Abstract
The author of this book, John Hagan, is one of the most versatile, prolific and accomplished living criminologists. He has received many major, well-deserved awards, most recently the Stockholm Prize in Criminology in 2009. The book under review has an ambitiously broad scope to it, insofar as it aspires to provide an overall understanding (to concerned citizens as well as criminologists) of the basic parameters of the American perception of and responses to crime during the course of the past 80 years or so. The core thesis of this book is as follows: during the ‘Age of Roosevelt’ (1933–1973), the ‘framing’ of crime was focused upon structural dimensions of American society and the failures of social control to respond effectively to criminogenic conditions. During the ‘Age of Reagan’(1974–2008), a focus on criminal offenders (including ‘career criminals’) led to a massive increase in the imprisonment of conventional offenders, while a free market ideology during this period of time led to deregulation across the board and a massive amount of white-collar crime. Altogether, Hagan argues convincingly that American society has over-controlled street crime—with devastating consequences for the African-American inner city community in particular—and under-controlled suite crime—with devastating consequences for all Americans. Following a Prologue of ‘Washington Crime Stories’, Chapters 1 through 6 systematically document the replacement of one crime frame with another, some factors driving this shift, and the consequences of the shift. The review of the standard criminological theories undertaken in Chapters 3 and 4 covers ground thoroughly familiar to all criminologists (and their students), but Hagan elegantly extracts core themes of these different theories to illustrate his fundamental framework shift thesis. Chapter 7 is devoted to what might arguably be characterized as the worst of all crimes: war crimes and crimes of states. In recent years Hagan has authored or co-authored a series of books addressing such crimes—including rape as a crime of war and genocide—and the justice system response to such crime, especially by the International Criminal Court. State crimes both reflect and intersect with the frame shift in the domestic realm.
In adopting a framework for this book that sees a fundamental shift in the perception of crime from the Age of Roosevelt to the Age of Reagan, Hagan inevitably produces a somewhat schematic account that neglects earlier historical developments and glosses over some contradictory tendencies in any historical era. Hagan addresses the populist anger in the Age of Roosevelt toward crimes of the privileged that arose in the wake of the 1929 stock market crash. The age of another Roosevelt not addressed by Hagan, that of FDR’s distant cousin, Theodore, early in the 20th century, was also one of populist anger that gave rise to the ‘trust-busting’ rhetoric and muckraking journalism of that time. But the overall thesis of the book is supported powerfully. The answer to the question posed in the title of this book—Who Are the Criminals?—is this: Those who commit the most consequential crimes are not inner city juveniles and adults committing muggings, armed robberies, burglaries, and the like, but those who occupy the suites of major financial and corporate institutions as well as the higher reaches of government, complicit in large-scale financial fraud and crimes of states. A criminology that aspires to remain relevant in the new century must attend much more fully than it has to date to these criminals.
Hagan is surely correct in chastising criminology as a disciplinary enterprise with being complicit in the distorted—and societally damaging—focus on conventional crime, and especially that of lower class African Americans. And he makes note of the key role of conflict criminologists (e.g. Chambliss, Quinney and Turk) in offering an alternative approach to understanding crime. But readers of this book who are not criminologists could easily get the impression that no noteworthy work in this tradition has been produced since the 1970s or early 1980s. Critical criminologists in recent decades have produced a large body of work on the crimes of the powerful, from corporations to states. However, there is absolutely no acknowledgement of this work. My own impression—correct or incorrect—is that Hagan’s high level of productivity includes limiting himself to addressing only that work which he specifically needs to advance his particular project, while disregarding a huge amount of work that addresses the same issues but that he does not need for his own purposes. On balance, it is cause for celebration that Hagan as a renowned and highly esteemed criminologist potently legitimates the case for more criminological attention to white-collar crime and crimes of state. This book deserves the widest possible readership. But readers of this book, if they find Hagan’s core claims persuasive, could now turn to the work of contemporary critical criminologists to further enrich their understanding of the causes and consequences of crimes of the powerful, and the ongoing, often daunting challenges in addressing effectively their crimes.
In a parsimonious afterword for the paperback edition of this book Hagan reviews relevant developments through January 2012, reiterating his claims of over-control of street criminals and under-control of suite criminals. To date, the crimes of the financial sector have been addressed principally with civil settlements, no admissions of guilt, deferred criminal prosecutions, and the like. The proactive prosecutorial use of wiretaps in the Raj Rajaratnam insider trading case was effective in obtaining a conviction, but this type of approach has not been applied to the subprime mortgage fraud cases. The collapse of MF Global, with some one billion dollars of customers’ funds unaccounted for, was an ominous reminder that the under-regulation of Wall Street has hardly been addressed. The potential for a rebalancing of our societal responses to street crime and suite crime is present in the Age of Obama, but has yet to be realized.