Criminology and responsibility: Enduring themes in the work of Jock Young

The purposes of criminology

It would be difficult to understand the development of Jock Young’s thinking about the discipline of criminology without grasping that he did not, in fact, think of criminology at its best as a ‘discipline’ in the specialized and denatured sense that we usually mean. Woven throughout the various phases of his work is the vision of criminology—and of social science generally—as an integral part of a larger struggle for social change.

His work is grounded in the awareness that the criminologist is operating within an unequal society in which human possibilities are stifled and distorted in the name of material gain and class power. The criminologist’s job is to uncover the mechanisms through which that system both generates harmful acts and simultaneously defines some (and only some) of them as against the law. But not in some antiseptic, ivory-tower fashion: a criminology worth its salt must see itself as contributing to the movement toward a society that is less unequal and more committed to the appreciation of diversity, a society that in some of his earlier writing Jock described as embodying ‘socialist diversity’ (see Young, 1975: 90). As he wrote with Ian Taylor and Paul Walton in the mid-1970s, a truly radical social science ‘has to develop methodologies for the realization of the societies its own critique would necessitate’ (Taylor et al., 1975: 24).

Almost 40 years later, Young makes a similar point in criticizing some contemporary Left perspectives in criminology for adopting an ‘impossibilist’ and hence passive stance toward social change—a ‘new Grand Theory’ of the Left that offers us ‘no suggestions at all as to what might make things even a little better and perhaps even offer transitional stepping stones to a genuine social transformation’ (Young, 2011: 218). Some of his immediate interests had shifted since the 1970s, but the idea that criminology should help foster ‘genuine social transformation’ had not. Understanding that core sense of mission requires a little historical perspective. Jock Young, along with his colleagues, wrote compellingly and often about the social and political conditions from which their own work, and that of other radical deviancy theorists in the United Kingdom, emerged. They saw this work as, in part, a critique of the ‘Fabian’ criminology of the previous several decades, which saw the rise and consolidation of a nominally socialist Labour Party and the creation of a vaguely ‘social democratic’ welfare state that, however, left the central pillars of 20th-century capitalism intact.

That welfare state was not without very real accomplishments: it had reduced material deprivation; provided better housing; opened up more opportunities in education for working class people; and created the National Health Service. But it remained a highly unequal social order despite having blunted some of the roughest edges of inequality, and seemed content to offer a wider range of people the chance to rise (or fall) in what was still a steeply stratified society. It was also a remarkably punitive and controlling society in which new legions of middle-class workers in the social service and social control industries labored to help those at the bottom or on the margins of the welfare state ‘adjust’ within a system whose fundamentals were no longer seriously challenged, and in which deep inequalities of gender, sexuality, and race had barely begun to be addressed.

Conventional criminology fit snugly into that general framework. It was mostly ‘correctional’ in its orientation, increasingly looking—at best—to improve offenders’ ability to function within a society whose enduring deprivations and restrictions were essentially taken off the table as objects of study, much less advocacy.

The 1960s and 1970s saw the emergence of new perspectives that challenged conventional conceptions of crime and deviance at their root, and indeed ‘inverted’ the concerns of correctional criminology. Borrowing heavily from US interactionist approaches to deviance, and forged in good part in the intellectually fertile environment of the series of National Deviancy Conferences in the UK in the late 1960s and early 1970s, that movement shifted the focus from the ‘management’ of the deviant toward a critique of the stigmatizing and typically counter-productive actions of the justice system and other agencies of social control.

But while the ‘new deviancy theory’ represented a genuine challenge to ‘correctional’ criminology, and did force a recognition of the situation of marginalized groups within the taken-for-granted welfare state, it lacked—sometimes even scorned—a strategy for change: ‘Skeptical deviancy theory’ had successfully highlighted ‘the excesses of a social control system that substitutes “care” for punishment.’ But it offered ‘no coherent alternatives’ and was therefore ‘exhausted except as a form of moral gesture’ (Taylor et al., 1975: 14). And lacking a strategy for change—or any links to actual groups in the real world engaged in organized struggle—it was a stance that veered perilously close to a kind of voyeurism. ‘New deviancy theory’ offered ‘few guidelines to provide pointers to practical struggle’: there was ‘no desire to dirty one’s hands in actual struggles (and certainly no programmes or policies spelt out for those who might so desire)’. It thus represented ‘an essentially idealist politics’ (Young, 1975: 69–70).

Against both this ‘appreciative’ but passive perspective and the minimal (or repressive) interventions of correctional criminology, Young argues for a criminology that is committed to advancing fundamental social change—not only in the kinds of questions it asks but also in the links it forges with people outside the academy who are (or may be) in the thick of actual struggles. In some of his work from the 1970s, the important political struggle is specifically defined as socialist—albeit a revivified socialism that appreciates the diversity of cultures and subcultures in contemporary society and envisions a world that is both just and culturally vibrant—one in which the ‘power to criminalise’ has receded (Taylor, Walton and Young, 1975: 44). Thus Taylor, Walton and Young called in 1975 for a ‘criminology which is normatively committed to the abolition of inequalities in wealth and power’, and insisted that ‘any theoretical position which is not minimally committed to such a view will fall into correctionalism’ (Ibid.: 44) What Young and his colleagues at that time called ‘radical deviancy theory’ would transcend passive idealism by fusing an appreciation of ‘radical diversity’ with a ‘fully social’ understanding of the larger social context. And it would take that understanding into the real world of political action by linking up with organizations involved in struggles against ‘both conservative and Fabian conceptions of order’ (1975: 19). As Paul Walton put it in an interview about the intellectual origins of The New Criminology, ‘The purposes behind our critique of criminology are clear. We are concerned to … remove the obstacles (in intellectual culture), that obstruct the possibility of an alternative and human society’ (in Mintz, 1974: 52–53).

Fidelity to reality: The overarching principle

Young’s brief against what he variously calls ‘correctional’ or ‘orthodox’ criminology, as well as what he came to call ‘left idealism’, is that, in different but oddly parallel ways, neither has what it takes to help in that struggle for an ‘alternative and human’ society. And at bottom, the reason is that they are incapable of adequately grasping the nature of social reality.

The insistence that any social science that claims to be taken seriously must be faithful to social reality runs like a thread through many decades of Jock’s work. It might seem a little odd to foreground what should be obvious and uncontroversial—surely it’s a no-brainer that criminology should reflect social reality (just as, say, economics ought to reflect economic reality). But in fact Young spent much of his career pointing out—often acerbically, almost always cogently—the ways in which much that passes for criminological theory and research actually has only a partial connection, at best, with the real world. Moreover, he worried that criminology’s disconnect from reality had very likely increased over time. And obviously, a perspective that misperceives (or, worse, deliberately obscures) social reality cannot be a guide to progressive social change.

In 1975, Young (1975: 87) approvingly quoted Leon Trotsky to the effect that ‘I work not with abstractions, only with realities’—and that principle is woven into his work right up to the end. In the final pages of The Criminological Imagination, contemporary criminology is condemned as ‘a criminology which has lost contact with reality’ (Young, 2011: 223). The book’s title, and inspiration, is of course taken from C Wright Mills, and Young admiringly notes that Mills more than half a century earlier had called out the ‘rise of abstracted empiricism where reality was lost in method and measurement, where the tools of the trade became magically more important than reality itself’. But the state of social science today was so much worse, Young argued, that it would astonish Mills himself: ‘in much of the social sciences reality has been lost in a sea of statistical symbols and dubious analysis’ (Young, 2011: viii).

Fidelity to social reality is the sine qua non of an intellectually responsible and politically useful social science. But conventional criminology regularly fails that test, in several ways.

The ‘total structure’

One of the most persistent criticisms Jock Young leveled against criminology for four decades was that it tended to isolate crime (or deviance) from the larger social structure in which it took place, the broader social forces that acted to shape both the expression of deviance and the definition of what was deviant or criminal in the first place. ‘The lens of orthodox criminology’, he wrote in The Criminological Imagination, ‘not only distorts, it leaves out’. In particular, it leaves out ‘all those acts and activities which would suggest that there are wider structural forces involved in the generation of social harms’ (Young, 2011: 189). Through that lens, crime and other social problems are presented in such a way that ‘the human actor is observed as an isolated atom without social context’.

Young published those words in 2011, but a remarkably similar view appears in much of his earlier work. ‘What we had all the time’, he noted in 1974 in speaking of the intellectual origins of The New Criminology, ‘was a “left take” on the social universe, a notion of the total structure’ (Mintz, 1974: 34):

I think the most important thing about The New Criminology is the attempt to do a criminology which takes account of the total society. It’s not microsociological, like symbolic interactionism, labeling theory and so on, and it’s not crude either in its view of social conflict … we see crime as an authentic form of consciousness, we take it seriously, and we try to relate that back to the total structure and avoid the impasse which characterizes micro-sociological accounts.

The way in which Young talks about the specific features of the ‘total structure’ that are crucial in understanding crime shifts from time to time—but not fundamentally. Throughout, the causal lens he applies to crime in capitalist societies is a political-economic one. Looking specifically at crime in British cities in the 1980s, for example, Young and John Lea emphasize the effect of economic marginalization and relative deprivation in generating a new culture among youth which, though it contained at least the germ of a sense of solidarity, also manifested a ‘highly individualistic, predatory streak’ (Lea and Young, 1993/1984: 226).

The link between the predatory individualism of the emerging youth culture and the surrounding structure and culture of contemporary capitalism in Britain is clearly drawn. But in Jock Young’s hands this insistence on the causal role of the ‘total structure’ is never deterministic—or simplistic. A unifying theme from the 1970s onward is that although individuals operate within a particular social context, they do not operate like robots or atoms, but as subjects, acting with some degree of consciousness rooted in their own understanding of their social situation. Young was importantly influenced in this by David Matza’s notion of ‘naturalism’, which insisted that the study of social action must focus on the whole phenomenon under study, including ‘human subjectivity, voluntarism, and culture’. Broad social forces, like poverty or unemployment, became causes of crime only in some circumstances and not others: these ‘factors’ only result in deviant action when they are ‘transformed into narratives shaped by particular cultures’ (Young, 2013: xxxii). It is sometimes argued that Young became more focused on those cultural particularities in some of his last works, where he expresses a strong kinship with cultural criminology (see Young, 2013). But the focus on consciousness and culture as integral parts of the reality of crime and deviance was present from the beginning, rooted in part in the work of radical British historians like EP Thompson who wove a similar appreciation of human agency and culture into their historical analyses.

The concept of ‘relative deprivation’, indeed, was particularly appealing to Young and his colleagues because it nicely blended an understanding of the causal force of the social context with an appreciation of the way in which human behavior is a product of consciousness and choice within that context. As Young wrote with John Lea in 1984, ‘relative deprivation manages to capture the creative and determined parts of the process of being human’. It is ‘totally opposed to simple deterministic ideas of crime … as if one could, with enough effort, come up with laws of human deviance like one can come up with natural laws of the physical universe’ (Lea and Young, 1993/1984: 81). The same critique is a central theme in The Criminological Imagination, a quarter of a century later, where the ‘Bogus of Positivism’ is lacerated with particular ferocity.

The failure of most conventional criminology to firmly situate the problem of crime in the larger social context is not simply an intellectual one: again, it takes on special urgency because it obscures the necessity for fundamental change and thus fails in its most primary responsibility. Again, in Young’s vision, we judge the adequacy of theories partly in light of their political adequacy, broadly speaking—their capacity to serve as guides to the creation of alternatives to the conditions that now cause harm. Thus what he calls ‘cosmetic criminology’ is deemed simultaneously intellectually and practically bankrupt because it sees crime and other social ills as ‘mere blemishes on the body politic which can be dealt with by superficial, administrative measures’ (Young, 2011: 191).

The imperative of specificity

The failure to see crime within the ‘total’ structure of society is closely related to another pervasive theme in Jock Young’s work: since the extent, the human impact, and the definitions of crime vary according to specific cultural, historical, national, and even local circumstances, a criminology that is attuned to social reality as opposed to academic abstractions has to place that variation at the forefront of analysis.

We see this concern again in again in Jock’s work over time, in many different forms: in his critique of the way in which much criminological theory (especially before the 1990s) had been based unreflectively on the US experience; in his critique, especially vehement in some later work, of criminology’s inability to properly grasp the extraordinary changes in ‘late modern’ society and culture that upended most of the stabilities and certainties of the postwar era; and, perhaps most importantly, in his argument that the reality of local variation in crime and victimization was critically important in assessing both theory and social policy.

He argued consistently from the 1970s on that ordinary street crime is heavily concentrated in areas that are also disadvantaged in other ways: its victims are disproportionately working class people who are likely to also suffer more from accidents, poor urban services, polluted and noisy neighborhoods, and bad schools. That reality was too often obscured by the use of statistics that were too general and too abstract: ‘global figures’ on the extent of crime ‘often hide the focusing of criminal victimization’ and obscure the fact that this focused vulnerability compounds the impact of other social problems: ‘Those who are already suffering from social problems are more victimized by crime than those who are well protected and secure’. Crime not only hits the poor more often but hits them harder (Lea and Young, 1993/1984: 53). This concentration has profound moral and political implications, and is part of the reason for Young’s insistence that a responsible criminology must aim to improve the conditions of human life. But it is also theoretically and methodologically important, and carries crucial strategic implications as well.

These concerns come together in Young’s critique of conventional crime surveys and his subsequent role in developing the series of local victimization surveys carried out with colleagues in Islington, Merseyside, and other local communities (see Jones et al., 1986). The local surveys flow directly from the imperative of specificity: they allow us to ‘go beyond the abstraction of the aggregate statistics’, and in doing so expose the limitations of perspectives that conceive of street crime as little more than a ‘blemish’ on the surface of an otherwise smoothly functioning social order. Put simply, if you look only at what the national British Crime Survey says about the prevalence of crime, you would come away with the sense that serious street crime is quite rare in Britain—which supports both a minimalist view that concern about crime is little more than a media-generated moral panic and a managerial perspective that sees crime as containable through small-scale interventions without serious efforts at social change. But if you take careful survey techniques to the streets of Islington, you see a very different picture. Crime is prevalent; it is among the routine and constant harms faced by disadvantaged people in the community, whose fear and anger about crime is at least partly grounded in reality—even if their interpretations of its extent and causes may not be entirely accurate: ‘“Irrational” fears become more rational once we focus on the inner city’ (Young, 1992: 37). The fact that street crime turns out, on this kind of close inspection, to be heavily concentrated just where some social theories would predict is both a validation of the salience of those theories and an affirmation of the need for fundamental challenges to inequality and relative deprivation in any realistic strategy against crime.

Taking crime seriously

The concern for specificity, in turn, is closely entwined with a third key theme within the overarching commitment to fidelity to reality: the insistence on ‘taking crime seriously’. That slogan was a central part of the message of ‘left realism’ in the 1980s and 1990s, but I think has been often isolated and misunderstood. For Young, the insistence on taking crime seriously is an integral part of the larger commitment to conceiving criminology as an instrument of progressive social change. Failing to recognize and appreciate the very real harm that street crime causes to working people and the persistently marginalized is not only empirically inaccurate, and thus an egregious violation of the scholar’s mandate to be faithful to social reality, it is also an abandonment of the needs of flesh and blood people in favor of academic abstractions. It is, again, a moral and political failure as well as an intellectual one.

The imperative of taking crime seriously is most fully set out in the 1980s, most notably in Lea and Young’s pivotal book What Is to Be Done about Law and Order (1984), which the authors would describe by the 1990s as having become ‘the founding text for “left realist” criminology’ (Lea and Young, 1993: vii). But it appears in essentially similar form much earlier. In the seminal 1975 essay ‘Working–Class Criminology’, Young (1975: 79) writes that ‘Working class people suffer from crime, confront daily the experience of material desperation, undergo the ravages of disorganization and competitive individualism’. Against the excessively romanticized visions of some versions of labeling theory, Young insists that a socially responsible criminology must distinguish between the ‘progressive components of pluralism’ and ‘activities which are directly the product of the brutalizations of existing society’:

It is unrealistic to suggest that the problem of crimes like mugging is merely the problem of miscategorization and concomitant moral panics … The reality of crime in the streets can be the reality of human suffering and personal disaster.

Communities hard-hit by the impact of rapacious capitalism really are often disorganized and dangerous: denying this not only obscures reality but perpetuates victimization and fear (and hands the crime issue to the political Right). A corollary is that a progressive criminology has to argue ‘strategically’ for the ‘exercise of social control’—not for a laissez-faire approach to the very real troubles those communities face. But it must be a different kind of social control—not the kind envisioned by ‘correctional’ criminology but control ‘exercised within the working-class community’ itself. Taking on the struggle for democratic social control can help a community ‘evolve out of its frequently disorganized and disintegrated state’—and, again, it is the job of the radical criminologist to ‘aid and inform such struggles and projects’ (Young, 1975: 89).

But there is more. Street crime should be taken seriously not just because of its often devastating immediate impact on vulnerable individuals or its adverse effect on the quality of life in stricken communities, but also because it is a reflection of much deeper structural injustices and of the toxic values of an individualistic and predatory society. This perspective is set out most powerfully in a compelling passage from What Is to Be Done about Law and Order, which is worth quoting at some length. The ‘individualism’ of street crime, Lea and Young (1993/1984: 55) write,

Produces a collapse of human solidarity; it represents the palpable breakdown of the social order, or the rampant individualism of a Hobbesian war of all against all. Crime is a potent symbol of the antisocial egotism which permeates the totality of behavior and values within capitalism.

Crime is the end-point of a continuum of disorder. It is not separate from other forms of aggravation and breakdown … it is a symbol of a world falling apart. It is lack of respect for humanity and for fundamental human decency.

Crime is the tip of the iceberg. It is a real problem in itself but it is also a symbol of a far greater problem, and the weak suffer most.

And again, in the early 1990s:

The crime rate is not a marginal concern but in many ways the moral barometer of our society, a key indicator as to whether we are getting things right, achieving the sort of society in which people can live with dignity and without fear.

Failing to be serious about crime, accordingly, is failing to care much about the rest of the iceberg—to care about the kind of society we live in. And a social science that doesn’t care about the kind of society we live in, from Young’s point of view, is a contradiction in terms.

Conclusion

It is impossible to do justice to Jock Young’s prodigious and complex body of work in a handful of pages. But I think it is important to emphasize that at its heart, his work represents not only an acute intellectual and practical critique of criminology as usually practiced over the past half century, but also a profoundly moral one. Jock levels at both ‘orthodox’ and some radical criminology the charge of failing in its most central responsibility: to provide the tools of description and analysis that can guide strategies to enduringly alleviate the harm and suffering that crime brings to the vulnerable. Some might ask what morality and responsibility have to do with academic social science. I think Jock Young’s answer would be—everything. Absent that commitment to developing tools that can be used in the service of reducing needless inequality, coercion, and suffering, it is hard to know what criminology could be for.

Wherever these values came from in Jock’s personal history—a good Protestant sense of duty and calling transposed to academia, sturdy craft values that make the quality of the work and the utility of the product paramount—they are values we abandon at our peril. Without them, as Jock hammered home for nearly half a century, criminology is at best irrelevant, at worst an accomplice of the forces that would obstruct progress toward a truly human society of dignity, equality, and creative diversity.