Abstract
This article examines the relation between criminology and the state in the postwar period. The article begins by looking at the role of the criminologist in the emerging welfare state. Here the state was regarded as benevolent, while the task of the criminologist was to help guide penal policy along benevolent lines. We then chart the development of a more critical approach to the state, now conceived as an authoritarian formation by critical theorists who no longer considered themselves insiders. We then trace a range of forces that worked to marginalise the state now increasingly viewed as irrelevant. These include the triumph of neoliberalism, the reception of Foucault’s work and globalisation theory on mainstream criminological thinking. We conclude by drawing attention to the reality of a post-welfare, neoliberal order, in which the state never went away, and profile recent attempts to theorise its nature. In the context of societies where state power is omnipresent in our lives, we suggest the time has now arrived when we need to reconnect the body of the King with his decapitated head.
Whatever happened to the state in criminological theory? Up to the 1980s, state analysis was considered integral to the study of crime and social control, a legacy both of Marxism and the ascendency of the New Left within academia during the 1960s. Such analysis, exemplified in books such as Policing the Crisis (Hall, Critcher, Jefferson, Clarke and Roberts, 1978), were also theoretically rich, drawing upon the insights of theorists such as Poulantzas and Gramsci to forge an interpretation of the changing nature of the state in the postwar period. Then the state literally vanished as an object of criminological enquiry and, with the exception of Marxist-inspired critical traditions, criminologists either forgot to talk about it, or relegated it to the margins of their enquiries, viewing it either as irrelevant to study or as a debilitated relic of a bygone age.
In this article we problematise this shift: the rise of and retreat from the state. To accomplish this, we present a story in four stages. We begin in the context of the post Second World War, welfare state settlement, an era when the state was considered a benign actor and one which criminologists could unproblematically work with and for. We then trace the rise of a new critically informed approach to the welfare state as it began to enter a period of crisis from the 1970s onward. Here the state began to be perceived less as a benevolent actor and more as an authoritarian formation. With particular reference to the work of Hall and his colleagues we examine the development of this, the authoritarian state thesis, and consider its various offspring. We then consider a range of forces that have collectively worked to marginalise the analysis of the state within criminology. These include the triumph of neoliberalism, the decline of Marxism, the reception of Foucault’s work and the impact of globalisation theory on criminological thought. Finally, we profile an emerging body of critical work that not only attests to the continued significance of the state but also casts considerable doubt on many of the criticisms that have been made justifying its marginalisation. In the context of a criminological tradition that still remains in hock to Foucault’s injunction that analysis would proceed better by metaphorically cutting off the King’s head, we will suggest that these developments invite us to rethink this approach. In the context of societies where the state never disappeared and where state power is omnipresent in our lives, we suggest the time has now arrived when we need to reconnect the body of the King with his decapitated head.
Criminology and the Welfare State
Criminology was never by nature an outlaw science, it was from the beginning a research tradition dedicated to the task of helping the state identify and respond to the problems posed by criminality, where the criminals in question were typically of the ‘usual suspect’ variety: young, working class and male. Confronting the ignorance of public opinion from below and political populism from above, criminologists, or more accurately the various psychologists and legal theorists who worked within the domain of penal policy-making, sought to provide expert opinion on crime and about criminals in the context of a political field where their expertise mattered and where, as a restricted policy elite, their views counted (Ryan 2003).
Within the developing welfare state this elite, by and large, conceived crime as a social problem that had social causes that benevolent interventions could engineer away. Working broadly within a positivistic tradition, crime was conceived as a residual problem that an expanding welfare state, committed to full employment and organised around Keynesian principles, could address. Crime was low on the political agenda and its regulation was seen as a largely apolitical technical issue (Downes and Morgan, 1994). While prisons existed, they were by and large viewed as relics of a bygone era soon to be rendered obsolete by new cadres of experts committed to the benevolent progress model of social change (Cohen, 1985).
Within the order of ‘penal welfarism’, as Garland would term this complex (Garland, 2001), the state was not itself an object of enquiry. Criminology was a discourse of the state and the criminologist someone who unproblematically worked to ensure that the social response to crime proceeded benevolently. Such optimism, however, would be short-lived as the welfare settlement began to fracture and crime rates began their seemingly inexorable rise upwards. While the crime experts employed within bodies such as the Home Office remained, over time they would begin to play a far less prominent part in the business of crime control. Partly, they were crippled by what Jock Young identified as an ‘aetiological crisis’ gathering pace from the 1960s in which mainstream criminology found itself unable to reconcile rising crime rates with continued economic expansion and overall reductions of poverty (Young, 1987). Meanwhile new players began to enter the field. Of particular relevance were new cadres of law-and-order politicians who had little faith in the expertise of restricted elites and who, in societies where crime control was becoming ever more politicised, began to initiate a punitive turn in penal policy in which, from being considered the solution to the problems posed by crime, penal welfarism itself came to be viewed as part of the problem (Garland, 2001). Against a backdrop characterised by a wider crisis of the welfare state, intensifying class conflict and a new more authoritarian law-and-order climate, the emerging state form itself would become the subject of analysis by a new, critically informed and sociologically grounded group of social scientists, not least among which were the new class of criminologists who attended the new National Deviancy conferences of the 1970s. These sociologists by no means saw themselves as servants of the state, nor did they view the state as a benevolent actor.
The Authoritarian State and its Offspring
It is in the work of Stuart Hall and his colleagues in the Birmingham School that we witness the first comprehensive attempt to problematise the state, a theme they substantively developed in their seminal work, Policing the Crisis (Hall et al., 1978). Though formally an analysis of the social response to a street crime wave, the book may be more accurately understood as an attempt to grasp the cultural dynamics of the British state as it began to mutate in a more authoritarian direction as the welfare state settlement of the postwar years began to fracture in the 1970s. As this text was pivotal to the development of critical criminology, a brief consideration of its central argument is justified.
By the end of the 1970s the British state was confronting what Hall et al., drawing upon Gramsci, defined as an ‘organic crisis’ (Gramsci, 1971). In effect, it could no longer reproduce the conditions necessary to sustain the circuit of capital and thus capitalist accumulation. The postwar boom economy had tilted towards recession and industrial decline, one consequence of which would be Britain’s diminished status as a world power. In the face of burgeoning economic crisis that would herald mass industrial unrest, three-day weeks and eventually the destruction of vast sectors of its primary manufacturing industry, the hegemonic consensus that had been established in the welfare state began to fracture. The recognition of workers’ organisations, extension of workers’ rights, corporatist trends, the formation of an inclusive welfare state—the very terms by which the postwar hegemony had been achieved—began to fall apart. A state crisis was provoked in a context where capitalism’s failure as an economic system was in danger of being openly revealed.
It was during this period of crisis where the existing hegemonic project was failing that the beginning of a new one began to be forged. The medium of transformation and the subject matter of Policing the Crisis was itself the social response to what was presented through the media at the time as an unprecedented crisis of law and order posed by a new category of deviant, the black street ‘mugger’. Drawing upon Stan Cohen’s work but resituating his analysis within a Marxist political economy, Hall et al. argued that the sensational media reporting of black street theft derived, not from any noticeable rise in street crime, but rather from a moral panic. The timing of the moral panic was, Hall et al. affirmed, by no means accidental: this was a panic with a purpose. What it would facilitate was a way of resolving the organic crisis of the state by helping forge a new hegemonic equilibrium.
It would function this way because in the media identification of the ‘black mugger’ a convenient scapegoat was devised upon which the collective fury of British society could be harnessed and projected. Different classes may well be opposed but street crime provided a point of negative identification around which a class consensus could be constructed and through it a disunited society would become unified in their fear and hatred. Moreover, this unified public would also come to accept the state-driven authoritarian ‘solution’ to the crisis as morally just and justified. This would resolve itself into the derogation of ever more coercive powers to the repressive apparatus of the state.
Through this scapegoating process a crisis that had its genesis in the economic base was successfully displaced to the ideological superstructure where it became reconstructed as a crisis over law and order. In this act of ideological displacement the conditions were created for what would become a new hegemonic equilibrium, and so a new authoritarian state was born in what Stuart Hall would go on to define as the forward ‘drift into a law and order society’.
The repression of mugging would subsequently become a blueprint for what, under Thatcher, would became a neoliberal state formation in which the politics of law and order would assume ever greater salience, where greater powers were devolved to the police, while institutional safeguards, such as civil liberties, were dramatically curtailed. Only, where Poulantzas had read this form of ‘exceptional state’ construction as a process characterised by ‘authoritarian statism’ (Poulantzas, 1975), Hall argued instead that the assault on rights and liberties within the context of a nominally democratic open society could better be read as ‘authoritarian populism’. This term would then come to dominate his analysis of Thatcherism and its success throughout the 1980s (Hall, 1988).
Developing further the account developed in Policing the Crisis, Hall argued that the success of Thatcherism ultimately lay in its ability to garner support from the very working class who had the most to lose from the retrenchment of the welfare state and the attack on the trade unions her government was otherwise pursuing. Thatcherism was successful because through the appeal of its authoritarian populism it was able to condense a wide range of popular discontents provoked by the reality of Britain’s stark and visible decline in the postwar era. These were then successfully articulated around a right-wing agenda which promised to ‘save’ the nation through a series of ‘get tough’ ‘solutions’. These would include crushing the unions and embracing a hard-line law-and-order rhetoric directed at various ‘enemies within’ (as Thatcher would memorably characterise her mission). By embracing the public with an appeal to its innate conservatism, and by promising to renew British society through a rampant neonationalist project predicated on the protection of British sovereignty, Thatcherism (understood as a new power bloc seeking hegemony) came to assume intellectual dominance and moral authority in Britain. Its power base lay both in the control that the Thatcher Government was able to command through its control of state power, and also through the control it was able to exercise through ‘the trenches and fortification systems of civil society’ to mediate and cement its ideological appeal.
Both the arguments posed in Policing the Crisis and the centrality of authoritarian populism were subsequently challenged within the Marxist camp. Jessop, Bonnett, Bromley and Ling (1984) challenged Hall’s assumption that the 1980s marked a watershed in the process of state change and transformation by arguing instead that processes of continuity in the postwar period were more dominant than the rupture and break Hall claimed to have found. Jessop also challenged the degree to which authoritarian populism resonated with the wider public, who by no means bought into (for example) the attempt to cut welfare spending. It was more the failure of Labour to effectively confront Thatcher and articulate a compelling vision, Jessop argued, that best explained Thatcher’s electoral success, than a populist appeal to their worst prejudice.
After Hall and his colleagues’ intervention, critical criminology by and large came to accept the vision of the authoritarian state as this had been articulated in Policing the Crisis. In Phil Scraton’s edited collection (Scraton, 1988), the British state is predominantly presented as a coercive formation which mobilises the mechanisms of the criminal justice system for the purpose of class, gender and ethnic repression against what Hillyard (1993) would subsequently come to term various ‘suspect communities’. From an analysis of state transformation the focus of critical criminology began to shift towards charting the way the criminalisation process was being enacted against various deviant groups by the state apparatus and registering the harms it occasioned along the way. The state in the process came to be seen as little more than a perennial authoritarian formation that was inherently violent. Critical criminology registered the effects of this violence and sought to celebrate all forms of resistance against it.
The endgame of this line of analysis would resolve itself into several tendencies, both supportive and critical. The analysis of resistance would become the focus of various ‘underdog’ forms of sociology. Youth subculture, in particular, became the favoured object of analysis. Its stylistic innovations were celebrated and subsequently explained as indicative of a culture of resistance. This form of analysis would result in one of the other great achievements of the Birmingham School, Resistance through Rituals (Hall and Jefferson, 1976), the themes of which are still reproduced today in cultural criminology (Ferrell, 2004; Ferrell and Sanders, 1995). The authoritarian state thesis also provoked renewed interest in the study of state crime, where the state was now treated as no more than a criminal actor in its own right. The work of Tony Ward and Penny Green today exemplify this tradition (Green and Ward, 2004). Finally, having challenged the legitimacy of criminal law and beyond that the repressive apparatus of the state, critical criminologists have sought to discover alternative approaches by and through which social harms could be addressed and resolved without recourse to state repression. Abolitionism, in this sense, emerged as a replacement discourse to criminal justice for critical criminology (de Haan, 1990; Hulsman, 1986).
There remained however another critical response to the authoritarian state thesis, Left Realism. Its proponents also came from the critical criminological tradition, only their relationship to the state would differ significantly from that of a critical tradition that had forsaken any and all attempts to do business with it and who condemned those who did as literally feeding from the state’s ‘trough’ (Scraton, 1988). In retrospect, Left Realism may be seen as the last attempt on the part of a liberal left to reason with the state. Arguing that crime was far more than a discursive construction of the powerful, Left Realists sought to humanise the business of crime control by problematising the question ‘what is to be done about law and order’ (Lea and Young, 1984). Their solution: a radical democratic politics of law and order grounded on the assumption that the state and its relationship to crime could be and needed to be changed. While New Labour under Blair would embrace the need to ‘get real’ about crime, the punitive neoliberal response that would follow bore very little relevance to the socialist agenda that Left Realists advocated. Left Realists were quickly consigned to the margins.
The Criminological Retreat from the State
The expulsion of liberal criminology from the policy-making apparatus of the state was reflected in the rise of a ‘crime science’ wholly divorced from social science (Clarke, 2010). This, in turn, was a consequence of the triumph of neoliberalism and the crisis of the welfare state. It reflected the material reality of political regimes that were seeking to inflict privatisation across the public sector and which spoke openly about the need to cut back on welfare and ‘roll back the state’.
But at the same time within critical criminology the study of the state began to wither. The theoretical landscape was also changing, and in ways that would further marginalise the state and its analysis. Of these, four bear consideration.
The Retreat from Class and Capital
First, there was a general disenchantment with Marxism and its key assumptions, part of what Ellen Meiksins Wood (1986) termed ‘a retreat from class’. Various proponents of ‘post Marxism’ attacked its status as a master narrative. The ascendancy of identity politics along with forms of poststructural theory also helped intensify a retreat from the study of social class. In the UK this process of disenchantment was reflected in developments ranging from the collapse of the magazine Marxism Today to the defeat of the trade unions by the Thatcher governments. On a larger scale the tendency was reinforced by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the triumph of free market capitalism under American hegemony. While a Marxist-inspired critical criminology continued, it remained at the margins of the discipline.
The retreat from class was part of a general retreat from capitalism as the key driver of social development. Emphasis shifted from late capitalism (Mandel, 1975) to late modernity (see Garland, 2001; Young, 1999, 2007) which, while providing perceptive analysis of the anomie, fragmentation and uncertainty of contemporary society, tended to underemphasise the rootedness of these developments in the concrete dynamics of capitalist development. The result was a lack of focus on neoliberalism as a distinct articulation of state strategy. In his materialist contribution to the rehabilitation of the state as an instrument for the control and oppression of the poor, Loïc Wacquant (2009: 303) emphasises that:
it is not the generic ‘risks and anxieties’ of ‘the open, porous, mobile society of strangers that is late modernity’ that have fostered retaliation against lower-class categories … but the specific social insecurity generated by the fragmentation of wage labour.
The Foucault Effect
The second major transition that would help stimulate the movement away from the state was the reception of Foucault’s work and the huge influence the ‘Foucault effect’ had on theory and practice. Though by no means hostile to a Marxist tradition in which he was also a major force, Foucault’s work challenged many Marxist assumptions about the centrality of the state. It was a challenge played out on many fronts. His analysis of the disciplines, understood as grounded upon generative power, was developed as a direct challenge to a Marxist tradition which he saw as overemphasising state power as a negative expression of force and coercion (Foucault, 1979). In place of a focus on the state understood as a juridical regime, Foucault stressed the importance of governmentality and governance. This, understood as ‘the conduct of conduct’, was a process occurring on a plurality of levels, micro and macro, and by a variety of agencies besides the state, including families, communities, a wide variety of non-state actors and private entities (Johnston and Shearing, 2003; Singh, 2005). The state was relegated to the status of simply one of a number of actors in this process whose role could be easily overemphasised. This theoretical sidelining was subsequently embraced by Foucault’s followers, who had little trouble in further marginalising the state in their own analysis where its death was described variously as the ‘rolling back’ of the state, the retreat of its functions from ‘rowing’ to ‘steering’ (Osborne and Gaebler, 1992) and the ‘death of the social’ (Rose, 1996).
In criminology many of these tendencies were reflected in the study of the increasing role of non-state organisations in crime prevention, management of prisons, supervision of offenders and in the role of private policing. Thus in major texts in critical criminology over the last twenty years—e.g. Cohen (1985), Garland (2001) and Zedner (2009)—Foucault’s legacy can clearly be seen in the diminished role of the state in such analysis. Garland recognises the centrality of the state but his key emphasis points to a more nebulous ‘culture of control’ (Garland, 2001). Zedner refers to the emergence of a ‘security society’ (Zedner, 2009). Meanwhile Johnston and Shearing (2003) take the marginalisation of the state to its logical conclusion in their work on ‘nodal security’. The state remains only in the distance as the ultimate repository of legitimate coercion and legal title to property rather than as the central agency of social control.
Globalisation and the ‘Withering of the State’
The third tendency that would conspire to marginalise the state was the growing body of literature on globalisation where this was theorised as a force that was fatally weakening the coordination powers of nation-states, not only over their economies but also over such matters as cultural values and population movements. With new global flows in capital, technology, culture, information and people, the image of the nation-state as a self-contained socioeconomic and political structure appeared to belong to a stage in modernity that was fast disappearing. Franko Aas summarises well the underlying thinking:
The various global flows, modalities, and ‘scapes’ challenge the idea that we are dealing with homogenous, territorially delineated units of research indeed if we ever have been. They challenge ‘the assumptions about the nation state as a container of progress (Sasson 2007). (Franko Aas, 2010: 431)
1
For criminologists interested in issues of transnational global security and international organised crime, the effect has been to marginalise the state as a debilitated relic, desperately aspiring to exercise sovereignty in a world where the porosity of the border renders such attempts meaningless. This view now prevails in studies of transnational policing and international security as well as in the developing field of cybercrime and eco-crime. In what, for many, appears a de-bordering world, the traditional distinctions between internal and external security that once defined the modus operandi of the national state have become all but obsolete; likewise, traditional conceptual distinctions between crime, warfare and punishment. Bodies involved in the social control of global risks have also hybridised in the face of these globalising forces, again reinforcing the idea that the state as conventionally imagined is no longer an appropriate vehicle through which to assess these tectonic shifts.
As a thesis about the ‘withering away of the state’, globalisation can muster some powerful arguments, specifically in relation to the state’s incapacity to regulate these new global flows. Such stark limits can be seen in the state’s inability to regulate the huge wealth hidden in offshore tax havens (Sheptycki, 2000); in the inability of western states to curb the supply and consumption of illegal drugs—despite their formal commitment to build ‘drug-free societies’; and their inability to successfully draw to a conclusion foreign policy adventures in states such as Afghanistan and Iraq.
If we consider the progressive privatisation of crime control functions away from the state and into a burgeoning private sector, coupled with the introduction of market solutions into policy arenas like health and security, once considered the prerogative of the state, then these forces all work to suggest that the nation-state can no longer be considered the central provider of security and social control. Cumulatively what these trends have worked to enforce is a climate where the state is typically examined in terms of what it has lost and can no longer do rather than in terms of what it now does.
The Return of the State
The problem is that the state never went away. Nor did it stand still. Indeed, many of the developments which were seen as heralding its demise were only possible through the decisive exercise of state power. What appeared as decline and debilitation was in fact part of the process of mutation and rearticulation (Crawford, 2006; Hallsworth and Lea, 2011; Lea 2002). Furthermore, it is no exaggeration to assert that the global economic crisis unfolding since 2007 has decisively settled the issue of the continued centrality of the state as an instrument of both economic and social policy and a decisive actor in the international system. What concerns us here is how this has been reflected in the way various tendencies in criminology have sought to refocus on the state. In what follows we conclude by looking at three adaptive responses to the state as these have been undertaken respectively by liberal criminologists, administrative criminologists and critical criminologists.
Seeking Readmittance: The Case of the Evicted Liberal Elite
Many criminologists have continued to resent their eviction from the corridors of power consequent on the decline of liberal criminology as a state discourse and its displacement by ‘crime science’ and other fashions. There is currently an attempt to demonstrate continued relevance so that liberal criminology too might be readmitted to the corridors of power. This, in our opinion, is the significance of the agenda of public criminology. While some, like Elliot Currie (2007), see public criminology as implying a radical, possibly oppositional political mobilising role, writers such as Loader and Sparks (2011) envisage the re-creation of a public sphere within which criminology will be able to influence policy.
Such a view can be admired for its integrity; however, as Loïc Wacquant has wryly commented, Loader and Sparks’s text is:
missing a meaty chapter on the neoliberal institutional ecology within which criminological knowledge is now being produced, validated and appropriated (or ignored). (Wacquant, 2011: 442)
In a similar way Roger Matthews (2009) offers a ‘re-fashioned realist criminology’ underpinned by the philosophy of critical realism and with a focus on ‘policy relevance’. He is well aware that ‘what we are seeing is the growth of an interventionist state’ (2009: 350) and sees one of the aims of critical realism as understanding why certain control strategies are introduced by the state. Nevertheless, in the stress on policy relevance the burden appears to fall almost entirely on criminology to develop ‘theoretically informed interventions employing an appropriate methodology’ (2009: 343). Policy relevance, it seems legitimate to assume, is something to be determined by the state. Yet it is difficult to see how realism can be critical without a clearer focus on the fact that ‘relevance’ is itself heavily influenced by prevailing power relations and in the present context. A critical realism must be oriented to a critique precisely of those power relations and the strategies of the neoliberal state within which they are embodied, rather than seeing them as either benevolent or, at least, non-repressive (see Matthews, 2005; O’Malley, 2000).
Reconnecting the King with his Head: The Return of Critical Theory
In conclusion, there is considerable cause for optimism regarding the renewal of critical theory in criminology. For a growing constituency of radical criminologists, reflecting wider developments, the issue is no longer the importance of the state as such but the dynamics and contours of new forms of social and penal control being developed by the neoliberal state. The worst economic and social crisis since the Second World War has reinforced this shift of focus and underlined once and for all the centrality of the state in the management of economic crisis and its consequences. The effect in radical criminology has been that a number of debates in existence for some time—the rise of risk management, urban security and surveillance, varieties of the ‘punitive turn’ in penal systems—achieve a new salience as aspects of what Wacquant (2010) has usefully termed ‘neoliberal state-crafting’.
A growing number of scholars are exploring aspects of the emerging authoritarian consensus built around the punitiveness infusing the established penal and welfare systems of Europe and the US (Bell, 2011; Wacquant, 2009). But most important, there is a growing awareness of the emergence of new varieties of coercion, focused on marginalised populations, within the interstices of liberal democracy (see, for example, de Giorgi 2006, 2010; Hallsworth and Lea, 2011). The latter has led to a useful debate, for example, with Wacquant over the relative importance of the penal system in relation to a spectrum of other agencies, both public and private, through which the new control mechanisms of the neoliberal state are being established (Lea and Hallsworth, 2012; Meyer, 2010).
The centrality of the state has been reconfirmed and the task of critical criminology in relation to the state is now clearer than it has been for some time: to document and understand the new forms of regulation and coercion that are emerging in the fields of penality, security and crime control. This project, we conclude, is integral to any attempt to (re)develop ‘new deviancy’ for new, new times.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.