THE DYSTOPIAN ASSUMPTION
“The beginning and the end of the nineteenth century marked two of the more utopian moments In crime-control history..At the beginning were those Great Transformations with which this book started. The founders of the penitentiary system in America and Europe were confident that they could devise a solution to the crime problem, a solution that. would .result In a better society. Rothman describes well this Spirit of Optimism, the explicit utopIan thinking which informed the design of the asylums. And at the end of the century came the positivist 'revolution' in criminology. Whether it was genuinely innovatory or merely an elaborate justification of existing policy, the new science of criminology took its message from the more general faith In Scientific progress. Science and technology (and not just a belief in doing good) could solve social problems and create a new social order. . . While these agendas are set by political and .economic contingencies, the very idea that a Social problem IS solvable needs an appropriate belief system. Some beliefs are favourable and others unfavourable to planned intervention. Those nineteenth-century moments of crime control contained favourable beliefs about two constants in the human predicament: human nature and the social order. The crime problem had always presented many awkward cognitive impediments to intervention: original sin, Calvinist ideas of predisposition, social Darwinism and the fatalism even within early biological versions of criminological positivism ('crime as destiny'). But once these beliefs could be neutralized, by-passed or forgotten, the way was open. If only the right combination of benevolence and technology could be found, even the worst of people could be changed and a better social order created. We have already encountered some of the many twentieth-century assaults on these beliefs: pessimism about changing human nature, skepticism about organized benevolence, disenchantment with progress, distrust of technology, a willingness to settle for limited horizons. This was and is the new 'realism' of crime control. I want now to retrace these beliefs and counter-beliefs, and locate them in the wider context of utopian and dystopian visions. This. is not in order to indulge in cheap futurology but rather to show how social-control ideology is deeply embedded in these more general predictions, fantasies, visions and expectations. By the time that criminological positivism was establishing itself, the social sciences as a whole had taken it for granted that an analysis of the past and the present could be directed towards visualizing the future. As Kumar notes in his excellent guide to the sociology of industrial society: 'when sociology arrived in Europe early in the nineteenth century, it marked a strand of thinking about man and society that was increasingly directed towards the future.' This strand became dominant as sociologists came to dwell on the Great Transformation which was to become their subject matter - the new social order of industrialism. Not all this thinking, of course, was optimistic. We know Weber's forebodings about rationalization and bureaucracy, Marx's apocalyptic vision of what had to happen before the new social order could emerge. But an influential stream of these thinkers, represented by Comte, St Simon and the other 'prophets of progress', presented a much less complicated vision of the coming into being of the new social order. Social change was progressive; science and technology would usher in a new era; disease, misery and crime were capable of being vanquished. With the obvious (though complicated) exception of Marx, few of these nineteenth-century social thinkers expressed themselves in the classic utopian form. Unlike in Plato's Republic or the original utopia of Thomas More, they were not constructing ideal societies. Theirs were not visions of what should be, but what is likely to be. And here, while never being quite as complacent as the literary and technological utopianists of their era, they were deeply influenced by the more general cultural optimism about science and technology.
After the First World War, however, even this cautious optimism was to disappear. A bleaker, even apocalyptic world view became dominant. Ominous, irrational forces were at work which made human nature and social order far less amenable to change than had been thought. This was the 'sense of ending'. Moral and material progress were not the same; scientific advances would not necessarily bring happiness. All this is now seen as characteristic of the twentieth-century world view: cynicism, disillusionment, pessimism. This is the 'cheap wasteland philosophy' about which Saul Bellow's heroes muse so often. In the social sciences, all those grand visions of progress and evolution were buried. Preoccupations became grandly abstract or minutely empirical. Within the limited fields that became known variously as social disorganization, social pathology, social problems and criminology, a degree of optimism remained. But it was only the degree needed to give credibility to the business of intervention. The evils of the big city, the disintegration of primary social control, the loss of community, the impersonality of technology - all such problems must get worse. Intervention could work, indeed it was desperately needed, but this was a rescue operation. The point was to save, treat or prevent the casualties of the machine. The social-problems industry remained the most optimistic part of the social sciences, but it was the optimism of the crusader, the muckraker, the lifesaver, and not the prophet of a new social order. In the 1950s there was some sort of recovery. Industrialism seemed more resilient, and the new theorists of 'the 'managerial revolution', 'convergence' and the 'end of ideology' began to imply that the structural problems of industrialism were working themselves out. A new note of complacency appeared which was not destined to last very long. By the 1960s the dark side of industrialism was rediscovered. It was not just the 'return' of ideology in the demands of Blacks and other ethnic minorities, gays and other groups labelled deviant, and the women's movement for a different place in the system, but a radical disenchantment with industrial progress itself. For many such groups, for the counterculture. and the new left, and then for the ecology movement, dystopIa was already on the way. Most of all, the danger came from the strong state; the quest for 'community' was an antistatist form of utopian thinking. The machine itself had to be destroyed before it destroyed us. This was the basis of the destructuring rhetoric. The old apparatus, with its bureaucracies, institutions, professionals (words which now acquired wholly negative meanings), had to be dismantled or by-passed. In the face of this apparent disintegration of the consensus, theorists started constructing a new vision and a new ideology. 'Post-industrial society' was now on its way. This was claimed to be a transformation which would eventually produce societies as different from· the classic industrial society of Marx, Weber and Durkheim as theirs was in turn from early agrarian, pre-capitalist formations. But as Kumar points out, neither the radical harbingers of Future Shock, the Third Wave, the Greening of America nor their more sober academic successors have shown just where this qualitative leap is taking place. For, despite the pretensions of post-industrial theorists, the future which the real social world of 1984 indicates looks more like an extension of the processes begun in the early nineteenth century. Nothing very new needs to be added to that package of concepts - formalization, rationalization, centralization, bureaucratization, professionalization - through which we understood the coming of industrial society. Not a new social order, but more of the same. This, of course, was the burden of my account of the fate of those radical destructuring movements. For what is true of the social sciences and society in general, is no less true for criminology and crime, (and its control). The general literatures on futurology and post-industrlal society however, are remarkably silent about crime and its control, while students of crime rarely articulate more than a vague sense that things are getting worse. Only one criminologist, Sykes, has formulated this sense more exactly. conventional crime, he plausibly argues, is likely to continue increasing. Virtually every single causation factor - economy, ecology, family, education, values, immigration, population, community - points to increasing rates of crime and delinquency. His scenario is familiar enough: middle-class flight to the suburbs; decaying inner-city slums; unskilled and Isolated minority groups; chronic unemployment; zero economic growth; disintegration of social ties; alienation and despair; abandonment of welfare ideologies; and so, more homicide, assault, robbery, larceny, rape. At the same time, all sorts of other changes - in technology, property relationships, corporate organization, political legitimacy - are likely to increase the amount of 'unconventional crime': white-collar crime, political crime, official lawlessness and political corruption.
So much for crime. As for its control, beyond the assumption that current policy has arrived at a turning point and that some sort of crisis is ahead, Sykes presents a choice between pessimistic and modestly optimistic alternatives:
It is possible to envision a society marked by increasing violence and attacks on private property, by intolerance of any deviation from an obsessive morality and by far reaching police surveillance coupled with a loss of civil liberties in a totalitarian social order. It is also possible (though admittedly more difficult in this disenchanted era) to envision a society with widespread acceptance of and conformity to the criminal law. a modest view of the proper reach of the State, and methods of law enforcement that are just, humane and effective.
A linear projection from current control trends suggests changes much more incremental and ambiguous. The assumptions which Wilkins noted more than a decade ago still apply. First, most criminal-justice planning will continue to seek solutions by means of more of the same. Second, the public will continue with the mistaken, and confused belief that because we do not like crime, what we do about it will decrease it. The results of these assumptions will be a total breakdown of the criminal-justice system (somewhere before the year 2000 Wilkins predicts), together with increasing pressure for more and more control. The resultant forms of control will be less noteworthy, for their effects on crime than their intrusive side-effects on ordinary citizens: a retreat into fortress living; streets abandoned to outlaws; inconvenience and erosion of civil liberty as a result of continual security checks and surveillance systems. We have already seen this prediction from several theoretical directions: for traditional law-and-order policies based on doing something to individual offenders, 'the game is almost up'. The next technology is the use of cybernetic planning at the level of systems and environments in order to make the initial act more difficult. The by-products might be unpleasant, but the old punitive technology will soon be extinct.
Apart from these more imaginative excesses - crises, system breakdown, desolation, totalitarianism - most crime-control predictions art! only modestly pessimistic. An optimistic, utopian element in crime-control thinking has always to be maintained: the counter-vision of order, regulation and security which will replace the imminent threat of breakdown and chaos. This vision appeared in the early penitentiary movement, in the idealistic excesses of scientific positivism, in the Continental social-defence school and today, in the bland technicist criminology peddled by international agencies to the Third World. The visions of chaos dominate; all that can be hoped for is a holding operation. Genuine utopianism only remains on the extreme right with its visions of environmental manipulation, psycho-technology or genetic planning and the extreme left, with its prospect of a 'crime-free' society with the dissolution of capitalism. The dominant tone is the realist right: 'I argue for a sober view of man and his institutions that would permit reasonable things to be accomplished, foolish things abandoned and utopian things forgotten.” - Stanley Cohen, Visions of Social Control. Crime, Punishment and Classification. Polity, 1985. p. 197-202.
