New deviancy,Marxism and the politics of left realism: Reflections on Jock Young’s early writings

The authenticity of the deviant

Two years after RD Laing argued in The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise (Laing, 1984) that it was not mental patients but society who was mad, Jock’s essay ‘The Zookeepers of Deviancy’ (Young, 1969) appeared in a special issue of the journal Anarchy devoted to ‘Libertarian Criminology?’. The article rehearsed many of the themes elaborated in his magnificent ethnography The Drugtakers (Young, 1971). A major aim was to defend the authenticity of the deviant against the repressive and medicalizing gaze of the experts who defined away any notion of personal integrity, autonomy and authentic existence. He wrote:

Our society is characterised by exclusion … [and creates] vast leprosariums in which we put the criminal, the insane, the crippled, and the old, and we leave all these social outcasts for the administration of experts in deviancy; the psychiatrist, the social worker, the priest, and the criminologist.

Those who had done most to oppose this repressive view of the criminologist as oriented towards humane ‘treatment’ of the deviant included Howard Becker, Erving Goffman and others of the Chicago School who identified with the deviant rather than the expert and sought, by contrast, to examine labelling processes whereby authentic human activity was constructed as pathological deviance. But, from the outset, Jock followed Alvin Gouldner’s critique of these new deviancy theorists. Gouldner had coined the term ‘zookeepers’ to refer to the fact that Becker et al. identified with the deviant albeit without any analysis of the social and political power relations that lay behind the labelling process. In this context deviants became simply ‘exotic specimens’. Gouldner (1975: 38), writing originally in 1968, was quoted by Jock: ‘The attitude of these zookeepers of deviance is to create a comfortable and humane Indian Reservation, a protected social space, within which these colourful specimens may be exhibited, unmolested and unchanged.’ Gouldner was himself strongly influenced by the Marxist tradition and, in following him, Jock was embracing it as well. Jock already understood that:

criminology is political: its whole subject matter is that of relationships of power, of conflict over desired resources, of the mode of repression of the weak and of the guardianship of property … and it is against the ideology of normality, the hypocrisy of the wealthy, that we must work.

This dynamic took a developed form in The Drugtakers (1971), where he both defends the authenticity of the marijuana smoker as normal human actor and, at the same time, provides an analysis of power whereby authentic behaviour is constructed as pathological. The focus in The Drugtakers is on the role of the police in ‘deviancy amplification’. The concept, taken from Leslie Wilkins (1964), is deployed to show how police repression drives the deviant further into the subculture and reinforces the very phenomenon that police action is designed to contain. This model of deviancy amplification was used by a number of critical criminologists. Stanley Cohen (1972) used it in his study of moral panics. Several years later, it reappeared in a slightly different form as a key component of left realism.

As the 1970s progressed, the politics and power relations involved in crime and crime control gained a stronger focus in Jock’s writing but without abandoning the insights of ‘zookeepers’ and The Drugtakers. In 1973, he wrote an article in the iconic 1960s radical magazine Oz entitled ‘It’s the Poor What Gets the Blame’ (Young, 1973). It embodied a shift of focus.

In terms of the actual commission of illegalities, rather than those who got caught, crime is well-nigh ubiquitous … law is made for the powerful to be applied against the powerless—it is scarcely surprising that the rich do not figure prominently in the crime statistics.

Note the emphasis here that is less on rescuing the authenticity of the deviant than on exposing the inauthenticity of the respectable. Distinct themes of class and power have now emerged, and blend into a reference to working class crime characterized on first impression by the very ‘left idealism’ of which Jock would accuse many on the far left a decade later: ‘Crime for the working class may be seen as an unorganised attempt to redistribute income … The problem is that the middle class are so much better at it’ (Young, 1973: 46). But, as he continued:

it is necessary to distinguish community crime and predatory crime. Community crime is progressive, it involves the redistribution of material and goods … Predatory crime is the illegal swindling of the poor by the wealthy and the rip-off of the poor by the poor … To talk of crime in the abstract as the liberation of property is nonsense.

The ‘rip-off of the poor by the poor’ and the critique of an abstract notion of crime as liberation of property was to take an increasingly pre-eminent place in Jock’s orientation as the 1970s progressed. However, a shift in emphasis should not be confused with a rejection of earlier commitments. What was changing was the social context. The post-war boom and the exuberance of the 1960s were giving way to slower economic growth, growing social inequality and the ‘re-discovery’ of poverty and deprivation in Britain. In the United States, Lyndon Johnson’s ‘War on Poverty’ had already met its nemesis in the Detroit insurrection of 1967.

Jock in no way rejected the authenticity of deviant subcultures—of the essentially harmless, victimless activity he had documented in The Drugtakers. Additionally, much working class crime was an attempt to cushion the ravages of capitalism. Rather, it was necessary to create a society in which harmless deviancy would neither be criminalized by power elites nor be seen as a threat by working class communities. As regards the destructive intra-class crime or ‘rip-off of the poor by the poor’, it was necessary to create the conditions in which such activity could be dealt with in a progressive manner within the working class community itself.

The encounter with Marx and Engels

Jock would never have described himself as a Marxist. Throughout most of his intellectual life, his inspiration was the radical American sociologist Charles Wright Mills, in particular the latter’s The Sociological Imagination (Mills, 1959). But Jock took Marxism seriously as a source of insights. When he wrote ‘It’s the Poor What Gets the Blame’ he was already working with Paul Walton—a prominent Marxist scholar whose 1972 study From Alienation to Surplus Value had won the Isaac Deutscher prize (Walton, 1972). In 1973, together with Ian Taylor, they published The New Criminology (Taylor et al., 1973). Space prevents a fuller discussion of this famous text save to say that the encounter with Marxism is a central part of a ‘fully social theory of deviance’. Marxism is recruited as an ally against the essential relativism of the new deviancy theorists such as Becker:

A full-blown Marxist theory of deviance … would be concerned to develop explanations of the ways in which particular historical periods … give rise to attempts by the economically and politically powerful to order society in particular ways. It would ask with greater emphasis the question that Howard Becker poses (and does not face), namely, who makes the rules, and why?

The book concludes with a similar theme, that a fully social theory of deviance must break with correctionalist criminology because ‘the causes of crime must be intimately bound up with the form assumed by the social arrangements of the time … for crime to be abolished, then, those social arrangements themselves must also be subject to fundamental social change’ (Taylor et al., 1973: 281–282). The emphasis here is in direct continuity with the earlier critiques, following Gouldner of the Becker school and its inability to pose key questions of power. Over the next couple of years two key ingredients of what was to become, a decade later, a fully fledged left realism begin to combine in Jock’s writing: first, the identification and critique of ‘left idealism’ and, second, the theme of the harmful effects of intra-class crime (‘the poor ripping-off the poor’) in the working class community. The most important texts are Jock’s essay ‘Working-Class Criminology’ in the edited collection (Taylor et al., 1975) and also in the preface he wrote for Frank Pearce’s Crimes of the Powerful (1976).

There is a straight line from the critique of the Becker school of radical deviancy theory to the critique of left idealism. This is clear in the Preface to Frank Pearce’s book. After underlining the great innovation of the new deviancy theorists as labelling, the weakness of Becker et al. is seen in both sides of the equation of power. On the side of the deviant it is seen in the view of the individual as ‘essentially free to evolve any values he chose, or experiment with various forms of behaviour’ (Pearce, 1976: 13) and, on the other hand, in the view of the powerful that ignored the ‘hegemonic domination of bourgeois values. By pointing to power without analysing its class basis and the nature of the state … (Becker et al.) … transformed the actions of the powerful into an arbitrary flexing of moral muscles’ (Pearce, 1976: 13). The result was ‘a romantic theory of the noble deviant, expressive and creative, who was bowed under the fetters of state control’ (Pearce, 1976: 13–14).

It is a short step to the critique of left idealism. The ‘noble deviant’ becomes the criminal who is only and always engaged in his own individual war with the ruling class, never ripping off his own class. It is only romantics, Jock continued,

who could view the petty thief, the violent offender and even the schizophrenic, as some way acting authentically in their circumstances. For to grant an actor purposiveness and consciousness is not to say that his solution is tenable, nor to condone his actions, nor to agree with his assessment of his predicament.

In other words, the denial by the state and its experts of authenticity to the harmless deviants of The Drugtakers is to be contrasted with the granting by left idealism of spurious authenticity to those who commit violence and theft against the poor. The elaboration of ‘left idealism’ first appears (as far as I am aware) in a chapter published in 1979 in which it is defined as ‘a voluntaristic conception of human nature coupled with a notion that social order is in essence maintained by a series of coercive institutions structured together in a functionalist fashion’ (Young, 1979: 13). The point here about the state is not the absence of coercion. Jock’s criticism of Becker et al. included their failure to understand state power. The issue is rather that coercion is not the only basis of state domination. Many state institutions, including police and criminal justice agencies, exercise functions that in themselves are socially useful and necessary. In this analysis Jock was influenced by the Marxist historian Edward Thompson who saw important gains embodied in the modern state, in particular, the rule of law (see Thompson, 1977). In the Preface to Pearce, Jock wrote: ‘the class society which creates social disorganisation also creates its partial palliative. Legal institutions also contain within them gains and concessions wrested from the bourgeoisie by the labour movement’ (Pearce, 1976: 19). The point is to democratize fully such institutions. The engagement with Marxism—very much of the Thompson rather than the Trotskyist tradition dominant among the student far left at the time—was thus a route out of the relativist quagmire of the new deviancy theory. It reflected understanding that the values pursued by some (not all) deviants in capitalist society were profoundly bourgeois, while the state secured its hegemony by appearing indispensable to protect the working class from other members of the poor engaged in ‘rip-off’ while actually protecting only the (white) middle class and the rich.

The emphasis, already identified in Jock’s earliest writings, on the destructive effect of much working class crime on the community and the understanding that ‘the working class community suffers immensely from the criminals in its midst’ (Pearce, 1976: 18) is not derived in any way from an abandonment or avoidance of Marxism. On the contrary, it is an outcome of Jock’s close encounter with Marxism. This is clear in ‘Working-Class Criminology’ (Young, 1975) where, unlike within The New Criminology (Taylor et al., 1973), Jock’s engagement is less with Karl Marx himself—whose writings on crime were important but sparse (see Lea, 2010)—than with his great collaborator Frederick Engels.

In his 1844 Condition of the Working Class in England (Engels, 2009), Engels documented the brutalizing effects of crime on the Manchester working class during the 1840s. He focused on criminality as the first stirrings of anger on the part of the working class which would eventually lead to radical political action. But he was careful not to see working class crimes, such as interpersonal violence or theft by the poor from the poor, as a form of radical political action (see Lea, 1996).

What emerges from Jock’s encounter with Engels is almost the complete programme of left realism, just under a decade before the publication of the founding manifesto (Lea and Young, 1984)

It is unrealistic to suggest that the problem of crimes like mugging is merely the problem of miscategorisation and concomitant moral panics … the reality of crime in the streets can be the reality of human suffering and personal disaster. We have to argue, therefore, strategically, for the exercise of social control, but also to argue that such control must be exercised within the working class community and not by external policing agencies. Further, it is only in the process of struggle for control that the community can evolve out of its frequently disorganised and disintegrated state.

Left realism and social democracy

The left realist project, as it developed in the mid-1980s, was ‘a social democratic approach to the analysis of crime and the development of effective policies of crime control’ (Young, 1991: 146). Many critics on the far left saw this as an abandonment of radicalism. This view gained in plausibility from the fact that the main social democratic party in Britain, the Labour Party, has little or no Marxist roots while the extra-parliamentary radical left has been dominated by the revolutionary traditions of Lenin and Trotsky. Historically speaking, though, it is quite possible to be a social democrat—that is, to believe in reforms through parliamentary democracy as the main strategy for the defence of the working class—and to subscribe to a Marxist analysis of the dynamics of capitalism. If the political aim of left realism was quite explicitly to provide the Labour Party (then in opposition) with a crime control policy that could counter the right wing Conservative ‘law and order’ policies of the Thatcher government (then in power), this in no way necessitated Jock somehow abandoning his earlier encounter with Marxism or a ‘former “idealist” self’ (Cottee, 2002: 388).

However, left realism was not a simple social democratic criminology in continuity with traditions of Labour reformism. Jock saw the latter as rooted in the twin assumptions that post-war economic expansion would reduce poverty and lead to falling crime, and that the state criminal justice institutions were capable of dealing with the residuum given the right policies. In fact, economic expansion—which slowed from the mid-1970s and was replaced by de-industrialization—produced growing inequalities and a rising sense of relative deprivation in poor communities that lay behind rapidly rising street crime. Meanwhile criminal justice institutions, the police in particular, were increasingly mired in accusations of incompetence, racism, sexism and an inability to respond to the crime problems of poor communities. Jock identified a double crisis in social democratic criminology: first, an ‘aetiological crisis’, or an inability to explain rising crime (Young, 1986); and, second, a policy vacuum derived from an over-focus on traditional criminal justice institutions. Social democracy was becoming defenceless in the face of Conservative ‘law and order’ campaigns.

Whether such a view involved a distortion or oversimplification of social democratic criminology (see Reiner, 2009) should not distract us here. The point is that, for left realists, the twin starting points were the reality of rising crime in working class communities and the need for democratic local community-based measures to deal with it. A long-standing element of Jock’s thinking was the understanding that only working class communities themselves could solve the crime problems in their midst as opposed to ‘external policing agencies’. This now came to be embodied in three key aspects of left realist policy. First, the role of the focused local crime and victimization survey in equipping local community groups (local councillors, women’s groups, ethnic minority groups, trades unions and community workers) with a source of data about crime and victimization. Second, the relation between police and poor communities had become trapped in a ‘vicious circle’ of police–community alienation in which repressive policing dried up sources of information from the community about crime which led in turn to more repressive policing (Lea and Young, 1984: 194). This cycle was based on the same methodology as the deviancy amplification spiral deployed in The Drugtakers. The solution was to see policing as a local ‘public good’ in which policing styles and priorities must be under the control of the local community. Third, the role of debate and community mobilization around crime control was a crucial element in reintegrating those who were both among the perpetrators of street crime and also its most likely victims: ‘a community-wide debate on crime … would provide a new source of cohesion as different groups discovered that they faced similar problems and had similar needs’ (Lea and Young, 1984: 259–260). Left realism secured the beginnings of a foothold at a local level. The Islington Crime Survey (Jones et al., 1986) of which Jock was the director, demonstrated the potential for empowering local communities in relation to crime and policing. This was, it should be remembered, an entire decade before the election of the first Labour government in the UK since 1979. When, finally, ‘New Labour’ led by Tony Blair, formed a government in 1997 the policy emphasis had already shifted to a neoliberal agenda. The language of ‘community’ was deployed but community-based crime prevention metamorphosed into a battery of top–down, police-led anti-social behaviour orders, dispersal zones, curfews and surveillance cameras (see Bell, 2011; Crawford, 2009). The political ground was for a long time cut from under the feet of left realism but it is precisely because the left realist project was so firmly rooted in his thinking over a long period, that Jock was able to resist any invitation to join the academic chorus celebrating Blair’s ‘Third Way’ (Giddens, 1998). He understandably moved on to other themes.