Abstract
Contemporary scholarship on punishment, politics and society generally treats democratic politics and crime policy as a dangerous mix. In this view, when crime comes onto democratic political agendas, it generates perverse political incentives that result in politicians pandering to and/or manipulating mass publics bent on harsh punishment. In this article, I argue that an examination of violent victimization complicates this conventional wisdom. Using violence as a framework, I challenge three fundamental assumptions about the relationship between democracy and crime. From there, I suggest how different democratic institutional arrangements might facilitate broader public participation in crime politics, and how that participation can lead to promoting less, rather than more punishment.
Introduction
Contemporary scholarship on crime, politics and society typically regard robust democratic politics and crime policy as a dangerous mix (Jacobs and Kleban, 2003; Lancaster, 2011; Tonry, 2007; Weisberg and Petersilia, 2010; Windelsham, 1998; Zimring and Johnson, 2006). Indeed, few spectacles vex advocates of criminal justice reform more than the bloodthirsty mob pursuing the suspected law-breaker. Scholars of comparative criminal law and punishment, for example, have lamented the constitutional structure of the United States, which, they argue, requires elected officials to be highly responsive to public opinion from multiple quarters, even if that opinion is ‘mercurial or mean-spirited’ (Tonry, 2007: 26).
In this article, I re-frame and challenge key assumptions about the relationship between democratic politics and crime. 1 In doing so, I argue for greater attention to violent victimization—especially murder—in order to puzzle through the political implications of serious violence. What do rising or high rates of violence mean for democratic politics, particularly for the political agency of those communities most affected by crime? Exploring this question reveals a more complex relationship between democratic participation and the politics of crime than we have heretofore imagined, in part because high or rising rates of violence expose communities not only to repressive state practices, but also to real suffering from predatory behavior. Under these conditions, the political agency of these communities can be activated to hold political actors accountable, not only for punishing perpetrators once violence has already occurred, but for addressing a wide range of problems, including the social conditions that generate rising rates of violence in the first place.
While the literature on the relationship between democratic politics and crime remains unsettled, with a few exceptions, the weight of the analysis suggests that the greater the capacity for pressure from mass publics, the more punitive the State will be. 2 Jacobs and Kleban (2003: 748, emphasis added), for example, conclude their cross-national analysis with the alarming warning those that those who ‘dislike the recent expansions in incarceration that have occurred in so many of the advanced democracies should not seek political arrangements that give the public greater influence’ (for similar claims, see Tonry, 2007: 26; Whitman, 2003: 200; Windelsham, 1998; Zimring and Johnson, 2006: 278). 3
These critiques are rooted in a number of assumptions about crime, punishment and democratic politics, and here I address three of the more fundamental of these assumptions: that crime rates are only marginally related to the politics of crime and punishment; that mass publics are ill informed, impulsive and largely, if not entirely, punitive; 4 and that the political process is driven not, primarily, by real anxiety about violence but, rather, by politicians who are motivated to shore up the authority and legitimacy of government institutions. 5 In this view, crime and punishment make good politics as politicians seek to capitalize on public anxieties about violence as a means of strengthening their political capital. At the core of anxiety about democratic politics and crime, then, is a deep mistrust of the ability of the public writ large to understand crime and justice issues, and the susceptibility of politicians to a perverse set of political incentives that result in pandering to mass publics demanding ever harsher punishment.
I challenge each of these assumptions by building on extant work that complicates the democracy–punishment narrative through attention to institutional dynamics (see Barker, 2009; Lacey, 2008; Miller, 2008; Weaver, 2007; see also Garland, 2001, Dzur, 2010 and Stuntz, 2011 for related arguments). In doing so, I argue that thinking more analytically about violent victimization can reconfigure our understanding of the relationship between democratic politics and crime by revealing the complex political demands of communities exposed to high rates of violence, as well as repressive state practices, and the variation in institutional capacities across democratic systems to respond to these communities. By de-coupling violence from the politics of crime and punishment, we have overlooked the fact that protecting citizens from violence is a first-order political problem and that, to the degree that more punishment does not effectively reduce violence and its attendant problems, political demands for a wide range of alternatives are likely to intensify. I further argue that an over-reliance on the US case has distorted our understanding of the democracy–crime–punishment connection because analyses of the USA tend to over-state the nature and extent of public participation and of democratic controls.
While security from government repression is a political outcome, security from violence is arguably the essence of statehood. 6 Rather than treating these two types of security in isolation from, or at odds with, each other, I suggest that real violence and the conditions that give rise to it form an important component of the politics of crime and punishment precisely because political agitation about crime can lead not only to demands for state intervention with criminals, but also for state intervention to ameliorate criminogenic conditions. In other words, violence is a real political problem that is often deeply connected to a wide range of socio-economic inequalities. Such inequalities are drawn into sharp relief when rates of violence are rising or relatively high and political agitation from communities facing a range of social inequalities, including violence, is likely to focus not just on punishing those responsible for predatory violence (though that is likely) but also on reducing the conditions that give rise to a host of social problems, including unemployment, poor schools, blighted neighborhoods and so on.
I draw these issues together through the concept of a security gap, which highlights the ways in which the politics of repressive government practices, such as arrest, detention and incarceration, are deeply linked to politics of emancipatory government policies, such as socio-economic development and police accountability that can free citizens from the high risk of violent victimization. From this perspective, the central question becomes, under what conditions can these populations, and those sympathetic to their interests, influence law and policy?
In fleshing out a framework for thinking about the relationship between democratic politics and crime and punishment, I draw on various data sources from the USA and the UK to illustrate my challenges to the democracy–crime thesis. I use these two countries because, while each represents one of the more punitive democratic countries of the past 30 years, they also have substantially different rates of violence, as well as different institutional arrangements that might promote or frustrate democratic popular control. As a result, I can explore a range of political possibilities that emerge from rising or falling rates of serious violence, including plausible reform alternatives, and how different democratic institutional configurations might facilitate or hinder those alternatives. 7
The article begins by explaining why predatory violence can and should be viewed as a real political problem for democratic politics, and proceeds to define the security gap, which links the politics of violence with the politics of other forms of insecurity, such as joblessness and poverty, in order to gain a more complete picture of how democratic systems confront predatory violence. I then review three primary claims about the relationship between democratic politics and crime. From there, I challenge the assumptions underlying these claims and suggest that by understanding the contours of violent victimization, we gain a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between democratic politics and crime policies. I conclude by discussing how the institutional dynamics of the US system filters citizen demands for security in ways that promote narrow punitive agendas and that those political systems that enable genuinely broad democratic participation (demos-enabling) may result in more balanced crime politics than those, such as in the USA, that inhibit it (demos-constraining). 8
The importance of violence and security
While the nature and causes of violence are not the primary concern of this article, it is nonetheless important to understand why violence is its focus. 9 Following John Keane (2004: 35), I call attention to the real acts of physical force and threats of such acts by individuals and groups against other individuals or groups, which results in ‘a series of effects ranging from shock … broken bones ... or death’. 10 In particular, I focus on homicide and, to a lesser degree, violence against persons generally.
From this definition, I proceed to two basic premises: that fear of violence, especially violent death, is a universal human condition; and that hostility toward criminal violence is the norm (see Zimring and Johnson, 2006: 269–270; see also Scheingold, 1984). Violence is intrinsically frightening and, per Thomas Hobbes, while we may not agree on what constitutes the best life, we can probably all agree on what constitutes the worst death. 11 Stuart Scheingold (1984) presciently noted that ‘the myth of law and order’—the idea there are dangerous and violent people in the world and they can be apprehended and removed from society to keep the rest of us safe—is maintained, in part, through powerful aspects of human nature that unite most people in a strong consensus against ‘manifestly predatory behavior’ (Scheingold, 1984: 18). 12
I recognize that these two foundations of the article are disputable, particularly in their degree and form. Nonetheless, in their most basic and general terms, they are likely to be widely understood. They form the foundation of the arguments in order to take seriously the problems violence may pose for democratic systems and also because, if my analysis here is correct, even assuming that the public is generally fearful of violence and hard-wired to punish law-breakers, I argue that there is still more hope for the democratic process to generate reform than we often assume.
Security
The security gap, then, is an essential aspect of a democratic polity because violence undermines not only individual and collective notions of safety, but can also expose weaknesses in the State’s efforts to reduce or limit the conditions that give rise to high rates of violence in the first place. While it is common knowledge that some communities are safer than others, rising rates of violence place these differences into sharp relief. Indeed, levels of social inequality, rates of violence and the risk and consequences of incarceration are tightly coupled (Clear, 2009; Western and Pettit, 2010). While we have explored in-depth the social and economic implications of these conditions, we have largely neglected the political agency of the communities that experience them. A key aim of this article, then, is to incorporate into theories of democracy, crime and punishment the subjective political actions of those who are suffering from both repressive state practices and predatory violence and the different institutional dynamics that might channel such actions into more incorporation and less repression. While a number of scholars have noted how institutional dynamics can mitigate the more punitive lawmaking impulses (Barker, 2009; Lacey, 2008), few have brought at-risk populations into the analysis. 13
From this perspective, the political environment that arises from high levels of violence can activate the desire to punish deviants, but can also generate political energy directed toward limiting differential exposure to a wide range of insecurities that are often deeply connected with high rates of violence, such as chronic underemployment, weak and ineffective schools, disorganized and blighted neighborhoods and so on. That high-crime communities are often disproportionately poor and constituted by racial or ethnic minorities should prompt us to inquire under what conditions these populations are able to exercise political agency to influence state responses to these conditions. If the politics of the security gap is, at least in some sense, a function of the allocation of power and resources and the ability of different segments of the polity to translate their needs into state action, we need an account of how public pressure tries to reduce levels of violence that inhere in high-risk communities.
A powerful example can be drawn from the United States where African-Americans continue to be incarcerated at rates six to seven times their white counterparts and to suffer from rates of violent victimization that are similarly disproportionate. Yet most scholarship on punishment in the United States has little to say about disproportionate rates of victimization, instead focusing on vast disparities in arrest, incarceration and other forms of punishment. 14 The populations that are at high risk of violence are rarely studied as such; instead, when punishment scholars examine victims, they tend to study the role of victims’ groups that are highly visible and demand more punishment (Garland, 2001; Gottschalk, 2006; Simon, 2007, 2010). An exploration of the risk of violent victimization across communities, however, reveals a dramatic security gap across racial, ethnic and socio-economic status that includes not only exposure to risk of violence but risk of other forms of insecurity as well. This gap can highlight how at-risk populations have a complex set of political demands, not the uniformly punitive ones that scholars often ascribe to victims’ groups and mass publics. In particular, it makes visible those who are largely left out of the benefits of security from violence in democratic systems and highlights their demands for greater security through criminal justice reform, economic integration and political inclusion, not merely more punishment.
The limited attention of scholars to these disproportionate security gap conditions skews our understanding of the relationship between democratic politics and crime by obscuring the extent to, and conditions under, which different populations are able to hold the State accountable for security (Hall and Winlow, 2003; see also Gregory, 1998; Miller, 2008). Reducing the prison population can reduce the negative consequences of arrest and incarceration that are disproportionate in minority communities in the USA, but it will do little to reduce the vast array of other social inequities experienced by such populations, including, but not limited to violence. As Mark Kleiman (2010: 117) notes, ‘Merely reducing the prison head count without also making the lives of residents of dangerous neighborhoods safer would solve only half the problem.’ It is worth taking account of political demands such communities make in the wake of high rates of violence and the conditions under which they may be successful.
Greater attention to the realities of violent victimization, then, forces a re-thinking of the relationship between democratic institutions, public participation and crime that takes account of the race and class distribution of violent victimization and the political voice, representation and authority of those victimized by violence. The high level of incarceration in the United States may be possible, in part, because the portion of the polity that is disproportionately victimized—and a broader political constituency sympathetic to those interests—is frequently underrepresented in the political process. When lawmakers are made to answer to people who are likely to experience violence and collateral consequences of a wide range of social and economic insecurities, there are fewer political incentives to rely on imprisonment as the sole or primary policy response. In this formulation, the USA is under-, not over-democratized, suggesting that those who are unhappy with the direction of penal politics over the past 30 years, to paraphrase Jacobs and Kleban, should perhaps celebrate more—that is, broader and deeper—democratic controls, not fewer.
The case against democracy
Arguments against the ‘politicization’ of crime—the presence of crime as an active political agenda item—rest on three primary assumptions. The first, the violence–punishment disconnection, is that politicization is largely untethered from actual rates of crime and violence and thus presents opportunities for public manipulation and governing through punishment independent of real threats of violence. 15 In a recent volume on developments in penal policy across the globe, Michael Tonry (2007: 17) characterizes rising crime rates as ‘background conditions’ that are not the important part of the story and some scholars refer to discussions of the crime–punishmentconnection as a ‘sidetrack’ to the analysis of punishment (Wacquant, 2010b: 80; see also Chambliss, 1964; Harcourt, 2010; Quinney, 1977; Scheingold, 1984; Tonry, 2007). Though many scholars do provide accounts of punishment that are connected to crime rates (Garland, 2001; Reiner, 2007; Weaver, 2007; Zimring et al., 2001),few consider rates of violence to be an intrinsically important part of the politics of crime. 16
A second claim is that mass publics are ill informed, impulsive and vengeful. There are several variants of this. One is that members of the public are easily malleable and both media and politicians regularly provide distorted, exaggerated and largely inaccurate information about crime and violence (Beckett, 1997; Lancaster, 2011). Another variant asserts that there is a form of populism that is characterized by its public punitiveness toward suspected lawbreakers and that this populism is highly distrustful of experts and politicians (Garland, 2001; Roberts et al., 2003; Simon, 2007: 154; Zimring et al., 2001). Bottoms’ (1995) characterization of ‘populist punitiveness’ brings these two variants together, suggesting that a punitive public is unwittingly tapped by politicians purely for electoral gain and without regard for a policy’s effectiveness or consequences (see Gottschalk (2010) for a useful summary of this perspective). 17 Such publics are largely incapable of recognizing, let alone opposing, harsh rhetoric and penalties even if they have little or no impact on crime rates.
Third, and relatedly, is the argument that contemporary democracies suffer from multiple crises of legitimacy (rising crime rates, collapse of manufacturing sector jobs, post-Fordism, new migrations, globalization and so on) and such crises have led governments to seek greater legitimacy through the amplification of their authority in the realm of crime and punishment. This set of arguments has several forms (Garland, 1996, 2001; Hall et al., 1978; Reiner, 2007; Simon, 2007; Wacquant, 2010a, 2010b) and each have made substantial contributions to our understanding of the growth of punishment regimes. I focus here on just one of the central assumptions, which is that crime and punishment make good politics because politicians have little capacity to control much else and therefore find it politically expedient to exploit fear for electoral gain. There are, in this view, numerous incentives to keep crime on the public and legislative agendas regardless of actual rates of violence because the issue is susceptible to politicization and has the potential to build government capacity. This politicization generates a reigning consensus that crime is the number one public enemy and that punishment works (see Loader, 2008 and Reiner, 2007 for related analyses).
These suppositions presuppose a particularly toxic mix of democratic politics and crime that inevitably leads to more punishment. Examining these claims in the context of the security gap and the politics generated by such a gap, however, can reveal a more complex dynamic that takes seriously the political problems that predatory violence poses for democratic lawmakers, the pressure imposed by those experiencing such violence, and the institutional dynamics that channel political participation and drive political actors toward more or less emancipatory practices in response.
In defense of the people
The violence–punishment disconnection
Let us begin by taking a closer look at violence. 18 As illustrated in Figure 1, death by homicide grew dramatically in the USA and the UK as well as in many industrialized democracies in the second half of the 20th century (see Eisner, 2008). 19 According to multiple data sources, the murder rate in the United States, for example, more than doubled between 1955 and 1980, from a rate of 4.1 persons per 100,000 to 10.2 per 100,000 (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2007). 20 The most significant increase in the homicide rate was between 1966 and 1972 (Farley, 1980). Robbery rates also increased fourfold from 60 per 100,000 in 1960 to 251 per 100,000 in 1980. 21 Similarly, homicide rates in England and Wales were at their lowest in the post-war period in 1961 (5.74 per million), but had doubled by 1974 (12.13 per million) (Smith et al., 2011). After a decade of relatively steady rates in the UK, homicides again rose between 1985 and 2004, from 12.35 per million to 19.73 per million. More generally, recorded crime statistics of violence against persons climbed steadily in the post-war period as well.
Homicide rates, USA and UK (England and Wales), per 100,000. (The increase in homicide rates in the UK in 2002 is due primarily to changes in national reporting standards. The spike in the homicide rate in 2003 is due to the inclusion of the 172 murders attributed to Dr Harold Shipman, which were added to the 2002/2003 total homicides. See Smith et al., 2011.)
A nuanced examination of the violence reveals substantial differences in the dramatic and swift exposure for some groups more than others, creating a substantial gap in security across race, class, age and gender. In the USA, young people below age 25 were victims of murder at exceptionally high rates during this period. Though they constituted just 15 percent of the US population, this age group experienced nearly one-third (30.1 percent) of the homicides between 1976 and 2005. Over this 30-year period, the rate of homicide victimization for adults under 35 was more than double that of those over 35 (Fox and Zawitz, 2010). 22 Blacks and men also experienced these rising crime rates out of proportion to their population. Though blacks were just 12 percent of the population during this time period, they were nearly half of the homicide victims. In the 30 years between the mid-1970s and the first half-decade of the 21st century, the murder rate for blacks was six times that of whites and the rate for men was more than three times the rate for women (Fox and Zawitz, 2010). In addition, between 1960 and 1970, rates of homicide victimization for men grew faster than those for women (Marvell and Moody, 1995). These rates of violence, it should be noted, were rising at the same time that rates of mortality from other causes were declining (Farley, 1980). In other words, as democratic societies were becoming more secure in the post-war period generally, random acts of violence were on the rise. Violent crime grew rapidly and was sustained at high levels, relative to previous eras (LaFree and Drass, 2002) and when rates did finally level off, those who experienced the biggest declines were whites and the middle class (Thacher, 2004).
Several aspects of these rising rates of violence can inform our understanding of democratic crime politics. First, it would be surprising if such a dramatic growth in the violent deaths and injuries of young people in a democratic society did not create substantial political pressure for government to respond. Of course, rising rates of violence are not the only mechanism that could drive public or legislative attention to crime. But if fear of violence is normal, then an increasing rate of violence is a very real political problem. By ‘real’, I mean that it is not merely subject to exploitation and manipulation (though it may be that as well) but it is a problem, like unemployment, communicable diseases and national security, which the public might sensibly be expected to pressure the Government to address. In this formulation, we should anticipate rising rates of violence to lead to public pressure for the Government to do more, and at least some of what it does more of might be to punish. While most scholars and criminal justice experts regard current levels of punishment in the USA and UK as excessive, both in terms of lack of effectiveness and collateral damage to incarcerated persons and their families and communities, we should be cautious about a priori assumptions that any increase in punishment as rates of violence grow is problematic. 23 Indeed, as I will discuss below, when it comes to economically and socially marginalized populations, problems of under-protection from violence have historically been at least as problematic as over-enforcement of the law. This complicates the politics of law and order in unexpected and largely unexplored ways.
While pressure to increase punishment is likely to result from rising rates of violence, to see crime rates as only providing opportunities for punishment, however, is to miss the fact that security is a political responsibility—arguably the first political responsibility—for which the public is likely to demand policy responses that have measurable effects. To the extent that punitive solutions work, we might expect agitation for more of the same. But to the extent that communities suffering from high rates of violence have a stake in crime actually diminishing, simply piling on the punishment may be an unsatisfying strategy for these communities and a serious political problem (see Weisburg and Petersilia, 2010 for a related discussion). Purely rhetorical or excessive punishment may be politically unpopular if it simply does not work and/or if it ensnares too many members of the community in an aggressive and manifestly inhumane way.
Similarly, since high-risk communities usually suffer from other insecurities as well, including high rates of unemployment, poor schooling, drug addiction, blighted and disorganized neighborhoods and so on, political attention to crime may also include parallel pressures for punishment to be coupled with other strategies for increasing security more generally. Roberts et al. (2003), for example, note that, though African-Americans have the highest rates of violent victimization in the USA, they are not the most punitive. 24 Rising violence, then, can also open up political space or, policy windows, for communities that actually experience high rates of violence to draw attention to the obligations of the State to remediate the criminogenic conditions in which they live. This is an important counter-argument to the view that contemporary state regulation can remain stubbornly punitive in response to crime, on the one hand, and decidedly non-interventionist in economic matters, on the other (see Harcourt, 2010). Where predatory violence is high, demands for state interventions that reduce violence through improved living conditions and reduced social inequalities may also increase. Furthermore, to the extent that the justice system generally, and police specifically, have engaged in ‘over-enforcement’ and ‘under-protection’, these same communities—frequently comprised of racial and ethnic minorities and lower-income populations—may agitate for reform-minded policing strategies and/or alternative punishments. 25
Counter-intuitively then, greater public attention to crime can create political opportunities for otherwise marginalized populations to enter into the ‘what to do about crime’ discussion. In the absence of heightened attention to the issue, these groups may have difficulty refocusing political attention precisely because of their weaker economic and political power. Rising crime rates in the 1960s and 1970s in the United States provided an opportunity for repressive policies and practices, particularly directed at blacks (Weaver, 2007); in addition, rising rates of violence also allowed for the link between crime and community conditions to be made explicit and for attention to the abuses of police power and punishment to be brought to light. The use of deadly force by the police, for example, declined substantially as police departments professionalized in response to public pressure in the 1960s and 1970s and widespread public attention to prison conditions contributed to a strong desire on the part of federal courts to improve them (Feeley and Rubin, 2000; Kuykendall, 1981). As the power of the civil rights movement waned and crime rates leveled off or declined, however, so too did the political link between crime and broader social conditions and public attention to police and prison abuses.
A second and oft overlooked feature of rising rates of violence is issue salience, which has important implications for law and politics. Rising crime rates can cause mass publics to become more attuned to danger, regardless of their own relationship to risk, and more energized and activated to respond to those potential dangers. In other words, crime rates can reasonably be expected to affect the polity’s preference intensity (see Zimring and Johnson, 2006 for a discussion specifically related to crime; see Cigler and Loomis, 1983; Olson, 1965; Schlozman and Tierney, 1986; Walker, 1991 for a more general discussion of group preferences). Preference intensity is an important aspect of democratic politics because the capacity of citizens to mobilize resources or effectively pressure lawmakers and command governmental attention is not evenly distributed across populations, however intense their preferences may be. Rising crime rates not only activate some members of the polity more than others, this differential mobilization must be filtered through different sets of political institutions, which are typically more responsive to dominant socio-economic and racialized interests than marginalized ones (see Baumgartner and Leech, 1998; Strolovich, 2007 for a general discussion; see Barker, 2009; Lacey, 2008; Miller, 2010 for accounts specific to the crime issue). High-profile crimes in particular may provide a context for extremely preference intense political actors who do not necessarily represent the median voter—victims of such rare crimes and their families, for example—to grab the attention of policymakers. To the extent that these groups are well situated in relation to the political system, it may provide an incentive for politicians to respond to these preference intense constituents.
This may seem to contradict my earlier claim that rising rates of violence can produce opportunities for vulnerable communities to attract the attention of lawmakers. Here I seem to be suggesting that public preferences are filtered through political institutions that privilege the status quo, rather than the politically and economically marginalized. But both of these may, in fact, be true. It is conceivable, for example that the 1960s and 1970s public fixation on crime in the US contributed to increased attention to police abuse and urban poverty as well as to new and stiffer penalties and racialized policy making. Furthermore, it may be the case that under normal conditions—that is, when crime is not a particularly salient public issue—routine political dynamics further marginalize those at greatest risk of victimization. Under heightened public attention to crime, however, those groups may be better positioned to call attention to the specific needs of their community. In fact, heightened attention to crime may be among the few times that these groups can garner attention from policymakers.
To summarize, rising rates of violence are a legitimate source of public anxiety and are likely to lead to democratic political mobilization and agitation. While this mobilization will probably include punitive measures, it may also mobilize political actors to address criminogenic conditions, including economic and social conditions, as well as police–community relations. Such pressure is hard for economically and politically marginalized populations to sustain when governmental and public attention is fixated elsewhere. The relative ease or difficulty with which these populations and those sympathetic to their interests can access political power may hinge, at least in part, on the design of democratic institutions and how effectively they draw in the interests of these populations.
Ill-informed, vengeful and easily manipulated public
One might reasonably argue in response to the above that it is precisely the highly punitive nature of the most preference intense actors—victims and their families, for example—that worry those who seek to insulate crime politics from the electorate. By directing governmental attention to crime, these groups contribute to misinformation and the misleading of the public, which is easily manipulated and eager to punish. This is certainly likely to be true under particular conditions, and I do not wish to dispute the claim in its entirety. The California Three Strikes and You’re Out law, for example, appears to have been languishing in various legislative committees in the state until a series of high-profile murders propelled the bill into law (see Zimring et al., 2001).
However, as a more general description of crime politics, this claim rests on assumptions about victim advocacy and interests that are peculiarly narrow. When we talk about the political mobilization of victims, which victims do we mean? While a number of works have justly highlighted the role that victims’ rights groups have played in intensifying the punitive trends (Gottschalk, 2006; Lancaster, 2011; Zimring et al., 2001), we have tended to infer that these highly visible groups are representative of victim advocacy groups more generally and that their advocacy efforts are a threat to reform and fair-minded policy.
Without a more complete mapping of groups responding to violence in all communities, however, not just those that have been able to maintain a prominent place in policy making, we know little about the character of victims’ groups more generally. Indeed, doing so calls attention to the barriers to collective action that inhere in some democratic systems more than others, and that the most visible organized interests sometimes do not represent mainstream perspectives (Fiorina, 1999). Furthermore, even apparently grassroots groups often reflect elite interests more than those of people whose living conditions are closer to the mean (Strolovitch, 2007; see also Schattschneider, 1960). Thus, when we talk about public support or opposition to various responses to crime, we have to consider not only the groups that become visible after high-profile but relatively rare crimes—parents of victims, family members of victims of violent sex offenses and so on—but also those who are exposed to risk on a more regular basis. How do such people respond to rising rates of violence? What makes it more or less likely that their mobilization will result in meaningful political pressure and outcomes?
Taking these groups into account, we can imagine that when crime rates spike, there may not necessarily be a reduction in support for ‘root cause’ responses to crime—in fact, there may be an increase because the political opportunities presented by spiking crime rates allows high-crime communities to focus on preventing victimization through reducing criminogenic conditions, not simply by punishing offenders. For example, while rising rates of violence in the 1960s in the USA created electoral incentives for white lawmakers to exploit fear of black violence and ratchet up criminal law, the high rates of violent deaths of young people in urban areas, particularly in the context of the civil rights movement, also created a political opportunity for introducing more structural explanations for crime and violence. A 1973 hearing before the House Subcommittee on Crime on the Community Anti-Crime Assistance Act, for example, included testimony from then Mayor of New York, John Lindsay who decried the absence of leadership from Congress on the availability of handguns and directly tied youth violence, gangs and homicide to larger social structures: ‘We are also talking about kids who are disconnected from every form of institutional life, including family life—schools, even neighborhoods, peers and seniors, court systems and most importantly, the job market. Most importantly the job market’. 26
The National Alliance for Safer Cities, a coalition of national and local organizations aimed at improving urban living conditions (including National Urban League, AFL-CIO, American Jewish Committee, Southwest Council of La Raza, National Council of Puerto Rican Volunteers, United State Youth Council, among others), also testified about the need to look beyond traditional law enforcement measures to strengthen communities and neighborhoods. A representative from the Urban League, also on the board of the National Alliance for Safer Cities, testified that the organization came into being because of concern that: the entire area of criminal justice was going to be preempted by those bent on repression and we thought it vitally important that those organizations which had demonstrated a social conscience in the past get into the area of the administration of justice and law enforcement in order to make sure there was some balance in the approach.
27
The testimony also directly addressed race relations and police–community relations.
This link between crime and violence and the broader social conditions that give rise to them proved difficult to sustain, however. As Stuart Scheingold (1984: 23–24) observed over 25 years ago, the redistributive politics that such linkages invoke require people to ‘acknowledge that social pathologies are at the root of criminality, to take some responsibility for that criminality, and to pay the substantial cost of structural policies’. Though these ideas continued to flourish at the local level, the limited authority of local governments in the American federal system makes them largely incapable of implementing substantial structural change and renders the mobilizing efforts of local groups largely invisible (Miller, 2010). I shall have more to say about this problem in the US system in the last section.
A more contemporary example from the UK case in the aftermath of the August 2011 riots illustrates the point that de-coupling crime from its causes may be easier in some democratic political systems than others. While much criminological attention has focused, understandably, on the high rate of arrest and harsh sentences for those involved in the riots, several other themes have emerged as well. For example, subsequent investigations into the causes of the riots uncovered deep and abiding distrust of the police in many communities in which the riots occurred, which are also areas where violence and crime are more routine (Lewis et al., 2011). This has drawn attention to, and criticism of, the highly contested ‘stop and search’ policies that have permeated policing throughout England and aggravated tensions between minority youth and the police. Such was the intensity of the criticism that even the Conservative Home Secretary, Teresa May, was forced to respond by announcing a review of the policy by the Association of Chief Police officers (Ball and Taylor, 2011). Second, there is some agreement across the political spectrum that the riots were so damaging, in part, because of the initial anemic and ill-prepared response of the police, thus leading to inquiries into the nature of policing in these areas.
28
Finally, at least some organized groups are seizing the moment to ‘push hard on Lib Dems’ to confront racial inequities across the socio-economic spectrum more directly, particularly those who are in constituencies with growing racial and ethnic minorities.
29
In his speech to Liberal Democrat party members in November of 2011, party leader Nick Clegg, in the context of the riots, talked about providing, for the first time, early years education specifically targeted at two year-olds from the most disadvantaged families. Intervening early saves a lot of heartache, crime and cost years down the line … putting money into schools with disadvantaged youngsters, expanding apprenticeships, increasing the provision of early years education. None of these will be quick fixes. There are no quick fixes. But these are the kind of investments that we need to make now, to spread opportunity in the future.
30
Of course, political attention to issues is not the same as political action (see Edelman, 1964, 1988). However, insecurity writ large cannot be addressed if no-one in a position to ameliorate it is paying attention to the communities experiencing it. Furthermore, the assumptions in the literature about mass publics and crime do not suggest that the ‘what to do about crime’ agenda is robust and contested, but that government officials only implement the punitive policy ideas. Rather, ideas about the nature of public attitudes that circulate throughout the crime and punishment literature presuppose that broad publics are primarily punitive—or at least highly seduced by punitive rhetoric—and high-profile crimes simply provide opportunities for that punitiveness to manifest itself in social policy. Here, I am trying to illustrate that taking seriously the political agency of those most victimized by violence generates a different picture of victims’ values and attitudes to crime and punishment than we generally suppose. In addition to concerns about criminogenic conditions, heightened attention to crime can also highlight the exposure of minorities and the poor to extra-legal violence. 31 In the US, lynchings, racist assaults, jury nullification of clearly guilty white defendants, violence in prisons and by the police, for example, were largely ignored during the supposed halcyon days of rehabilitative emphasis. It was only when pressure on public officials to address victimization increased did we see responses to these forms of violence. Seen through this broader lens, increasing accountability of elected officials to public concerns about crime can lead not simply to more punishment but also to greater citizen oversight in policing, improved conditions in prisons, and attention to previously ignored harmful violence.
This then leads to questions about the degree to which at-risk communities and members of the broader polity who share their concerns and interests are in a position to hold government officials accountable for violence. This may be difficult where they do not form a majority or cannot form coalitions with other constituencies who share at least some of their interests. One can begin to see how important variation in democratic political institutions might be in terms of the capacity of marginalized populations to influence political agendas and outcomes. Such political institutions deserve exploration as mechanisms that can filter public attitudes toward violence into policies that perpetuate the security gap or those that attempt to ameliorate it. I return to this topic in the last section.
Legitimacy and authority
Even if we accept that rising crime rates generate legitimate public pressure to respond, and that democratic publics are not necessarily uniformly punitive and ill informed, there is another truism of contemporary punishment scholarship to consider. From this perspective, the context of high crime and the ensuing public attention to it provide a prime opportunity for government officials to shore up legitimacy and authority at a time when governments increasingly find it difficult to deliver on the promise of prosperity (Garland, 2001; Reiner, 2007; Simon, 2007; Wacquant, 2010a). Even when crime rates fall, maintaining public attention to crime and adopting a ‘tough on crime’ platform makes good politics because it has little or no political costs, particularly at the local level where politicians have strong incentives to react punitively to an angry public. Gottschalk (2010: 63), for example, notes: ‘While the government struggles to restore economic health, some public officials may be tempted to act out in impulsive, unreflective ways, promoting highly punitive measures for their immediate symbolic and expressive value’. There are, in this view, few disincentives for politicians to keep crime alive on legislative agendas, even in the absence of high crime rates or public pressure, because it is largely, if not entirely, politically costless to do so.
But once again, attention to rates of violence complicate these assumptions. To the extent that governments can be held accountable by the electorate for violence, and to the extent that violence is, unlike, say, communicable diseases, an intractable problem not amenable to outright elimination, politicians may actually have disincentives to address crime unless they face substantial pressure to do so. It may, in fact, be the case that governments can do little to address the major social insecurities of the early 21st century, but it is not immediately clear why they would choose to shift public attention to crime—arguably an even more intractable problem—instead. Recent work in public policy suggests that government officials are at least as eager to avoid blame, as they are to take credit (Hood, 2011; see also Levy, 2003). Given how much media attention high-profile crime events receive, blame avoidance would seem to be the more likely default strategy for those in government, absent strong public pressure to do otherwise. To the extent that rates of violence fall or remain steady, there seems to be little incentive to give the public the impression that they are on the rise.
A few glimpses into public opinion and legislative agendas, against the backdrop of homicide, support this more complicated picture. Figures 2 and 3 show the percentage of the public in the USA (Figure 2) and the UK (Figure 3) that identified crime, the economy or national defense as the most important problem facing the country. 32 The Figures also include the homicide rate for each country. Several points are worth noting. First, in the USA, as we saw earlier, between 1962 and 1972, homicide rates nearly doubled from 4.6 per 100,000 to 9.0 per 100,000, and the percentage of the public that identified crime as the most important problem rose from less than 2 percent to nearly 20. Despite increasing homicide rates over the next decade, however, crime is not a serious problem for a substantial portion of the public as the economy worsens and concern about unemployment rises. By 1982, nearly 79 percent of the American public identified the economy, jobs or unemployment as the most important problem facing the country. This broad responsiveness of public opinion to underlying social realities is not unique to crime or unemployment (see Baumgartner and Jones, 1993; Jones and Baumgartner, 2005). It is also true of other issues such as civil rights (identified as the most important problem by almost half the population in the mid-1960s at the height of the civil rights movement and the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, not shown) and terrorism (as illustrated by the importance of national defense to nearly a third of the public following the attacks of 11 September 2001).
‘What is the most important problem facing the country?’ US, 1960–2007, selected responses, and homicide rate
‘What is the most important problem facing the country?’ UK (England and Wales), 1960–2010, selected responses, and the (recorded) homicide rate. (The increase in homicide rates in the UK in 2002 is due primarily to changes in national reporting standards. The spike in the homicide rate in 2003 is due to the inclusion of the 172 murders attributed to Dr Harold Shipman, which were added to the 2002/2003 total homicides. See Smith et al., 2011.)
In the UK, in 1972, concern about crime barely registered. 33 Between 1972 and 1994, however, the percentage of the public indicating that they believed crime to be the most important problem rose from less than 1 percent to 12 percent. During the same time period, the homicide rate rose from 9.6 per million to 14.2 per million, an increase of nearly 150 percent. There is also a spike in recorded murders as well as public concern about crime between 2003 and 2007. Several high-profile cases were on the public agenda at this time, including the 7 July London Underground bombings and the bizarre case of serial murderer Harold Shipman.
On a fundamental level, we would expect the public to be broadly sensitive to underlying conditions that shape people’s day-to-day lives. While most people are not at high risk of homicide, the same is true for unemployment and vulnerability to terrorist attacks. Nonetheless, when these issues are prominent in the news, when people hear from friends and neighbors about such conditions, they become more salient and concern rises. In a September 2011 Gallup poll about the nation’s most important problem in the USA, crime was not even among the top 10 concerns and was mentioned by less than 1 percent of the respondents. Not surprisingly, nearly two-thirds (67 percent) indicated the economy or jobs were most important (Gallup Poll, September 2011, ‘What do you think is the most important problem facing this country?’). We would hardly be surprised by these figures despite the fact that chronic unemployment affects only a small percentage of the public. Thus, it may be harder to redirect public opinion to crime—at least in broad terms—than it appears.
A second observation from these figures is that attention to crime waxes and wanes. Though public attention sometimes remained high as crime rates were falling (as in the 1990s in the USA), it is only in recent years that homicide rates have begun to approach the low levels of the 1960s. Furthermore, crime is never cited as the most important problem by a majority of the population in either country, and it does not appear to be particularly difficult to displace with economic or national security concerns. To the extent that politicians aim to keep the public fixated on crime, it is not clear that they are doing a particularly good job. Furthermore, regardless of what elected officials may be doing, the public seems to be particularly responsive to economic concerns with large majorities citing it as the most important problem facing the country during economic downturns.
Finally, Figure 4 shows the homicide rate in England and Wales and the percent of topics in each year’s Queen’s Speeches that were dedicated to crime and justice. 34 The Queen’s Speech is ‘the statement delivered by the monarch, on behalf of the government, at the beginning of each session of the U.K. Parliament’. 35 The overall trends are both increasing but it is clear that, at least insofar as crime is an issue significant enough to warrant frequent mention in the annual speech outlining the governing party’s legislative agenda, governments mostly steered clear of the issue, even as homicide rates increased into the 1990s. The first substantial spike in attention to crime in this annual speech comes in 1996, and 2002 marks the peak in crime topics, topping out at 20 percent, a non-trivial, yet hardly hegemonic presence. It is difficult to square these generally low levels of attention to crime issues, even as rates of violence were rising, with the idea that the party in power is eager to keep crime and violence on the political agenda as primary issues.
Percent of Queen’s speech topics dedicated to crime and justice. (The increase in homicide rates in the UK in 2002 is due primarily to changes in national reporting standards. The spike in the homicide rate in 2003 is due to the inclusion of the 172 murders attributed to Dr Harold Shipman, which were added to the 2002/2003 total homicides. See Smith et al., 2011.)
My aim here is not to suggest that crime has no political utility for politicians or that fear of crime is not also tied to and activated by other anxieties beyond objective risk. What this discussion illustrates, however, is that it is not obvious that crime politics is always good and easy politics. It is far from clear that those in elected office are fixating public attention on crime, that public concern about crime is so easily de-coupled from actual homicide rates or that governments have, since the 1970s, been leveraging the crime issue as an electoral strategy. Clearly the dynamics of the Labour government under Tony Blair from 1997–2007 in the UK and Bill Clinton’s presidency from 1992–2000 in the USA, and their specific attention to crime, law and order need more analysis. 36 But it is worth noting that both of these charismatic leaders won re-election with historically low voter turnout, Clinton, in 1996, with only 49.0 percent of the voting eligible population and Blair, in 2001, with only 59.4 percent, both of which represented historic lows in the post-war period. 37 The dynamics of this period are important but the underlying relationship between democracy and crime go well beyond what happened during the Clinton or Blair years.
Democratic institutions and crime
Security is a valuable public good, a constitutive ingredient of the good society, and the democratic state has a necessary and virtuous role to play in the production of this good.
As with theories of punishment, which tend to be isolated from the broader field of political theory (Lacey, 1999), theories of democracy and crime politics are often isolated from broader understandings of democratic political institutions. 38 And yet, the importance of political institutions may be particularly crucial in the realm of crime and justice precisely because the issue represents such a fundamental arena of government power, both in terms of the power to protect, as well as the power to punish. I have suggested that paying attention to the security gap in violence and other forms of insecurity within a democratic polity can reconfigure our understanding of the democracy and crime–punishment nexus because it redirects our attention to the political demands of those most at risk of violence as well as a whole host of other social inequities, including higher rates of exposure to state repressive practices.
In this last section, I offer a framework for thinking about how democratic political participation about crime might be filtered, shaped and channeled in different ways under different democratic institutional designs such that the politicization of crime does not necessarily lead to greater demand for punishment. In doing so, I highlight the importance of political institutions at the macro level that shape the quantity and quality of public participation in social policy making. We generally assume that democratic institutions that are more demos-enabling—that is, those that promote broad public participation and political accountability in shaping the decisions of public representatives on crime—are more likely to promote highly punitive law and policy, whereas demos-constraints—such as judicial review, expert commissions and other institutional mechanisms that allow narrower groups to override majoritarian institutional decision making—are likely to lessen punitiveness.
As Barker (2009) has illustrated, however, the relationship between democratic participation and the politics of crime and punishment is much more complex than it first appears. Indeed, a major contribution of Barker is to dissect the dynamic nature of public activity in policy making across the varied US states. In doing so, she reveals that some states, such as Washington, have high levels of citizen input into the nature of criminal law and justice, but the state has nonetheless remained less punitive, in relative terms, than others. The institutional dynamics that shape the nature and character of public participation, then, may form a crucial component of the relationship between democratic politics and crime and punishment.
I build on Barker’s claim by highlighting elements of the US system, in contrast to the UK, which actually limit public participation and decrease accountability of the Government to the public, thus calling into question the claim that the US high rates of incarceration can be explained in relation to its highly democratic participatory system. The United States is the poster child for the purported dangers of excessive democratic political participation and disproportionate punishment. It is widely cited as providing many opportunities for the public to be involved in decision making, thus creating too many spaces for punitive publics to press lawmakers for more and harsher law and order. Lawmakers, dependent on public perception of them as effective, are not only willing to oblige, they fuel the public’s anxieties through aggressive law and order campaigns and the exploitation of public fear, particularly of minority groups (Tonry, 2007; Zimring et al., 2001).
While this is not the space in which to detail all of the idiosyncracies of the American political system, a brief mapping of the actual exercise of power in the USA reveals that many of the arguments about its highly democratized nature overstate both the capacity for broad public participation, as well as the ability of the public to hold government accountable for crime and violence. Doing so reveals that, in at least some respects, the USA is an (un)democratic outlier that can hardly be characterized as highly accountable to mass democratic participation, least of all for those who experience the vast array of social inequities that lead to greater exposure to violence. 39 I highlight two elements of the US system that, in practice, are less democratic than they initially appear and should prompt us to develop more fully our understanding of the institutional dynamics of public participation and political accountability.
First, unlike many federal countries around the world, the United States’ federal system is one in which a wide range of social problems are now debated and legislated independently at every level of government. This de-centered nature of US politics seems intuitively more porous and open (hence more democratic) than more centralized systems because of the many opportunities it provides for citizen participation. Many have contrasted this system with the more traditional, corporatist systems in Europe, for example, which shield criminal justice policymakers from direct democratic pressures, thus limiting the demands on them to engage in particularly punitive policies (Lacey, 2008; Sutton, 2004).
However, not all levels of government in the USA are equally situated to address serious social problems, and this generates biases in the political process that privilege some political, demands over others. Cities, for example, are notoriously the weakest level with respect to their ability to engineer social outcomes since they are beholden to keeping businesses and upper-middle class taxpayers within the city limits (Peterson, 1981). Redistributive policies are extremely difficult at this level, and, as a result, cities tend to de-emphasize public policies that address broad social inequities and focus instead on crime policies within their control, such as police services (see also Scheingold, 1984). Even the states face challenges in addressing major socio-economic problems because they cannot run deficits or otherwise manipulate cash flow and economic policies.
Thus, while the fragmented nature of American federalism may appear to create many opportunities for democratic politics, that politics is biased against addressing the very factors that might contribute to rising rates of violence and other social pathologies. There are, in fact, real incentives for lawmakers to avoid responding to citizen pressure to address violence through reducing social inequalities and increasing opportunities, for example. Thus, when policymakers respond to public demands to do something about crime with more police and longer sentences, we should be cautious about assuming that these responses reflect broad public participation and pressures (see also Stuntz, 2011).
Indeed, there is good evidence that, at the local level, precisely where we often assume there is the greatest pressure to ratchet up punishment, public input routinely connects crime to a wide range of social problems. Elsewhere (Miller, 2008), I have, demonstrated the highly pluralistic nature of crime politics in two urban areas in the USA, with public demands focused on effective strategies for reducing violence that address the causes of violence rather than harsh responses to violent offenders. It seems equally plausible that some members of the polity, those with more disorganized and fractured communities where risks of violence are real, are more likely to support redistributive policies and less likely to see pure punishment policies as effective in reforming their communities. In addition, there is likely to be a deep and abiding awareness that increasing punishment is likely to ensnare a larger portion of young people than is warranted, and that punishment as a policy strategy is not effective in the long term. Because of the biases of US federalism, however, policies addressing root causes of violence are difficult for local (and sometimes state) governments to enact (see Peterson and Krivo, 2010 for a related discussion of the deep racial inequities in urban communities). 40
Ironically, at the same time that local governments have few opportunities to pursue comprehensive policies that address the root causes of violence, the higher levels of government have few incentives to do anything but simply increase punishment. This brings us to the second element of the US political system that needs re-interpretation, its three-tiered, multi-dimensional model. This system is frequently hierarchical so that policies at one level can be trumped at a higher level. Our conventional wisdom, seen mostly through the lens of the civil rights movement, typically regards this as national majorities winning out over regional minorities. But in fact, the process can also work the other way round, with narrow but highly mobile and influential groups pushing policy at the state and national levels that trump majoritarian local efforts to improve community life. This can reduce, rather than enhance, the accountability of policymakers to the public. If local constituents, for example, want to limit gun access in cities, or if a state wishes to decriminalize marijuana, these policies can be—and have been—overridden at higher levels of government. 41 Counter-intuitively, the openness of the political system not only makes accountability difficult (contributing to lack of trust and general feelings of ineffectiveness of government), it exacerbates classic collective action problems, facilitating the ability of small and narrow (but highly resourced) group interests to outflank broader ones (see Lijphart, 2008; Miller, 2008). As Barker (2009) notes in the California case, when mass political participation is stymied, sometimes narrow, yet powerful, sets of interests can dominate the legislative process, providing the appearance of broad democratic responsiveness which, in reality, is quite narrowly focused. With respect to the populations most at risk of violence, accountability at the higher levels of government for actually reducing levels of violence is low. Few people think about their Senators—or even their state lawmakers—when they think about local crime rates but it is only these higher levels of government, especially the national government, that are in a position to ameliorate the dire economic circumstances of the urban poor. Conversely—or perversely—local mayors and city council members are routinely pressed to limit access to guns, for example, but are largely powerless to implement stricter gun policies because of pre-emption bills passed by state lawmakers. 42
The point is not that mass publics are not punitive in the USA. It is, rather, that we should not treat punitive outcomes as evidence of a singularly punitive public. By examining the mechanisms through which ordinary people try to push government to respond to problems of violence, the US political system is more regularly responsive to the portion of the public which is satisfied with punishing more, regardless of the outcome, than the populations who wish to see violence—and all the attendant socio-economic and political causes and consequences—dealt with in a more comprehensive manner. Previous analyses which have focused on how governmental actors respond with punitive solutions to public outcry about crime are describing a very real political process, but one that is truncated and winnowed as a function of the institutional dynamics of US politics (Tonry, 2007; Zimring et al., 2001). Not all public attention to and political involvement with crime issues inevitably leads to more punishment and, perhaps most importantly, not all public pressure is necessarily indicative of a highly democratic process. The US political system often mobilizes out of state and national politics the very public pressures for violence-reduction that connect crime to broader social conditions. 43 It is, I think, premature to conclude that political systems where crime and violence are salient political issues and where governments can be held accountable by broad publics for addressing these issues, are necessarily going to be excessively punitive regimes.
Indeed, in the broader context of comparative democratic systems, federalism is largely regarded as a veto system, one that inhibits, rather than promotes, mass political participation and accountability, particularly by more disadvantaged members of the polity, and one that provides more opportunities for minority interests to veto the majority than unitary systems (Brooks and Manza, 2007; Foweraker and Landman, 2002; Lijphart, 2008; Stepan, 2001). Scholars of comparative welfare politics, for example, have concluded that constitutional systems that provide many veto points can stymie democratic majorities: Constitutional structures that disperse political power and offer multiple points of influence on the making and implementation of policy are inimical to welfare state expansion and will be negatively associated with our various measures of welfare state effort. These aspects include federalism, presidential government, strong bicameralism, single-member-district electoral systems, and provisions for referenda.
It is worth noting that the United States has all of those features, thus suggesting that its political institutions might actually limit rather than enhance the effectiveness of mass political mobilization, contributing to its relative limited social welfare benefits (Beckett and Western, 2001; Downes and Hansen, 2006) and, I suggest, its persistent high crime rates and high incarceration rates. 44 Thus, it is possible that corporatist, unitary political systems have lower rates of punishment not because they have less democratic participation but because they have more democratic accountability.
It is true that imprisonment and other forms of repressive state intervention have risen in the UK as well as the USA, despite its different institutional configuration, namely a (largely) unitary, parliamentary structure. But this increase needs to be understood in several contexts, including rising rates of real violence yet continued support for social safety nets, public policies that keep rates of predatory violence lower than in the USA and substantially lower incarceration rates overall. In addition, while it remains to be seen, for example, what, if any, actual policies result from the August 2011 riots, the ongoing political pressure to address underlying causes and the political attention to police behavior have already far exceeded the national political attention of the US Congress to, for example, comparable issues following the riots after the acquittal of five Los Angeles police officers charged with excessive force in the beating of Rodney King in 1992. 45
What explains these differences needs further research, but I propose that democratic governments can be broadly responsive to a part of the public and its concerns about violence, or, perhaps more accurately, it can be partially responsive to the general public concern about violence, while simultaneously being largely unaccountable for reducing the actual violence that worries the public in the first place. The implication is that where accountability is low, incentives for emphasizing punishment and repressive practices may be high. Such is the case in the USA where there are many points of access and potential for responsiveness to highly active, narrowly focused groups or high-profile crimes, but real political accountability for reducing violence is difficult. In contrast, opportunities for responsiveness in the UK are more tightly coupled with accountability because the political agenda is more concentrated, less diffuse and cannot as easily be addressed with singularly punitive policies. This distinction between accountability and responsiveness may be more important in understanding the dynamics of democratic political participation on crime issues than the centralization of political authority dynamic described by Barker (2009) because it recognizes that the political capacity of those most at-risk of violence is best enhanced when there are fewer opportunities for override by more narrowly focused interests. This distinction also allows us to factor in how widespread and diffuse predatory violence is across countries, which may affect law and policy as well.
Conclusion
How, then, would ‘power to the people’—in other words, more democratic accountability—alter the politics of crime and punishment? It would be a mistake to see the argument here as advocating for greater control over crime politics in one particular venue (i.e. national or local) over another. The point is not that publics in one are more or less likely to push for more punishment than the other. Rather, the argument has focused on how institutional dynamics matter for both the degree and kind of public participation that emerge from democratic systems and has suggested that real political responsiveness to a broad range of pressures about violence may not necessarily lead to more punishment. High rates of real violence, in other words, can cause real political problems to which lawmakers must respond. While we have assumed that democratic participation leads primarily to punishment, we have overlooked how deeply intertwined violence is with other forms of insecurity, to which the public may react with greater demands for community empowerment and reductions in the causes of violence and inequality. Where the costs of making policy more punitive are low—that is, where people who experience both the collateral consequences of more punishment, as well as the stubborn non-responsiveness of violence to imprisonment policies, have less political voice—there are likely to be few incentives to tackle crime in ways much beyond simply more law and order. 46 Where lawmakers are broadly accountable to a wide range of publics, however, where singularly punitive proposals are challenged, we might expect the narrowly punitive approach to face competition from alternative approaches that are coupled with significant social reforms. Competition also drives up voter participation, which can draw in groups that are less likely to vote—precisely those groups that experience higher rates of victimization and the consequences of punitive policies (Bonneau and Gann-Hall, 2009).
What particular institutional designs might promote more varied policy proposals? The US model, despite its many venues for participation by groups with different interests, rarely forces those advocating more punishment to respond to those advocating alternatives because of the nature of the US federal system. Unitary systems require, at least on a basic level, advocates for simplistic punitiveness to make their case on the same playing field as advocates for reform and broader understandings of security. Other aspects of institutional design, however, are also likely to affect the range of ideas about crime and violence. Proportional representation systems (PR) are widely regarded as promoting more public attention, knowledge and participation than single-member plurality systems precisely because they are more likely to be multi-party systems in which members of the public are likely to find a party sympathetic to their interests (Lijphart, 2008; see also Lacey, 2008). PR, coupled with a unitary system, then, may be more likely to draw in the very communities that are facing higher risk of violence, thus promoting more competition, broader participation and a wider range of policy ideas.
A contemporary issue in UK crime politics is the impending introduction of elections for police commissioners. Given the above discussion, the issue may be less one of whether elections will result in more or less punitive policies, and more one of how well those elections represent the full constituency and whether they will allow members of the polity to hold the Government accountable for security, broadly conceived. If police commissioners (and mayors, for that matter) are locally accountable but anemic with respect to actual political authority, or if elections draw low voter turnout, elections could produce more punishment and less attention to the causes of violence. The blame in that case, however, should perhaps not be laid at the feet of the democratic ‘mob’, but rather, at the level of institutional design.
The perverse outcomes that we have seen in many western democracies over the past 30 years, particularly in the USA, may not reflect negative externalities of full-fledged democracies but, rather, imperfect democratic institutions that limit, rather than promote, the ability of the masses to hold government accountable. Rather than seeing high levels of punitiveness in democratic systems as symptomatic of excessive responsiveness of elites to mass democratic politics, I have suggested here that excessive punishment is a sign of less responsiveness to a broad ranging public—that is, less democracy. This counter-intuitive claim is rooted in the challenges to basic assumptions about mass publics, government officials and democracy that emerge from a closer examination of the potential effects of violence on democratic politics. By recognizing the enormous variation in exposure to violence across different segments of society, we can see much more clearly how political agendas can be driven into more punitive directions not so much by mass democratic politics but by the insufficient political voice and representation of those most affected by violence and those who support their interests.