especially in the United States and Great Britain. The main reason for this is the fact that governments in capitalist societies prefer to rely on the private sector to produce jobs.
The private sector, however, as has been well demonstrated (See Harrington, 1980), cannot and will not move us in the direction of full employment. The only way a full employment economy can be reached is through the provision of public jobs and planned social investment.
Even the Reagan administration in the U.S. began to get that message, and in early 1983, backed the passage of a public jobs bill (a rather inadequate jobs bill, but a jobs bill nonetheless). More such bills are necessary if we are at all serious about reducing crime. Still, the provision of jobs alone is not the only issue to be considered from a crime prevention standpoint.
As Currie (1982:21) points out, “The economic context of crime is not just the rate of unemployment itself, but the more general conditions of the secondary labour market.” He reviews a RAND study of California “repeaters” which illustrates the strengths of this connection. As Currie (1982:21) notes:
This [study] suggests that job quality and stability are the real issues. Simply forcing the urban unemployed into new variants of low-wage, menial labour as much current [Reagan] administration urban policy proposes, won’t begin to come to grips with urban crime.
Nor can we expect much help from a strategy- of general economic expansion if it doesn’t include well targeted employment and training programs for the kinds of people typically left behind. A strong jobs policy, therefore, one that deals with the issue of job quality and stability, must be our first order response to the crime problem (especially youth crime).
The state must be pressured to pursue this course. Not only is it more effective to create jobs than to build prisons but is also less expensive. The left must stay the course on this issue and attempt to counter the resistance of the private sector to public jobs programs. A second area of intervention to reduce crime, according to Currie is the family.
Given the evidence of the fragmentation of families and the developmental disturbances that can occur within them due to the adverse impact of economic factors, it is important to develop comprehensive multiservice programs for high-risk families. Currie (1982:22) quotes psychologist E. M. Hetherington who has said, “it is critical to develop social policies and intervention procedures that will reduce stresses and develop new support systems for single parent families.”
Sum-Up
The crime prevention strategies recommended in this paper all require positive interventions by the state in the social and economic organization of society. In all Western nations, particularly in the United States and Great Britain, conservatives, both in and out of government, insist that “government” is powerless to do anything about the causes of crime; that the governments’ only proper role is to punish offenders and maintain law and order.
As Currie (1982:25) points out, however: In fact, of course, the opposite is true. “Government” in the United States is already deeply implicated in policies that cause families and communities to disintegrate, and in deflecting policies that might help hold them together.
“Government,” indeed, can fairly be said to have followed a pro-crime policy for years. Government tax and- subsidy policies supported the vast’ uprooting of population through a “modernization” of agriculture closely entwined with the disintegration of the social fabric of the cities.
Government spurred the out-migration of industry and jobs that aggravated it further. Government regularly induces unemployment, community decline, and geographic uprooting in the service of the putative fight against inflation. Government helps subsidize the multinationals’ cataclysmic reordering of social life in the “developing” world… Under the auspices of the right, “government”
will certainly do so even more, by aligning itself ever more closely with the most disintegrative forces of the private market. In support of the interests of capital the state promotes policies that bear a large part of the responsibility for the high levels of crime and violence that plague many western nations.
But the state is not simply a tool or instrument of capitalistic interests. The state in late capitalism is an autonomous power and an object of class struggle. Critical criminologists and the left in general must enter into the struggle over state policy.
It is only through political action and pressure on a variety of fronts that we will be able to achieve significant reforms now and the eventual democratization of the social order in the future. Not only do we hope to achieve a more equal and just society in this process, but also a significant reduction in the level of traditional crime.
While the punishment (even by incarceration) of individuals surely has a place in any future crime control strategy, as does the rehabilitation or treatment of troubled individuals, only the kind of structural changes proposed by critical criminologists will alleviate the victimization of our society by crime.
Specific policies
Second, the question of specific policies within existing capitalistic structures is considered. The Reconstruction of Socialist Policy Progressive criminologists generally agree that any resolution to the contemporary problems of crime will necessitate a ie form of transition to some form of socialism.
This view is based on the recognition that both working class varieties of common crime and the more organized and destructive forms of social injury committed by, or in service to, the powerful are grounded in the social conflicts and exploitative relations that characterize life in class society.
(Mischalowski, 1983:13) If traditional crime is indeed rooted in the structural features of capitalist society, one obvious solution to the crime problem would seem to be radical structural change. Many Marxist criminologists have argued that the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement by socialism will leave society crime free.
Stripped of its utopian overtones, there is considerable merit to this idea. It can be argued convincingly that there would be far less crime in a more equal, more just, socialist society.
As the British criminologist Ian Taylor (1982: xv-xvi) has put it: So – although it will appear as a dogmatism – we can assert that the essential significance of a very high rate of interpersonal and property violence in a society is that it expresses the lack of socialism in the personal and social relations of that society.
And we can define the absent socialism here, quite conventionally, as a political and social formation which guarantees equality of life chances and mutual regard between people, irrespective of race, age, and sex. It is the obverse, therefore, of the conditions that exist in an unreformed class society like Britain today. From this perspective, therefore, the single best crime prevention strategy would be to replace capitalism with socialism.
Aside from the fact that this is an exceedingly simplistic idea, there are problems with the notion that socialism will drastically reduce the level of crime in society. As Braithwaite (1979:243) has argued, “…the overthrow of capitalism is not a panacea for crime which knows no limitations.
The overthrow of capitalism creates merely the potential for a more equal and less segregated society.” Braithwaite goes on to point out that gross inequalities in wealth and power persist in the so-called socialist societies that do exist, and the available evidence suggests that the lower classes in these societies also-have the highest rate of crime
Modern socialism
One obvious problem in this kind of discussion is the fact that there are many different conceptions of socialism and many different existing social formations that call themselves socialist.
There does appear to be, however, two major traditions of modern socialism, both of which are seriously deficient, according to Alan Hunt (1982:16): The “revolutionary” tradition looks to a revolutionary upheaval which has not come, and which seems more distant today than it was when the socialist movement was born.
The “social democratic” tradition, after long and varied experiences of exercising governmental power in many European nations, has not produced any decisive social, political or economic change that reveals the possibility of a new socialist order.
Indeed, in their different ways, both traditions have created political and state systems that are distant from the people and have not released democratic and popular participation in social, economic, and political life.
The authoritarianism of the socialism of the East and the paternalism of the socialism of the West have both contributed to an undermining of the popular appeal of socialism.
If’ the creation of a socialist society is to be a primary way of reducing traditional crime (among many other social problems) then we will have to develop a new socialist tradition, one which will release democratic and popular participation in social, political and economic life. As Taylor (1982) has argued, we need to have a “reconstruction of socialist policy.” The argument for socialism once again, must be made.
This time, however, socialists will have to develop a more specific blueprint for a democratic socialist society which offers a positive alternative conception of the Welfare State to replace the “tattered and discredited reality we still defend.” (Deacon, 1981:46). What would a “reconstructed socialist policy” look like?
What elements would it contain? Again, space prohibits an extended discussion, but we can examine some of the arguments Taylor (1981; 1982) has advanced in LAM and Order: Arguments for
Ai m-. and elsewhere. First, Taylor clearly rejects the anti-statism of a libertarian character which ran through much of the early literature of the radical criminologists (Hunt, 1982). He (1981:100) insists upon “
…the recognition of a state form as a necessary element in the administration of complex industrial societies…o Thus, in the current period it is important to enter into the struggle over state policy in all areas.
Secondly, Taylor argues the necessity of “social order” and thus of the necessity for some form of criminal justice apparatus. The issue, for him, is to create a “new” social. order (“a social order for all”, p. 123) and a democratization of the criminal justice process. The key element in Taylor’s socialist strategy is the thoroughgoing democratization of the entire social order.
This aspect of social reconstruction must begin at the local level to fulfil immediate, pressing needs. Economic decision-making must be democratized, Production must be organized rationally to fulfil continuing and often unmet social needs for goods, services, and employment’. This notion of economic democracy has recently taken hold over the left in the United States
Predictable buzzword
Currie (1982:22) then comments that “changing the pinched and deeply stressful state of dependent poor families can have an impact on youth crime in fairly short order.” What kind of service programs for dependent poor families would help to reduce crime?
Currie cites the Child and Family Resource Programs (CFPR) sponsored by the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare as an exemplar. These programs provided the following kinds of services to poor families: crisis intervention, education against child abuse, family counselling, Head Start and tutoring programs, meals for children, and pre- and post-natal health counselling.
All these programs were designed to encourage parent involvement in policymaking. The results of these programs, overall, were excellent. Currie (1982:23) cites the conclusions of a U.S. Government Accounting Office evaluation of CFPR in summarizing the impact of family intervention programs on crime rates:
The GAO argued that these early childhood intervention programs would reduce delinquency mainly through improving early parent-child relations and school performance, and both possibilities fit well with what a growing body of research has to say about family and developmental influences on youth and adult crime.
We don’t know how much crime we could prevent by developing a better range of supports for early child development. We do know that there are very good reasons for selecting the effects to be substantial. In addition to the family, a third area of intervention for crime reduction is the network of community supports.
Although “community” has become a kind of predictable buzzword on both the left and right, and although just about everybody agrees that-“community” is important in preventing crime, Currie (1982:23) argues that “…nearly everyone has a different conception of what community means and what might be done to create or restore it.” He reviews the variety of community crime prevention programs initiated in the United States in the 1970s by the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA),
Principles
The results of these efforts, he argues, were ambiguous. He sees nothing wrong in Principle with such programs as “‘Neighbourhood Watch” or the organization of civilian anti-crime patrols, but he cautions that such programs are “. -likely to have limited impact as long as the larger forces ripping apart the community’s infrastructure. Are left intact.” What’s most important in community crime prevention, according to Currie (1982:24), are “the broader forces that make for community stability and sustain local social networks.”
He argues (1984:24) that, “one of the most damaging flaws in liberal thinking about social policy has beau ills tendency to downplay the importance of social bonds and communal sup) orts in preventing or mitigating social pathology.” Several radical criminologists, in addition to Currie, have recently echoed these sentiments and have begun exploring the issue of community critter prevention (Browning, 1982, Bute, 1982, Gross, 1982).
The most compelling approach to crime prevention on the community level according to Currie, is the idea of creating “mediating structures” to prevent Various kinds of social pathologies. By “mediating structures” is meant intermediate institutions such as neighbourhoods, kinship structures, and ethnic organizations, which lay between individuals and larger bureaucratic structures.
Crime-preventing role
One example cited by Currie is Philadelphia’s House of Umoja, a community based residential program for black youth gang members. Reviewing the evidence on the crime-preventing role of “mediating structures, Currie (1982:24) concludes:
A large and growing body of research has demonstrated the importance of communal networks of support in mitigating the impact of social and economic stress, with very significant consequences not only for crime, but for physical and mental health as well. Several cross-national studies also suggest the significance of community networks of support in preventing crime.
Currie (1984:24) points to Japan and Switzerland and argues that the low crime rates in these two countries can be traced back to the fact that economic development in these nations appears to have taken place “within the bounds of pre-existing ties of kinship and local community.”
Currie (1982:25) concludes that, “One clear implication of this is that much could be gained, over the long term, through integrating community programs specifically designed for crime prevention with broader strategies of locally based economic development.”
Critical criminologists argue that the causes of traditional crime are located in the political and economic structure of capitalist society. A reduction in crime, therefore, depends upon major political and economic changes.
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