CRIME
AND CAPITALISM
CRIME
AND CAPITALISM Readings in Marxist Criminology EXPANDED AND UPDATED EDITION
Edited by DAVID F. GREENBERG
TEMPLE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Philadelphia
Temple University Press, Philadelphia 19122 Copyright © 1993 by Temple University. All rights reseIVed First edition published 1981 by Mayfield Publishing Co. Expanded and updated edition 1993 Printed in the United States of America
@l The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed LibraI}' Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984 LibraI}' of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Crime and capitalism: readings in Marxist criminology / edited by David F. Greenberg.-Expanded and updated ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-56639-025-7 (cloth: alk. paper).-ISBN 1-56639-026-5 (pbkJ 1. Crime--Economic aspects. 2. Criminology. 3. Marxian school of sociology. I. Greenberg, David F. HV6030.C7 1993 364.2'56--dc20 92-34763
To the memory of Petra Kelly, Gary Rader, and Fay Stender
Our Trimmer adoreth the Goddess Truth, tho' in all Ages she hath been scurvily used, as well as those that Worshipped her; 'tis of late become such a ruining Virtue, that Mankind seemeth to be agreed to commend and avoid it; yet the want ofPractice which Repealeth the other Laws, hath no influence upon the Law of Truth, because it hath root in Heaven, and an Intrinsick value in it self, that can never be impaired; she sheweth her Greatness in this, that her Enemies even when they are successfUl are asham'd to own it; nothing but powerfUl Truth hath the prerogative of Triumphing, not only after Victories, but in spite of them, and to put Conquest her selfout ofCountenance; she may be kept under and supprest, but her Dignity still remaineth with her, even when she is in Chains; Falshood with all her Impudence hath not enough to speak ill of her before her Face, such Majesty she carrieth about her, that her most prosperous Enemies are fain to whisper their Treason; all the Power on Earth can never elCtinguish her; she hath liv'd in all Ages; and let the mistaken Zeal ofprevailing Authority christen any opposition to it with what Name they please, she maketh it not only an ugly and unmannerly, but a dangerous thing to persist; she hath lived very retired indeed, nay sometimes so buried, that only some few of the discerning part ofMankind could have a Glimpse ofher; with all that she hath Eternity in her, she knoweth not how to die, andfrom the darkest Clouds that shade and cover her, she breakethfrom time to time with Triumph for her Friends, and Terrour to her Enemies. GEORGE SAVILE
The Character ofa Trimmer (1684/5)
From the cowardice that shrinks from new truth, From the laziness that is content with half-truths, From the arrogance that thinks it knows all truth, Oh, God of Truth, deliver us. AUrHOR UNKNOWN
vii
Contents
Preface to the Second Edition Introduction
xi
1
Part 1 Marx and Engels on Crime and Punishment 1 Crime and Primitive Accumulation
37
45
KariMarx
2 The Demoralization of the English Working Class
Friedrich Engels 3 Crime in Communist Society Friedrich Engels 4 The Usefulness of Crime 52 KariMarx
5 The Labeling of Crime KariMarx
54
51
48
viii
Contents
6 On Capital Punishment Karl Marx
55
Part 2 The Causes of Crime
57
1 Karl Marx, the Theft of Wood, and Working-Class Composition Peter Linebaugh 2 Goths and Vandals: Crime in History Geo.!fr'ey Pearson
100
122
3 Hunting, Fishing, and Foraging: Common Rights and Class Relations in the Postbellum South 142 Steven Hahn 4 Organized Crime and Class Politics Frank Pearce
169
5 Urban Crime and Capitalist Accumulation, 1950-1971 Don Wallace and Drew Humphries
194
6 The Social Economy of Arson: Vandals, Gangsters, Bankers, and Officials in the Making of an Urban Problem 211 James Brady 7 Wealth, Crime, and Capital Accumulation Harold Barnett 8 Auto Theft and the Role of Big Business Harry Brill
258
265
9 The Production of Black Violence in Chicago Cyril D. Robinson
279
10 Delinquency and the Age Structure of Society David F. Greenberg
334
11 Rape, Sexual Inequality, and Levels of Violence Julia Schwendinger and Herman Schwendinger 12 The Gendering of Crime in Marxist Theory David F. Greenberg
405
357
Contents
Part 3 Criminal Law and Criminal Justice
443
1 The Dialectics of Crime Control 463 Drew Humphries and David F. Greenberg 2 A Reinterpretation of Criminal Law Reform in Nineteenth-Century England 509 Michael Rustigan 3 The Walnut Street Jail: A Penal Reform to Centralize the Powers of the State 533 Paul Takagi 4 Policing a Class Society: The Expansion ofthe Urban Police in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries 546 Sidney L. Harring 5 The Political Economy of Policing 568 Steven Spitzer 6 At Hard Labor: Penal Confinement and Production in NineteenthCentury America 595 Rosalind P. Petchesky 7 Convict Leasing: An Application of the Rusche-Kirchheimer Thesis to Penal Changes in Tennessee, 1830-1915 612 Randall G. Shelden 8 The Cooptation of Fixed Sentencing Reform 621 David F. Greenberg and Drew Humphries 9 The Enforcement of Anti-Monopoly Legislation Harold Barnett
641
10 The Standards of Living in Penal Institutions 649 Herman Schwendinger and Julia R. Schwendinger
Part 4 Crime and Revolution: Is Crime Progressive?
665
1 Crime, the Crisis of Capitalism, and Social Revolution Morton G. Wenger and Thomas A. Bonomo
674
ix
x
Contents
2 Gangs and Progress: The Contribution of Delinquency to Progressive Reform 689 Evan Stark
PartS Praxis and Marxian Criminology Glossary Index
757
751
737
xi
Preface to the Second Edition
No thoughtful person could prepare a book of Marxist theory at this moment in history without wondering for at least a moment whether the enterprise is quixotic. Have not political and theoretical developments of the last decade raised all kinds of questions about the viability of Marxism? One set of questions is raised by the restoration of capitalism and the still-shaky mUltiparty political democracy in Central and Eastern Europe. Though this largely unanticipated revolution poses a challenge of explanation for Marxism, it is not a challenge that threatens the foundations of the theory. Marxism has encountered unanticipated developments before and has met the challenge. The threat is rather to the emotional energies that helped to sustain Marxism in the past. For many years most Western Marxists have regarded the Soviet Union as a brutal and exploitative dictatorship remote from Marxist conceptions of socialism. Yet it also represented the possibility of an alternative to capitalism. The workers and peasants may have been betrayed, but in 1917 they "durst defY the Omnipotent to arms" (Milton, Paradise Lost I.49) and founded a noncapitalist society committed to ending the exploitation of one class by another. Their success, even though later undermined by the hostility of the capitalist powers and the betrayal of
xii
Preface to Second Edition
corrupt Communist party leaders, meant that others, too, could succeed. With time, with effort, with the right strategy, capitalism could also be overthrown in the West. To many Western Marxists, the faults of the Soviet Union were so deeply rooted, so intertwined with the structure of power in that country, that they could only be remedied by a second workers' revolution, one that would establish an authentic socialism in a country that called itself socialist but was not. Instead of choosing socialism, however, the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe opted for capitalism. To the Western Marxists who hoped for an alternative to both capitalism and dictatorial state socialism, the tum to capitalism is inevitably a disappointment. Now that the introduction of market principles to the economies of the former Warsaw Pact nations, and to China, is leading to higher levels of unemployment and crime, some people are beginning to regret the hasty adoption of capitalism. Still, in the short run, the former self-styled "socialist" nations are not likely to tum to socialism. It has been too badly discredited by those who ruled in its name. Can we expect more from social democracy? In those regions of Western Europe where it has been strongest, it has managed to achieve much-greater equality of incomes and better medical care, for example. However, these important gains have now been checked by widespread opposition to high taxes and centralized governmental bureaucracies. It seems doubtful that social democracy will soon show us an electoral route to socialism. As politicians and newspaper editorialists have celebrated the fall of Communist governments and heralded the triumph of the market, Western leftists have rightly reminded us of the serious, seemingly intractable problems that continue to plague the "advanced" capitalist democracies: despoliation of the natural environment, urban decay, poverty and unemployment, crime and corruption, drug addiction, a failing education system, unaffordable medical care, racial and sexual oppression. Hard-won advances of the sixties are now threatened. Neither conservatives nor liberals offer viable solutions; even serious public discussion of these issues is rare. The left, disorganized, has not been able to capitalize on the failings of capitalism by mounting a broadly based challenge. Once upon a time, Marxists often argued that crises in the capitalist system generated discontent that could be mobilized to challenge the system. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, labor militancy grew, and American workers won genuine victories. Today we cannot count on achieving comparable gains. Though the Left's critique of capitalism has lost none of its cogency, its ability to articulate a credible alternative and to devise a workable strategy for reaching it has clearly suffered from the triumph of the market. Optimists contend that without an external military threat, greater attention will be paid to domestic issues, and that the Right will now find
Preface to Second Edition
xiii
it harder to smear the Left as unpatriotic agents or dupes of an "evil empire." However, the government's ability to demonize uncooperative Third World countries may continue to keep attention away from divisive domestic issues. Moreover, the internationalization of capital, which is proceeding through the establishment of the European Economic Community and the signing of "free trade" pacts, will make effective opposition more difficult. Rosy-eyed dialecticians may argue that as capital increasingly operates on a global scale, it will forge an internationally minded working class, forced by necessity to overcome barriers of language and national prejudice. Perhaps it will-this was the hope of the First Internationalbut the likelihood is small. Unions and parties that found it difficult to mobilize effectively on a national scale will find even greater obstacles when organizing internationally. Moreover, the fragmentation of personal identities in the capitalist democracies leads to cleavages, conflicts, and social movements organized along diverse and crosscutting lines: race and ethnicity, class, sex, and sexual orientation among them. Building a cohesive opposition from these disparate, cross-cutting identities and social movements will not be easy. Optimism that the ongoing development of the means of production will bring about the consciousness that transforms a "class in itself' into a "class for itself' is not warranted. Difficult questions of priorities, strategies, and tactics are not settled just because so many of us are oppressed by capitalism and have a common interest in opposing it. Opponents of Marxism have openly expressed the hope that these setbacks and obstacles will prove fatal. They are headed for disappointment. Though academic Marxism has lost ground in the last decade to feminism, postmodernism, and deconstructionism, it is not going to disappear. The new perspectives usefully remind us that Marxism does not hold all the answers. Marxism disposes of a limited number of concepts designed to answer specific questions. Inevitably, other perspectives, asking different questions and utilizing new concepts, spring up. This theoretical florescence does not invalidate older theories and methods. It may enrich them. Marxism is so fundamental to the social sciences that it need not fear being displaced by the latest fads. In fact, it continues to lead to powerful sociological insights. Though weakened numerically by the academic repression noted in the introduction to the first edition of Crime and Capitalism, Marxist criminology retains much vigor. The English-language journals Contemporary Crises (recently renamed Crime, Law and Social Policy) and Crime and Social Justice (now Social Justice), the Italian periodical II questione criminale, and the German Kritische Justiz continue to publish the work of an international community of scholars, while the recently founded Critical Criminology Newsletter publishes short contributions written from a variety of left-wing theoretical stances. The establishment of a "critical criminology" section of the American Society of Criminology
xiv
Preface to Second Edition
shows that this tendency within criminology has an appreciable following, with younger scholars building on the work done in the sixties and seventies. Nevertheless, it must be acknowledged that Marxist criminology is still marginal to the mainstream. Textbook treatments are somewhat more extensive than they were ten years ago, but they remain far from adequate. Much criminological research, theory, and teaching ignores the radical contributions. More than ten years ago the first edition of Crime and Capitalism was put together to make available some of the new and exciting criminological work inspired by Marxism that was being done by the emerging school of radical criminology. This second edition preseIVes all the essays of the first edition, while adding several new essays representing work done in the past decade. New contributions deal with arson for profit, auto theft, rape, gender, and race. The focus remains on crime in the United States, England, and Europe. Although it would have been desirable to include material on crime in the Third World, conditions in Africa, Asia, and Latin America are so variable that one or two articles could not do justice to the subject.
1
Introduction
In the 1970s a new school of criminological thought, known variously as "new," "critical," "radical," or Marxist, came on the scene.l It challenged the paradigms that then dominated criminology, and drew on the insights of New Left social criticism in developing a host of new and controversial ideas about crime. Ours, of course, is not the first generation to have drawn on radical critiques of existing social arrangements in writing about crime. Nineteenth-century utopian socialists, anarchists, and Marxists all discussed crime and punishment in terms that foreshadow some of today's discussions. Radical Jacksonians in the early nineteenth century campaigned against prison construction, arguing that public education and the redistribution of income would eliminate most crime and make new prisons unnecessary. Some late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century criminologists on both sides of the Atlantic were socialists or anarchists, or were influenced in their thinking by these social movements. They wrote about the role of capitalism in causing crime, and the repressive activities of the state. From the mid-1920s on, however, radical perspectives virtually disappeared from the criminology literature, at least in the English language.2 After the First World War, radical scholarship in all the social sciences was repressed. Many radical scholars lost university positions, and research funding went primarily to work that posed no intellectual threat to the government or the capitalist economy. In addition, the orthodoxy that the
2
Introduction
international communist movement imposed on its members was not conducive to creative scholarship. This orthodoxy did not entirely sweep the field in Western Europe, where a tradition of independent Marxist scholarship survived; but with two world wars and the rise of fascism, European Marxists had more pressing problems on their minds than explaining conventional crime. It has become conventional to describe the sort of criminology that has been carried on in universities and research institutes ever since the voices of radicalism were stilled as "positivist." Positivist criminology is usually traced to the research on the biological causes of crime carried out by Cesare Lombroso, an Italian physician. Although he and his disciples soon broadened the focus of their work to include psychological and social variables, they continued to explain crime in terms of the individual attributes of criminal-law violators. Today the term "positivist" is bandied about quite loosely, usually in a derogatory tone. It generally refers to criminology characterized by one or more of the following assumptions: (1) The causes of crime are deterministic (i.e., accurately predictable from its initial causes) and pathological. (2) Criminal behavior can be explained without reference to the meaning that the behavior has for the criminal actor. (3) Crime and criminals exist as phenomena independently of whether the behavior and the persons in question are regarded as criminal by the government or the public at large. (4) Crime can be studied through the same methods (quantitative statistical techniques) and with the same goals (the formulation of historically invariant laws) as the natural sciences. (5) The government can and should take steps to eliminate the causes of crime, drawing on scientific knowledge provided by criminologists. Since many criminologists have abandoned at least some of these assumptions in recent decades, the term "positivist" has lost a good deal of its usefulness. It is fair to say, though, that most criminologists have seen crime as something that was not inherent in the organization of a capitalist society. Either it was seen as intrinsic to all societies, so that nothing could be done about it; or it was seen as contingent on arrangements that a benign and enlightened government could eliminate without fundamental social change. Only in the last decade has this view come under sustained attack from the Left. In fact, virtually every tenet of positivist criminology has been criticized by radicals.
THE ORIGINS OF RADICAL CRIMINOLOGY Several developments in mainstream criminology, though not radical in themselves, helped to prepare the way for radical criminology by casting doubt on some taken-for-granted ideas. For example, to avoid using the long-suspect official statistics on crime and criminals, some criminologists in the 1960s carried out studies in which subjects (usually school children)
Introduction . 3
were asked to report on the crimes or delinquent acts they had committed. A number of these studies found a weak or vanishing relationship between involvement in crime or delinquency on the one hand, and race or socioeconomic status on the other. Crime seemed to be spread much more evenly through the class structure than official statistics suggested. These findings cast doubt on the belief (shared up to then by most sociologically oriented criminologists) that crime was mainly a lower-class phenomenon, causally linked with position in the class structure. Taking the self-reporting studies at face value, many researchers interpreted the over-representation of blacks and persons from impoverished family backgrounds in arrest and conviction statistics to the discriminatory practices of the enforcement agencies. It was not that the poor stole more, but rather that when they did, the police were more likely to arrest them, the prosecutors to press charges, and the judges to convict and sentence them.3 By inference, official crime and criminal justice statistics told us more about the practices of law enforcement agencies than about crime or criminals. This line of reasoning turned research energies from the study of criminals to the study of law enforcement agencies. Researchers typically brought a skeptical attitude toward agency claims, and made the discrepancy between what the agencies did and what they said they did a major theme in their work. Drawing on older American social psychology, sociologists known as labeling theorists argued that efforts to punish or treat those involved in crime and delinquency were more likely to increase than to decrease subsequent illegal conduct by stigmatizing them as "delinquents," or "criminals" and by altering their self-concepts. This view, along with publicity given to criticisms of treatment programs, did much to discredit the view-common until then among criminologists-that the solution to the crime problem lay mainly in rehabilitating individual criminals. The thrust of the message that labeling theory directed to social workers, probation officers, and juvenile court judges was: the less you do, the better off we all will be (Schur, 1973). This policy recommendation meshed perfectly with the rejection on the part of labeling theorists and phenomenologists of the notion that crime was in itself pathological or morally wrong.4 Instead, it was to be considered no less meaningful or authentic than any other form of human activity. Matza (1969) called on us to "appreciate" deviance as a form of human diversity, rather than view it as something to be eradicated. This was a radical departure. The familiar disagreements about policy up to that time had largely centered around whether it was better to punish criminals because they were wicked and immoral, or to treat them because they were sick. Now criminologists were saying that criminals were just as good as anyone else, and even added a little local color. This radical cultural relativism had instantaneous appeal for students and professors who were active in the civil rights and antiwar movements or were sympathetic to a hedonistic counter-culture that approved drug use
4
Introduction
and less restrictive sexual mores. They certainly did not consider themselves pathological. Preoccupied with college deans who meddled in students' private lives, and police detectives trying to stop marijuana use, students found the labeling theorists' portrait of deviants as the victims of moralistic busybodies or repressive bureaucracies especially congenial. As cultural radicalization proceeded, students and their teachers began to reject conventional ways of earning a living. As they saw it, conventional jobs offered few opportunities for self-expression and required one to accept a "system" of racial discrimination and militarism. The suburban nuclear family masked boredom, hypocrisy, and intra-familial hostility. The deviant, rejecting the seductive material rewards of a morally corrupt society, became a cultural hero, and deviance theory a form of cultural criticism (Pearson, 1975). Once illegal life-styles are regarded as no less legitimate than any other, their prohibition inevitably comes to be seen as arbitary and repressive. Labeling theorists who took this view pointed to deep social disagreements about the appropriateness of treating some forms of behavior-especially those they considered "victimless"-as criminal.5 The processes by which these behaviors had become criminalized became a subject for investigation. The theme that dominated much of the work in this area was the contention that criminal legislation was determined not by moral consensus or the common interests of the entire society, but by the relative power of groups determined to use the criminal law to advance their own special interests or to impose their moral preferences on others. At a time when the decriminalization of marijuana and abortion were being debated, and the arrests of civil rights workers made the daily headlines, this position made a good deal of sense. Austin Turk (1969: vii) must have been speaking for many when he introduced his analysis of crime, power and social conflict by saying Embarrassment provided much of the initial push that led to the writing of this book. I was embarrassed at my lack of good answers when confronted by perceptive students who wondered, somewhat irreverently, why criminology is "such a confused mishmash," and who found their texts vague and sometimes contradictory, ... stuffed with anecdotes and data from sources which were shot through with defects according to those same texts. Some of these students were especially bothered by the "unreality" of criminological studies, by which they meant the lack of sustained attention to connections between the theories and statistics on crime and what they heard every day about relations among social conflicts, political maneuvers, and law violation and enforcement.
Although labeling theorists themselves did little to clarify the sources of power and thus to identify just which interests and moral preferences were embodied in the law, they laid the groundwork for such an inquiry by intro-
Introduction
5
ducing the concept of power as relevant to an understanding of criminallaw. These developments, both within criminology and in the larger society, were one important source of ideas for radical criminology. The other major source, at least in the United States, was the New Left. The civil rights movement in the 1960s had begun the process of radicalizing students, and a protracted war in Southeast Asia, widely seen as imperialist, together with the legal and illegal government repression of protest, led to disaffection on an unprecedented scale. By the early 1970s, radicalized graduate students and college faculty began to draw on the world view they had developed in the New Left to criticize accepted ideas in the social sciences. Marxist ideas helped to shape this world view, but other strains of thought, including anarchism and populism, were also important.6 Opposition to racism, war, and imperialism were central issues. The early radical criminologists drew eclectically on labeling theory, phenomenology, power elite analysis, and New Left ideology generally to develop a distinctively new approach to criminology? They generated a great deal of excitement, revitalizing a moribund discipline by exposing serious weaknesses in mainstream criminology, developing new insights, and stimulating empirical research. The diversity of views taken by radical criminologists and the subtlety of some of their analyses make it hard to summarize their work. Nevertheless, several themes stand out as significant, even though not all radical criminologists were or are in agreement about them. Generally speaking, these themes are the definition of crime (and, by extension, of criminology), the theoretical weaknesses of mainstream criminology, the relation of power to law, the inadequacy of liberal reform, the distinction between crime and politics, ideologies of crime, and radical action. In their treatment of every one of these issues, radical criminologists diverged from their mainstream counterparts. We now tum to an exploration of those divergences. What is crime?
Radical criminologists called the legal definition of crime into question and thereby opened to doubt the very scope of the field of criminology. Herman and Julia Schwendinger (1970), for example, argued that to restrict research to violations of state-made law is to accept the definitions of harm and wrongfulness that the state asserts, and they urged their co-workers to redefine crime as a violation of human rights.8 These definitions are based on the conceptions of harm held by those who have the power to make the law, and consequently tend to exclude from scrutiny harms caused by the actions of the upper class. The following passage written by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) Working Party captures the spirit with which radical crimi nolo-
6
Introduction
gists rejected official definitions of criminality: Actions that clearly ought to be labeled "criminal," because they bring the greatest harm to the greatest number, are in fact accomplished officially by agencies of the government. The oveIWhelming number of murders in this century has been committed by governments in wartime. Hundreds of unlawful killings by police go unprosecuted each year. The largest forceful acquisitions of property in the United States have been the theft of lands guaranteed by treaty to Indian tribes, thefts sponsored by the government. The largest number of dislocations, tantamount to kidnapping-the evacuation and internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II-was carried out by the government with the approval of the courts. Civil-rights demonstrators, struggling to exercise their constitutional rights, have been repeatedly beaten and harassed by police ahd sheriffs. And in the Vietnam war, America has violated its Constitution and international law. (1971:10-11)
Others wrote of environmental pollution, hazardous work conditions, extortionate profiteering, and the marketing of unsafe products by capitalists. To ignore imperialism, racism, sexism, and capitalism as threats to human welfare, the radical criminologists charged, was to acquiesce in them. In calling on other criminologists to redefine crime as a violation of fundamental human rights, radicals summoned them to join the struggle to end the abridgement of these rights.9 A critique of mainstream criminology
Radical criminologists subjected the major theoretical perspectives of mainstream criminology to far-reaching criticism. Taylor, Walton, and Young (1973) dissected a number of the leading theories of crime causation. They demanded of theory that it provide a fully social account of action, respecting its authenticity and purposefulness and avoiding value-laden concepts of individual pathology. To this extent, the influence of phenomenology is clear. But they went beyond this to demand also that criminologists take account of the socially structured inequalities of wealth and power that shape human action. Finally, they called on theorists to show how society might be transformed so that it did not need to criminalize diversity. Holding up the theories they examined, they found them deficient in explaining the social origins of crime, and inadequate politically for implicitly denying the possibility of fundamentally egalitarian social change. Richard Quinney went beyond the critique of specific theories to attack the underlying epistemological and causal assumptions of positivist criminology. Positivists assumed that an external world with objective properties exists, and that the categories of theory or observation correspond to those of the external world. In opposition to this, Quinney asserted a radical subjectivity (1970a:4-5):
Introduction
7
The mind is unable to frame a concept that corresponds to an objective reality. We cannot be certain of an objective reality beyond man's conception of it. Thus, we have no reason to believe in the objective existence of anything. We must, instead, formulate theories that give meaning to our experiences .... Thus, our concern is not with any correspondence between "objective reality" and observation, but between observation and the utility of such observations in understanding our own subjective, multiple social worlds.
Positivist explanations of crime framed in terms of mechanical cause and effect Quinney similarly rejected in favor of a conception of causality that took subjective definitions of situations into account. In this approach, conduct is explained in terms of the actor's goals and perceptions. This is a more voluntaristic conception of human behavior (Quinney, 1970a:5-7). He went on to outline several modes of criminological thought-positivist, social constructionist (i.e., concerned with the social origins of categories like "criminal"), and phenomenological-and analyzed their political ramifications. He found none of them capable of transcending the existing social order, and therefore turned toward critical philosophy as a vehicle for human liberation (Quinney, 1970b, 1973). Focusing more directly on policy-related research and analysis, Tony Platt (1974) criticized the cynicism, defeatism, and pragmatism of liberal criminology, and argued that as an academic discipline, Criminology has strengthened the state and supported the extension of welfare capitalism. With the weakening of liberalism and the rise of the New Right, Platt and Takagi (1977) exposed the viciousness and anti-working-class politics of the "new realists" who called for more punitive crime control policies. Power and the law Radical criminologists built on the labeling theorists' observation that power is critical in shaping the content of the law to analyze specific structures of power. Thus, Bany Krisberg (1975) analyzed the consequences of differentials in power and privilege associated with race, class, and sex for patterns of crime, victimization, and treatment of offenders at the hands of law enforcement agencies. Quinney (1970a) and Chambliss and Seidman (1971) documented the many ways that the criminal law and patterns of law enforcement serve powerful interests and dominant classes. Radical research collectives and individuals analyzed the origins and development of police forces in the United States, paying particular attention to police involvement in the suppression of black and working-class militancy, and left-wing political opposition (NARMIC, 1971; Takagi, 1974; Center for Research on Criminal Justice, 1975). Others exposed the nightmarish conditions and totalitarian regimen of the prison system, and revealed the brutal repression directed toward militant prisoners who challenged the system (AFSC Working Party, 1971; Wright, 1973).
8
Introduction
Although racial and class discrimination had by no means been ignored by liberal criminologists, the radicals gave it much more attention. Unequal treatment of blacks, the poor, and political and cultural minorities resulting from institutionally structured disadvantage and the discretion of individual officials became a major theme of literature on police-citizen encounters, the prosecutorial and judicial processing of defendants, and the paroling of prisoners (AFSC Working Party, 1971; Chambliss and Seidman, 1971). This emphasis clearly reflected the grievances of a civil rights movement that sought formal, legal equality without (at least at first) calling the ideal of equality itself into question. A critique of liberal reform
Radical criminologists developed a powerful critique of liberal reform. Tony Platt's (1969) influential study of the juvenile court movement argued that the Protestant, upper-class Republican women who led the movement sought to advance the interests of their sex and class, rather than those of the Catholic and Jewish working-class immigrant children they said they wanted to help. The consequences of establishing the juvenile court, Platt maintained, were not beneficial to juveniles. Before the creation of the court, much juvenile mischief was ignored or handled informally. By creating a court with jurisdiction over juveniles who had broken no criminal law, the reformers increased young people's vulnerability to deprivation of liberty through commitment to reformatories. Another component of the critique of liberal reform was an attack on correctionalism. If crime is not viewed as the product of individual pathology, then it makes no sense to deal with crime by rehabilitating individuals. But the radical critique went farther than arguing that rehabilitation was irrelevant. Now the argument was being made that the individualized treatment model which liberals had promoted had become an instrument of oppression. It provided the rationale for expanding the administrative powers of the state, powers that were used in practice to control inmates. Discretionary power to individualize disposition, to "treat the criminal, not the crime," resulted in arbitrariness and biased decision making (AFSC Working Party, 1971; Wright, 1973; Mitford, 1974; Smith and Fried, 1974). Crime and politics
Radical criminologists sought to abolish the distinction between crime and politics that crippled earlier criminology. In relation to law enforcement, this meant shattering the myth that crime prevention was a socially neutral function and that questions of policy were no more than issues of technical, administrative expertise. Thus Smith and Fried (1974:140) obseIVe, when we say that all inmates are political prisoners, we are not asserting that all criminal acts are deliberate, self-conscious acts of rebellion against an unjust authority. In fact, the overwhelming majority of inmates we saw are
Introduction
9
doing time for narrow, selfish acts such as stealing, breaking and entering, and fighting. Nevertheless, their incarceration is political since it is the end-product of decisions to treat some social harms as deseIVing of penal sanctions and others as not-with little regard to the actual extent of social damage. !Emphasis in original.l Crime itself was invested with political meaning. Some saw crime as a form of protest against oppressive social conditions, a refusal to play the game by the established rules (rules that favored some social groups and disadvantaged others), or even a rejection of the existing game in favor of another one altogether (Taylor, Walton, and Young, 1973). Here the meaning of crime is subjective: it is the intentions of the criminal that make crime political. Prisoners' writings on crime and criminal justice were given prominence as points of view to be incorporated into the newly developing perspective (Krisberg, 1975).10 These developments cannot be fully understood except in a social context: in the late 1960s and early 1970s, conventional distinctions between crime and politics were breaking down in the society at large. Prison inmates were becoming radicalized and were initiating strikes and prison takeovers in support of demands that reflected a new political understanding of their predicament; at the same time, civil disobedience was an important tactic in the civil rights and antiwar movements. Some elements of the New Left and the black power movement were turning toward sabotage and guerrilla warfare, and even larger sections of both groups were being treated by the government as criminals. Substantial numbers of political dissenters were being arrested, tried, and in some cases imprisoned for their involvement in opposition to government policy. Ideologies of crime
Radical criminologists began to investigate the content and the social sources of beliefs about crime, law, and criminal justice in the mass media, in government propaganda, and even in the writings of criminologists. The radicals argued that many of these beliefs were false, and that they tended to reinforce capitalist domination. Believing that crime is largely a workingclass phenomenon, for example, may blind people to the crimes of capitalists. Identifying legal crime with social harm distracts public attention from the many social-systemic harms that are not prohibited under the criminal law. To the extent that opinion sUIveys showed a consensus about crime, then, radical criminologists argued that it was a manufactured consensus (Quinney, 1970; Michalowski and Bohlander, 1976; Reiman, 1979: 162-168). From research to radical action
Radical criminologists attempted to move criminology out of the ivoI)' tower and the police department by wedding research to radical action.
10
Introduction
Criminologists worked in community campaigns to curb police brutality, raise bail for indigent defendants, end the death penalty, stop the repression of political militants and support prisoners. These activities are discussed in Part 5. Some criminologists articulated the goal of radical action to be the creation of a society that did not criminalize diversity and that would make use of informal, community-controlled methods of social control, such as arbitration and negotiation of conflict (Taylor, Walton, and Young, 1973; Mathiesen, 1974; Quinney, 1974; Pepin sky, 1976).n Others expected such institutions as the prison to survive the transition to socialism, but with a restricted class of prisoners and a more humane system of administration (Wright, 1973: Smith and Fried, 1974). The American New Left suffered some serious setbacks just at the transition between the 1960s and 1970s. Many militant black leaders were in jail, in prison, or in exile, and leading black organizations fell apart. Other black leaders pursued careers in government that the civil rights movement had opened up. At the end ofthe 1960s, SDS, a major component of the New Left, splintered into rival factions. One faction, the Weathermen, turned to guerrilla warfare and subsequently went underground. As the draft ended and American troops withdrew from Vietnam, the campuses lapsed into a state of political passivity that reminded many of the 1950s. Only the women's movement, and to a more limited extent, the gay movement, remained capable of energizing and mobilizing large numbers of people on behalf of left causes the way the antiwar and civil rights/black power movements had done. The conservative presidencies of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, and the rise of opposition to gay rights, reproductive freedom, and affirmative action to achieve employment equality for minorities, all demonstrated the limitations of the social movements of the 1960s. These movements, based on specific constituencies (students, blacks, Hispanics, American Indians, prisoners, gays, etc., together with the support of unions and the white, liberal middle class on specific issues) were not large enough or cohesive enough to carry through an ongoing program of left-liberal reform. With the movement of the sixties at least temporarily blunted, leftists who retained their political commitments dug in for the long haul. Some turned to community or work-place organizing. Old Left parties picked up members, and new groups formed, some of them disciplined Leninist organizations and others democratic-socialist in character. As it became apparent that a revolution could not be made by the central constituencies of the 1960s alone, without massive participation from the white working class, many turned to Marxism in the hope of deepening their understanding of social processes. Radicals in the universities, most of them graduate students or junior faculty, began to draw on Marxist ideas in their own disciplines. By the mid 1970s, a specifically Marxian criminology began to take shape.
Introduction
11
Marxism in criminological thought
What specifically does Marxism have to offer criminologists? The answer to this question is by no means obvious-and indeed is hotly debated. Marx and Engels wrote from time to time about crime, law, and criminal justice (see Part 1 of this collection), but gave them no systematic treatment. Their scattered observations show great insight at times, less insight at other times, but in any event they do not add up to a criminology. After examining Marx's statements on crime, Taylor, Walton, and Young (1973:219) conclude: "If Marxism offers us anything of value in understanding the way in which social conflict is generated, sustained, and helps to shape the kind and amount of criminal and deviant activity at large, we are more likely to find it in Marx's general theory than we are in the more specific statements." Most early Marxist thinkers did not give crime serious attention. Some, perhaps, were influenced by Marx's contempt for the [umpenpro[etariatthe beggars, pimps, and criminals found in all capitalist societies. But a few late nineteenth and early twentieth-century scholars who wrote about crime were influenced to some extent by Marxist ideas. K. G. Rakowsky, Filippo Turati, Bruno Battaglia, Napoleone Colejanni, Achille Loria, Alfredo Niceforo, August Bebel, Paul Lafargue, Joseph Van Kan, and Willem Adriaan Bonger all wrote about the ways that economic conditions in capitalist society produce crime. Bonger (1916), the most well-known of this group (and often cited mistakenly as the only Marxist criminologist), argued that competitive capitalism gave rise to selfish individualism, which manifested itself in egoistic acts, including crimes.12 Since much of Marx's work had not been published at the tum of the century, these authors derived their understanding of Marxism from a limited portion of his writings, and from expositions written by leaders of the Second InternationaL a loose federation of national socialist organizations founded in 1889. These expositions tended to vulgarize Marxism by depicting it as a form of economic or technological determinism. Although it is clear, when one takes Marx's work in its entirety, that this is a misinterpretation, this reading of Marx made possible the synthesis of Marxism and positivism. The early Marxist criminologists differed from their positivist counterparts only in paying greater attention to economic causes of crime. They carried out numerous studies of the relationship between crime rates and various economic indicators, such as unemployment and food prices.13 By comparison with the Lombrosian literature on crime, which gave great play to supposed biological causes, this literature holds up quite well. One can find in it insights that remain provocative and suggestive today.14 Yet, as they had little first-hand knowledge of crime, they were prone to accept many conventional stereotypes of criminals unquestioningly. To them, crime was an exclusively lower-class phenomenon, invariably hamlful to society. They described criminals as being driven to crime by poverty or
12
Introduction
pernicious social conditions, but not as seeking it out for personal gain. The possibility that some forms of crime might be acceptable in working-class communities, or represent a form of rebellion against class oppression, was not even considered. No conception of the criminal as a subjective agent appears in this literature. And no attention was given to the criminal and the criminal jut'tice system as objects of study. Some of the radical criminology literature written early in the 1970s also suffers from weaknesses, including oversimplification, excessively broad and insufficiently qualified generalizations, and utopianism. Empirical research to verify claims being made about crime and criminal justice was sometimes neglected. When it was performed, it did not always confirm the radicals' claims. From the point of view of Marxian theo!)" a good deal of this literature is unsatisfacto!),. As mentioned above, early radical criminology was a theoretically incoherent amalgam-a pastiche of Marxism and other political philosophies and sociological perspectives. (Piers Beirne has recently observed that researchers who cite empirical findings that supposedly confirm or refute "Marxist criminology" have sometimes assumed too casually that the propositions tested have any real connection with Marxist theo!),.) Some of the weaknesses stemmed from the cultural milieu of the late sixties and early seventies. The romanticizing of crime was obviously related to the hippie counterculture and black rebellion. The solipsism of Richard Quinney's writings surely grew out of a New Left culture that emphasized the importance of subjective experience and of changing consciousness as a way of changing the world. It is symptomatic that when the British radical criminologists Taylor, Walton, and Young (1973) turned to Marx, it was primarily to the philosophical anthropology of the early writings, not to the political economy of his later years. Another weakness had to do with the way Marx was used. Unlike the British or the Europeans, some American scholars had a limited knowledge of Marxism, and so their reliance on Marx for theoretical grounding was at times crude and mechanical. At its worst, this "Marxist" literature described law and its enforcement as only a weapon used by the powerful, the elite, the ruling (capitalist) class to preserve its domination of the proletariat and of racial minorities. It dismissed fear of crime and popular support for law enforcement as "false consciousness," the product of government propaganda designed to distract people from the real sources of their problems, capitalism itself. Criminals were depicted as proto-revolutionaries, motivated by a refusal to abide the constraints imposed by a capitalist society. With the disappearance of the state, this literature prophesied, crime would disappear, the state would wither away, and neither law nor criminal justice would be needed to order human affairs (Greenberg and Stender, 1972; Taylor, Walton, and Young, 1973; Quinney, 1974; Michalowski and Bohlander, 1976; Hepburn, 1977; Reiman, 1979). Though there is some truth to some of these propositions, they are also oversimplified and derive from a shallow and highly selective reading of Marx. Though not all radical
Introduction
13
criminology suffered from these deficiencies, they marred a good deal of the early work. The time has come to build on these fledgling efforts in a way that preserves what is of permanent value in them, while transcending the weaknesses. Marxist criminologists are now making that attempt. \Vhere the early writings often tended to be programmatic, sketching what a Marxian criminology would look like if it were to be created, now Marxist criminologists are grappling with the hard task of actually creating a new criminology on Marxian foundations. Marx's own project was to create a science of society. This is the goal that Marxist criminologists have set for themselves vis-a-vis crime. To understand these attempts, it is essential to have at least some familiarity with the outlines of Marxian social theory. It is to a review of some of the essentials of Marxism that we now turn.
SOME ELEMENTS OF MARXIAN SOCIAL THEORY In making use of Marxian theory today, one must come to terms with serious questions that rival schools of Marxist scholarship have raised about just what Marx and Engels' writings mean, as well as challenges that both Marxists and non-Marxists have raised regarding the logical and empirical status of their ideas.l5 One pair of Marxist theorists has highlighted some of these difficulties: Despite its apparent intellectual vigour and its current popularity among sections of the Western intelligentsia, Marxist theory is riven by problems and divisions such that it is in danger of falling into utter incoherence and methodological immobility. The current debates (however lively they may appear), on the nature of the state and the political level, on the nature of the "middle strata," on productive and unproductive labour in the definition of the working class, and on the theory of value, all reveal fundamental ambiguities and difficulties in the basic concepts of Marxist theory. (Hindess and Hirst, 1977:72)
Since most of these debates do not touch on issues of obvious relevance for criminology, they can be passed over here without comment. Yet this precautionary warning should alert us that Marxist theory in its present form leaves much room for conceptual clarification and development. There can be no question, then, of taking a fully developed theory and mechanically deducing from it a complete set of propositions about crime and crime control. Ambiguities notwithstanding, the main outlines of Marxian social theory are not in serious dispute. Only those ideas needed for our present discussion will be reviewed here. The discussion will focus on Marx's break with Hegel's idealism (a philosophical stance that gives ontological priority to ideas), his conceptualization of social formations, and the role of class
14
Introduction
conflict in generating social change. Other aspects of Marxist theory will be reviewed in the introductions to the different parts of the book, as needed. The break with philosophical idealism
The young Marx rejected Hegel's notion that human actions are to be explained as the manifestation of disembodied ideas that exist and evolve independently of the human beings who adhere to them. He argued that an analysis of human action properly begins instead with existing social relations, with people as they actually live in society: "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness" (Marx, 1904:11). Marx did not deny that ideas influence human behavior or playa role in social change; in his Introduction to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, he claimed that "theory itself becomes a material force when it has seized the masses." But to understand the genesis of ideas, the reasons they are accepted or fail to gain acceptance, and their relationship to actions, we must look to the social realm. The analysis of social formations
Marx begins his analysis of the social realm with the organization of production, devising two analytical concepts-the forces of production and the social relations of production. The forces of production refers to tools, technical knowledge, human labor, raw materials, and the way all these are combined. The social relations of production refers to the distribution or possession of the means of production (i.e., the land, the machinery, and so forth required to produce goods) and the form in which surplus labor is appropriated. Together the forces and relations of production comprise a mode of production. 16 Slavery, feudalism, capitalism, socialism, and communism are all modes of production. Surplus labor refers to labor (or its products) above and beyond what is needed to "reproduce" the laborer from day to day and from generation to generation; it can, and generally does, exist in all societies, but the form in which it is appropriated varies greatly.17 Several modes of production can co-exist in a single society, with one typically playing a leading role and thus giving its character to the entire configuration. As Marx puts it in Grundrisse, in all fonns of society there is one specific kind of production which predominates over the rest, whose relations thus assign rank and influence to the others. It is a general illumination which bathes all the other colours and modifies their particularity. It is a particular ether which detennines the specific gravity of every being which has materialized within it. (Marx, 1973:106 -71
Introduction
15
In his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx suggests that the relationship between the mode of production and other aspects of society can be grasped through a base-superstructure metaphor. He conceptualizes society as a building with different levels: The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society-the real foundation, on which rise legal and political superstructures and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political and spiritual processes of life. 11904:111
This passage has been criticized for economic reductionism, that is, for claiming that all aspects of society are completely determined by the economy. A careful reading, though, does not sustain this criticism. To say that the relations of production are a foundation on which legal and political structures "rise" is not to say that these structures are determined by the foundation, or base. The foundation of a building does not uniquely specify the form of the upper stories, but it does set limits. Thus, the characterization of Marxism as a form of "economic determinism" is a caricature. As Louis AIthusser, the French structuralist Marxist has stressed, the legal, political, and other institutions of a society, as well as its "forms of consciousness," have a dynamic of their own. They evolve in a manner that is related to, but not reducible to the economy. To use what has become a catch phrase, they are "partially autonomous." Taken too far, the base-structure metaphor can lead to difficulty (Thompson, 1978). Once a building is built, it doesn't change very much, and its "levels" don't intersect or interact, whereas that is hardly the case with society: PoliticaL juridical, philosophical, religious, artistic, etc. development is based on economic development. But all these react upon one another and also upon the economic basis. It is not that the economic situation is cause, solely active, while everything else is only passive effect. There is, rather, interaction on the basis of economic necessity, which ultimately always asserts itself. IMarx and Engels, 1969:502. Emphasis in original.l
Indeed, a given mode of production may require specific political and legal arrangements if it is to survive. But the effects of politics, law, and forms of consciousness are determined by the mode of production. Marx makes this clear in his response to a criticism of his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy in a German-American newspaper: in the estimation of that paper, my view that each special mode of production and the social relations corresponding to it, in short, that the economic structure of society, is the real basis on which the juridical and political superstructure is raised, and to which definite social forms of thought correspond; that the mode of production determines the character of the social, political, and intellectual life generally, all this is very true for our own times,
Introduction
16
in which material interests preponderate, but not for the middle ages, in which Catholicism, nor for Athens and Rome, where politics, reigned supreme . . . . This much, however, is clear, that the middle ages could not live on Catholicism, nor the ancients on politics. On the contrary, it is the mode in which they gained a livelihood that explains why here politics, and there Catholicism, played the chief part. IMarx, 1967:82)
Marx thus analyzes society as a set of asymmetric but reciprocal determinations.ls Its "levels" form a totality, but without losing their distinctiveness. An articulated totality of economy, state, ideology, and so on, is called a social formation (Hindess and Hirst, 1975).19 Classes and contradictions
Social formations are not necessarily stable: they can change through slow evolution or sudden, violent eruptions. Marxism views such historical change as occurring largely through contradictions that are present in a society. These contradictions are not logical inconsistencies; nor are they dysfunctional aspects of society. Rather, they are antagonisms or conflicts between different elements in the existing social arrangements that in the long run are incompatible with one another. As long as they are both pressent, they will tend to destabilize society, leading to social change. When Marxists say that change occurs dialectically, they mean that it comes about through contradiction. To take this view of change is to see change as thE' product of conditions that are internal to a society, not external. The society itself gives rise to the conditions that will change society. It is well-known that Marx paid particular attention to the role of contradictions associated with class in this regard. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels went so far as to proclaim, "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." For Marx, classes are constituted by the social relations of production described earlier. If some possess the means of production but others use the means of production without possessing them, the economic relationship between these two groups defines two classes. Thus one finds such paired classes as capitalist (who owns capital20 ) and worker or proletariat (who does not); landlord (who owns land) and tenant (who does not); lender (who owns money capital) and borrower (who does not). Class is not an attribute of an individual or group; it denotes a position in a relationship. There can be no slave without a master, no serf without a lord, no worker without a capitalist. Although the distinction between classes has consequences that can be measured in quantitative terms (differences in income, longevity, chances of being arrested, etc.), the distinction itself is qualitative. This means that class is not defined by income, occupational prestige, or lifestyle, though all these things may influence one's consciousness of one's class, that is, one's subjective class identification.
Introduction
17
When one class lacks the means of production, it is in a position to be exploited by those classes who do. Serfs are permitted to cultivate land for their own use only on condition that they pay feudal rent to the lord. Workers, lacking means of production of their own, must agree to put their labor power at the disposal of the capitalist, who extracts surplus value in the form of profits. Exploitative social relations are viewed in Marxian theory as inherently unstable. Those who are exploited may attempt to reduce or eliminate their exploitation, while the exploiters are expected to resist these efforts, or even to intensity them. The existence of classes thus implies class struggle?l Ultimately, Marx thought, class struggle would intensity, leading to a socialist revolution that would abolish capitalism, putting an end to classes and to class struggle.
Implications for criminology
In its insistence that any social phenomenon must be looked at in the context of social totality, Marxism has methodological implications for the criminological enterprise. As crime does not exist in isolation, it must be analyzed in the context of its relationship to the character of the society as a whole. With only a handful of exceptions, non-Marxian work on criminology does not attempt to do this?2 Most of it tends, instead, to focus on the attributes of individuals (such as their psychological traits) or on their immediate social settings (the classroom, the family, the neighborhood, and the peer group). The society itself rarely appears. The possibility that its organization-its way of producing and distributing material goods, and of organizing its political and legal institutions, for example-might have major implications for the amount and kinds of crime present in a society, as well as for the character of its crime control apparatus, is not even considered. To be sure, not all Marxian work in criminology takes a holistic view. As mentioned above, much of the early twentieth-century Marxian work on crime tended to look at economic conditions alone as the critical causal factor, completely ignoring the role that state organization and ideology might play. The same limitation mars some of the early work on crime by contemporary American Marxists.23 But the most recent Marxist work on the state and on ideology calls on us to take a broader approach. To criticize mainstream criminology for its tunnel vision is not to say that its findings are wrong. Specific claims can only be evaluated case-by-case. From a Marxist point of view, much of the trouble in mainstream criminology is of a different sort. In failing to consider the possibility that findings might be valid only within the context of given social arrangements one is apt to interpret them as if they had universal validity. When Marx criticized earlier economists, it was not to say that all their work was wrong. He readily
18
Introduction
conceded that much of what they had to say accurately described how the economy worked within a capitalist mode of production, and he built on their work. At the same time, he was concerned to demonstrate that what economists postulated to be universal laws were in fact historically contingent. Because Marxists recognize this contingency, they do not seek laws of crime that remain invariant across epochs, independent of the mode of production. Instead, they expect patterns of crime and of social responses toward crime to change as society's economic and political organization change. There is a great deal of evidence to support their expectation. This is most obvious when it comes to social responses toward crime. Such institutions as the police force, the juvenile court, and the penitential)' are all fairly recent inventions. The readings in this book offer persuasive evidence that their introduction was associated with economic and political change of a fairly fundamental sort. The same is true of patterns of Criminality. At present, working-class and black families are disproportionately involved in crimes of interpersonal violence. But the historian Guido Ruggiero (1980) has shown that in early Renaissance Venice, the nobility were disproportionately represented in violence statistics. According to historians, urbanization and industrialization under capitalist auspices have radically changed patterns of crime (Gurr, 1976; Weisser, 1979). In central and eastern Europe, the structure of criminality was transformed after the abolition of capitalism (Dzekebaev, 1974:42 - 76; Swida, 1977; Vermes, 1978:73), To study crime in relation to the way societies organize their economic and political institutions is to ask different sorts of questions about crime than have typically been asked in non-Marxist criminology.24 Marxists do not deny that social-psychological processes and face-to-face interactions may have some importance for understanding crime and criminal justice, but they tl)' to see these as shaped by larger social structures. And in characterizing these structures, they give particular attention to the organization of economic activity, without neglecting the political and ideological dimensions of society. Thus the Marxist perspective directs criminological theol)' "outward" rather than "inward." This difference in perspective has practical ramifications. If the social structure is an important constraint on the behavior of individuals and institutions, then there are limits to the change that it is possible to induce in individuals or institutions without changing the social structure. Vocational training for prisoners, for instance, will not eradicate unemployment or do away with low-wage industries. Even when individuals can be helped, the larger problem remains. To deal with crime by "treating" individuals is like tl)'ing to empty the ocean with a bucket. If we are to discover the relationship between different social arrangements and crime we must be able to compare societies in which these arrangements differ. Thus we need comparative or historical data. Generally, Marxists have preferred the latter. Comparison of societies at a given point in time are frequently predicated on the implicit assumption that all
Introduction
19
societies will evolve through the same stages. Thus it is a matter of indifference whether one studies a contemporary society with feudal institutions or one that existed seven hundred years ago. Marx appeared to hold this view, but few contemporary Marxists do. We now understand that international relations have changed in ways that may preclude late industrializing nations from following the same lines of economic and political development as the early industrializing nations. To learn about process, then, requires examining the course of development over a period of time. A second reason for turning to history is implied in the following passage from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: "Man makes his own history, but he does not make it out of whole cloth; he does not make it out of conditions chosen by himself, but out of such as he finds close at hand. The tradition of all past generations weighs like an alp upon the brain of the living" (Marx, 1913:9). The social institutions that exist at any given time, the resources available for solving problems, even the ideas that people think, are largely handed down from the past. This is very clear in the case of criminal justice. One cannot fully explain the criminal law or the nature of the criminal justice system by referring to the functions they allegedly serve today. To understand the character of law and criminal justice one must look to the time when they were created, not because they have not changed, but because they have changed in ways that are constrained and shaped by a historical heritage. Current debates over sentencing policy, for example, invoke arguments introduced by the philosophers Kant and Hegel two hundred years ago. For these reasons, a substantial number of the readings included in this book are historical studies. Although the comparative study of social formations is a major part of the Marxian project, it is also true that Marxist criminologists have been concerned with crime and criminal justice in a given social formation, usually their own. Criticism of mainstream criminology's treatment of crime in capitalist society has been a major focus of radical criminology. The results have not always been satisfactory. In response to Gouldner's (1968) accusation that Howard Becker, a leading labeling theorist, "views the underdog as someone who is being mismanaged, not as someone who suffers or fights back. Here the deviant is sly, but not defiant; he is tricky but not courageous; he sneers but he does not accuse; he 'makes out' without making a scene," it would be appropriate to ask whether Gouldner thinks Becker should have described the people he studied as fighting back when he saw them doing nothing of the sort. A similar rebuttal might be framed in answer to Taylor, Walton, and Young's criticism of criminologists for failing to show us the deviant as rebel. No doubt a good many criminological findings have been obtained by research methods so flawed that the findings cannot withstand critical methodological scrutiny. But some are sure to stand up. To deny them is to produce a criminology that is equally or even more mystifYing than the original. Jock Young (1975) was closer to the mark when he observed that criminals often look the way positivists describe them, though not necessarily for
20
Introduction
the reasons positivist criminologists have thought. When Marx revealed bourgeois economics as ideological, he was not concerned only with refuting it, but also with demonstrating how the routine functioning of capitalism gave rise to misleading appearances regarding its functioning. It is therefore in the realm of interpreting research findings that Marxists will often find grounds for disagreeing with the work of their non-Marxian colleagues (Krisberg, 1975). As Taylor, Walton, and Young (1973) emphasize, Marx makes explicit assumptions about human nature (at least in his early writings; Taylor, Walton, and Young do not distinguish the early from the mature Marx) that are not always shared by non-Marxian criminologists. Marxian conceptions of the state, and of social process generally, often differ from those held by non-Marxian social scientists. However, criticism of existing criminology on the grounds that it disagrees with Marx is always vulnerable to the rejoinder: why should we believe Marx? He could have been wrong. Long ago, Galileo pointed out that it was theory that must conform to facts, not facts to theory. Where there is disagreement between Marxian and non-Marxian theory, then, the superiority of the Marxist analysis must be demonstrated. Such demonstrations will not be easy because both Marxian and nonMarxian ideas are frequently hard to operationalize. Many of Marx's ideas are expressed in language that is metaphorical and ambiguous. Similar problems pervade non-Marxian criminology.25 Given this difficulty, we may end up evaluating theories on the basis of how congenial we find their untestable metasociological assumptions, but this circumstance is not one that should make us happy.
CAN THERE BE A MARXIST CRIMINOLOGY? The value of these and other elements of Marxist theory for criminology is presently a matter of vigorous debate. Some Marxists have asserted that there can be no such thing as a Marxian criminology, a Marxian theory of the family, a Marxian theory of the educational system, etc. (Hirst, 1972, 1975; Mugsford, 1974; Bankowski, Mungham, and Young, 1977). They argue that Marxist theory can only involve the restricted set of concepts developed by Marx, such as class, capital, value, state, ideology. Crime not being one of these privileged concepts, it cannot find a place in Marxist theory. Just how these privileged concepts are to be selected from the many concepts that figure in Marx and Engels's voluminous writings is not entirely clear. Although Marx did not have a complete theory of crime, that is also true of the concepts that Hirst and the others admit to privileged status. As the selections in Part 1 demonstrate, Marx and Engels did write about crime on a number of occasions. However, even if Marx and Engels had never said a word about crime, it would not follow that a Marxian criminology is impossible. If one starts from the proposition that Marxist theory was incomplete when Marx and
IntrDductiDn
21
Engels died, then it is surely legitimate to extend and develop the theory to deal with new phenomena. One could then use the concepts and methods of reasoning found in Marxist texts without turning them into sacred books. Marxist critics notwithstanding, some of us find that our ability to analyze and understand crime is enhanced by the ideas developed in the writings of Marx and Engels. Later Marxist thinkers, too, show themselves to be valuable resources. Some of us have even concluded that our analyses of crime will enrich and contribute to the development of Marxist theory itself.26 Other critics do not necessarily dispute that a Marxist criminology is possible, but they do dispute, the claim that it enhances our understanding of crime. In the view of one critic, Marxist criminology has reached "the point at which its capacity for contribution is exhausted, and where it must confront the reality of its own theoretical and empirical poverty or wither and die" (Klockars, 1979:478-79). A second critic characterizes radical criminology as sentimental (Toby, 1979b), and a third calls it "immoral" (Nettler, 1978). Ultimately readers will have to judge whether our capacity for contribution is exhausted, and whether our work is sentimental and immoral, or whether, as I believe, Marxist criminology is healthier than it has ever been.27 Since some of the issues raised by our critics touch on fundamental issues-whether the work is scientific, whether it is moralistic, and how it is supported or contradicted by the experience of social societies-a few words about them are in order. Is Marxian criminology scientific?
One prominent criticism of our work is that it is not scientific-that it makes unverifiable statements about value preferences (Turk, 1979). In truth, the same might be said of much conventional criminology. Over the decades, non-Marxist criminologists have devoted a great deal of energy to framing policy recommendations on the basis of their own valuessometimes liberal, sometimes conservativei sometimes making their values explicit, more often disguising them as value-neutral science. Neglect or denial of discomforting empirical evidence has long characterized mainstream criminology. Marxists seem no more prone to bias than anyone else. Marx's stance was strongly against slanting one's analysis to fit a predetermined conclusion. In Theories of Surplus Value, he was quite explicit: "But when a man seeks to accommodate science to a viewpoint which is derived not from science itself (however erToneous it may be) but from outside, from alien, external interests, then I call him 'base "' (Marx, 1968:119). Marxists have certainly made clear their political views (as have many other criminologists, including some of our critics). But this does not in itself invalidate their assertions about crime. Strategists in a military campaign have every reason for wanting accurate information about the terrain, and the same is true in political struggle.
22
Introduction
Is Marxian criminology moralistic? A second criticism is that Marxist criminology is moralistic; it blames the wealthy but not the poor for their misdeeds, and it attributes all the bad features of our present society (such as crime) to capitalism, while failing to note the many benefits that capitalism has brought (Klockars, 1979; Toby, 1979). It may well be true that some Marxist criminologists (like some of their non-Marxist colleagues) have been moralistic; whether this is a flaw is itself a value judgment that can be left aside here as uninteresting. Marx himself repudiated moralism time and time again. Although he was angered by the indignities that workers suffered under capitalism (indignities that were objectively unnecessary because the development of industry was making deprivation and hardship unnecessary), he did not blame individual capitalists for their actions. They, no less than workers, were constrained by the logic of the capitalist system: I paint the capitalist and the landlord in no sense couleur de rose. But here individuals are dealt with only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-relations and classinterests. My standpoint ... can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them. (Marx, 1967:10) A century later Chambliss 11969:421) echoed this sentiment: The legal process must be understood as taking the form that it does because of characteristics of the social system which are independent of, and which render relatively inconsequentiaL the motives, character, or personality of the particular people who occupy positions in the system. It is precisely because they attribute the ills of a capitalist system to the system itself that Marxists want to replace capitalism with socialism, a different social system, and not to replace "bad" capitalists with "good" ones. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels applauded the bourgeoisie for their positive accomplishments. They praised capitalism for clearing away the ruins of feudal society, doing away with a host of ancient prejudices, and developing the forces of production. Yet despite itself, they argued, capitalism created the proletariat that would eventually overthrow it. And this too, they asserted, would be progress, because the social relations that were progressive at one point in time were at later times no longer progressive. In view of the deteriorating quality of life (including rising crime rates) in so many capitalist societies around the globe, our critics' defense of contemporary capitalism is not very convincing.
Is Marxian criminology utopian? Finally, Marxian criminology has been criticized as utopian. Specifically, in blaming crime on capitalism and asserting that crime and repression will
Introduction
23
disappear in a socialist society, Marxist criminologists are accused of neglecting the persistence of crime and repression in existing socialist societies (Nettler, 1978; Akers, 1979; Klockars, 1979). This is a complex issue. There is no doubt that the historical development of capitalism transformed criminal law, patterns of crime, and methods of crime control. The various readings in this collection provide ample documentation (see also Weisser, 1979), At least in this sense, the basis for asserting that capitalism causes crime and criminal justice is empirically well grounded. If, however, one interprets the word "cause" more narrowly to mean that only in capitalist societies does one find crime or formal methods of crime control, then the assertion is clearly false. Crime was unquestionably present in precapitalist societies (Jeudwine, 1917; Given, 1977; Hanawalt, 1979). There is equally no doubt that crime and criminal justice institutions are found in societies that are considered socialist. Central and East European criminologists have made crime in their own societies a central focus of their research, and Western criminologists, both Marxist and non-Marxist, have also written about it.28 Although some Western Marxists can fairly be accused of neglecting political repression and the abuse of power in socialist countries,29 others have taken note of them (e.g., Schwendinger and Schwendinger, 1970). Rather than refuting Marxism, the persistence of crime in noncapitalist countries provides the occasion for Marxian theorizing, specifically for analyzing crime in relation to the modes of production, the state and juridical systems, the ideologies, etc., in these societies. For several decades, Western Marxists have grappled with the thorny problem of how the existing socialist societies should be conceptualized in Marxian terms. As yet, no consensus has been reached. Some (Cliff, 1974; Nicolaus, 1974; Bettelheim, 1976) have held that the USSR, for example, is not socialist at all, but a state capitalist society; that is, a society in which the state has established a monopoly in most sectors of the economy, and runs it in exactly the same wayan individual capitalist runs a private enterprise. Harmon (1970) suggests that the state capitalist societies have this character because their rulers have no alternative to acting like capitalists if they are to survive competition with other ruling classes, both capitalist and state capitalist. A second position is that the societies in question are neither capitalist nor socialist, but a new social formation altogether. Thus Schachtman (1962) characterizes the Soviet Union as a bureaucratic collectivist society, since the major means of production are owned collectively but controlled by the bureaucracy rather than the working class.3o A third position is that the societies in question are in fact socialist, albeit imperfect. Marx points out in his 1875 Critique oithe Gotha Program that in the immediate aftermath of a socialist revolution one deals with a society .. as it emerges from capitalist society; and which is thus in every respect, economically, morally and intellectually, still stamped with the birth-marks
24
Introduction
of the old society from whose womb it emerges" (emphasis in original). He then goes on to note that in this phase of socialist development, law will retain its bourgeois quality, adding that "these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society." This is not a mere matter of cultural lag. With the development of the forces of production, when the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and with it the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; when labour is no longer merely a means of life but has become life's principal need; when the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of cooperative wealth flow more abundantly-only then will it be possible completely to transcend the narrow outlook of bourgeois right. Although a full exploration of these positions and their ramifications is not possible here, they do have different implications for criminality. One possible interpretation of the third position is that crime is inherently bourgeois. Although crime may persist for a while under socialism, it does so only as a "relic" of capitalism, to be explained by the survival of capitalist elements in popular consciousness. "Relic theory" has been rejected by most non-Marxian criminologists as naive and utopian, and has also been criticized by criminologists in Central and Eastern Europe (Lemell, 1967:494-5). More than sixty years having elapsed since the October Revolution in 1917, it becomes increasingly implausible that crime in the USSR is only a survival of Czarism and has no sources in existing social arrangements. A more materialist version of relic theory might attempt to link the persistence of crime with social inequalities in socialist societies. The Polish criminologist Leszek Lemell (1978:180), for example, has argued that relative deprivation can lead to crime. This argument is comparable to that made by anomie theorists in the West. Jerzy Jasinski (1978:476), another Polish criminologist, has presented a similar analysis: The last dozen or so years have seen some increase in differences of income -there is now a bigger gap between the highest and lowest earners. All these things have happened at a time of tremendous widespread growth of economic aspirations associated with the awakening of both cultural and material needs of all strata of the population. It would not be reasonable to count on a very rapid diminution of this gap between certain demands (which are strongly felt and now even regarded as necessities) and the means of satistying them. In all likelihood this is a situation in which we can count on a long period during which people will experience some pressure to resort to not very legal means in order to acquire the wherewithal to satisty their demands. We should therefore reckon seriously with the possibility of a real increase in the number of crimes against property (particularly public property), in the number of economic offenses, and in some categories of offences committed by officials-particularly if the aforesaid gap between demands and the satisfaction of these demands were to widen, even temporarily.
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25
This discussion implies that inequality is due to the underdevelopment of the forces of production, and therefore unavoidable for now. The state capitalist and bureaucratic collectivist positions would view inequalities of income and privilege as due to social relations of domination and exploitation.3! Here limitations on the reduction of inequality are linked with antagonistic class relations, such as bureaucrats' interest in preserving their privileged status, or the contradiction between centralized planning and lack of political democracy (a position taken by Draper, 1974).32 The resulting inequalities would be expected to result in anomie-induced crime, especially when exposure to consumerism in the West elevates desires for goods, and an ideology of egalitarianism makes the legitimation of inequality difficult. Theft by employees, which is reputedly very common in the USSR (Juliver, 1976:149-50) would be a manifestation of worker alienation stemming from both economic inequality and powerlessness in the work place (as well as in political affairs). Following the reasoning that Spitzer (1975) has developed regarding capitalist societies, we might also look to the way superstructural institutions such as the school, functioning in ways established to reproduce class rule, give rise to crime, delinquency, and other forms of deviance .33 We need not decide among these three positions here; clearly, the matter is one that requires a great deal of careful study. The point is that the persistence of crime in countries conventionally called socialist is not necessarily an embarrassment, but rather a phenomenon to be understood within the framework of Marxian theory. Marxism does provide conceptual tools for addressing this issue. What must be unequivocally rejected is the seeming assumption on the part of the critics who denounce our utopianism that the only alternatives we have are to continue with capitalism (possibly with some reforms) or to opt for totalitarian repression. As Quinney and many others have noted, there is a tradition of democratic socialism that extends, rather than denies freedom. The libertarian thrust of much radical criminology literature is one of its most prominent features.
WHITHER MARXIAN CRIMINOLOGY? In the space of a few years, Marxian criminology has moved beyond the programmatic statements that gave it its first, tentative coherence, and has now begun the difficult task of developing an understanding of crime, criminallaw, and criminal justice in different social formations. There are some areas where Marxian criminology has not yet advanced very far, and where, therefore, the work remaining to be done is especially great. One is the subject we have just touched on: crime and law in socialism. For understandable reasons, Marxian criminologists in the West have analyzed their own societies first. There is, however, a growing interest in crime in socialist society. Arguably, the credibility of socialism in the
26
Introduction
West depends on the ability of Western socialists to present a credible analysis of existing socialist societies. Hampered by political constraints, social scientists in the existing socialist societies have not been able to do this. Crime and criminal justice in the Third World also require investigation. The impact of capitalism on the Third World has been quite different from its impact on England, Europe, and the United States, and one might expect this difference to be reflected in patterns of crime, as well as social responses to crime. Work along these lines is already being carried out by Third World criminologists. Another area for future work concerns the social psychology of crime. Redo (1979) has noted the inattention to the role of personality in crime causation in Western Marxist criminology; and Pearson (1975) has expressed the fear that in turning from radical criminology to a more "hard nosed" Marxism, the concern for personal liberation is being lost. He suggests that psychoanalysis is an important resource for dealing with this concern. Here, two issues are raised. First, can one draw on Freud, or Mead, to supplement the suggestions that Marx himself left for the development of a social psychology, or are these schools of thought fundamentally incompatible? Second, how important is it to understand individuals in this way? Does it make any difference whether or not we can predict which particular individuals will become involved in crime? Opinions are likely to differ. Some work is already being carried out on ideologies of crime, but this work is still in its early stages. It is important to understand lay beliefs about the causes of crime, the social backgrounds of criminals, and solutions to the crime "problem." What role do the mass media play, compared to personal experience and informal communication with friends, relatives, neighbors, and co-workers. How do these beliefs vary by class? What are the sources of ideology in criminological writing? What knowledge do students take away from their criminology courses? Still another area where attention is badly needed is the relation between criminological theory and political practice. Radical criminologists have participated actively in a number of political struggles over the past ten or twenty years, but this accumulated experience has not been subjected to thorough analysis and evaluation. Possibilities for action in the future need to be assessed in light of this experience. Some suggestions are offered in Part 5, but they are only the beginning of a discussion.
NOTES 1 Many of the developments that commonly accompany the inception of a new scientific perspective have attended this one. New journals have been created to publish its writings: Crime and Social Justice: Issues in Criminology and Contemporary Crises: Crime, Law and Social Policy in the United States; II Questione Criminale in Italy; and the Alternative Criminology Journal in Australia. The British National Deviancy Conference and the European
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27
Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control have provided peliodic conferences for developing this new approach to climinology. IThe Union of Radical Criminologists in the United States proved to be less successful; the organization is now defunct.1 Mainstream climinological associations such as the Amelican Society of Climinology have organized debates at annual meetings, and clitical appraisals have appeared in a number of mainstream journals. Introductory textbooks have begun to take note of radical climinology, 1Nettler, 1978; Sykes, 1978; Gibbons, 19791, and several treatments of the field written entirely from the point of view of the new perspective have been published IQuinney, 1979; Balkan, Berger, and Schmidt, 19801. Parallel developments marked the early years of positivist climinology in late nineteenth-century Europe and early twentieth-century United States. 2 The very few exceptions, such as the work of Rusche and Kirchheimer 119391, have been influential in recent years, but made little impact at the time of publication. What little work was done along these lines reflected influences external to climinology; neither Rusche nor Kirchheimer had been trained in climinology or 'employed as a climinologist. 3 It is symptomatic of the emphasis given to face-to-face interaction in research on the climinal justice system that allegations of bias focused on the individual decision maker: the policeman, the prosecutor, or the judge. Recent research on police and sentencing shows this emphasis to have been exaggerated. On the other hand, evidence is surfacing that agency decisions about how to allocate resources may place some categolies of individuals in greater jeopardy of being apprehended than others. For example, police are allocated to black neighborhoods in numbers that exceed what would be expected on the basis of the number of climes reported in those neighborhoods ICaITOll and Jackson, n.d.l. 4 Labeling theolists are sociologists who took the labeling of deviance at societal, organizational or individual levels as a central subject fOf sociological investigation. In the 1960s labeling theolists and phenomenologists Iwho seek to capture the subjective meanings of actions and expeliencesl made important contlibutions to deviance theory and research. 5 Critics of the position that such disagreements exist have pointed to surveys suggesting that all races and classes tend to agree about the relative seliousness of offenses; but they have not given enough attention to the substantial differences of opinion that are not related to race or class, or to the discrepancy between punishments actually imposed and those thought to be appropliate by the public. Wolfgang 119801 has recently noted that whitecollar clime is punished much less seliously than the general public thinks appropliate. For consensual climes, widely considered among the least selious, the discrepancy sometimes goes the other way. Johnson 119721 reports that "Robert Apablaza, a housepainter, was sentenced to fifty years in plison with no provision for parole by a New Orleans court four years ago for selling a matchbox full of malijuana. In Odessa, Texas, in March 1971, Bentura Flores was convicted of selling $10 worth of heroin. He received a sentence of 1,800 years in plison. He will be eligible for parole when he has served a third of his term." 6 It is symptomatic that the New Left slogan called for power to "the people" rather than to the proletaliat. 7 This eclecticism can be seen for example, in the work of Barry KMsberg 119751, who draws on Marx, Weber, Mills, Blauner, Balbus, and other sources. For the argument that there is little that is new in the new climinology, see Meier 119761. I find Meier's argument strained and unpersuasive. Why do practitioners of the old climinology attack the new so vehemently Isee belowl if it is really the same old thing? 8 The Schwendingers have subsequently modified their position and now argue for a proletarian definition of clime as conduct harmful to the objective interests of the working class 11977). 9 Marx's discussion of this issue does not lend support to a "human lights" definition of clime. When the nineteenth-century French philosopher Proudhon wrote in The
28
Introduction
Philosophy of Poverty that "property is theft," implying that capitalist exploitation was a form of larceny, Marx responded in The Poverty ofPhilosophy with a denial. He pointed out that the concept of theft made sense only in relation to a juridically defined concept of property, and added that in capitalism, workers receive evel)'thing they deseIVe. On a number of occasions, he maintained that morality could be no higher than the social relations of production permitted, and that therefore immorality could be defined only in relation to a given social formation. 10 Indeed, some radical criminologists suggested that criminals, rather than the working class. might be the vanguard of the revolution IGreenberg and Stender. 1972; Mathiesen. 1974). 11 Dissenters, on the other hand, argued that some formal social controls might be needed in any large-scale industrial society, and questioned the desirability of eliminating all constraints on the measures that can be taken against offenders (Thompson, 1975; Greenberg, 1979). 12 For two recent Marxist critiques of Bonger's work. see Taylor. Walton. and Young (1973) and Mike 11976). 13 Some of Marx's own writings on crime are in this vein. In an essay on Belgium, Marx (1848) attributed rising rates of crime to the pauperization of the population that resulted first from free trade and then from protectionism. 14 In a sensitive analysis of street crime, Tony Platt brings Bonger's treatment of crime and capitalism to mind: "While the link between 'street' crime and economic conditions is clearly established, we must guard against economism. Crime is not simply a matter ofpoverty, as evidenced by the unparalleled criminality and terrorism of the ruling class. Nor is 'street' crime explained by poverty, for petty bourgeois youth in the United States are probably just as delinquent as their working class counterparts, and there are many impoverished nations in the world that do not in any way approach the high level of criminality in this country. The problem of 'street' crime should be approached not only as a product ofthe unequal distribution of wealth and chaotic labormarkt>t practices, but also as an important aspect of the demoralizing social relations and individualistic ideology that characterize the capitalist mode of production at its highest stage of development" 11978:33). 15 Some of these issues are reviewed in Hindess and Hirst 11975). Therborn (1976), Cutleret al. 11977) and Wright 11978). See also Hartmann 11970). 16 The relationship between the forces and relations of production within a given mode is a subject of great importance for Marxian theory, but since it is tangential to our discussion it cannot be explored here. 17 In feudalism, surplus labor takes the form of feudal rent, which may be paid in the form of labor seIVices, cash or in kind. In the capitalist mode of production, workers sell their labor power to capitalists in return for wages. The difference between the value that workers receive in the form of wages and the value they produce is surplus value-the specific form that surplus labor takes in the capitalist mode of production-and is appropriated by the capitalist. This is the source of profits. 18 Marx takes the same approach to the different aspects of the economy itself: "The conclusion we reach is not that production, distribution, exchange and consumption are identical, but that they all form the members of a totality, distinctions within a unity. Production pre.dominates not only over itself, ... but over the other moments [aspects] as well.... A definite production thus determines a definite consumption, distribution and exchange as well as definite relations between these different moments. Admittedly, however, in its onesided form, production is itself determined by the other moments .... Mutual interaction takes place between the different moments. This is the case with every organic whole" IMarx, 1973:99. Emphasis in originaU. 19 The precise number of categories required for conceptualizing this totality is not entirely clear. Most work on social formations has posited three "levels," the economic, the political,
Introduction
29
and ideological; but one could also discuss non ideological culture. the structure of organizations that lie outside the state. and so on. 20 Capital has a dual aspect in Marxist theory. On the one hand. capital is wealth that is. or can become economically productive lusable to produce surplus value). e.g. instruments of production. or money. On the other hand. capital embodies a social relationship. Since workers do not have capital themselves. they must sell their labor power to those who do in order to survive. Thus the possession of capital bestows on the capitalist the power to command the labor of workers. Since capital can be possessed legally or illegally. this power does not always coincide exactly with legal rights of ownership. 21 Conflict is also an element in some non-Marxian social theories. For example. in Weberian theory. groups come into conflict over their "life chances." No special relationship between groups is assumed; groups are simply hypothesized to exist and to have the tendency to come into conflict with one another. In Marxian theory. however. the groups in conflict (classes) bear a relationship to one another and the conflict is rooted in that relationship. 22 The exceptions are those inspired by functionalist or Weberian theory. Functionalist social theories are those that explain the existence of social phenomena in terms of what they contribute to maintaining existing social patterns. Emile Durkheim. Talcott Parsons. and Robert K. Merton are among the leading functionalist sociologists. Marx pokes fun at functionalist logic in one of the extracts reprinted from his writings in Part I. Max Weber was an early twentieth-century German sociologist whose writings are used as a conceptual resource by some present-day non-Marxian conflict theorists. Austin Turk is a leading representative of this perspective. 23 See. for example. Gordon 11971) and Quinney 1197B:399l. On the other hand. Steven Spitzer's (1975) sketch of a Marxian approach to deviance theory is exemplary in taking explicit account of both base and superstructure. 24 To the extent that this is true. Marxist and non-Marxist criminology are not in competition with one another. and it would be meaningless to ask which is better. except insofar as one was concerned with judgments about the relative importance of the questions that each perspective raised. 25 The difficulties in operationalizing Sutherland's differential association theory. for example. have been known for decades. 26 It may be noted that even if one were to accept the rigid position that a Marxist criminology was impossible. one would not be denying the theoretical worth or empirical validity of the work done by those of us who think that the criminology we are doing is appropriately called Marxist. The only thing at stake would seem to be its pedigree. A more detailed criticism of the sort of reasoning employed by Hirst. Mugsford. and Bankowski. Mungham. and Young can be found in Thompson (1978) and Greenberg 11980a). 27 As the number of critics has been quite large. and much of the criticism has been repetitive; a point-by-point response would be tedious. Overall. a good deal of the criticism is misinformed. misrepresents sources. or attacks a few writers without demonstrating that their work is representative. For example. many critics. such as Klockars and Akers. have accused radical criminologists of exaggerating the degree of dissensus about the content of law. and of wrongly maintaining that all law represents the interests of powerful elites. without noting Chambliss's work. which seriously qualifies such arguments. According to Chambliss (1969:10). it would be a mistake to think "that all laws represent the interests of persons in power at the expense of persons less influential. In many cases there is no conflict whatsoever between those in power and those not. For' most crimes against the person. such as murder. assault. and rape. there is consensus throughout society as to the desirability of imposing legal sanctions for persons who commit these acts." He goes on to say that "laws are passed which reflect the interests of the general population and which are antithetical to the interests of those in power.... The influence of interest groups. then. is but one as-
30
Introduction peet of the processes which detennine the emergence and focus of the legal norms." Much criticism is seriously outdated. Having failed to recognize that the previously eclectic radical criminology has evolved into a theoretically more coherent Marxian criminology, critics have attacked work that has already been transcended, has been explicitly repudiated by its authors, or as Beirne (1979) stresses, has no real connection with Marxian theory. For example, Toby 11979b), like Meier (1976), accuses Marxists of oversentimentality toward criminals, failing to note the explicit repudiation of the romanticizing of crime in Young 11975) and Crime and Social Justice Collective (1976), The paucity of references to recent work suggests that our critics are not well informed about the current state of Marxist criminology. Thus Toby 11979b) cites but a single work of radical criminology in his polemic, and it was published in 1973.
28 For the work of Central and East European criminologists, see All-Union Institute 11974), Buchholz et al. (1974), Dzekebaev (1974), Godony 11974a, b), Jasinski (1978), Vermes (1978),and Redo 119S0l. For Western work on crime in socialist societies, see Connor 11972), Juviler 11976), Brady 11977), Wilson, Greenblatt, and Wilson (1977), Solomon (1978), Volgyes (1978), Salas 11979), Balkan, Berger, and Schmidt 11980:324-34), Shelley 11980), and Greenberg 11980b). 29 For example, Quinney praises Cuba and China as places where "popular justice institutions have been created and supported by the state. These institutions," he argues "protect and solidilY the working class against internal and external class enemies, as well as against elitist bureaucratic tendencies in the state apparatus" (1974:163). Balkan, Berger, and Schmidt assert that "The Chinese constitution does guarantee, at least in principle, the right to freedom of speech, association, demonstration, and the freedom to strike .... Citizens' freedom in their own homes is inviolable, and no citizen can be arrested before a complete investigation is made and the evidence considered sufficient by the Chinese court. Any arrest must be made in public, during the daytime, and in front of witnesses .... In addition, there are special legal agencies designed to deal with government and party officials who have violated the law" 11980:329). Neither of these sources refers to testimony that there are miIlions of slave laborers in Chinese penal colonies lRuo-Wang/1976). Neither mentions the possibility that freedoms guaranteed on paper may be drastically infringed in practice, or that popular justice institutions can be manipulated by bureaucrats for their own purposes. According to a recent report, "Over the last two decades, either trials were not held at all or the judicial process was left to the Ministry of Public Security Ithe police) and party authorities .... In a murder case in Kwangsi Province, the 'judicial workers, ... without hearing the case in a court of law and without making further investigation to verilY relevant data, suggested that the defendant be sentenced to death and summarily executed.' Later it was found that the whole case was a 'frame-up' and the defendant's confession had been extorted" (Butterfield, 1979: p. A4). Recent Chinese government announcements have reported many wrongful executions and false imprisonments. 30 Laibman (1978) presents a critique of both the above positions. 31 For descriptions of social inequality in the USSR, see Lane (1971) and Matthews (1978). 32 Nove 11980) argues that while these factors may hold back production, the centralized bureaucratic control of the economy is itself a fetter on production. 33 Rates for common forms of crime appear to be considerably lower in the Soviet Union than in the United States, although official figures are not published; they definitely are lower in Poland (Greenberg, 1980b). It is not certain, though, whether crime rates are lower because social inequality is considerably less, as Lane (1971:74) indicates to be the case, or because law enforcement is more effective. Prison populations in the Soviet Union are several times higher than in the United States, and restrictions on geographical mobility in the Soviet Union make possible a degree of social control not available in the United States in the "war against crime" (Shelley, 1980).
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31
REFERENCES
American Friends SeIVice Committee (AFSC) Working Party (1971). Strugglefor Justice. New York: Hill and Wang. Akers. Ronald L. (1979). "Theory and Ideology in Marxist Criminology: Comments on Turk. Quinney. Toby and K1ockars." Criminology 16:527-43. All-Union Institute for the Study of the Causes and Elaboration of Measures for the Prevention of Crime (1974) .Recent Contributions to Soviet Criminology. Rome: United Nations Social Defence Research Institute. Balkan. Sheila. Ronald J. Berger. and Janet Schmidt (1980). Crime and Deviance in America. Belmont. Calif.: Wadsworth. Bankowski. zenon. Geoff Mungham. and Peter Young (1977), "Radical Criminology or Radical Criminologist?" Contemporary Crises 1:37-51. Beirne. Piers (1979). "Empiricism and the Critique of Marxism on Lawand Crime."Social Problems 26:373-85. Bettelheim. Charles (1976). Class Struggles in the U.S.S.R .• First Period: 1917-1923. New York: Monthly Review Press. Bonger. William Adrian (1916), Criminality and Economic Conditions. Boston: little. Brown. Originally published in 1905. Brady. James P. (1977). "Political Contradictions and Justice Policy in People's China." Contemporary Crises 1:127-62. Buchholz. Erich. Richard Hartmann. John Lekschas. and Gerhard Stiller (1974) .Socialist Criminology: Theoretical and Methodological Foundations. Lexington: Lexington Books' Butterfield. Fox (1979), "China is Codifying Legal System and Plans to Insure Open Trials. "New York Times. Jan. 15. pp. AI. A4. Carroll. Leo. and Pamela lIVing Jackson (n.d.). "On the Behavior of the Determinants ofthe Size of Municipal Police Forces." Unpublished paper. University of Rhode Island Sociology Department. Center for Research on Criminal Justice (1975), The Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove:AnAnalysis ofthe U.S. Police. Berkeley. Calif.: Center for Research on Criminal Justice. Chambliss. William J. (1969). Crime and the Legal PT'Ocess. New York: McGraw-Hill. ---and Robert B. Seidman (1971). Law. Order. and Power. Reading. Mass.: Addison-Wesley. Cliff. Tony (1974), State Capitalism in Russia. New York: Urizen. Connor. Walter (1972). Deviance in Soviet Society. New York: Columbia University Press. Crime and Social Justice Collective (1976). "The Politics of Street Crime." Crime and Social Justice 5:1-4. Cutler. Antony. Barry Hindess. Paul Hirst. and Athar Hussain (1977). Maf7('s "Capita/" and Capitalism Today. vol. 1. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Denisoff. R. Serge. and Donald McQuarie (1975). "Crime Control in Capitalist Society: A Reply to Quinney." Issues in Criminology 10:109-19. Draper. Hal (1974).' 'The Dynamics of Bureaucratic Collectivism." InBureaucratic Collectivism: The Stalinist Social System. Highland Park. Mich.: Sun Press. Dzekebaev. U.S. (1974). Criminality as a Criminological Problem. Alma Atar. USSR: Nauka. Gartner. Rosemary (1979). "Urbanization. Urban Growth and Homicide: A Comparative Analysis." Paper presented to the American Sociological Association. Gibbons. Don C. (1979). The Criminological Enterprise: Theories and Perspectives. Englewood Cliffs. NJ.: Prentice-Hall.
32
Introduction
Given, James B. (1977). Society and Homicide in Thirteenth-Century England. Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press. GOdony, Joseph (1974a). "Criminality in Industrialized Countries." In Crime and Industrialization . Stockholm: Scandinavian Research Council for Criminology. -(1974bJ. "Report on Criminological Researches in the National Institute of Criminology and Criminalistics in Hungruy." In Crime and Industrialization . Stockholm: Scandinavian Research Council for Criminology. Gordon, David M. (1971). "Class and the Economics of Crime." ReviewofRadical Political Economy 3:51-75. Gouldner, Alvin (1968). "The Sociologist as Partisan: Sociology and the Welfare State." The American Sociologist 3:103-16. -(1973). "Foreword." In Ian Taylor, Paul Walton, and Jock Young, The NewCriminology: Fora Social Theory of Deviance. New York: Harper and Row. Greenberg, David F. (1979). "Book Review of Class, State and Crime: On the Theory and Practice of Criminal Justice, by Richard Quinney." Crime and Delinquency 25:110-13. -(1980a). "A Critique of the Immaculate Conception: A Comment on Piers Beirne." Social Problems (April). -(1980b). "Penal Sanctions in Poland: A Test of Alternative Models." Social Problems (December). - a n d Fay Stender (1972). "The Prison as a Lawless Agency." Buffalo Law Review 21:799-838. Gurr, Ted Robert (1976). Rogues, Rebels, and Reformers: A Political History of Urban Crime and Conflict. Beverly Hills: Sage. Hanawalt, Barbara A. (1979). Crime and Conflict in English Communities, 1300-1348. Cambridge: HalVard University Press. Harmon, Chris (1970). "The Stalinist States." International Socialism 42: 1?-20. Reprinted in Bureaucratic Collectivism: The Stalinist Social System. Highland Park, Mich.: Sun Press. Hartmann, Klaus (1970). Die Mar}(.ische Theorie. Berlin: De Gruyter. Hepburn, John R. (1977). "Social Control and the Legal Order: Legitimate Repression in a Capitalist State." Contemporary Crises 1:77-90. Hindess, Barry, and Paul Hirst (1975).Pre-Capitalist Modes ofProduction . Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ---(1977). Mode of Production and Social Formation. Atlantic Highfields, NJ.: Humanities Press. Hirst, Paul Q. (1972). "Marx and Engels on Law, Crime and Morality." Economy and Society 1:28-56. -(1975). "Radical Deviancy Theory and Marxism: A Reply to Taylor and Walton." In Ian Taylor, Paul Walton, and Jock Young (eds.), Critical Criminology. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Jasinski, Jerzy (1978). "Direction and Determinants of Expected Changes in the Trends and Structure of Crime." In Jerzy Jasinski (ed.), Problems of Social Maladjustment and Crime in Poland. Warsaw: Polish Academy of Sciences - Ossolineum Publishing House. Jeudwine, J. W. (1917). Tort, Crime, and Police in Medieval Britain. London: Williams and Norgate. Johnson, Joe (1972). "Behind the Prison Revolt." International Socialist Review 33:8-15. Juviler, Peter H. (1976). Revolutionary Law and Order: Politics and Social Change in the U.S.S.R. New York: Free Press.
Introduction
33
Klockars, Carl B. (19791. "The Contemporary Crises of Marxist Criminology." Criminology 16:477 -515. Krisberg, Barry (19751. Power and Privilege: Toward a New Criminology. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. Krohn, Marvin 119761. "A Durkheimian Analysis ofIntemationai Crime Rates." Paper presented to the American Sociological Association. Laibman, David 119781. "The 'State Capitalist' and 'Bureaucratic-Exploitative' Interpretations of the Soviet Social Formation: A Critique." The Review of Radical Political Economics 10:24-34. Lane, David 119711. The End of Inequality? Stratification under State Socialism. Baltimore: Penguin. Lemen, L. L.119671.Scientific Foundations of Criminal Policy. Warsaw: State Scientific Bublishing Company. ---119781.Zarys KIyminologii Og6lnej/Outlines of General Criminology. Warsaw: Panstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe. Marx, Karl 118481. "The 'Model State' of Belgium." Neue Rheinische Zeitung 68 (August 71. In Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 7.
---119041. Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy. Tr. N.!. Stone, Chicago: Charles H. Kerr. Originally published 1859. ---119131. The Eighteenth Brumaire ofLouis Bonaparte. Tr. Daniel De Leon. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr. Originally published 1852. ---119671. Capital, vol. 1. Tr. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. New York: International Publishers. Originally published 1867. ---(19681. Theories of Surplus Value, vol. 2. New York: International Publishers. ---119731. Grundrisse: Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy. Tr. Martin Nicolaus. New York: Vintage. Marx, KarL and Frederick Engels 119691. Selected Works, vol. 3. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Mathiesen, Thomas 119741. The Politics of Abolition. New York: Halstead. Matthews Merryn 119781. Privilege in the Soviet Union: A Study of Elite Life-Styles under Communism. London: George Allen and Unwin. Matza, David 119691. Becoming Deviant. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. Meier, Robert (19761. "The New Criminology: Continuity in Criminological Theory." Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology 67:461-69. Michalowski, Raymond J., and Edward W. Bohlander 119761. "Repression and Criminal Justice in Capitalist America." Sociological Inquiry 46:95-106. Mike, Barry 119761. "Wilhelm Adriaan Bonger's 'Criminality and Economic Conditions': A Critical Appraisal." International Journal of Criminology and Penology 4:211-38. Mills, C. Wright (19591. The Power Elite. New York: Oxford University Press. Mitford, Jessica (19741. Kind and Usual Punishment. New York: Vintage. Mugsford, S. K. (19741. "Marxism and Criminology: A Comment on the Symposium Review of'The New Criminology'." The Sociological Quarterly 15:591-96. NARMIC, National Action and Research on the Military-Industrial Complex 11971I.Police on the Homefront. Philadelphia: American Friends Service Committee. Nettler, G"Yfln (19781. Explaining Crime. 2nd. ed. New York: McGraw-Hill. Nicolaus, Martin (19741. The Restoration of Capitalism in the U.s.S.R. Chicago: Uberator. Nove, Alec (19801. "Problems and Prospects of the Soviet Economy." New Left Review 119:3-19.
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Introduction
Parsons, Talcott (1977). Evolution of Societies. Englewood Cliffs, NJ.: Prentice-Hall. Pearson, Geoffrey (1975). The Deviant Imagination: Psychiatry, Social Work and Social Change. New York: Holmes and Meier. Pepinsky, Harold E. (19761. Crime and Conflict: A Study of Law and Society. New York: Academic Press. . Platt, Tony (19691. The Child-Savers: The Invention ofDelinquency . Chicago: University of Chicago Press. -(1974), "Prospects for a Radical Criminology in the United States." Crime and Social Justice 1:2-10. ---(1978). '''Street' Crime-A View from the Left." Crime and Social Justice 9:26-34. Platt, Tony, and Paul Takagi (19771. "Intellectuals for Law and Order: A Critique of the New 'Realists'." Crime and Social Justice 7:1-16. Quinney, Richard (1970a). The Social Reality of Crime. Boston: little, Brown. --(1970b). The Problem of Crime. New York: Dodd, Mead. - - I 1973). "Crime Control in Capitalist Society: A Critical Philosophy of Legal Order," Issues in
Criminology 8:75-99. of Legal Order: Crime Control in Capitalist Society. Boston: Little, Brown. Redo, Slawomir M. (1979). "The New Criminology: The Problem of Etiology of Crime." Acta Universitatis Nicolai Copernici 18:109-22. - ( 19801. "Crime Trends and Crime Prevention Strategies in Eastern Europe." Working Paper for the Sixth United Nations Congress on the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders. Reiman, Jeffery (1979). The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison. New York: Wiley. Ruggiero, Guido (19801. Violence in Early Renaissance Venice. New Brunswick, NJ.: Rutgers University Press. Ruo-Wang, Bao (1976). Prisoner of Mao. Baltimore: Penguin. Rusche, Georg, and Otto Kirchheimer (19391. Punishment and Social Structure. New York: Columbia University Press. Salas, Luis (1979). Social Control and Deviance in Cuba. New York: Praeger. Schachtman, Max (1962). The Bureaucratic Revolution: The Rise of the Stalinist State. New York: Donald. Schur, Edwin M. (1973). Radical Non-Intervention: Rethinking the Delinquency Problem. Englewood Cliffs, NJ.: Prentice-Hall. Schwendinger, Herman and Julia (1970). "Defenders of Order or Guardians of Human Rights." Issues in Criminology 7:72-81. ---(19741. The Sociologists of the Chair: A Radical Analysis of the Formative Years of North American Sociology, 1883-1922. New York: Basic Books. -(1977), "Social Class and the Definition of Crime." Crime and Social Justice 7:4-13. Shelley, Louise (1980), "The Geography of Soviet Criminality." American Sociological Review 45:111-22. Smith, Joan, and William Fried (1974). The Uses ofthe American Prison: Political Theory and Penal Practice. Lexington: Lexington Books. Solomon, Peter H. (1978) .Soviet Criminologists and Criminal Policy. New York: Columbia University Press. Spitzer, Steven (19751. "Towards a Marxian Theory of Deviance." Social Problems 22:638-51. Swida, Witold (1977). Kryminologia. Warsaw: Panstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe. Sykes, Gresham M. (1978). Criminology. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. ---(19741. Critique
Introduction
35
Takagi, Paul 119741 . "A Garrison State in a 'Democratic' Society." Crime and Social Justice 1:27 - 33. Taylor, Ian, Paul Walton, and Jock Young 119731. The New Criminology: For a Social Theory of Deviance. New York: Harper and Row. Therbom, Goran 119761. Science, Class and Society: On the Formation ofSociology and Historical Materialism. Atlantic Highfields, N.J.: Humanities Press. Thompson, E. P. 119751. Whigs and Hunters: Origins of the Black Act. New YOlk Pantheon. Thompson, E. P.119781. "The Poverty ofTheOlY or an Orrery of Errors." In E. P. Thompson led.I,The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review Press. Toby, Jackson 11979al. "Societal Evolution and Criminality: A Parsonian View." Social Problems 26:386-91. -(1979bl. "The New Criminology is the Old Sentimentality." Criminology 16:516-26. Turk, Austin T. 119691. Criminality and Legal Order. Chicago: Rand McNally.
---119791. "Analyzing Official Deviance: For Nonpartisan Conflict Analyses in Criminology."
Criminology 16:459-76. Vermes, Miklos 119781. The Fundamental Questions of Criminology. Leyden: A. W. Sijthoff. Volgyes, Ivan 119781. Social Deviance in Eastern Europe. Boulder, Colo.: Westview. Weisser, Michael R. 119791. Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Europe. Atlantic Highfields, N.J.: Humanities Press. Wilson, Amy Auerbacher, Sidney Leonard Greenblatt, and Richard Whittingham Wilson (19771. Deviance and Social Control in Chinese Society. New York: Praeger. Wolfgang, Marvin E. 119801. "Crime and Punishment." New York Times, March 2, p. E21. Wright, Erik Olin 119731. The Politics ofPunishment: A Critical Analysis ofPrisons in America. New York: Harper and Row.
---119781. Class, Crisis and the State. London: New Left Books. Young, Jock 119751. "Working-class Criminology." In Ian Taylor, Paul Walton, and Jock Young leds.l, Critical Criminology. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Part 1 Marx and Engels on Crime and Punishment
Part 1
38
Part 1
Although crime was not a central interest for Marx and Engels, they did discuss crime and punishment in some of their writings. Now, when radical Marx and criminologists are attempting to reconstruct Engels criminology on Marxian foundations, these writings on Crime are of particular interest. To convey a sense of what and Marx and Engels had to say about crime, representaPunishment tive selections from these writings are reprinted here.1 The first three selections concern the relationship between crime and capitalism. The first, extracted from Capital, is part of a larger discussion of the origins of capitalism in early modem England. Marx was particularly concerned with refuting the view-held by economists of his day (as well as oursl-that capitalism was a natural way of organizing human relationships. What could be more taken for granted than the notion that some people are paid to work by other people who own businesses, hire workers, and collect profits? As we grow up in a capitalist society, we anticipate that we will perhaps be a paid wage earner, or an owner of a business that employs wage earners. Some of us may come to disapprove of these arrangements, but we are not surprised that they exist. Yet only a few centuries ago, in Europe and England, few people worked for wages. Most were free peasants, growing food on their own land. Artisans and craftsmen who made and sold things were usually independent workers. Few peasants or artisans were eager to give up their independence to work for wages on farms or in factories owned by others. Yet capitalism could never have developed had not large numbers of people been willing to do just that. A precondition for the establishment of capitalism as a mode of production, then, was the creation of people who had no alternative but wage labor. Wherever people had alternatives, they refused to do wage labor. Marx makes this point in Capital by telling the story of a certain Mr. Peel: Mr. Peel ... took with him from England to Swan River, West Australia, means of subsistence and of production to the amount of £50,000. Mr. Peel had the foresight to bring with him, besides, 3,000 persons of the working-class, men, women, and children. Once arrived at his destination, "Mr. Peel was left without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water from the river." Unhappy Mr. Peel who provided for everything except the export of English modes of production to Swan River! IMarx, 1967:766)
Mr. Peel's workers were able to desert him because Australian land was freely available. As long as English peasants had land, they too could avoid becoming employees. Before capitalism could be created, then, peasants had to be separated from land and deprived of other traditional sources of support. This theft was accomplished by force. When it became profitable for large landowners to raise sheep for market, they converted land previ-
Marx and Engels an Crime and Punishment
39
ously used for crops into pasturage, at first illegally and then later by Act of Parliament. Villagers were thus deprived of their customary rights to use common lands to graze their own livestock, gather wood, fish, and so on. Many therefore found it impossible to remain on the land, and whole villages were deserted. Then, too, the confiscation of Church lands deprived paupers of their legal right to share in the tithe. The feudal retainers discharged by their lords when private armies were suppressed swelled the ranks of those whose customary incomes were vanishing as economic relationships became commercialized and the state began to centralize. The common lands stolen from peasant use enlarged the estates of rural landlords and created a population that had no source of legal income other than the wage. Capitalism itself originated in larceny of the grandest scale imaginable (yet it was a larceny that was-to use Mark Kennedy's pregnant phrase-"beyond incrimination"). The textbook version of how capital is accumulated-by self-deprivation and saving-is belied, as Marx demonstrated, by the history of how primitive accumulation actually took place. Since the dispossessed could not all be absorbed in agriculture or in primitive industry, many turned to begging or theft. The Elizabethan undmworld of thieves, gamblers, and confidence men had its origins in the same processes that made capitalism itself possible: the massive, forcible restructuring of economic relationships. The goal of the increasingly bloody legislation of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries against vagrancy, begging, idleness, and petty forms of theft was to prevent all these alternatives to wage labor. Criminal law in this period was thus deployed to help give birth to a radically new form of economic organization: capitalism. In the passage excerpted, Marx sees crime and criminal law as different aspects of the same process. The transformation from independent, petty commodity production to capitalism entailed the taking of land, the criminalizing of the conditions of survival for those thrown off the land, and the violation of criminal laws by people who had no choice but crime for their livelihood. It is of more than passing interest that somewhat parallel processes took place in America. According to Gus Tyler (1962:44-45): Land grants, covering the acreage of full states, were gained by hribery of colonial legislatures and governors. Original accumulations of capital were amassed in tripartite deals among pirates, governors, and brokers. Fur fortunes were piled up alongside the drunk and dead bodies of our noble savages, the Indians. Small settlers were driven from their lands or turned into tenants by big ranchers employing rustlers, guns, outlaws-and the law. In the great railroad and shipping wars, enterprising capitalists used extortion, blackmail, violence, bribery, and private armies with muskets and cannons to wreck a competitor and to become the sole boss of a trade.
The second selection consists of several excerpts from Engels' The Condition of the Working Class in England, published in 1845. Sent to Manchester
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Part 1
to learn the ropes in his father's business, Engels spent much of his twenty months in England studying working-class life. Manchester was in the midst of rapid and unplanned industrialization, and Engels' book, based on wide reading and extensive personal investigation, concerns the social consequences of this development. Engels points out that the factories whose profits and cheap goods were raising middle-class living standards were at the same time creating a new social entity, the working class. For it, industrialization implied not prosperity, but uncertain periods of employment and unemployment, low wages and work that never varied in its routine.2 Demoralized by brutally unhealthy living conditions in the factories and factory towns, workers were reduced almost to animals, and responded with drunkenness, sexual indulgence, and even suicide. This portrait of working-class culture is unquestionably colored by Engels' middle-class morality. Yet, unlike most of his contemporaries, Engels saw these forms of behavior not as evidence of the inherent degeneracy of the working class, but as an understandable adaptation to social conditions that they had not chosen. In Engels'view, industrialization so dehumanized workers that virtually only one human faculty was left to them: the capacity to rebel. Anticipating present-day radical criminologists, Engels characterizes crime as a form of rebellion, a refusal to conform to the established order. Yet he recognizes that it is an unsatisfactory form. Individualistic and easily repressed, it fails to change conditions. Nevertheless, he argues, it is the first stage in a process in which working-class opposition to capitalism will become more unified and political. In a period of militant union and working-class political activity directed at getting universal suffrage, this was an understandable, if not entirely accurate political prediction. In his masterly discussion of this book, Steven Marcus (1974) points out that Engels was the first middle-class socialist to write of socialism as something to be achieved by workers themselves, rather than paternalistically established by employers or the government. The third selection, Engels' speech at Elberfeld, Germany, was one of several devoted to the subject of communism. Writing to Marx after the event, Engels indicated that everyone in the town attended-except the workers. In this speech, Engels attributed crime to the atomizing effect of capitalism. When the economy is based on competition, he told his audience, everyone comes to see everyone else as a potential competitor, an enemy. The consequence is social war. It is of some interest that Engels describes this war in language borrowed from Hobbes-a war "of all against all," not necessarily of one class against one another. Crime, Engels argued, is one manifestation of this war. Early in the twentieth century, Wilhelm Bonger extended this line of thinking in his massive study, Crime and Economic Conditions. Engels goes on to argue that in an egalitarian communist society, the antagonisms due to competition would be abolished by extensive administrative coordination. Once everyone received all the goods and seIVices they
Marx and Engels on Crime and Punishment
41
needed, crime would disappear, and with it the agencies of law enforcement. The few disputes that might still arise from time to time would be settled amicably, by arbitration. As the Introduction pointed out, the cor.ditions under which crime might be expected to disappear from society remain a topic for discussion among Marxist criminologists. The fourth and fifth selections are noteworthy for their anticipation of later developments in non-Marxian criminological theory. The fourth selection, taken from Marx's posthumous Theories of Surplus Value, was provoked by debates among economists about whether service occupations (Le., occupations that do not produce tangible goods) should nevertheless be considered "productive" because people are willing to pay for the services. Marx ridicules this notion by demonstrating that it logically entails viewing criminals as "productive," because they give rise to the occupations that provide the service of protecting people from crime. In this brief, mocking essay, Marx anticipates theories of crime that focus attention on the positive functions crime serves for society. The best known of these functionalist theories is probably that of Durkheim, who argued that crime contributes to social solidarity ~y arousing the collective wrath of the community.3 Although functionalism has been attacked on many grounds, the insight that crime benefits some people seems plausible. Many businesses profit from crime by selling protective devices or insurance; and without crime the Hollywood film industry would be at a real loss for plots. It may also be true that crime helps to stabilize capitalism, for example by dividing the working class and leading workers to depend on the government for protection. Marx's contention (perhaps tongue-in-cheek) that crime does as much as more familiar forms of class conflict to develop the means of production is not one that other students of crime have done much to test, and it is not likely to be generally true.4 However, Richard Quinney (1977) has argued that crime does contribute to the dialectic of capitalism, bringing socialism nearer by intensifying the fiscal crisis of the state. Wenger and Bonomo assess this argument in Part 4. The fifth reading, part of an article Marx wrote for a New York newspaper, anticipates labeling theory, a perspective that had great influence on criminology and the sociology of deviance during the 1960s and early 1970s. Whereas traditional criminological theory takes for granted the legal categories used to distinguish criminals from non-criminals, labeling theory takes these categories as problematic. In so doing, it opens them up to investigation. Howard Becker's classical formulation captures the key idea of the labeling theorists' perspective quite well (1963:9): Social groups create deviance by making the rules whose infraction constitutes deviance, and by applying those rules to particular people and labeling them as outsiders. From this point of view, deviance is not a quality of the act the person commits, but rather a consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to an "offender," The deviant is one to whom that label
42
Part 1
has successfully been applied; deviant behavior is behavior that people so label.
As noted in the Introduction, Marxists-along with many criminologists with other theoretical orientations-have criticized various aspects oflabeling theory. Here, though, Marx himself writes squarely within the labeling tradition a hundred years before it was created. He observes that the social response to an infraction is governed not only by the behavior of the person who commits the infraction, but also by the way society chooses to respond to it. In "improvising crime," society decides, in fact, what is and what is not to be regarded as an infraction. A Marxist is unlikely to be satisfied until an explanation is given for the way society makes this decision. Presumably it is not arbitrary. But in this newspaper column, Marx does not say. The excerpt reprinted here was incidental to a discussion of another topic, and Marx never returned to the provocative ideas he suggested but did not develop. Only in recent years have scholars begun to develop them. The sixth selection, part of a newspaper column, concerns the punishment of criminals. It deals with the philosophical justification for capital punishment. As one might expect, given Marx's Hegelian background, Marx is contemptuous of utilitarian theories of punishment-theories that justify the right to punish criminals by pointing to the benefits that other members of society gain from reducing their chance of becoming a victim. Although Marx argues that punishment is not effective in reducing crime,5 his position fundamentally rests on nonutilitarian grounds: to sacrifice criminals for someone else's good is to treat them as objects. It denies their humanness. At first, Marx seems to endorse the "retributive" philosophies of Kant and Hegel, who depict crime as a freely chosen, willful act that should be punished because wrong-doers deserve punishment. (This rationale has nothing to do with the effect that punishment will have on crime rates.) Yet he immediately qualifies this endorsement. He does so not on political grounds (for example, by arguing that the law really defends ruling class interests rather than the interests of society as a whole), but rather because the abstract concept of "free will"-e.g., freely choosing to commit a crime-ignores the concrete differences in the conditions of people's existence. These differences playa large role in determining whether a person becomes involved in crime. Unlike later positivist criminologists who also rejected the retributive rationale for punishment, Marx does not deny the concept of free will; he simply argues that if we want to understand people's involvement in crime we must look at the concrete social circumstances in which they find themselves. Today this is a sociological truism. Although Marx was not alone in his own day in attributing crime to the effects of the social environment, the law took a quite different view. Even today, popular opinion has by no means adopted the sociological point of view. Elsewhere, Marx argues that the conception of man found in law and in the retributive theory of punishment is distinctly bourgeois. The conception
Marx and Engels on Crime and Punishment
43
views people as abstractly and formally free and equal despite manifest social differences and constraints. It is the market that equalizes qualitatively different commodities, including labor, essentially eradicating all distinguishing qualities. Marx concludes by citing the work of Quetelet, a Belgian astronomer and statistician of the early nineteenth century who pioneered in the statistical analysis of crime. Comparing the age distribution of criminality in France and in Philadelphia, Marx argues that the similarity in patterns shows that crime primarily reflects a society's social arrangements, not its political institutions. In truth, the comparison shows nothing of the kind. To conclude that social conditions cause crime we would need to examine crime figures from societies in which these conditions val}'. Similarity in crime patterns between France and Philadelphia is just as compatible with a biological explanation of crime as with a social explanation! Marx probably did not take strictly biological explanations of crime seriously enough to worl}' about them. He saw human nature as something that develops historically and is not fixed independently of social arrangements. Marx wrote again about the punishment of criminals in his Critique of the Gotha Programme. The Programme was drafted in 1875 as a platform for the founding congress of the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany. Marx found much of the draft to be theoretically weak and politically unsound, and expressed his criticisms in the Critique. One of the points in the Programme called for regulating prison labor to protect the working class. The demand was intended to cope with the competition to which free laborers were exposed when prisoners' labor was made available to manufacturers at low cost.6 In France, workers had made this a political issue as early as 1848 (Duesterberg, 1979:104). Marx responds by noting that socialists should have clearly said that they did not oppose humane treatment of prisoners, including the right to engage in productive labor-an activity that might help them to rejoin the working class in a lawful occupation after their release: it should have been clearly stated that there is no intention from fear of competition to allow ordinary criminals to be treated like beasts, and especially that there is no desire to deprive them of their sole means of betterment, productive labour. This was surely the least one might have expected from socialists. (1970:22)
Until quite recently, socialists after Marx's time have shown relatively little interest in advancing programs directed toward realizing the common interests of prison inmates and workers outside of prisons. In practice, even prisoners who labor have been ignored as a fraction of the working class. NOTES 1 The selections reprinted here are restricted to discussion of crime. None of Marx's and Engels' extensive writing on law has been included. Cain and Hunt (1979) provide a generous
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Part 1
selection of their writings on law, as well as on crime. 2 Some of Marx's later writings on the effects on the subordination of workers to the machine are anticipated in this early work by Engels. 3 Other scholars who developed functional analyses of crime are George Herbert Mead, Robert K. Merton, Daniel Bell, Kingsley Davis, and Kai T. Erikson. 4 In particular circumstances, crime may contribute to the advance of the forces and/or the relations of production. In unpublished research on crime in eighteenth-century England, Peter Unebaugh finds that highway robbery contributed to the development of branch banking. 5 Neither the statistics available to Marx nor those available to us today conclusively demonstrate that pilnishment does not deter crime, but many consumers of crime statistics, including some far more sophisticated in statistics than Marx, have wrongly concluded that they do. For some of the methodological problems, see Blumstein, Cohen, and Nagin (1978) Greenberg (1977), and Greenberg, Kessler, and Logan (1979). 6 Rosalind Petchesky shows in her essay in Part III that competition between prisoners and workers outside of prison was a politically controversial issue in the United States at the same time.
REFERENCES Becker, Howard S. (1963). Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. New York: Free Press. Blumstein, Alfred, Jacqueline Cohen, and Daniel Nagin (1978). Deterrence and Incapacitation: Estimating the Effects of Criminal Sanctions on Crime Rates. Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences. Cain, Maureen, and Alan Hunt (1979). Maf7( and Engels on Law. New York: Academic Press. Duesterberg, Thomas (1979). "Criminology and the Social Order in Nineteenth Century France." Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University. Greenberg, David F. (1977). "Deterrence Research and Social Policy." In Stuart Nagel (ed.) Modeling the Criminal Justice System. Beverly Hills: Sage. Greenberg, David F., Ronald C. Kessler, and Charles H. Logan (1979). "A Panel Model of Crime Rates and Arrest Rates." American Sociological Review 44:843-850. Marcus, Steven (1974). Engels, Manchester and the Working Class. New York: Random House. Marx, Karl (1967). Capital, vol. 1. New York: International Publishers. Originally published 1867. - - - (1970). Critique of the Gotha Programme. New York: International Publishers. Quinney, Richard (1977). Class, State and Crime: On the Theory and Practice ofCriminal Justice. New York: McKay. 1Yler, Gus (1962). Organized Crime in America. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
45
1 Crime and Primitive Accumulation Karl Marx Reprinted from Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1. Edited by Frederick Engels and translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. London: Swan Sonnenschein, LoWlY and Co. The text is that 011 the 1887 English edition.
The prelude of the revolution that laid the foundation of the capitalist mode of production, was played in the last third of the 15th, and the first decade of the 16th centuI)'. A mass of free proletarians was hurled on the labour-market by the breaking-up of the bands of feudal retainers, who, as Sir James Steuart well says, "eveI)'Where uselessly filled house and castle." Although the royal power, itself a product of bourgeois development, in its strife after absolute sovereignty forcibly hastened on the dissolution of these bands of retainers, it was by no means the sole cause of it. In insolent conflict with king and parliament, the great feudal lords created an incomparably larger proletariat by the forcible driving of the peasantI)' from the land, to which the latter had the same feudal right as the lord himself, and by the usurpation of the common lands. The rapid rise of the Flemish wool manufactures, and the corresponding rise in the price of wool in England, gave the direct impulse to these evictions. The old nobility had been devoured by the great feudal wars. The new nobility was the child of its time, for which money was the power of all powers. Transformation of arable land into sheep-walks was, therefore, its cI)'. Harrison, in his "Description of England, prefixed to Holinshed's Chronicles," describes how the expropriation of small peasants is ruining the countI)'. "What care our great encroachers?" The dwellings of the peasants and the cottages of the labourers were razed to the ground or doomed to decay. "If," says HarrisOI., "the old records of euerie manour be sought ... it will soon appear that in some manour seventeene, eighteene, or twentie houses are shrunk ... that England was neuer less furnished with people than at the present ... Of cities and townes either utterly decaied or more than a quarter or half diminished, though some one be a little increased here or there; of townes pulled downe for sheepe-walks, and no more but the lordships now standing
46
Karl Marx
in them ... I could saie somewhat." The complaints of these old chroniclers are always exaggerated, but they reflect faithfully the impression made on contemporaries by the revolution in the conditions of production .... Legislation was terrified at this revolution. It did not yet stand on that height of civilisation where the "wealth of the nation" (i.e., the formation of capital, and the reckless exploitation and impoverishing of the mass of the peopre) figure as the ultima Thule of all state-craft .... [Marx goes on to describe Acts of Henry VII and Henry VIII that attempted to limit land enclosures and preseIVe the free peasantry. According to a passage Marx quotes from one of Bacon's essays, free peasants were thought to make the best foot soldiers, and it was feared that their destruction would weaken the kingdom militarily. Sporadic attempts to enforce this legislation were largely ineffective.] "The device of King Henry VII.," says Bacon, in his "Essays, Civil and Moral," Essay 29, "was profound and admirable, in making farms and houses of husbandry of a standardi that is, maintained with such a proportion of land unto them as may breed a subject to live in convenient plenty, and no servile condition, and to keep the plough in the hands of the owners and not mere hirelings." What the capitalist system demanded was, on the other hand, a degraded and almost servile condition of the mass of the people, the transformation of them into mercenaries, and of their means of labour into capital .... The process of forcible expropriation of the people received in the 16th century a new and frightful impulse from the Reformation, and from the consequent colossal spoliation of the church property. The Catholic church was, at the time of the Reformation, feudal proprietor of a great part of the English land. The suppression of the monasteries, &.c., hurled their inmates into the proletariat. The estates of the church were to a large extent given away to rapacious royal favourites, or sold at a nominal price to speculating farmers and citizens, who drove out, en masse, the hereditary sub-tenants and threw their holdings into one. The legally guaranteed property of the poorer folk in a part of the church's tithes was tacitly confiscated.... Even in the last decade of the 17th century, the yeomanry, the class of independent peasants, were more numerous than the class of farmers .... About 1750, the yeomanry had disappeared, and so had, in the last decade of the 18th century, the last trace of the common land of the agricultural labourer. We leave on one side here the purely economic causes of the agricultural revolution. We deal only with the forcible means employed. After the restoration of the Stuarts, the landed proprietors carried, by legal means, an act of usurpation, effected everywhere on the Continent without any legal formality. They abolished the feudal tenure of land, i.e., they got rid of all its obligations to the State, "indemnified" the State by taxes on the peasantry and the rest of the mass of the people, vindicated for themselves the rights of modern private property in estates to which they had only a feudal title, and, finally, passed those laws of settlement, which mutatis mutandis, had the same effect on the English agricultural labourer,
Crime and Primitive Accumulation
47
as the edict of the Tartar Boris Godunof on the Russian peasantry. The "glorious Revolution" brought into power, along with William of Orange, the landlord and capitalist appropriators of surplus-value. They inaugurated the new era by practising on a colossal scale thefts of state lands, thefts that had been hitherto managed more modestly. These estates were given away, sold at a ridiculous figure, or even annexed to private estates by direct seizure. All this happened without the slightest observation of legal etiquette. The Crown lands thus fraudulently appropriated, together with the robbery of the Church estates, as far as these had not been lost again during the republican revolution, form the basis of the to-day princely domains of the English oligarchy. The bourgeois capitalists favoured the operation with the view, among others, to promoting free trade in land, to extending the domain of modem agriculture on the large farm-system, and to increasing their supply of the free agricultural proletarians ready to hand. Besides, the new landed aristocracy was the natural ally of the new bankocracy, of the newly-hatched haute finance, and of the large manufacturers, then depending on protective duties .... Communal property-always distinct from the State property just dealt with-was an old Teutonic institution which lived on under cover of feudalism. We have seen how the forcible usurpation of this, generally accompanied by the turning of arable into pasture land, begins at the end of the 15th and extends into the 16th century. But, at that time, the process was carried on by means of individual acts of violence against which legislation, for a hundred and fifty years, fought in vain. The advance made by the 18th century shows itself in this, that the law itself becomes now the instrument of the theft of the people's land, although the large farmers make use of their little independent methods as well. The parliamentary form of the robbery is that of Acts for enclosures of Commons, in other words, decrees by which the landlords grant themselves the people's land as private property, decrees of expropriation of the people .... The spoliation of the church's property, the fraudulent alienation of the State domains, the robbery of the common lands, the usurpation of feudal and clan property, and its transformation into modern private property under circumstances of reckless terrorism, were just so many idyllic methods of primitive accumulation. They conquered the field for capitalistic agriculture, made the soil part and parcel of capital, and created for the town industries the necessary supply of a "free" and outlawed proletariat. The proletariat created by the breaking up of the bands of feudal retainers and by the forcible expropriation of the people from the soil, this "free" proletariat could not possibly be absorbed by the nascent manufactures as fast as it was thrown upon the world. On the other hand, these men, suddenly dragged from their wonted mode of life, could not as suddenly adapt themselves to the discipline of their new condition. They were turned en masse into beggars, robbers, vagabonds, partly from inclination, in most cases from stress of circumstances. Hence at the end of the 15th and during the whole of the 16th century, throughout Western Europe a bloody legisla-
48
Friedrich Engels
tion against vagabondage. The fathers of the present working-class were chastised for their enforced transformation into vagabonds and paupers. Legislation treated them as "voluntary" criminals, and assumed that it depended on their own good will to go on working under the old conditions that no longer existed.
2 The Demoralization of the English Working Class Friedrich Engels Reprinted from Frederick Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, translated and edited by W. O. Henderson and W. H. Chaloner. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958, pp. 130, 145-46, 149, 242-43 .
. . . Immorality is fostered in every possible way by the conditions of working class life. The worker is poor; life has nothing to offer him; he is deprived of virtually all pleasures. Consequently he does not fear the penalties of the law. Why should he restrain his wicked impulses? Why should he leave the rich man in undisturbed possession of his property? Why should he not take at least a part of this property for himself? What reason has the worker for not stealing? .. . . . Distress due to poverty gives the worker only the choice of starving slowly, killing himself quickly or taking what he needs where he finds it-in plain English-stealing. And it is not surprising that the majority prefer to steal rather than to starve to death or commit suicide . . . . The clearest indication of the unbounded contempt of the workers for the existing social order is the wholesale manner in which they break its laws. If the demoralisation of the worker passes beyond a certain point then it is just as natural that he will turn into a criminal-as inevitably as water turns into steam at boiling point. Owing to the brutal and demoralising way in which he is treated by the bourgeoisie, the worker loses all will of his own and, like water, he is forced to follow blindly the laws of nature. There comes a point when the worker loses all power [to withstand temptation].
Demoralization of English Working Class
49
Consequently the incidence of crime has increased with the growth of the working-class population and there is more crime in Britain than in any other country in the world. The annual statistics of crime issued by the Home Office show that there has been an extraordinarily rapid growth of crime. The number of those committed for trial on criminal charges in England and Wales alone has increased sevenfold in thirty-seven years .... . . . There can be no doubt that in England the social war is already being waged. Everyone looks after his own interests and fights only for himself against all comers. Whether in doing so he injures those who are his declared enemies is simply a matter of selfish calculation as to whether such action would be to his advantage or not. It no longer occurs to anybody to come to a friendly understanding with his neighbours. All differences of opinion are settled by threats, by invoking the courts, or even by taking the law into one's own hands. In short, everyone sees in his neighbour a rival to be elbowed aside, or at best a victim to be exploited for his own ends. The criminal statistics prove that this social war is being waged more vigorously, more passionately and with greater bitterness every year. Social strife is gradually developing into combat between two great opposing camps-the middle classes and the proletariat. No one need be surprised at the existence either of the social war of all against all or of the struggle between the workers and the bourgeoisie. These conflicts are no more than the logical consequence of the fundamental principle upon which free competition is based. It is, however, somewhat surprising that the bourgeoisie should remain so complacent and placid in the face of the thunderclouds which are gathering overhead and grow daily more threatening. How can the middle classes read about these things in the newspapers every day without showing some anxiety as to the consequences? Do they not see that the individual crimes of which they read will one day culminate in universal revolution? . .. Acts of violence committed by the working classes against the bourgeoisie and their henchmen are merely frank and undisguised retaliation for the thefts and treacheries perpetrated by the middle classes against the workers. Since its beginning in the early days of the Industrial Revolution the revolt of the workers against the middle clas.ses has passed through several phases. I do not propose to examine here the historical significance of these phases in the history of the English people. This must be reserved for a later study. For the time being I propose to confine myself to a brief survey of the principal facts concerning the hostility of the workers to the middle classes in order to show what effect this has had upon the development of the English proletariat. Criminal activities were the first, the crudest and the least successful manifestation of this hostility. The worker lived in poverty and want, and saw that other people were better off than he was. The worker was not sufficiently intelligent to appreciate why he" of all people, should be the one to suffer-for after all he contributed more Ito society than the idle rich, and
50
Friedrich Engels
sheer necessity drove him to steal in spite of his traditional respect for private property. We have already pointed out how crime has increased as industry has expanded. It has been shown that there has been a constant relationship between the number of arrests and the annual consumption of bales of cotton. The workers, however, soon realised that crime did not forward their cause. The criminals, by their thefts, could protest against the existing social order only as individuals. All the mighty forces of society were hurled against the individual law-breaker and crushed him with their overwhelming power. In addition theft was the blindest and most stupid form of protest and consequently this never became the universal expression of the workers' reaction to industrialisation, although many workers doubtless sympathised privately with those who broke the law. The first organised resistance of the workers, as a class, to the bourgeoisie, was the violence associated with the movements against the introduction of machinery. This occurred in the earliest stage of the Industrial Revolution. Even the earlier inventors of new machines, such as Arkwright, were attacked in this way and their machines destroyed. Subsequently there were many instances of machine breaking. These generally followed the same course as the printers' riots in Bohemia in 1844, when both workshops and machines were destroyed. This type of protest was also far from universal. It was limited to certain localities and was confined to resistance to one aspect of industrial change. If the immediate object of the machine breakers was attained, then the defenceless law breakers had to face the full fury of the established order. The criminals were severely punished and the introduction of the new machinery went on unchecked. It was clearly necessary for the workers to find a new method of expressing their discontent.
51
3 Crime in Communist Society Friedrich Engels From Frederick Engels, "Speech in Elberfeld," Feb. 8, 1845. Reprinted by permission from Karl Marx. Frederick Engels Collected Works, vol. 4, pp. 248-49. Moscow: Progress Publishers, and London: Lawrence and Wishert, 1975.
Present-day society, which breeds hostility between the individual man and everyone else, thus produces a social war ot all against all which inevitably in individual cases, notably among uneducated people, assumes a brutal, barbarously violent form-that of crime. In order to protect itself against crime, against direct acts of violence, society requires an extensive, complicated system of administrative and judicial bodies which requires an immense labour force. In communist society this would likewise be vastly simplified, and precisely because-strange though it may sound-precisely because the administrative body in this society would have to manage not merely individual aspects of social life, but the whole of social life, in all its various activities, in all its aspects. We eliminate the contradiction between the individual man and all others, we counterpose social peace to social war, we put the axe to the root of crime-and thereby render the greatest, by far the greatest, part of the present activity of the administrative and judicial bodies superfluous. Even now crimes of passion are becoming fewer and fewer in comparison with calculated crimes, crimes of interest-crimes against persons are declining, crimes against property are on the increase. Advancing civilisation moderates violent outbreaks of passion even in our present-day society, which is on a war footing; how much more will this be the case in communist, peaceful society! Crimes against property cease of their own accord where everyone receives what he needs to satisfY his natural and his spiritual urges, where social gradations and distinctions cease to exist. Justice concerned with criminal cases ceases of itself, that dealing with civil cases, which are almost all rooted in the property relations or at least in such relations as arise from the situation of social war, likewise disappears; conflicts can then be only rare exceptions, whereas they are now the natural result of general hostility, and will be easily settled by arbitrators. The activities of the administrative bodies at present have likewise their source in the continual social warthe police and the entire administration do nothing else but see to it that
Karl Marx
52
the war remains concealed and indirect and does not erupt into open violence, into crimes. But if it is infinitely easier to maintain peace than to keep war within certain limits, so it is vastly more easy to administer a communist community rather than a competitive one. And if civilisation has already taught men to seek their interest in the maintenance of public order, public security, and the public interest, and therefore to make the police, administration and justice as superfluous as possible, how much more will this be the case in a society in which community of interests has become the basic principle, and in which the public interest is no longer distinct from that of each individual! What already exists now, in spite of the social organisation, how much more will it exist when it is no longer hindered, but supported by the social institutions!
4 The Usefulness of Crime Karl Marx From Karl Marx. "Theories o[Surplus Value," vol. 1. Reprinted by pennission from Thomas B. Bottomore and Maximilien Rubel (eds.). Karl Marx, Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy (New York: McGraw-Hill. 1964. pp. 158-601.
A philosopher produces ideas, a poet verse, a parson sermons, a professor text-books, etc. A criminal produces crime. But if the relationship between this latter branch of production and the whole productive activity of society is examined a little more closely one is forced to abandon a number of prejudices. The criminal produces not only crime but also the criminal law; he produces the professor who delivers lectures on this criminal law, and even the inevitable text-book in which the professor presents his lectures as a commodity for sale in the market. There results an increase in material wealth, quite apart from the pleasure which ... the author himself derives from the manuscript of this text-book. Further, the criminal produces the whole apparatus of the police and criminal justice, detectives, judges, executioners, juries, etc., and all these different professions, which constitute so many categories of the social divi-
Usefulness of Crime
53
sion of labour, develop diverse abilities of the human spirit, create new needs and new ways of satistying them. Torture itself has provided o-;casions for the most ingenious mechanical inventions, employing a host of honest workers in the production of these instruments. The criminal produces an impression now moraL now tragic, and renders a "seIVice" by arousing the moral and aesthetic sentiments of the public. He produces not only text-books on criminal law, the criminal law itself, and thus legislators, but also art, literature, novels and the tragic drama, as CEdipus and Richard /II, as well as Mullner's Schuld and Schiller's Rauber, testifY. The criminal interrupts the monotony and security of bourgeois life. Thus he protects it from stagnation and brings forth that restless tension, that mobility of spirit without which the stimulus of competition would itself become blunted. He therefore gives a new impulse to the productive forces. Crime takes off the labour market a portion of the excess population, diminishes competition among workers, and to a certain extent stops wages from falling below the minimum, while the war against crime absorbs another part of the same population. The criminal therefore appears as one of those natural "equilibrating forces" which establish a just balance and open up a whole perspective of "useful" occupations. The influence of the criminal upon the development of the productive forces can be shown in detail. Would the locksmith's trade have attained its present perfection if there had been no thieves? Would the manufacture of banknotes have arrived at its present excellence if there had been no counterfeiters? Would the microscope have entered ordinary commercial life (cf. Babbage) had there been no forgers? Is not the development of applied chemistry as much due to the adulteration of wares, and to the attempts to discover it, as to honest productive effort? Crime, by its ceaseless development of new means of attacking property calls into existence new measures of defence, and its productive effects are as great as those of strikes in stimulating the invention of machines. Leaving the sphere of private crime, would there be a world market, would nations themselves exist, if there had not been national crimes? Is not the tree of evil also the tree of knowledge, since the time of Adam? In his Fable of the Bees (1708) Mandeville already demonstrated the productivity of all the English occupations, and anticipated our argument. "What we call Evil in this World, Moral as well as Natural, is the grand Principle that makes us sociable Creatures, the solid Basis, the Life and Support of all Trades and Employments without Exception: That there we must look for the true Original of all Arts and Sciences, and that the Moment Evil ceases, the Society must be spoiled if not totally dissolved." Mandeville simply had the merit of being infinitely more audacious and more honest than these narrow-minded apologists for bourgeois society.
54
5 The Labeling of Crime Karl Marx Reprinted from Karl Marx, "Population, Crime and Pauperism," New York Daily Tribune, Sept. 16, 1859.
There must be something rotten in the very core of a social system which increases its wealth without diminishing its misery, and increases in crimes even more rapidly than in numbers. It is true enough that, if we compare the year 1855 with the preceding years, there seems to have occurred a sensible decrease of crime from 1855 to 1858. The total number of people committed for trial, which in 1854 amounted to 29,359, had sunk down to 17,855 in 1858; and the number of convicted had also greatly fallen off, if not quite in the same ratio. This apparent decrease of crime, however, since 1854, is to be exclusively attributed to some technical changes in British jurisdiction; to the Juvenile Offenders' Act in the first instance, and, in the second instance, to the operation of the Criminal Justice Act of 1855, which authorises the Police Magistrates to pass sentences for short periods, with the consent of the prisoners. Violations of the law are generally the offspring of economical agencies beyond the control of the legislator, but, as the working of the Juvenile Offenders' Act testifies, it depends to some degree on official society to stamp certain violations of its rules as crimes or as transgressions only. This difference of nomenclature, so far from being indifferent, decides on the fate of thousands of men, and the moral tone of society. Law itself may not only punish crime, but improvise it, and the law of professionalla"yers is very apt to work in this direction. Thus, it has been justly remarked by an eminent historian, that the Catholic clergy of the medieval times, with its dark views of human nature, introduced by its influence into criminal legislation, has created more crimes than forgiven sins.
55
6 On Capital Punishment Karl Marx From Karl Marx, "Capital Punishment." New York Daily Tribune, Feb. 18, 1853. Reprinted by permission from Thomas B. Bottomore and Maximilien Rubel leds.l, Karl Marx, Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy INew York: McGraw-Hill, 1964, pp.228-301 .
. . . It would be very difficult, if not altogether impossible, to establish any principle upon which the justice or expediency of capital punishment could be founded, in a Society, glorying in its civilization. Punishment in general had been defended as a means either of ameliorating or of intimidating. Now what right have you to punish me for the amelioration or intimidation of others? And besides, there is history-there is such a thing as statistics-which prove with the most complete evidence that since Cain the world has neither been intimidated nor ameliorated by punishment. Qui te the contrary. From the point of view of abstract right, there is only one theory of punishment which recognizes human dignity in the abstract, and that is the theory of Kant, especially in the more rigid formula given to it by Hegel. Hegel says: "Punishment is the right of the criminal. It is an act of his own will. The violation of right has been proclaimed by the criminal as his own right. His crime is the negation of right. Punishment is the negation of this negation, and consequently an affirmation of right, solicited and forced upon the criminal by himself." There is no doubt something specious in this formula, inasmuch as Hegel, instead of looking upon the criminal as the mere object, the slave of justice, elevates him to the position of a free and self-determined being. Looking, however, more closely into the matter, we discover that German idealism here, as in most other instances, has but given a transcendental sanction to the rules of existing society. Is it not a delusion to substitute for the individual with his real motives, with multifarious social circumstances pressing upon him, the abstraction of "free-will"-one among the many qualities of man for man himself? This theory, considering punishment as the msult of the criminal's own will, is only a metaphysical expression for the old "jus talionis," eye against eye, tooth against tooth, blood against blood. Plainly speaking, and dispensing with all paraphrases, punishment is nothing but a means of society to defend itself against the infraction of its
Karl Marx
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vital conditions, whatever may be their character. Now, what a state of society is that which knows of no better instrument for its own defence than the hangman, and which proclaims through the "leading journal of the world" its own brutality as eternal law? Mr. A. Quetelet, in his excellent and learned work, l'Homme et ses Facultes, says: "There is a budget which we pay with frightful regularity-it is that of prisons, dungeons and scaffolds .... We might even predict how many individuals will stain their hands with the blood of their fellow-men how many will be forgers, how many will deal in poison, pretty nearly the same way as we may foretell the annual births and deaths." And Mr. Quetelet, in a calculation of the probabilities of crime published in 1829, actually predicted with astonishing certainty, not only the amount but all the different kinds of crimes committed in France in 1830. That it is not so much the particular political institutions of a country as the fundamental conditions of modern bourgeois society in general, which produce an average amount of crime in a given national fraction of society, may be seen from the following tables, communicated by Quetelet, for the years 1822 - 24. We find in a number of one hundred condemned criminals in America and France: Age
Under twenty-one years Twenty-one to thirty Thirty to forty Above forty
Philadelphia
France
19
19
44 23
35 23 23 100
14 100
Now, if crimes observed on a great scale thus show, in their amount and their classification, the regularity of physical phenomena-if, as Mr. Quetelet remarks, "it would be difficult to decide in respect to which of the two (the physical world and the social system) the acting causes produce their effect with the utmost regularity"-is there not a necessity for deeply reflecting upon an alteration of the system that breeds these crimes, instead of glorifYing the hangman who executes a lot of criminals to make room only for the supply of new ones?
Part 2 The Causes of Crime
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Part 2
Part 2
By the mid to late 1960s, some non-Marxist criminologists had virtually stopped looking for causes of crime and had turned instead to studying social The Causes of responses to it. They did so not merely to correct an Crime imbalance, to study the police and the courts because so much less was known about them than about thieves, addicts, and prostitutes. Rather, the shift represented fundamental theoretical commitments. Austin Turk (1964) assured us that the search for causes of crime was futile: what distinguished criminals from noncriminals was not their personal attributes but their lack of political power, which left them vulnerable to law enforcement agencies. The British criminologist Dennis Chapman (1968) similarly suggested that traditional criminological work, which was based on the assumption that there were class differences between criminals and noncriminals, reflected stereotypes created by class differences in immunity from law enforcement. Further, deviance theorists argued that crime had no systematic social causes but was largely a consequence of labeling an individual or group as deviant. David Matza (1964) maintained that there was no persuasive evidence that delinquents, for instance, were more likely to come from one part of the social structure than another, and he therefore criticized traditional criminological conceptions of causality. Of course, one could have accepted the claim that criminality is widely distributed in the class structure (with heavy upper-class involvement in white-collar crime) and still tried to establish causal explanations of criminality. One could do this by looking for causes unrelated to class (e.g., in biology), for an explanation of class differences in kinds of crime committed, or by considering the effect of social systems in their entirety on patterns of crime. This latter approach, which suggests comparisons between societies rather than between classes within a given society, even had some precedent in Durkheim's study of suicide. But this was not the direction that criminology took. Instead, the notion of causality itself was thrown into question. The British psychologist R. D. Laing and his associates exercised great influence over radical sociologists in the 1960s. They pointed out that human action could be explained in two quite different ways. One way looked at behavior physiologically, in terms of movements of muscle and bone, amino acids, and so on. Such a treatment conceives ofthe human body as a set of chemical and mechanical processes. The other way looked at behavior as purposeful. From this point of view, an action, say walking, is explained not as a set of muscle contractions and bone movements but as
The Causes of Crime
59
a way of executing some purpose. Thus,. if someone asks me why I am walking into my kitchen, I say that I am hungry and want to get something to eat. This second point of view is more recognizably human than the first, since people have purposes and mechanical objects do not. Although these two modes of explanation are not necessarily incompatible, they were often treated as such. Under the influence not only of Laing but also of European phenomenologists, many sociologists argued for research to discover the meaning of action to the actors as a substitute for older positivistic styles of research, which tended to ignore those meanings in the search for objective antecedents of criminality. The early radical criminologists found this repudiation of traditional causal analysis quite appealing (Quinney, 1970; AFSC Working Party, 1971; Taylor, Walton, and Young, 1973). Much of the eXlisting literature on the causes of crime was patently insulting to criminals and often seemed to embody politically conseIVative assumptions. For example, some researchers suggested that the black ghetto uprisings of the 1960s were caused by brain pathologies among blacks. Much of the literature on female crime was based on sexist stereotypes (e.g., that women are inherently more deceitful than men, or that their criminality is a reflection of pathologically masculine tendencies). Some of the research had been undertaken to provide police, judges, wardens, and parole boards with the information needed to repress crime. In reaction, radical criminologists celebrated the authenticity of crime and stressed its meaningfulness, its rationality, and its quasi-political character as a response to social constraint or oppression (Cohen and Taylor, 1975). Yet the refusal to address the question of causes left radicals ill equipped to participate in the political debates that arose over the increase in common forms of crime that took place in the 1960s (Young, 1975). Since the radicals had no way of accounting for the increase, they tended to deny that there had been any (referring glibly to the poor quality of crime statistics), and thus they had little to say to residents of neighborhoods being overrun by junkies and teenage gangs or burned down by paid arsonists. And though radicals could engage in muckraking in connection with crimes committed by corporations or government officials, they could not explain these either, except as the doings of wicked people. It became apparent that the denial of causality was quite unsatisfactory. It may be that notions of causality are so deeply embedded in our culture that they cannot be entirely eradicated in explaining events. Thus, Taylor, Walton, and Young (1973) did not speak about the "causes" of crime but about its "origins," really a synonym for causes, provided "cause" is not interpreted too mechanically. Dissatisfaction with sweeping the question of causality under the rug was heightened as it became apparent that denying the structural sources of deviance had extremely conseIVative ramifications. If, as the more extreme labeling theorists argued, crime is produced largely by overreaction to basically innocent
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Part 2
activities, then the solution is to do less. There need be no alteration in the patterns of property ownership or income distribution, for example, because these have nothing to do with crime causation. Instead, we must stop the police from arresting mischievous children and turning them into career criminals by changing their self-concepts, stigmatizing them, and so on. Implicit in this line of thinking is the assumption that the deviant actor has no commitment to continue deviation, that the violation is casual and will probably not be repeated if it is ignored. Although there may be some forms of noncriminal deviance for which that position is valid (e.g., stuttering)' there seem to be some obvious exceptions. Many homosexuals were involved in illegal homosexual activities on a continuing basis even though they had never been publicly identified as homosexual. Political radicals and revolutionaries seemed to have a commitment to their actions that did not originate with repressive or therapeutic labeling on the part of authorities (Mankoff, 1971; Walton, 1973; Taylor, Walton, and Young, 1973; Manders, 1975). Thus, the extreme labeling position was too inconsistent with empirical information about crime to gain long-run acceptance, and too conservative politically to appeal to radicals on an ideological basis. Early in the 1970s, some radicals began to address the causes of crime again. David Gordon (1971), a Marxist economist, traced much crime to the basic structure ofthe American economy. Taylor, Walton, and Young (1973) called for the analysis of causation as part of a fully social (rather than individual) theory of deviance, though without undertaking that analysis themselves.
MARXISM AND THE CAUSES OF CRIME
Steven Spitzer (1975) took a major step toward overcoming the radicals' reluctance to deal with the causes of crime by outlining a Marxian approach to the social production of deviance. He posited an intimate link between socially produced deviance and the contradictions of a social formation. Spitzer argued that populations are treated as deviant in a capitalist society when in one way or another they disrupt capitalist social relations, and he explicitly identified two sources of these "problem popUlations." The economy is one of these sources. Drawing on Marx's treatment of the development of a capitalist economy, Spitzer argued that capitalism creates a "relative sUIplus population" that is not needed for production and is consequently excluded from remunerative employment. Even though unemployment benefits employers by keeping wages down, it also generates a number of problems for them. Crime may be one. The second source of problem populations is contradictions in the superstructural institutions created to secure class rule. The school is a familiar example. Mass education was introduced to the United States to
The Causes of Crime
61
meet the needs of corporate capitalism. Yet the intellectual skills it imparts may enable students to develop critical perspectives on capitalism. Weak students may become disaffected not only from the school, but from the larger society as well. Although Spitzer's essay concerned deviance, not crime, the two concepts overlap, and much of his reasoning can be applied to crime causation. In fact, since his essay was published, much Marxist theorizing about crime causation has appeared, most of it conforming to the paradigm that Spitzer established. Before turning to readings that pursue this logic, however, we must first examine what it might mean to call a causal explanation of crime Marxist. The absence of an explicit theory of crime in the writings of Marx and Engels forces us to develop one of our own. We are challenged to develop an explanation that is consistent with existing Marxist theory, or stems from its theoretical traditions, but goes beyond it to offer an account of crime patterns that is consistent with the relevant empirical evidence. Criminologists have been grappling with this challenge in a variety of ways, many sharing a logic in which Marxism provides an account of the existence or certain social conditions and criminology offers an explanation of why these conditions cause crime. 1 It is not obvious at the outset that an effort of this sort will prove fruitful. If one wanted to develop a Marxist explanation of sneezing, the effort might falter because Marxism might not have anything to say about the conditions that cause people to sneeze (allergies, rhinovirus infections). On the other hand, Marxism might help explain conditions that cause cancer (industrial pollution, an unhealthy diet) or heart attacks (stress) .2 Marxist analyses of crime causation begin with the working hypothesis that Marxism can contribute to an understanding of the social conditions responsible for crime. These analyses differ in the kinds of crime patterns they try to explain, the social conditions on which they focus, and the specific Marxist explanations they offer for these conditions. Crime and economic conditions
Within the past few years, several criminologists have tried to pursue this program by using Marxist economics to explain the existence of economic conditions they believe to be criminogenic (Iadicola, 1983; Lynch, 1988). This approach is attractive because Marxist economics is the most formally developed part of Marxist theory; some versions make predictions about economic trends that can be tested empirically. Marxist economics is founded on the proposition that in a competitive, market economy, the sale and purchase of commodities at a price is possible because they have something in common, value. This is the average amount of socially necessary labor required to produce the commodity.
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In capitalist production, profits originate in the appropriation of surplus value. After workers are paid for their labor and after raw materials and equipment used up in production have been paid for, what remains is surplus value. Though created by the "living labor" of the workers (it is they who make the goods, not the capitalist owners), surplus value is taken as profits by the owners of capital.3 With this and several additional assumptions, Marx was able to develop models of the business cycle that purport to explain the sequence of "boom and bust" in capitalist economies. He noted that in a competitive economy, private owners of capital do not coordinate their investment decisions. Under these circumstances it is easy for sectoral imbalances, characterized by excessive investment in one sector of the economy and insufficient investment in another, to develop. Also, when the economy is expanding, unemployment may decline, permitting the workers to command higher wages. To protect profits, employers may respond to increased wages by substituting labor-saving machinery, thereby throwing some of their employees out of work. With less money to spend, unemployed workers will buy fewer goods. The resulting lower level of demand will lead owners to cut back production further, bringing about a recession or depression. In addition, Marx suggested that in the aggregate, workers may be paid too little to buy back all the consumption goods they produce; if so, a "realization" crisis, stemming from capitalists' inability to sell all the goods they produce, wIll occur. Marx also made predictions about the long-term tendencies of capitalist economies. He predicted that the concentration of capital would grow with time, so that the economy would increasingly be dominated by monopolies and oligopolies. Though wages might rise temporarily, they would be brought down again by competition from the "reserve army" of the unemployed. This army is itself a product of capitalism, for it results from the replacement of workers by new capital-intensive technology introduced by capitalists who must spend less on wages to meet the competition. With wages held down by competition, Marx expected the share of labor in value produced to decline with time. In relative terms, if not absolutely, poverty would grow. With surplus value originating in the labor of employees, a rise in the organic composition of capital (ratio of capital expenditures to wages) should lead to a long-term decline in the rate of profit. Marx noted that other developments (such as a reduction in the cost of capital goods or an intensification in the exploitation of workers) could for a time compensate for this decline, but thought that in the long run, the tendential decline would prevail. Since capitalists invest to reap profits, this decline would ultimately choke the capitalist system. Clearly there is much here that could be utilized in developing a theory of crime causation. If one thought that frustration stemming from
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unemployment induced people to commit assaultive crimes, Marxism has an explanation for unemployment. If one believed that businesses threatened by declining profits are more likely than other firms to commit "white-collar crimes," Marxism explains why profits decline. This explanatory strategy makes sense, obviously, only if one thinks that economic factors actually play an important role in crime causation. Until the 1960s this importance was widely taken for granted. Criminologists regarded poverty and social disorganization (often in neighborhoods of immigrants) as contributing to high rates of crime and delinquency. Yet in the late 1960s and 1970s the importance of poverty became controversial. Though economists who began to depict crime as a rational choice on the part of utility-maximizing individuals continued to consider economic motivations important, other social scientists concerned with crime began to question their significance. Official crime statistics demonstrate seemingly clear-cut relations between economic status and crime. A high percentage of those arrested were unemployed at the time of arrest or were employed irregularly at jobs with low pay. Left-liberal criminologists of the 19605 dismissed these figures, along with statistics showing that blacks and Hispanics are arrested more often than whites, as the product of discriminatory police practices. And they criticized criminological theories linking lower-class personal backgrounds with delinquency as marred by a conservative, anti-workingclass bias. The kernel of truth in the skeptical position is that a great deal of crime, including illegal acquisition and drug use, is committed by individuals of the middle and upper classes. The sheer magnitude of this crime is staggering. According to an estimate prepared for the U.s. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly, the annual cost to the American public from corporate crime in the early 1970s was in the vicinity of $200 billion (Coleman, 1989:6). But for specific kinds of offenses, such as robbery, there can be no doubt !that the poor and minorities are overrepresented. Statistical comparisons of crime rates in different jurisdictions, or in single jurisdictions in different years, are less clear-cut. Some find higher rates of crime where unemployment rates are high, others do not. 5 However, as Elliot Currie (1985:103-41) emphasizes in a very fine overview of these issues, methodological weaknesses render these studies inconclusive. Unemployment figures are only imperfectly related to joblessness. People who have never entered :the labor market, or who have become so discouraged that they have stopped looking for jobs, are not counted as unemployed in the official statistics. Some of those who lose jobs-for example, middle-income or affluent professionals and business executives-have savings on which to fall back and good prospects for future employment, making their unemployment largely irrelevant as far as crime is concerned.
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Though liberal reformers sometimes suggest otherwise, employment in itself may not necessarily do much to prevent crime. Many jobs are not attractive alternatives to lucrative crime because they pay little for unpleasant and unrewarding work or offer only irregular employment with no prospects for advancement. Individuals who hold these jobs may supplement their incomes by stealing from their employers or others, or may use their jobs as covers for illegal activity. With the flight of manufacturing from northern cities to the South, and from the United States to Third World countries where labor costs are low, many of the newly created jobs in the American economy are of this kind (Wilson, 1987).6 In an especially careful study of the relationship between employment and crime, Emilie Allan and Darrell Steffensmeier (1989) found that property-crime rates for the period 1977-80 were higher in those states where employees tended to receive low wages and had to work part-time because they could not find full-time employment. The criminological implications of the trends Wilson notes are ominous: the American economy is evolving in a direction that will increase property-crime rates. Inequality is another dimension of economic conditions. Conservative social critics of the past decade have argued that the egalitarian social reforms of the 1960s have undermined the family, destroyed incentives to work, and brought about higher crime rates. Yet there is much evidence that runs counter to the conservative argument. Other factors being equal, crime rates in American cities are higher where inequality is higher, not lower (Blau and Blau, 1982; Devine, Sheley, and Smith, 1988; Neuman and Berger, 1988; Harer and Steffensmeier, 1989). The same is true in Great Britain, where crime rates grew by 50 percent during the Thatcher years of inegalitarian reforms and a "law and order" campaign (Sampson and Castellano, 1982; Taylor, 1988). International comparisons do not support the conservative position either. The bulk of the evidence indicates that crime rates are lower where unemployment and social inequality are low and where welfare supports are high (Krohn, 1976; Braithwaite, 1978; Braithwaite and Braithwaite, 1980; Messner, 1980; Currie, 1985:143-79; Kick and LaFree, 1985; Avison and Loring, 1986; Krahn, Hartnagel, and Gartrell, 1986; Neuman and Berger, 1988; Land, McCall, and Cohen, 1990). Among the industrial nations, the United States stands out as having high unemployment, high inequality, and low levels of welfare support. As a percentage of wages and salaries, government transfer payments in 1977-79 were 18.7 percent in the United States, 33.7 percent in Sweden, and 53.5 percent in the Netherlands (Heidenheimer, Heclo, and Adams, 1983:204). The corresponding homicide rates per 100,000 population in 1971 (the most recent year for which I was able to find them) were 8.50 in the United States, 2.70 in Sweden, and 0.61 in the Netherlands (Archer and Gartner, 1984). It is obvious from these figures that there are major differences among capitalist nations in the way income is distributed. These differences
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appear to produce corresponding differences in crime rates. Currie suggests an explanation for these differences in income distribution patterns: the United States has a far greater commitment to free-market economic policies than the European nations. Another has to do with class politics: "Generally egalitarian redistribution is stronger in nations with a powerful working-class political presence and weaker where this presence is lacking" (Heidenheimer, Heclo, and Adams, 1983:226-27; see also Esping-Anderson, 1985). In light of this analysis, recent trends in the distribution of income in the United States are worrisome. A study conducted for the House Ways and Means Committee and released in March 1989, found that between 1979 and 1987, private income for the bottom fifth of all American families dropped by 8 percent, while government benefits declined by 9 percent. For the top fifth of all families, on the other hand, private income rose by 16 percent, with no change in government benefits. During the same period, the amount of taxes paid by the bottom fifth did not change, while for the top fifth it rose by just 3 percent. Conservative political analyst Kevin Philips (1990) has noted that in 1980, corporate chief executive officers earned forty times as much as the average factory worker; by 1989, they earned ninety-three times as much. In a paper not reprinted here, Michael Lynch (1988) has used the predictions of Marxist economics to explain trends in American property-crime rates between 1950 and 1974 in terms of the rate of surplus value extracted in the manufacturing sector. The rate of surplus value, sometimes called the rate of e~ploitation, is the ratio of the surplus value extracted in producing an item to the wages paid. Lynch reasons that increased exploitation occurs at the expense of workers. When exploitation is sufficiently intense, workers are pushed into a "marginal" status. This could mean unemployment, but could also mean irregular, poorly paid employment. Marginalized workers have greater financial needs than nonmarginalized workers, and therefore have a greater incentive to commit property crime. Many have little to lose from an arrest or conviction. The conditions of life for marginalized workers discourage postponement of shortterm gratification to achieve long-term goals. This is so because marginalized workers are pulled in and pushed out of the labor market by developments in the economy over which they have very little control. Forced to piece together a living income from whatever sources are available-lawful employment, theft, drug sales, prostitution-they have little incentive to invest in strategies (such as education) to improve their "human capital" that may not payoff untiil years later (if ever). That the bottom ranks of the job "ladder" may provide insufficient rewards to prevent workers from turning to crime is not a new insight. The mid-nineteenth-century British ethnographer Henry Mayhew observed that "where the means of subsistence occasionally rise to ISs. per week and occasionally sink to nothing, it is absurd to look for prudence,
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economy or moderation. Regularity of habits are [sic] incompatible with irregularity of income . . . it is a moral impossibility that the class of laborers who are only occasionally employed should be either generally industrious or temperate" (quoted in Jones, 1971:263). Mayhew's insight is constantly being confirmed by those who live in poverty nowadays. When President George Bush visited a shelter for runaway youth in New York, one eighteen-year-old male, a formerresident of Harlem, told him, "I'm not working for $125 for a whole week. At McDonald's? Flippin' hamburgers? One hundred dollars a week? That ain't no money. I can make that in fifteen minutes selling drugs." When the President's wife, Barbara Bush, patronizingly pointed out that this might mean jail or death, he replied, "I don't care" (Sutton, 1989). Lynch (1988) finds empirical support for his hypothesis that the property-crime rate rises with the rate of surplus value. Even when other variables are controlled, the rate of surplus value extracted influences the property-crime rate positively. Though the influence of unemployment was also in the expected direction, it was not statistically significant. However, Lynch's work is still in its early stages. A variety of me tho do logical problems remain to be resolved before the empirical findings can be construed as providing strong support for his reasoning. Among other things, marginalization is a fuzzy concept. Statistics on the size of the marginalized population are not readily available, and Lynch does not develop any. Consequently his interpretation of the relationship between crime and surplus value, though plausible, is not yet firmly established. Work of this kind undoubtedly holds potential and merits further exploration. However, caution is essential when using Marxist economics. Since the end ofthe ninteenth century, non-Marxist economists have criticized Marx's economics. Over the past two decades, the revival of academic interest in Marx has led to a clarification of the logic of Marxist economics and has also subjected it to a new round of criticism, not just from anti-Marxists but from many Marxists and Marx-sympathizers as well. This criticism has cast grave doubts on the entire edifice of Marxist economics. Part of the problem is that Marx's predictions about tendencies in capitalist economies were based on extremely simple models. For example, his argument that exploitation occurs in production, not in exchange, assumes that pure competition prevails. In reality, competition is often imperfect. Monopolies, oligopolies, taxes, balance of payment problems, deficit spending, the money supply, and interest rates are matters that Marx either ignored totally or treated superficially. However, the problems in Marxist economics are not restricted to the simplicity of the models; after all, a simple model can always be elaborated if the basic ideas are sound. The problem is more fundamental: the foundations of Marx's analysis of economic activity are seriously flawed. This conclusion has been reached not just by economists who are hostile
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to Marxism but also by a number WhD are sympathetic (Blaug, 1982; Bowles and Gintis, 1981; King, 1982; Macy, 1988; Nell, 1981; Roemer, 1981:97-105, 118-19; Roemer 1982; Roemer 1986; Samuelson, 1982; Steedman, 1977, 1981; Valdes, 1987; Wolff, 1981). These economists have concluded that the labor theory of value, which lies at the heart of Marxist economics, is largely vacuous. There is nothing special about labor to privilege it over other factors of production as a unit for measuring other contributions to production, such as raw materials. These economists have concluded that Marx's belief that labor alone is the source of profits is not well-founded. In general, profits cannot be assigned uniquely to any single factor of production. Marx probably assigned them to labor, not because this conclusion was logically required, but for moral and propagandistic reasons. The labor theory of value suggests that profits are illegitimate, a kind of theft. The theory highlights the historical contingency of capitalist arrangements. It reminds us that it is not foreordained that the economic surplus always be appropriated by a class of owners rather than be made available to its produ eel's or used for general benefit. It points to the possibility of class conflict between owners and workers. As a strictly economic theory, though, it lacks explanatory power. Some of the conclusions Marx drew about tendencies within capitalist economies also appear to be flawed. There is no inherent tendency of the organic composition of capital to rise. Capitalists will introduce laborsaving technological innovations when the cost of labor is high, and capital-saving, labor-intensive methods when the cost of capital is high. Even when the organic composition of capital rises, rates of profit will normally not fall so long as wages do not rise. A broader challenge to Marx's work has been raised by the British Marxist historian E. P. Thompson (1978), who argues persuasively that the theoretical strategy Marx adopted in his later years was flawed. Although Marx was aware that economic developments could be influenced by class struggle and state inteIvention, the formal schemes worked out in Capital attempt to theorize the temporal development of a capitalist economy as if class struggle and state intervention were irrelevant. The attempt was valiant, but doomed to fail. Politics and ideology are too thoroughly interwoven with economic affairs for an attempt of this kind to succeed. Recent Marxist theorizing has implicitly ackowledged this by making the state and ideology integral to the theorization of crisis (Habermas, 1975; O'Connor, 1973). Textbooks in Marxist economics (e.g., E. Mandel, 1970) often point to evidence that supports Marx's conclusions. Given that the logic leading to these conclusions is faulty, the agreement is not so impressive. After all, an observed increase in the organic composition of capital or a fall in the rate of profits could have come about in ways other than those Marx suggested-for example, through investment tax credits, higher wages to workers, higher costs of raw materials, higher taxes, or the adoption of
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pollution controls that reduce the efficiency of production. Under these circumstances orthodox Marxist economics is a very shaky foundation on which to build a criminology. To bypass Marxist economics does not require that one abandon Marxism altogether. The essays included in this section draw on diverse elements in Marxist social theory to explain criminogenic social conditions, without relying on the shakier propositions of Marxist economics. Crime and the origins of capitalism
As pointed out in the Introduction, every social formation in which a state exists and criminalizes behavior has its own distinctive patterns of criminality. When the social relations of production and distribution change, so do crime patterns. One of the early chapters in their joint history is set in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when the commercialization of English agriculture led the great landlords to evict tenant farmers and enclose common lands where peasants had previously grazed livestock and raised poultry. This and other processes related to the breakup of feudalism increased vagrancy dramatically and led to the formation of a criminal subculture in London and other large cities. Thus, as peasants were marginalized-that is, made marginal to the regular economy-they turned to crime. The first three readings that follow, by Peter Linebaugh, Geoffrey Pearson, and Steven Hahn, deal with crime and capitalism at later stages in the history of capitalism. In Germany, England, and the American South, capitalist development brought with it changes in the criminal law that cut the laboring classes off from a traditional livelihood. They resisted as they could and, in so doing, sometimes ran afoul of the law. In each of these locales, activities that were eventually to become criminal were initially lawful ways of making a living. They were criminalized as part of an offensive on the part of property owners, and from that time on, the newly criminalized forms of appropriation became a form of class struggle. In Germany, laborers stole wood from the forest rather than emigrate, starve, or work in factories. Linebaugh's discussion is of interest to the history of mainstream criminology, since most ofthe criminals studied by nineteenth-century German positivists had been prosecuted for stealing wood. At the same time, Linebaugh notes, it was the debates in the Rhine Diet, a parliamentary body, that first turned Marx's attention toward the significance of economic considerations in politics. Of greater interest for us, though, is Linebaugh's account of why laws against taking wood from the forests were passed, and why peasants took the wood. Customary law guaranteed peasants a wide range of uses of the products of the forest. Fuel and food gathered in the woods helped to cushion them from hardship during famine or depression. This cushion became especially important in the second quarter of the nineteenth
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century as parcelization of land and severe famine in central Europe created what one historian of crime has called "the greatest subsistence crisis of modern times in the Western world" (Zehr, 1976:43). It was just at this time that improvements in transportation (which created a national market) and increased industrial demand for lumber sent the price of wood rapidly upward. The interests of the forest owners joined those of the state, which had its own interests in the orderly exploitation of the forests, in passing laws against the taking of wood. Linebaugh's analysis of the class basis for the resistance to this legislation is of particular interest. He argues that this resistance did not come from people who were situated entirely outside capitalist relations. Many small cultivators were given plots of land or rights in the forest as compensation for their labor in manufacturing. In the early stages of industrialization, employers sometimes preferred such arrangements because they made lower wages possible, supported workers during periods of unemployment, and increased workers' dependence on their employers. Toward the end of his article, Linebaugh refers to the "latent"and "stagnant labor reserves" and to the "relative redundant population." Marx introduced these terms (1867:621--44) in an analysis of the effect of the growth of capital on the working class. Since the expansion of employment raises the demand for labolr, it would tend to raise wages. Marx argued that capitalists respond to the possibility of rising wages by introducing machinery that displaces workers. The ratio of constant capital (machinery, raw materials) to variable capital (wages) thus tends to rise. Workers who lose their jobs in this process or who are never hired in the first place, constitute the relative redundant, or surplus, population. Marx goes on to argue that the existence of this population further depresses wages, since employed workers can be replaced by members of the "industrial reserve army" if they demand excessive wages. Marx identifies four different forms of the relative surplus population. The "floating" form consists of workers who are hired and fired according to the requirements of business. Employees who lose their jobs when a factory is relocated would be an example. This category grows in number as capitalism expands, but not in proportion to the growth of production. Where there is an absolute reduction in the numbers of workers employed, there is the "latent" form. The transformation of the agricultural population into an urban or manufacturing proletariat depends on the existence of a "latent" surplus population in the countryside-"latent" because it may only move when the alternative employment opens up. The "stagnant" form consists of very low paid and irregularly employed workers, often in decaying sectors of the economy. Unskilled day laborers are an example. This form is "self-reproducing and self-perpetuating" in part because of an extremely high birth rate but also because it recruits redundant workers from other sectors of the economy. Lastly, there are paupers. This form includes those who are unable to work (the elderly,
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the disabled, the sick, the orphaned), those who do not adapt to industrial labor discipline, and a "dangerous class" of criminals. Linebaugh locates the theft of wood and related forms of resistance to capitalist industrialization in the latent and stagnant fractions of the relative surplus population, not in the "criminal classes." Some of the other readings in this book also grapple with the question whether crime should be considered primarily in connection with a criminal class or with a part of the working class. Linebaugh's subtitle, "A Contribution to the Current Debate," and the opening remarks of his essay invite us to consider the possibility that the categories he employs to analyze the criminal involvement of different strata ofthe nineteenth-century German working class may be relevant to our times. When urban riots erupted in the 1960s, some radicals pronounced them an advanced form of militancy on the part of an especially oppressed part of the working class. Other radicals dismissed rioters as lumpen proletariat, an epithet Marx used to describe criminals and paupers in his own day. Some of the leading positions in this debate are reviewed by Wenger and Bonomo in Part 4. Linebaugh clearly rejects the mechanical dismissal of criminals as lumpen, and demonstrates through his analysis of the theft of wood in nineteenth-century Germany that much analytical power is gained through a more careful conceptualization of the different factions of the working class. The term "lump en proletariat" does little more than display scorn for the people so described. Insofar as it suggests a stratum that exists independent of capitalist social relations, it may interfere with analysis rather than advance it. Needless to say, an argument about the character of riots and crime in twentieth-century America cannot be settled by studying another country in an earlier century. However, Linebaugh's analysis suggests that it might be fruitful to examine the movement of southern blacks to northern cities, the immigration of Puerto Ricans to the U.S. mainland, and the immigration of illegal aliens to nations and the impact of these migrations on crime-in terms of the latent fraction of the relative surplus population. Cyril Robinson's essay on black crime, discussed below, implicitly adopts such a framework. Geoffrey Pearson's essay focuses on the responses of the English laboring classes to the industrial revolution. For some decades, historians have debated whether the living standards of the working class rose or fell during the industrial revolution? In part these differences revolve around technical questions. What years are chosen in studying trends? Are we talking about the working class as a whole, or some fraction of it? Should the standard of living be measured only by objective indicators for which data are available (such as variety and quality of food) or which the historian assumes are the most relevant, or may subjective responses to qualitative changes in a way of life be taken into account? As E. P. Thompson (1963) emphasizes, there can be little doubt that many
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workers experienced the changes in work and family life brought about by factory production as destructive. Lawful means of coping with this assault on traditional ways of life were very limited. Labor unions were illegal, and workers could not vote for Parliament. As a result, resistance often took illegal forms. Artisans, craftsmen, and laborers deprived of their autonomy by factory production destroyed machinery. They were joined by workers who had lost their jobs when capitalists introduced machines that made inferior goods cheaply and that could be operated by children, who were paid much less than adults. Farm laborers responded in similar ways to the modernization of agriculture by destroying labor-saving threshing machines. Crimes ofthis sort were a major dimension of class struggle. Pearson notes that historians and social scientists have tended to portray the destruction of machinery as irrational. Even some Marxists have treated it with disdain, arguing that it was backward-looking, obstructed the progress of industry, and was doomed to defeat. More recent research has forced a revision in this picture. The targets of destruction were carefully chosen. Warnings were often given in advance. Some of the smashers' proposals-such as taxing employers who introduced labor-displacing machines and using the revenues to pay for retraining and relocating displaced workers-sound surprisingly modem. Like other British radical criminologists (Taylor, Walton, and Young, 1973; Cohen and Taylor, 1975), Pearson argues that contemporary crime must be viewed as no more meaningless than crime committed two hundred years ago. To make his point, he traces "Paki-bashing" (assaults on Pakistanis in England) to economically engendered conflict between British youths and immigrant textile workers. What is not certain is how far this approach can be extended. There are probably few crimes that don't have some logic or meaning to those who commit them, but at the same time these crimes may be ineffective as means for attaining the perpetrators' goals, as well as destructive to their victims. Ultimately, we might ask, what difference does it make whether we can view crimes as rational? It does not tell us what, if anything, should be done about them. (Crimes of capitalist exploitation may be rational, but radicals would hardly condone them.) The possible contemporary relevance of this study of machine breaking is raised in Pearson's reference to the present-day ecology movement. Will "vandals" strike again at technology to save the environment? Recent civil disobedience aimed at stopping the construction of nuclear power plants forces us to take this question seriously. It is worth noting, though, that the acts Pearson describes took place at a time when other forms of working-class power did not exist. Once unions were permitted and suffrage was extended to the working class, the defense of workers' interests came to be channeled increasingly through these forms, though sabotage and other illegal activities were never totally abandoned (Taylor
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and Walton, 1971). The tactics adopted to oppose destructive technological developments are likely to be shaped by the types of struggle that are politically feasible at any given time. Until recently, it was thought that the story of how the legal creation of new property rights in land criminalized long-accepted methods of appropriating the products of nature was relevant only to English and European history in the early stages of capitalist accumulation. Steven Hahn's work shows that a similar process was at work in the American South during the nineteenth century. Though the legal form in which land was held as property in the first half of the nineteenth century was bourgeois, free from feudal-type restrictions on inheritance or transfer of land, a de facto acceptance of extensive, nonexclusive usunuct rights to unenclosed land prevailed. These customary rights permitted rich plantation owners to engage in their favorite sport, hunting, and to graze their herds on what was technically someone else's undeveloped land. They also enabled small cultivators and landless people to supplement their incomes by fishing and hunting. Though some planters demanded stricter protection for property rights, they made little headway with legislators who feared the potentially explosive consequences of restriction. As long as plantation owners had slaves to work their plantations, the owners were not terribly concerned with smallholders. After the Civil War, many freed slaves left the plantations to begin farming on unenclosed land. At this point, with their labor force threatened, plantation owners became more concerned with use rights to their land. The rise of commercial cotton farming gave them a greater incentive to bring unenclosed land into production. The new trespass and fencing laws they proposed elicited strenuous opposition from poor whites and ex-slaves-sometimes successful, but often not. These laws, even where evaded, made it harder for blacks to operate small farms and, in doing so, played a role in creating a black cottonpicking agricultural proletariat. They thus helped set the stage for the complex social processes that were later to generate high levels of black participation in crimes of theft and violence (delineated in Cyril Robinson's essay, discussed below). Organized crime
Class conflict is also a central element in Frank Pearce's analysis of organized crime. Strictly speaking, almost all crimes carried out jointly by two or more people could be accurately described as organized, since they involve a division of labor and shared expectations regarding role performance. Criminologists, though, have used the phrase "organized crime" in a narrower sense. Clinard and Quinney (1972:224), for example, define organized crime as business enterprise "organized for the purpose of making economic gain through illegal activities." They go on to note
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what they regard as its distinguishing features: hierarchical structure, monopolistic control, the threatened use of force to maintain internal discipline and discourage competition, immunity from law enforcement through corruption, and large profits resulting from specialization. In the public eye, and for many criminologists too, organized crime is virtually synonymous with "the Mafia," even though it is now widely understood that involvement in organized crime is far from exclusively Italian and that it is misleading to think of organized crime in terms of a single nationwide or international bureaucratic organization. Several scholars have investigated the historical development of the Sicilian mafia in relation to class forces, the organization of production and distribution, the character of the Sicilian state, and the position of Sicily in the international economy (Hess, 1973; Blok, 1974; Schneider and Schneider, 1976; Arlacchi, 1979). These themes have been less prominent in the literature on American organized crime. Instead, one finds discussion of the alleged roles that organized crime plays in stabilizing highly competitive sectors of the economy and in providing a route for upward social mobility to ethnic minorities that are barred by discrimination from the more remunerative lawful occupations (Bell, 1962; Ianni, 1972,. 1974).8 The entrepreneurial, income-generating activities most often mentioned in connection with organized crime are gambling, loan-sharking, prostitution, the manufacture and sale of alcohol during Prohibition and of narcotics. What distinguishes these from crimes of violence and theft is that all of them are consensual. Buyers of illegal goods and services buy willingly, even though they may be the worse off for the transaction. Although the monopoly power of the seller permits him to charge the buyer higher prices than would prevail in a competitive market, there is no complainant who requests help or protection from the police. 9 Yet organized crime is by no means restricted to the supply of illegal but desired goods and services. The infiltration of lawful business and racketeering of various kinds may involve direct coercion. Businessmen, for example, may be forced to pay for "protection" lest their businesses be burned down. The fourth essay, an excerpt from Crimes of the Powerful, by Frank Pearce, deals with the relationship between organized crime and the labor movement. In the struggles over unionization in the early 1920s and 1930s, employers made use of gangsters to smash union organizing, and at times, the unions made use of gangsters to defend themselves against these attacks. Pearce goes on to describe the change in these relations brought about by the New Deal. Laws passed during the 1930s gave workers in most sections of the economy the legal right to form unions.1° The subsequent growth of unions made it possible for organized crime to siphon off union pension funds and to form fictitious union locals in return for payments from employers.u Union members who get substandard wages or no pension benefits clearly lose from these arrangements.
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The literature on organized crime is filled with passages expressing the fear that organized crime has become so powerful as to threaten the integrity of the government itself. Pearce challenges this view, maintaining that organized crime has been tolerated when useful to the ruling class and has been repressed whenever it damaged ruling class interests. Pearce's description of the way organized crime has been deployed on behalf of American foreign policy goals is of particular interest in this connection. It certainly challenges the notion of an underworld that is isolated from and antagonistic to the "legitimate world." The relation appears far more symbioticP Pearce's evidence is valuable in forcing a rethinking of the relation between organized crime and the ruling class, but in conveying the impression that organized crime is a mere pawn of capitalist interests, his essay may oversimplify the relation. His treatment may be too undialectical. The large financial contributions that organized crime can make to political campaigns arguably give it substantial political powerP This power is certainly not sufficient to threaten the capitalist system, but then there is no reason why organized crime figures would want to do so. Nevertheless, the exercise of the power that organized crime does have may at times be detrimental to business as well as to labor interests.1 4 Pearce's demonstration that there is a complex and at times intimate relation between business and government on the one hand and organized crime on the other not only puts organized crime in a new light but illuminates other forms of crime as well. It is clear, for example, that if we want to understand why some people use heroin, we must look beyond their own psychological traits and the values and norms that they and their friends hold. Heroin would not be available for these users to inject unless America's imperialist involvement on foreign continents made the importation of large quantities of heroin profitable (McCoy, 1973; Chambliss, 1977). Pearce's discussion raises questions that merit further investigation. For instance, organized crime on the scale found in the United States seems not to exist in Western Europe outside Italy. How can the difference be explained? Presumably we must look to such variables as class forces, political arrangements, and so on. Possibly where class consciousness is stronger and the state more centralized (making corruption more difficult), organized crime cannot so easily gain a foothold. If organized crime is not routinely necessary for capitalists but is only a convenient way of reaching certain goals from time to time, then we must ask about the precise circumstances under which it is convenient and why other alternatives are not chosen.
Crime without class conflict Though class conflict is important to the explanation of some kinds or instances of crime, all crime is not a direct manifestation of class conflict.
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To explain these crimes we must look to other components of Marxist theol}'. In the fifth essay of this section, Don Wallace and Drew Humphries examine the criminological consequences of profit -seeking on the part of privately owned businesses. In theol}', the pursuit of profits provides incentives to entrepreneurs to satisfY consumer preferences, improve efficiency, and win a larger share of the market by cutting prices. However, in the course of their operations, businesses can also impose costs ("externalities") on the rest of society which it has not agreed to bear and for which it receives no compensating benefit. An all-too-familiar example is the damage to our physical environment that manufacturing firms or those in the extractive industries have sometimes inflicted. Indirectly, a business can also impose costs on communities even when it is not violating the law, by influencing the social and economic conditions in a community. In hiring and firing, for example, businesses affect employment levels. When a company relocates from a region of the countl}' where labor costs or taxes are high to one where they are low, it changes the employment picture in both locations. In this way, it affects the opportunity structures that individual members of the working class face, as well as the potential costs and benefits of crime. Family dynamics can change when bread winners lose their jobs, or when housewives begin to earn more than their husbands. Thus, movements of capital have potential consequences for the distribution of power within the family. Violence is a familiar response of a husband whose dominance in the family is threatened by the loss of his job. Regional differences in crime rates
Criminologists have long known that there are sharp regional differences in crime rates in the United States (Kowalski, Dittman, and Bung, 1980). Sociological explanations of these differences have typically used such concepts as subculture, poverty, and inequality. Economists have tended to assume that prospective offenders seek to maximize gain and minimize loss or pain; the crime rate then depends on the possible gains from criminal and noncriminal activities and the losses associated with being arrested and prosecuted. (For one exposition of this approach, see Greenberg, 1979.) In an analysis of trends in urban crime rates in the United States, Wallace and Humphries examine regional patterns of crime and changes in these patterns over the years 1950 through 1971. The dynamic qualities of capitalism as an economic system are fundamental to their analysis. In the ceaseless quest for higher profits, capitalists shift their investments from one part of the countl}' to another--indeed, from one part of the globe to another. The collective consequences of these private decisions made for private gain are enormous, both in the regions where factories are abandoned or workers dismissed and in those where new investment
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takes place. The analysis presented in the essay by Wallace and Humphries concerns the consequences of shifting patterns of investment for rates of crimes reported to the police.1s This approach to the study of crime patterns makes research on the political economy of cities relevant to criminology (Harvey, 973; Fainstein and Fainstein, 1978; Tabb and Sawers, 1978). Such factors as wage differentials (themselves affected by minimum wage and right-to-work legislation), differences in tax rates, and direct subsidies from local governments have given rise to massive shifts in investment and, correspondingly, in patterns of crime. Although it is not emphasized in this reading, Wallace and Humphries' work suggests that higher crime rates in cities abandoned by manufacturers can be traced to successfUl class struggle. If workers in one area win higher wages, succeed in gaining greater social services from local government (to be financed by higher taxes), and prevent the subsidizing of industry, corporations may abandon production and relocate in regions of the country (or the world) where the working class is weaker and local government more pliable. Successful opposition to this strategy would seem to require national political control over investment; in the case of multinational corporations, international strategies are needed. Students who are unfamiliar with multiple regression statistical techniques will find it helpful to read the Editor's Notes at the end ofthe essay before reading the essay itself.
Arson for profit The routine profit-seeking behavior of capitalist enterprises is also central to James Brady's analysis of arson for profit. Brady points out that the rate of arson for profit has been soaring in American cities, as well as in the metropolitan centers of some of the capitalist European nations. There was no comparable development in the so-called socialist countries. This increase cannot plausibly be explained by the individual psychological traits of arsonists or the supposedly distinct subcultures of the lowincome neighborhoods where much of this arson takes place. Rather, it has to do with the political economy of capitalist cities. Marx pointed to a number of strategies that manufacturers faced with declining profits can adopt. They can find cheaper raw materials, pay their workers less, or layoff some of them; or they can increase their productivity (e.g., through a speedup or by introducing new machinery). If they sell in a noncompetitive market, they may be able to raise their prices. Many of these options are unavailable to landlords. Small owners command too little market power to reduce the cost of water, fuel, or garbage collection. Unions representing janitors and repairmen may prevent owners from cutting wages. Taxes are set by the state. Interest rates on mortgages are fixed at the time oflending. Rents cannot be raised
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at will because tenants living on welfare or working at poverty-level wages may be unable to pay more. 16 Nonpayment of rent because a tenant loses a job or a welfare agency has delayed a check is common in low-income neighborhoods. With costs constant or rising and no potential for increasing revenues, a landlord may be unable to operate a building lawfully in a manner that will yield expected returns on capital. Under these circumstances owners may find the prospect of burning down a building to collect an insurance payment quite attractive (other owners, of course, may buy the building for just that purpose). The owner of a failing business may take the same way out. That this should have happened in the past decade more than in the past reflects the conjuncture of several economic developments. One is the falling share of income going to the poorest section of the American population (Harrison and Bluestone, 1988). The migration of manufacturing to Third World countries, immigration from them to the industrial nations, and the introduction of labor-saving equipment that has reduced the demand for blue-collar labor-these have left residents of low-income neighborhoods increasingly unable to afford even the fundamentals oflife, like housing (Sassen, 1988). Rates of homeless ness have risen dramatically over the past decade (Marcuse, 1988). This deterioration in the economic position of the poorest stratum of the population has occurred in a society in which most housing is provided by private entrepreneurs, for profit. This system is proving incapable of supplying minimally acceptable housing (housing that meets minimal standards of occupancy set by law) at affordable prices to the poorest part ofthe populationP As dreadful as public housing can be in the United States, its tenants, some ofthem deeply involved with illegal drugs and other criminal activities, rarely try to destroy the buildings in which they live. In principle, one would expect the insurance companies to take measures to stop arson for profit. In 1980 they lost $1.6 billion to arson (Maitland, 1980). If only a fraction of that loss was due to arson, it was still a large amount. Surely it would be in their interests to discourage fraudulent claims. Yet it can be difficult to prove that a given fire was caused by arson, or that a building was overvalued. The legal costs of fighting a questionable claim could in many instances exceed the claim itself. Moreover, as Brady notes, brokers who sell insurance have no interest in screening applicants for policies (nor do banks whose loans are insured). Their commissions are based on the volume of sales, whether to fraudulent or honest owners. Faced with rapidly mounting costs, insurance companies have begun to use computers to identity buildings at high risk for arson. Yet criminality has always proved difficult to predict with high precision. This can never be more than a partial solution. Brady highlights "red-lining" on the part of the banks-refusal to lend
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money for buildings in certain neighborhoods-as another element in the picture. When banks refuse to lend money, owners may be unable to make needed repairs and ultimately may be forced to abandon their buildings. It would be a mistake to demonize banks for doing this. As capitalist institutions, they seek to maximize profits, not social welfare. Small loans to owners of residential buildings in slum neighborhoods may simply be riskier or less profitable than other loans. Banks are responsible to their shareholders, not to the public good. Were social criteria such as need and the social desirability of encouraging residential stability to influence the granting of loans, funding to improve the housing stock in low-income neighborhoods would undoubtedly be given much higher priority. Not only is this need not met by the use of strict profit-making criteria, it is exacerbated. By definition, most residents of a low-income neighborhood have low incomes. Their poverty limits the quality of the housing they can afford, as well as their ability to keep it in good repair. Yet they do have some income. Brady's figures show that in Boston, when this income is deposited in local banks, most of it is not used for loans within the neighborhood. Instead, the money is lent to more affluent borrowers outside the neighborhood, whose higher and more stable incomes make them more attractive to lenders. Thus godless capitalism willy-nilly follows the cynical religious aphorism "To every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have in abundance, but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath" (Matthew 25:29). Arson for profit exacerbates neighborhood deterioration. The destruction of the housing stock and the exodus of tenants erodes the tax base. In the single year 1976-77, for example, the Bushwick section of Brooklyn lost a third ofits housing to arson (Maitland, 1980). The resulting loss of customers led many neighborhood businesses to fail, further weakening the neighborhood's financial base. Tax losses stemming from business closings weaken a city's ability to fight fires (budget problems have forced the closing of fire stations in New York) and to supply other essential services. State inteIVention in the housing mi:rket-an issue Brady does not discuss-also contributes to arson. For some decades, federal, state, and city housing programs have made loans, subsidies, and tax write-offs available to owners to encourage the rehabilitation of residential buildings. In New York, these include the city's J-51 program-under which funds are granted automatically for the upgrading of buildings that are not tax delinquent and are free of liens, even when the owner has had a history of harassing tenants-and section 8 of the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974. Under the latter program, the city of New York targets designated neighborhoods for assistance. Evidence has been accumulating that these programs have unintentionally stimulated the burning of buildings. To restore buildings to the tax rolls and to avoid having to locate
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tenants, the city made funds available for the renovation of large vacant buildings. With tenancy an obstacle to the granting of funds, some unscrupulous owners of occupied buildings took steps to ensure that their buildings would become vacant. They withdrew services (heating, hot water, garbage collection), hired goons to harass tenants, and let security in the building lapse. A series of small fires-intended to frighten tenants without doing major structural damage-usually finished the job of driving tenants out. Once the subsidized rehabilitation was complete, the improved apartments could be rented at higher rates to more aflluent tenants or sold as cooperatives or condominiums.18 Crime and monopoly
Most of Marx's works in economics concerned the laws of motion of a competitive capitalist economic system. Yet Marx also noted the tendency for capital to become more concentrated over time, ultimately destroying the competitiveness of the market. Less efficient enterprises are driven out of business, leaving a few large enterprises to dominate a given sector of the economy. The technical demands of advancing industry may also favor the concentration of capital by forcing firms to adopt equipment that is too expensive for small ones. On the basis of this reasoning Marx concludes (1867:763), "One capitalist always kills many." Classical liberal economists (i.e., contemporary conseJvatives) have argued that this conclusion is premature, because purely economic tendencies toward increased concentration and decreased competition may be undermined by other economic factors. If oligopoly or monopoly position in an industry leads to higher-than-average rates of profit, for instance, investors attracted by the prospect of higher profits will move into the industry in question. Competition will then drive prices down. These economists, therefore, argue that monopolies based on purely economic strength tend to be unstable. They suggest that the government creates and perpetuates monopolies by granting special privileges and largess, and by imposing costs on businesses (e.g., pollution standards, safety precautions, minimum wages) that smaller firms cannot meet. This position is by no means incompatible with Marxists' undertanding of the role that the state plays in the monopoly stage of capitalism. Whether one looks only at economic forces, or examines political factors as well, there seems to be little doubt that capital is indeed becoming more concentrated. In 1948, the hundred largest manufacturing firms held 40.1 percent of total manufacturing assets; by 1971, they held 48.9 percent (Edwards, 1975). In the seventh essay in Part 2, Harold Barnett argues that the concentration of economic power in the monopoly and oligopoly sectors of the economy can be an important cause of crime. When only a few firms dominate a sector of the economy they can more easily collude to fix
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prices, divide up the market, and eliminate competitors. Since stock ownership is concentrated in the upper income brackets, it is primarily the wealthy whose incomes are enlarged by these means. Thus, corporate crime that is made possible by monopolization of the economy intensifies inequality of income. An especially intriguing facet of Barnett's work concerns the effect of corporate crime on street crime. Since empirical research indicates that rates of theft and interpersonal violence go up when inequality in income increases (Danziger and Wheeler, 1975), it follows that the oligopoly structure of the economy increases the rates of these forms of crime. In other words, crime in the suites and crime in the streets are not simply two different types of crime that coexist; rather, they are causally connected. Although Barnett does not explore the issue, the economic consequences of oligopolization for the competitive sector of the economy are worth noting. Just as individuals must pay higher prices because of oligopoly power, so must firms in the small, competitive sector who buy from the giants. In addition, small firms who sell products to large corporations may have to accept a lower price for their goods. The consequences will be lower profits in the competitive sector and stronger motivation to shore up these profits by illegal means. One would thus expect consumer fraud, labor law violations (such as hiring illegal immigrants at wages below the legal minimum), fencing operations, and tax evasion to occur more frequently when the economy is dominated by a few large firms. Little is known about the frequency of such violations. However, Marilyn Walsh (1977) found that 64 percent of the receivers of stolen goods whom she studied were proprietors of "permanent, legitimate" businesses. In many instances, the revenue derived from fencing seemed to make the difference between bankruptcy and the profitable operation of the small businesses she studied. What are the implications of this analysis for social policy regarding oligopolies and monopolies? Conservative economists argue that the role of government in the economy should be minimized. In particular, government regulation that favors large corporations should be ended so that market forces will come into play, reducing prices and increasing efficiency. Socialists have often argued that a return to a competitive economy is impossible. And they favor, instead, a transformation of the economy along socialist lines. In earlier decades, socialists did not view the growth of monopolies as particularly bad. This growth was seen as part of the process by which production became socialized. If industry were dominated by a few large enterprises, socalists thought, it would be easier for the state to take it over. Today, many socialists queston the notion that socialism amounts to no more than the government taking over industry and running it without a fundamental change in the social relations of the work process
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itself. Obviously, fundamental issues about the nature of socialism are at stake here. Is the essence of socialism a centrally planned economy? Some socialists have thought so. Others hold that centralized planning is inefficient and gives too much power to the planning bureaucracy. For them, the essence of socialism is the direct power of workers and community members over production, Debate over this issue continues.
Auto theft Normally we expect a theory of crime causation to be a theory that explains why some people, but not others, are motivated to commit crime, or why some ofthe people who are motivated to commit crime do so, while others do not. This is true, for example, of such mainstays of criminology as anomie theory, learning theory, and control theory. In recent years, though, we have seen other explanatory strategies. Cohen and Felson (1979), for example, have argued that the high crime rates American cities have seen for the past quarter century can be explained not by changes in offender motivation, or in their assessments of the cost of crime, but in changes that have taken place in the structure of illegal opportunity. Increased affluence in American life has made available more commodities that can be stolen-in particular, items that are small and light, easy to carry away. With women entering the labor force in greater numbers, they spend more of their waking hours outside the home, where they are more vulnerable to assaultive crimes. Homes that are empty during the day are easier to burgle. Harry Brill's study of auto theft approaches the facilitation of crime differently. He notes that automobiles are extremely easy to steal. Car manufacturers could easily make theft more difficult, passing the very modest cost of doing so on to customers. They do not do this because it is in their financial interest to sell more cars. Most car thieves are not in the market to buy new ones, but those whose cars are stolen are. Insurance companies could provide an incentive to customers to pay the higher cost of buying a protected car by offering lower premiums. However, insurance companies profit by investing customers' premiums. Lower premiums would reduce the cash they have available for investments, thereby reducing their profits. For this reason, insurance companies have fought legislation requiring that manufacturers make cars difficult to steal. The papers by Wallace and Humphries, Brady, Barnett, and Brill highlight the various ways that the actions of privately owned business enterprises, operating in a market economy, lead to crime. However, it cannot be forgotten that the state, too, is an influential presence in the economy. It makes rules and enforces rules for private economic transactions, and also inteIVenes directly in the economy. It taxes incomes, provides "transfer payments," subsidizes private investment, issues regulations that impose costs on business, and is a major purchaser of goods and services.
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The state and the ghetto economy Cyril Robinson's essay sketches some little-discussed forms of state action that have had major ramifications for urban vice and crime. For 150 years "ethnic" immigrants-the Irish, Italians, Poles, Jews-have had difficulty in finding a place in the lawful economy. Discrimination, language disabilities, and the limited job skills of immigrants from rural regions made it hard for many to find good jobs. Still, when the economy was expanding, the demand for low-skilled manual labor was high enough to provide jobs for most. Some, on the other hand, turned to illegal sources of income such as stealing and supplying illegal goods and services (including alcohol, sex, drugs, and gambling). For most of American history, blacks were little involved with most of these activities. Until the First World War, more than ninety percent of the black American population lived in the South-primarily in rural areas, where opportunities for illegal activities were limited. Then, as white workers were drafted out of the factories to fight in Europe in both world wars, northern employers recruited blacks from the South. The mechanization of southern agriculture greatly increased this immigration. The introduction of a machine that could pick cotton displaced both black and white agricultural workers, but blacks suffered more than whites because they were more likely to work on large plantations where economies of scale facilitated capital investment. Significantly, this development did not occur via free markets. Much of the research to develop the cotton picker, and scientific methods of farming more generally (including the use of irrigation and fertilizers), was done at U.S. agricultural stations with federal funding.19 Other federal programs, including road construction, irrigation, loans, and crop insurance, facilitated the transition to capital-intensive agriculture. 20 It was understood from the start that this transition would drastically reduce the number of people who would be able to find employment in the agricultural sector. Yet no steps were taken to resituate the displaced workers. Thus, the mechanization of agriculture involved major subsidies to the land-owning class and the loss of a livelihood for the workers. These developments had a much more severe impact on blacks than on whites. In 1920, one of every seven farmers in the United States was black; in 1982, only one in sixty-seven (Amott, 1989). The uneven development of capitalist industry, together with racial discrimination, made it impossible for most of those displaced to find employment in southern cities. Large numbers came north. Just as southern blacks and some poor whites were arriving in the northern cities, the white middle and upper classes already living there were leaving for the suburbs. No doubt many factors contributed to this exodus; among them, Robinson points out, were enormous government subsidies for home mortgages in the suburbs, denial of mortgage support for residences in racially integrated and low-income neighborhoods, and
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federal highway construction that made it easy for suburbanites to commute to jobs in central cities. Though many of the new arrivals found employment in the manufacturing, retail, and service sectors ofthe nm1hern cities, not all were able to do so. Limits on the number of jobs available, inferior schooling, and discrimination in employment left many without a reliable source of adequate income. In the absence of lawful employment, some turned to theft. Others found employment in the "vices," or "victimless crimes,"supplying illegal goods and services to willing customers.21 With the higher levels of organized crime dominated by those who had entered it earlier, blacks had difficulty moving into the more lucrative, higher levels of production and distribution (Gage, 1971), though some managed to take over distribution in predominantly black ghetto neighborhoods (Ianni,1974). ECONOMICS ISN'T EVERYTHING As important as economic conditions obviously are in causing crime, economics isn't everything. The holistic character of Marxism lends itself to a more inclusive analysis. Attempts to include noneconomic factors in an analysis of crime have taken various forms. The essay on juvenile delinquency by David Greenberg represents one approach. Although it takes immediate economic considerations into account, it also considers the effects of institutions, like the school, that Marxist theory has regarded "superstructural" (see the Introduction to this volume for a discussion of the "base-superstructure" metaphor). Juvenile delinquency
Twentieth-century criminologists have probably written more about juvenile delinquency than about any other single topic. Much of this literature has been criticized by radical criminologists as logically defective and empirically wrong (Taylor, Walton, and Young, 1973). I argue (in the tenth essay) that this literature need not be dismissed out of hand. Although some of it may be mistaken, it is not all worthless. In fact, it can be used in creating a theory of delinquency that goes beyond the juvenile's immediate social setting, consisting of family, school, neighborhood, and peer group, to deal with the place of the juvenile in the larger society. Noting that only recently have levels of juvenile involvement in crime been exceptionally high, this reading suggests that high levels of delinquency have been caused by changes in young people's relation to economically productive activity in a capitalist society.22 These changes have made juveniles a part of the relative surplus population, creating
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motivation toward delinquency by excluding them from lawful sources of income. The reading goes on to argue that these changes have also had ramifications for the juvenile's position in the family and the school in ways that have increased delinquency. This analysis conforms to the general approach outlined by Spitzer (1975) in placing delinquency in the context of both the ongoing reorganization of the social relations of production and the responses of other social institutions to this reorganization. The approach also provides plausible accounts of differences among races and between sexes in involvement in delinquency. It is implicit in this reading that the concerns of positivist criminology and its empirical research findings are not inherently incompatible with a Marxian perspective.23 This is a controversial position, and the reader may want to pay particular attention to the way these two perspectives are handled. Another point of interest in this reading is the treatment of class. Although class analysis is usually considered distinctive to Marxism, many non-Marxian criminologists have explored the relevance of social class to delinquency. They have argued on a variety of grounds that rates of delinquency are expected to be especially high among lower-class male youths (Cohen, 1955; Miller, 1958; Cloward and Ohlin, 1960). Yet self-reporting studies in which juveniles are asked about offenses they have committed show small or vanishing differences among the classes (for a review of these studies, see Tittle, Villemez, and Smith, 1978). These findings have led some sociologists to suggest that class differences in the rates of officially processed delinquents-those who are arrested and/or brought into the juvenile court-are entirely due to discrimination on the part of the criminal justice system. There are several reasons for thinking that this conclusion is premature. First, there is a good deal of evidence for the existence of racial differences with regard to some forms of crime, for example, homicide, assault with weapons, armed robbery, and the use and sale of heroin (not to speak of corporate crime, where blacks have few opportunities to become involved). Some of this evidence comes from self-reporting studies, but much of it comes from victims, who can usually provide information about the race of an attacker (Hindelang, 1978; Hindelang, Hirschi, and Weis, 1979). If it were true that within each racial category, class had no effect on involvement in crime, we should find an overall association between class and crime, since race is itself correlated with class. Ifthe overall correlation vanishes, it must mean that class membership has effects on criminality that are opposite for blacks and whites. This would imply, for example, that lower-class blacks have lower crime rates than middle-class blacks, but lower-class whites have higher crime rates than middle-class whites. We know of no reason to expect patterns of this kind. In addition, most of the self-reporting studies have used a definition of class that is questionable from the point of view of Marxian theory.
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'JYpically, a child's class is determined in these studies by the prestige of the father's job, the parents' combined income, the number of years of education the parents have had, or similar indicators. Yet, as noted in the Introduction, Marxists define class in terms of relation to the means of production. Although there may be some relation between these two different definitions, it is by no means a perfect one. Some members of the working class, for example, have had more years of education and earn better pay than some members of the petty bourgeoisie. Going further, we can ask whether children should be automatically assigned to the class of their parents. The reading reprinted here implicitly questions that procedure by examining the juveniles' relation to the means of production. In industrial societies this relation is largely one of exclusion from economically productive activity, accompanied by mandatory training for future production" In these terms, youths can be considered to constitute a class of their own. Membership in this class is of course very brief, though with the protraction of education, longer now than it was a few decades ago. In treating class in this unorthodox way, I implicitly take a stand against the application of fixed categories in favor of an analysis of social arrangements as they are. With the development of capitalism, familiar class categories such as "capitalist" and "proletariat" are not necessarily conceptually adequate for understanding everyone's place in production; there are too many people who have some relation to production other than those of these two classes. The women's movement has pointed out the difficulty of understanding the housewife's relation to production in familiar Marxian categories, and the same seems true for juveniles as well. In Marx's day this problem of conceptualization would not have existed, because the children of working-class families entered the labor force at an early age. Although I argue that most attempts to eliminate delinquency would have little effect in the absence of far-reaching economic change, it may be worth considering whether this conclusion is too pessimistic. Are there steps that might go part way toward integrating juveniles more fully in the economic and social life of the society, and that might lower the delinquency rate? In Switzerland, where most youths leave school at age sixteen and enter apprenticeships, school-related delinquency is low (David, 1978). Could a system like that be adopted here?
Crime and social integration Drawing on the philosophical anthropology of Marx's early writings, Gregory Grose and W. Byron Groves (1988) have proposed a theory of crime causation that is fundamentally noneconomic. They interpret passages in Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts-passages that build on some of Hegel's writings--as positing the existence of fundamental human needs, among them, the need to identifY with a
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human group and to feel oneself a valued member of that group (one who contributes to its collective labor and whose contributions are socially recognized and valued) .24 As Grose and Groves point out, it is not entirely clear whether Marx considered these needs to be basic to human nature or to be acquired. It is clear that he regarded the realization of the potential for identification with the entire human species as both desirable and a goal toward which human society was moving. Though the need to be recognized may be universal, social arrangements can frustrate it by denying to individuals or groups the opportunity to make a contribution to the achievement of a collective goal and to be valued for that contribution. Grose and Groves suggest that when the possibility of achieving recognition lawfully is frustrated, individuals may attempt to achieve it illegally. Crimes usually considered in other terms can be reinterpreted in light of this idea. For example, much economic crime is not a means for achieving the necessities of life or even material comfort. Possessions can be regarded as an indicator of moral worthiness, a sign that one is the sort of person that others should honor or respect.26 People who steal may be doing so to gain this recognition from others, or even from themselves. In some instances, the intent of violent interpersonal crime is to force the target to accord the perpetrator recognition or respect that would not otherwise be forthcoming (Katz, 1988; Bernard, 1990). Social formations differ in the degree to which they offer members opportunities for fulfilling recognition needs. In a small-scale band or tribe, typically everyone is accepted as a part of the collective, but in the more stratified societies this is not so. In the extreme case, slaves may be treated by their owners as nothing more than beasts. A society with a large marginalized population has on its hands a large number of people who will have great difficulty satisfYing their "recognition motive" within the law. Crime and empathy
Empathy, or the lack of it, is another noneconomic factor that must be taken into account. Where it exists, empathy with an intended victim may restrain someone from committing a crime, even where the motivation to commit the crime is strong. When criminals talk about their criminal activities, one of the most striking themes is their utter indifference to the pain they cause their victims. Some even enjoy the sense of power that comes from hurting othersP The sociologists Gresham Sykes and David Matza (1957) have dealt with delinquents' lack of empathy in terms of their "techniques of neutralization." Most delinquents, they argue, do not reject the moral dictates of respectable society that frown on violence and theft. If they wish to engage in these activities, they must find a way to "neutralize"
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their moral inhibitions. They do this) not by rejecting society's norms and values) but by finding them inapplicable in a particular instance because of special circumstances. Among these rationalizations is the derogation of the victim. By representing potential victims to themselves as deserving suffering) delinquents can carry out crimes that inflict suffering and still think of themselves as morally worthy. Rationalizations can be learned in face-to-face interaction or from the mass media. This social-psychological analysis can be connected to Marxism through the observation that the availability and acceptability of techniques of neutralization vary with the social relations present in a society and the ideological discourses that circulate in it. To date) no one has studied this question systematically; consequently only a few preliminary thoughts can be offered here. It is true of many social formations Ithat they sustain definitions of social boundaries that distinguish social members from nonmembers) and that they consider the moral injunctions against victimizing behavior to be valid only in relation to members. In a primitive culture) for example) a clan or lineage will generally try to discourage theft and violence within the kinship unit) while regarding the same acts against members of other clans) lineages) or tribes in purely pragmatic terms. The salient question is not whether an attack on others is morally wrong) but whether they will retaliate or end a mutually beneficial, ongoing social arrangement, such as a trade agreement. In a nontribal society) identification and loyalty are to an ethnicity) religion) or nationality. Where conflict with another group) religion) or nationality develops) victimization of those who belong to the antagonistic group is often defined as praiseworthy. In some parts of the capitalist world) the growth of commerce and industry that marks the rise of capitalism have weakened these loyalties. According to the early twentieth-century Russian jurist Evgeny Pashukanis) the cash nexus tends to dissolve particularites into an abstract formal equality (Greenberg and Anderson) 1981). However) precapitalist social identities surviving into the capitalist era have sometimes been strengthened by tensions connected with capitalist (or "socialist") development. New ideological justifications for victimization have appeared under these circumstances; Nazism is the classical example. 28 Ideologies devaluing members of other classes have also contributed to victimization-for example) when a slave owner beats or rapes a slave) or a rebellious slave kills a master) or alienated workers steal from their employers to compensate for perceived exploitation) or capitalists use violence to kill union organizers or suppress strikes. Certain developments associated with capitalism tend to promote not just group victimization but more or less random victimization of anyone within the offender's reach. Empathetic identification that could restrain victimization is to a degree the product of long-term social interaction) but the mobility of capital and labor that accompanies capitalism tends
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to reduce attachments to neighbors that might sustain an ethic of responsibility. Unless we are in sharp conflict with them, we generally care about our neighbors more than we do about strangers. 29 The competitive phase of capitalism brings with it an ideology of radical individualism that asserts the desirability of self-seeking behavior. To profit at the expense of others is considered praiseworthy. A responsibility to the collectivity is denied. Indeed, philosophers of the nineteenth century argued that help for the unfortunate would in the long run prove socially pernicious. Their arguments may have helped upwardly mobile businessmen sleep more soundly at night; arguably, they also made it easier to commit crime. When the word of the day is "success at almost any cost," it is hardly surprising that some will drop the "almost," especially when the cost is to be paid by someone else. The market itself reinforces teachings of social irresponsibility. Consider the case of a manufacturer whose orders are declining. He wants to layoff some workers but realizes that doing so will cause them financial hardship. If he keeps them on the payroll, his costs will be high at a time when sales are not producing enough revenue to pay their salaries. His kindheartedness will lead him straight to bankruptcy. If he wants to continue running his business, he must not indulge his tenderheartedness and will have to fire them. Material conditions may influence the adoption of callousness or indifference to the well-being of others. Someone whose wealth guarantees every imaginable pleasure can afford a bit of generosity. On the other hand, those who live at the edge of survival will tend to jettison ethical teachings as useless claptrap in an anomic, dog-eat-dog world. Colin Turnbull's (1972) study of the Ik, an African people, under conditions of mass starvation, shows us the extremity of social disintegration; life among some drug dealers, pimps, loan sharks, extortionists, and thieves may come close (Messerschmidt, 1986:66-67; Katz, 1988). Too much should not be made ofthis, however. The "hardened" street criminal who kills to impress his competitors or associates with his toughness has nothing on the Ford Motor Company executives who calculated that it would cost the company less to pay damages awarded in liability suits stemming from the deaths of drivers who would bum while driving the defective Pinto than to correct the defect at the manufacturing plant (Dowie, 1977). Nor is there any reason to think them more "sociopathic" than the business executives who exported children's sleepware treated with a flame-retardant known to be carcinogenic, or sold intrauterine devices (Dalkon shields) after it was known that they posed a major risk of fatal infections, or continued to set employees to the task of painting watch dials with radium paint after it was known that exposure to radium caused cancer (Michalowski and Kramer, 1987; Caufield, 1989). These cases suggest that even in the absence of poverty, capitalism can be powerfully criminogenic. This discussion might lead one to think that capitalism is unique in
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fostering the instrumental, depersonalized treatment of other human beings. An examination of state policy and ideology in the Soviet Union or in the People's Republic of China quickly refutes that conclusion. State policies adopted in the USSR during the Stalin era, and in China under Mao, brought suffering and death to millions. Some have argued that by viewing historical change as the product of impersonal class forces dialectically working toward human emancipation, and by derogating the role of spirituality in human life, Marxism lends itself to the depersonalization and objectification of flesh-andblood human beings. Others explain these developments in terms of the pressures on Communist states to industrialize rapidly and defend themselves against implacable external enemies as well as internal opposition. Still others point out that corruption develops among holders of dictatorial political power anywhere. Gender and crime
One of the liveliest areas of recent criminological work has concerned gender aspects of crime. Interest has focused on two broad issues. The first is the explanation of crimes against women, crimes such as forcible rape. 30 Why do they occur? What explains the variation in their rates? The second concerns the gendering of all kinds of crime. Why are lawbreakers so disproportionately male? Why more so for some crimes than others? How and why is this disproportionality changing? A strictly economic explanation for crime would have a hard time accounting for some of the most basic facts. Women earn less than men and are employed less often. If low wages and unemployment lead to higher rates of crime, we should expect levels of crime to be higher for females than for males. The reverse is true for every category of crime except prostitution. Moreover, most legislators are male. If they operated solely as an interest group, one would expect them to criminalize female activities, not those of their own sex. The essay on forcible rape, by Julia and Herman Schwendinger, was one of the first to tackle these issues. It was written at a time when radical feminists who favored separatism were attributing rape to the essential makeup of human males. 31 If this position were true, the Schwendingers point out, most men should be rapists, and levels of rape should be more or less the same in all societies. Arrest statistics and victimization surveys, however, indicate that relatively few men rape. 32 Anthropological evidence suggesting that levels of rape depend on the status of women in a society points to the importance of social factors in causing rape. The Schwendingers go on to interpret cross-cultural variation in the situation of women within an evolutionary framework based on Engels's classic study, The Origins of the Family, the State, and Private Property. Engels believed that in the early stages of human life, women's status, power, and autonomy were high. The development of
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class divisions and the rise of the state brought this Garden of Eden to an end by subordinating women. Engels's analysis of gender has been controversial among anthropologists. They have pointed out that Engels was writing at a time when very little was known about contemporary primitive peoples, much less about the Stone Age. Some find dubious the tacit assumption of evolutionary theorists that one can learn about early stages in human history by studying contemporary primitives, who, after all, have had a history as long as ours. Nonetheless, Engels's ideas have found support from some anthropologists. In the Engels-Schwendinger model, gender relations in primitive society change because the development of production or exchange relations favors the exploitation of female labor, or because warfare leads to higher levels of all kinds of violence. These changed gender relations then lead to higher levels of rape. The Schwendingers' analysis never makes explicit just what it is about gender that leads to an asymmetry. When it becomes profitable to exploit another person's labor, why is it women whose labor is selected for exploitation? The last essay, by David Greenberg, examines the reasons men are more likely to be criminal. In every country for which crime statistics are available, sex differences in rates of involvement in crime are as large or larger than class or race differences. Yet it is only with the rise of "second wave" feminism in the past quarter century that criminologists have devoted major energies to the study of these differences. Greenberg's essay explores the possibilities for explaining these differences within the framework of Marxist theory.
NOTES 1 This strategy circumvents the contention of Hirst 11975) and O'Malley 119871 that a MaI'xist criminology is an impossibility because crime is not an element of Mar'Xist theory. The logic described in the text does not require crime to be an element of Marxist theory. only the conditions that cause it. 2 Evidence consistent with this kind of Marxist explanation of heart attacks can be found in Wolf and Bruhn (19921. 3 Of course, the owners will usually have to pay some of this surplus value to the government as taxes. Some of it will also go to owners ofland for rent. to patent holders in the fonn of royalty payments or license fees. etc. For that reason, the sUI'Plus value a firm produces cannot be equated with its profits in the conventional sense. 4 National figures are not available for arrestees, but for inmates of state cormctional institutions. In a 1974 survey. 60 percent of inmates had not completed high school, 30.8 percent had been unemployed at the time of their arrest, and only 13.7 percent had had an income of $10,000 or more in the year before their arrest IU.S. Department of Justice, 1976:24. 25. 271. 5 For overviews and selected msearch studies see Orsagh (1980). Long and Witte (19811; Horwitz (1984); Thornberry and Christenson 119841; Cantor and Land 119851; Cook and Zarkin (1985.19861; Chiricos (1987); Allan and Steffensmeier 119891.
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6 Bluestone and Harrison (1987) note that in the period between 1963 and 1979, only 20 percent of new jobs had low wages (less than $7400 in constant 1986 dollars); while between 1979 and 1985, 44 percent did. At the same time, welfare support was seriously reduced (Mann and Albelda, 1989; Henry and Brown, 1990). 7 The most systematic argument in favor of the optimistic position can be found in Hartwell (1971). Thompson (1963) presents the case for the pessimistic position. S In understanding organized crime as a response to discrimination, some of Arlacchi's (1979) work may be helpful, even though ethnic mobility is not an issue in western Sicily. Arlacchi argues that the prices of Sicilian commodities fluctuate on the national and international markets so rapidly that upward and downward mobility is extreme. Under these conditions, subjective classes cannot form. Mafia-like strategies for self-advancement are thus chosen instead of socialist strategies for advancing the class. It may be that the conditions associated with emigration to the United States weakened class identification for some emigrant groups, encouraging individualistic rather than group efforts to overcome discrimination. 9 It is this feature of these offenses that has led some sociologists to call them "victimless" (Schur, 1965). Strictly speaking, the notion that consensual transactions are victimless is bourgeois ideology. Marxian critique of the wage contract makes this explicit in the case of agreements between employers and employees. Reiman (1979) has develoed a parallel argument for addiction and prostitution. 10 Pearce interprets this development as a manifestation of corporate liberalism, a concept developed by early New Left American historians. It was argued that twentieth-century liberal forms were conceived, guided, or approved by leaders of large corporations. Their concern was to stabilize capitalism by government intervention, and by allowing the poorer classes a share of the wealth produced by an expanding economy (Weinstein, 1968). Recognition of unions that accepted corporate capitalism and supported the government's cold war policies fit into this scheme as a strategy to head off growing working-class radicalism. The historians who developed this perpective recognized that the initiative in drawing attention to social problems often came from below, but insisted that solutions were largely shaped by business interests. Recent critics of the perspective have argued that it exaggerates capitalists' ability to control the direction of reform, and minimizes the Significance of working-class victories (Ratner, 1981). 11 In 1988, approximately 15 percent of the nonfarm employed labor force in the United States was unionized, a very low percentage by historical standards and in comparison to other western industrialized democracies. 12 William Chambliss has developed this theme with regard to professional theft (1972:165-79) and organized crime (1979).A suggestive piece of journalism that suggests such symbiosis can be found in Crile 11975). 13 Bell (1962) suggests that corporate contributions were channeled into federal elections after the New Deal, with the result that scarce funds for local campaigns opened the door to organized crime. Suppliers of these funds sought immunity from unpopular legislation in return for their contributions. However, several writers have suggested that during the Nixon administration, the influence of organized crime reached into the White House (Myerson, 1973; Gerth, 1974; Oglesby, 1976). 14 This is clearest in the case of small firms that must pay for protection or buy their goods under threat of violence; but even large firms have sometimes had to make payments to organized crime in order to retail their products. Occasionally, business executives who have refused to cooperate with organized crime figures have been killed. 15 There seems to be some evidence that economic expansion can contribute to crime even in noncapitalist societies. According to Moscicki (1978), factory construction in
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Part 2 Poland is associated with temporary increases in crime. These increases are apparently linked with migration and the bringing of manpower reseIVes into the economy. Landlords sometimes point to rent control regulations as an additional factor limiting profits. However, rent control does not seem to have the impact that landlords claim (M. Mandel, 1986J. The problem is only in part one of individuals being unable to afford housing because they are too poor. There are also obstacles that interfere with the construction of new low-cost housing, including building-code standards, zoning restrictions, and the channeling of housing subsidies to the high end ofthe market (Swanstrom, 1989). This discussion is based on information acquired as a consultant to New York City's Arson Strike Force. Significantly, Congress did not fund agricultural research at the black land-grant colleges until 1972 (Amott, 1989). Had it done so, the direction of this research might have been quite different. The Farmer's Home Administration, an agency of the u.S. Department of Agriculture created during the Great Depression to aid low-income farmers, did not extend credit to black farmers, making it difficult for those who owned land to adopt the new, more costly methods (Amott, 1989). In recent years they have been joined by still newer immigrants-Latinos, Asians, Russian Jews, etc.-who have also turned to organized criminal activity. Several other criminologists have also analyzed delinquency in relation to the structural position of the juvenile in modem society. Bloch and Niederhoffer (1958), Glaser (1972), Schwendinger and Schwendinger (1976), Friday and Hage (1976), and Christie (1978) have all analyzed delinquency from this angle. A similar approach is implicit in Seppilli and Abbozzo's attempt to understand crime in Italy in the context of post-World War II economic development. They argue (1975) that the rapid, uneven development of the Italian economy exposed individuals to inconsistent systems of social control; the resulting inconsistency in socialization gave rise to psychological conflict, which was in tum a source of crime and other forms of deviance. This line of reasoning resembles some of the ideas of early social disorganization theorists, such as Thomas and Znaniecki, but places them in the context of the dynamic development of a particular capitalist social formation. Groves and Sampson (1987) argue more generally that radical criminology is not incompatible with such mainstays of "traditional" criminology as strain theory, cultural deviance theory, and critical theory. The early twentieth-century social psychologist W. I. Thomas developed related ideas independently. Of the four "wishes" .that he postulated as fundamental to human nature, one was the wish for recognition, another was the wish for response. There is less emphasis here on an integrated relationship with a collectivity. In his book The Unadjusted Girl, published in 1923, Thomas argued that young women could be led to crime through attempts to fill these wishes. Grose and Groves refer to these needs as the "recognition motive," but the need for feeling "subjectively integrated" strikes me as more apt. Marx's views on the question of "human nature" have been given a detailed analysis by Archibald (1989J. This insight may help to make sense of the large volume of acquisitive crime committed by corporate executives and high-ranking government officials. An obvious limitation of explanations of robbery and burglary that focus only on need is that some people who are relatively well-to-do steal when they are given the opportunity. To take an example from a recent newspaper story, a twenty-one-year-old high school
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dropout confessed to killing a nurse by stabbing her in the neck: "I felt real high, a sense of power when I stabbed her and when she died. She died and I lived. It felt good" 1Cassidy and McNamara, 19891. 28 As violent ethnic conflicts now breaking out in the former Soviet republics demon-
st!'ate, these ethnic identifications do not disappear simply because a revolution abolishes capitalism. Indeed, favoritism in the distIibution of government benefits, which can occur when the socialist state is dominated by a single ethnic group, can exacerbate traditional antagonisms.
ever simple. Arguably, the increased exposure to diverse cultures that has accompanied the expansion of capitalism gave rise to the Enlightenment ideal that "all men are equal" and that one's loyalty should be to humanity as a whole. Such developments, aIising at a certain stage in European capitalism, together with an older Christian notion that in the eyes of God all are equal, gave rise to such developments as antislavery movements, feminism, pacifism, and humanitaIian concern for the oppressed. When one considers the bloody histOJY of capitalist societies during the past couple of centuries, it is difficult to lend much credence to the restraining fon;e of humanitarian sentiment, but that force should not be dismissed altogether. 30 Homosexual rape also occurs, but outside penal institutions it is infrequent by comparison with the heterosexual rape offemales. 31 More I'ecently, some sociobiologists have seen !'ape as an evolutionary adaptation that helps to maximize the number of children a man has.
29 Nothing is
32 James Messerschmidt (19861 has challenged the Schwendingers on this point, noting
that if fOJ'cible or coercive sexual relations with a spouse or intimate are taken into account, rape is far from infrequent in contemporary AmeIican society.
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Sampson, Robert J., and Thomas C. Castellano (1982). "Economic Inequality and Personal Victimization." British Journal of Criminology 22:363-85. Samuelson, Paul (1982). "The Normative and Positivistic Inferiority of Marx's Values Paradigm." Southern Economic Journal 49:11-18. Sassen, Saskia (1988), The Mobility of Capital and Labor: A Study in International Investment and Labor Flow. New York: Cambridge University Press. Schneider, Jane, and Peter Schneider (1976). Culture and Political Economy in Western Sicily. New York: Academic Press. Schur, Edwin M. (1965). Crimes without Victims. Englewood Cliffs, N J.: Prentice-Hall. Schwendinger, Herman, and Julia Schwendinger (1976). "Delinquency and the Collective Varieties of Youth." Crime and Social Justice 5:7-25. Seppilli, Tulio, and Grazietta Guatini Abbozzo (1975). "The State of Research into Social Control and Deviance in Italy in the Post-War Period (1945-1973)." In Herman Bianchi, Mario Simondi, and Ian Taylor, eds., Deviance and Control in Europe, 35-50. New York: Wiley. Spitzer, Steven (1975). "Toward a Marxian Themy of Deviance," Social Problems 22:638-51. Steedman, Ian (1977). Marl(. after Sraffa. London: New Left Review. - - - (1981). The Value Controversy. London: New Left Review. Sutton, Lany (1989). "Dear Prez, This Is Life." Daily News, June 5, 5. Swanstrom, Todd (1989). "Homelessness, a Product of Policy." New York Times, March 23, AZ9.
Sykes, Gresham, and David Matza (1957). "Techniques of Neutralization: A Theory of Delinquency." American Sociological Review 22:664--70. Tabb, William K., and Larry Sawers (1978). Marl(.ism and the Metropolis: New Perspectives in Urban Political Economy. New York: Oxford University Press. Taylor, Ian (1988). "Left Realism, the Free Market Economy and the Problem of Social Order." Paper presented to the American Society of Criminology. Taylor, Ian, Paul Walton, and Jock Young (1973). The New Criminology. New York: Harper and Row. Taylor, Laurie, and Paul Walton (1971). "Industrial Sabotage: Motives and Meanings." In Stanley Cohen, ed., Images ofDeviance, 219-45. Baltimore: Penguin. Thompson, Edward P. (1963). The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Vintage. - - - (1978). The Poverty ofTheory and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review Press. Thornberry, Terence P., and R. L. Christenson (1984). "Unemployment and Criminal Involvement: An Investigation of Reciprocal Causal Structures." American Sociological Review 49:398-411. Tittle, Charles R., Wayne J. Villemez, and Douglas A. Smith (1978). "The Myth of Social Class and Criminality." American Sociological Review 43:643-56. Turk, Austin (1964). "Prospects for Theories of Criminal Behavior." Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology and Police Science 55:454--61. Turnbull, Colin M. (1972). The Mountain People. New York: Simon and Schuster. U.S. Department of Jusice, Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (1976). Survey of Inmates of State Correctional Facilities 1974-Advance Report. National Prisoner Statistics Special Report SD-NPS-SR-2. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office. Valdes, Benigno (1987). "Technical Change and Profitability: The 'Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall' Reconsidered." In Richard W. England, ed., Economic Processes and Political Conflicts: Contributions to Modern Political Economy, 107-17. New York: Praeger.
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Walsh, Marilyn (1977). The Fence. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. Walton, Paul (1973). "The Case of the Weathermen: Social Reaction and Radical Commitment." In Ian Taylor and Laurie Taylor, eds., Politics and Deviance: Papers from the National Deviancy Conference, 157-81. Baltimore: Penguin. Weinstein, James (1968). The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900-1918. Boston: Beacon Press. Wilson, William Julius (1987). The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wolf, Stewart, and John G. Bruhn (1992). The Power of Clan: The Influence of Human Relationships on Hean Disease. New Brunswick: Transaction. Wolff, Robert Paul (1981). "A Critique and Reinterpretation of Marx's Labor Theory of Value." Philosophy and Public Affairs 10(2): 89-120. Young, Jock (1975). "Working-Class Criminology." In Ian Taylor, Paul Walton, and Jock Young, eds., Critical Criminology, 63-94. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Zehr, Howard (1976). Crime and the Development ofModern Society. London: Croom Helm.
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Karl Marx, the Theft of Wood, and Working-Class Composition Peter Linebaugh From "Karl Marx. the Theft of Wood. and Working Class Composition: A Contribution to the Current Debate." Crime and Social Justice: Issues in Criminology 6 11976): 5-16. © Crime and Social Justice. P.O. Box 4373. Berkeley. CA 94704. Reprinted by permission.
The international working-class offensive of the 1960s threw the social sciences into crisis from which they have not yet recovered. The offensive was launched in precisely those parts of the working class that capital had formerly attempted to contain within silent. often wageless reserves of the relative surplus population, that is, in North American ghettoes, in Caribbean islands, or in "backward" regions of the Mediterranean. When that struggle took the form of the mass, direct appropriation of wealth, it became increasingly difficult for militants to understand it as a "secondary movement" to the "real struggle" that, it was said, resided only in the unions and the plants. Nor could it be seen as the incidental reactions of "victims" to an "oppressive society," as it was so often by those organizations left flat-footed by the power of an autonomous Black movement and an autonomous women's movement. This is not the place to elaborate on the forms that the struggles have taken in the direct appropriation of wealth, nor how these were able to circulate within more familiar terms of struggle.1 We must note, however, that they thrust the problem of crime, capital's most ancient tool in the creation and control of the working class, once again to a prominent place in the capitalist relation. As the political recomposition of the international workI wish to thank Norman Stein. who provided me with some material assistance in the preparation of this article. My deepest thanks to Gene Mason, Bobby Scollard, and Monty NeilL my comrades in the Northeast Prisoners' Association, for their criticism of an earlier draft of this paper.
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ing class threw into crisis the capitalist organization of labor markets, so that part of traditional social science, criminology, devoted to studying one of the comers in the labor market, "criminal subcultures" and street gangs, had to face a crisis of its own. George Jackson recommended burning the libraries of criminology. Young criminologists began to question the autonomous status of criminology as a field of study (Hirst, 1972:29; Phillipson, 1973:400; Mellosi, 1976:31; Currie, 1974:113). Accompanying both the internal and external critique of criminology has been a recovery of interest in the treatment of crime within the Marxist tradition. Yet, that tradition is by no means accessible or complete and in fact contains contradictory strains within it, so that one cannot be completely unqualified in welcoming it. In stating our own position let us try to be as clear as possible even at the risk of overstatement. We wish to oppose the view that fossilizes particular compositions of the working class into eternal, even formulaic, patterns. We must, in particular, combat the view that analyzes crime (or much else indeed) in the nineteenth century in terms of a "lumpenproletariat" versus an "industrial proletariat." It is to be regretted that despite the crisis of criminology and the experience of struggle that gave rise to it, some militants can still speak of the "lumpenproletariat" tout court as though this were a fixed category of capitalist relations of power. When neither the principle of historical specification nor the concept of class struggle is admitted there can be no useful analysis of class strategy, howsoever exalted the methodology may be in other respects.2 In the rejection of various idealist interpretations of crime including their 'marxist' variants, there is, perforce, a revival of interest in the situation of the problem within specified historical periods, that is, within well constituted phases of capitalist accumulation. In this respect the recent work that discusses the problem in terms of original accumulation must be welcomed (Melossi, 1976:26ff). At the same time we must express the hope that this analysis may be extended to the discussion of the appropriation of wealth and of crime at other periods of the class relation. The contribution of those whose starting point in the analysis of crime is the concept of "marginalization" (Crime and Social Justice Collective, 1976:1-4; Herman and Julia R. Schwendinger, 1976:7-26) leads us to an analysis of the capitalist organization and planning of labor markets, certainly an advance in comparison to those for whom capital remains de-historicized and fixed in the forms of its command. On the other hand one cannot help but note the unilateral nature of the concept, the fact that it entails an approach to the question that must accept capital's point of view without adequately reconstituting the concept with working-class determinants. One remembers that the life and works of Malcolm X and George Jackson, far from being contained within incidental, "marginal sectors," became leading international reference points for a whole cycle of struggle. The recent publication of the English translation of Marx's early writings on the criminal law and the theft of wood provides us with a propitious moment for another look at the development of Marx's thinking on the
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question of crime.3 We hope that some suggestions for placing those articles within the context of the real dynamics of capitalist accumulation may not only allow us to specify the historical determinants of class struggle in the 1840s, but-what is of far greater importance-may make a contribution to the present debate, a debate which in its abandonment of "criminology" as traditionally constituted in favor of an analysis of the political composition of the working class has more than a few similarities with Marx's own development after 1842.
II It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that it was a problem of theft
that first forced Marx to realize his ignorance of political economy, or to say that class struggle first presented itself to Marx's serious attention as a form of crime. Engels had always understood Marx to say that it was the study of the law on the theft of wood and the situation of the Moselle peasantry that led him to pass from a purely political viewpoint to the study of economics and from that to socialism (Cornu, 1958:ii, 68). Marx's own testimony is no less clear. In the 1859 preface to his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy he wrote, In 1842 - 43, as editor of the Rheinische Zeitun~ I found myself embarrassed at first when I had to take part in discussions concerning so-called material interests. The proceedings of the Rhine Diet in connection with forest thefts and the extreme sub-division of landed property; the official controversy about the condition of the Mosel peasants into which Herr von Schaper, at that time president of the Rhine Province, entered with the Rheinische Zeitung; finally, the debates on free trade and protection, gave me the first impulse to take up the study of economic questions (Marx, 1904:10).
Faced with his own and Engel's evidence, we must therefore beware of those accounts of the development of Marx's ideas that see it in the exclusive terms of either the self-liberation from the problematics of Left Hegelianism or the outcome of a political collision that his ideas had with the French Utopian and revolutionary tradition that he met during his exile in Paris. The famous trinity (French politics, German philosophy, and English political economy) of the intellectual lineages of Marx's critical analysis of the capitalist mode of production appears to include evel)'thing but the actual, material form in which class struggle first forced itself to the attention of the young radical in 1842. Our interest, however, is not to add the footnote to the intellectual biography of Marx that his ideas, too, must be considered in relation to their material setting. Our purpose is different. We wish to find out why, as it was his inadequate understanding of crime that led him to the study of political economy, Marx never again returned to the systematic analysis of crime as such. As we do this we shall also find that the mass illegal appropriation of
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forest products represented an important moment in the development of German capitalism, and that it was to the partial analysis of that moment tnat a good part of the work of some founders of German criminology was devoted. The same moment of struggle in German agrarian relations produced contradictory results among those .attempting to understand it: on the one hand, the formation of criminology, and on the other, the development of the revolutionary critique of capitalism.
III
Between 25 October and 3 November, 1842:, Marx published five articles in the Rheinische Zeitung on the debates about a law on the theft of wood that had taken place a year and a half earlier Hl the Provincial Assembly of the Rhine.4 The political background to those debates has been described several times (Cornu, 1958: ii, 72-95; Mehring, 1962:37fi). Here we need only point out that the "liberal" emperor, Frederick William IV, following his accession, attempted to make good on a forgotten promise to call a constitutional convention, by instead re-convening the provincial assemblies of the empire. Though they had little power, their opening, together with the temporarily relaxed censorship regulations, was the occasion for the spokesmen of the Rhenish commercial and industrial bourgeoisie to stretch their wings in the more liberal political atmosphere. The Rheinische Zeitung, staffed by a group of young and gifted men, was their vehicle for the first, hesitant flights against the Prussian government and the landed nobility. Characterized at first by "a vague liberal aspiration and a veneration for the Hegelian philosophy" (Treitschke, 1919:vi, ,538), the journal took a sharper tum under Marx's editing and it was his articles on the theft of wood that caused von Schaper to write the Prussian censorship minister that the journal was now characterized by the "impudent and disrespectful criticism of the existing government institutions" (Marx, 1842:747). Though containing passages of "exhilirating eloquence" (Wilson, 1940:124), the articles as a whole suffer from an uncertainty as to their central subject. Is it the appropriation of wood, legal or illegal? Is it the equity of the laws of property governing that appropriation? Or, is it the debates with their inconsistencies and thoughtlessness that took place in the assembly before the law was passed? Marx is least confident about the first subject; indeed, we learn little about the amounts and types of direct appropriation. He really warms to the second as it allows him to expound on the nature of the state and the law. On the third his chamcteristic wit and sarcasm come into full play. Despite these ambiguities, the articles as a whole are united by the theme of the contradiction between private self-interest and the public good. He objects, in particular, to nine provisions in the new law: 1. It fails to distinguish between the theft of fallen wood and that of standing timber or hewn lumber.
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2. It allows the forest warden to both apprehend wrongdoers and evaluate the stolen wood. 3. It puts the tenure of the appointment of the forest warden entirely at the will of the forest owner. 4. Violators of the law are obliged to perform forced labor on the roads of the forest owner. 5. The fines imposed on the thief are remitted to the forest owner (in addition to compensation for damaged propertyl. 6. Costs of defense incurred at trial are payable in advance. 7. In prison, the thief is restricted to a diet of bread and water. S. The receiver of stolen wood is punished to the same extent as the thief. 9. Anyone possessing wood that is suspected must prove honest title to it.
Young Marx was outraged by the crude, undisguised, self-interested provisions of punishment established by this law. He was no less indignant with its substantive expansion of the criminal sanction. His criticism of the law rested upon an a priori, idealist conception of both the law and the state. "The law," he wrote, "is the universal and authentic exponent of the rightful order of things." Its form represents "universality and necessity." When applied to the exclusive advantage of particular interests-the forest owners-then "the immortality of the law" is sacrificed and the state goes "against the nature of things." The "conflict between the interest of forest protection and the principles of law" can result only in the degradation of "the idea of the state." We stress that this criticism applied to both the substantive and the procedural sections of the law. In the latter case, "public punishment" is transformed "into private compensation." "Reform of the criminal" is attained by the "improvement of the percentage of profit" devolving on the forest owner. The attack on the substantive part of the law rests on similar arguments. "By applying the category of theft where it ought not to be applied you exonerate it." '!All the organs of the state become ears, eyes, arms, legs, and means by which the interest of the forest owner hears, sees, appraises, protects, grasps and runs." "The right of human beings gives way to the right of trees." As he stated this, Marx also had to ask, which human beings? For the first time he comes to the defense of the "poor, politically and socially propertyless" when he demands for the poor" a customary right." On what basis is the demand made? Some confusion results as Marx, only a few years away from his Berlin studies of the pandects and jurisprudence, attempts to solve the problem. First, he justifies it on the basis that the law must represent the interests of all "citizens," that is, he refers to the classical arguments of natural justice. Second, and not altogether playfully, he says that "human poverty ... deduces its right to fallen wood" from the natural fact that the forests themselves present in the contrast of strong, upright timber to the snapped twigs and wind-felled branches underneath an "antithesis between poverty and wealth." Third, in noting that the inclusion of the appropriation of fallen wood with that of live and hewn timber under
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the rubric of the criminal sanction is inconsistent with both the sixteenth century penal code and the ancient "Germanic rights" (leges barbarorum), he suggests the greater force of these feudal codes. It is true that Marx understands that these changes of law correspond, over the centuries, to changes in property relations: "all customary rights of the poor were based on the fact that certain forms of property were indeterminate in character, for they were not definitely private property, but neither were they definitely common property, being a mixture of private and public right, such as we find in all the institutions of the Middle Ages." Accumulation has in these articles no separate existence apart from the law which indeed determines it, as Marx implies when he says that it was the introduction of the Roman law that abolished "indeterminate property." Powerless to resist, as it were, the tide of a millenium of legal development, Marx seeks to defend the "customary right" by fleeing the seas of history altogether and placing his defense upon the terra firma of nature itself. There are objects "which by their elemental nature and their accidental mode of existence" must defy the unitary force of law which makes private property from "indeterminate property," and the forests are one of these objects. Appeal as he might to the "universal necessity of the rightful order of things" or to the bio-ecology of the forest, neither of these lofty tribunals could so much as delay, much less halt, the swift and sharp swath that the nobility and burgomasters in Dusseldorf were cutting through the forests of the Rhineland. Fruitless as such appeals had to be, Marx could not even understand, by the idealist terms of his argument, why it was that the rich Rhenish agriculturalists found it necessary' to pass such a law at that time, thus expanding the criminal sanction. Nor-and this was far dearer to his interests-could he analyze the historical forces that propelled the Rhenish cotters to the direct appropriation of the wood of the forests. To be sure, we know from passing remarks made in other articles of the 1842-43 period that Marx understood that the parcelling of landed property, the incidence of taxation upon the vineyards, the shortages of firewood, and the collapsing market for Moselle wines were all elements of a single situation that he could, however, only see from the partial, incomplete standpoint of natural justice.
IV When looking at these articles from the standpoint of Marx's later works, we can see that he analyzes only the contradictmy appearance of the struggle. Having no concept of class struggle or capitalist accumulation he treats the Rhenish peasantry with a democratic, egalitarian passion, but still as an object external to the actual forces of its development. Unable to apprehend the struggle as one against capitalist development, he assumes that a rea-
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soned appeal to the agrarian lords of the forest, or to their sympathetic brethren in Cologne, will find sympathetic ears. Thus real development occurs, he thought, at the level ofthe state, which only needed to be reminded of its own inherent benevolence to reverse the course of the law and of history. Precisely this viewpoint, though in an inverted form, dominated the work of the early German criminologists.5 Like the young Marx, they separated the problem of the state and crime from the class relations of accumulation. They saw crime from a unilateral, idealist viewpoint. However, for them it was less a question of state benevolence than it was of the malevolence of the working class. They sought to determine the "moral condition of the people" by the classification, tabulation, and correlation of "social phenomena." The work produced in this statistical school sought to find "laws" that determined the relative importance of different "factors" (prices, wages, extension of the franchise, etc.) that accounted for changes in the amounts and types of crime. Like the young Marx, they were unable to ask either why some forms of appropriation became crimes at specified periods and others not, or why crimes could at some times become a serious political force imposing precise obstacles to capitalist reproduction. The problem of the historical specification of class relations and in particular those as they were reflected in Marx's articles, can be solved only from the standpoint of his later work, especially the first volume of Capital. There we learn that in discussing the historical phases of the class relation it is necessary to emphasize the forms of divisions within the working class that are created by combining different modes of production within the social division of labor. This is one of the lessons of Chapter xv. The effect of the capitalist attack managed by means of the progressive subordination of living labor to machines is to extend and intensilY "backward" modes of production in all of their forms. This is one of the weapons capital enjoys in establishing a working class articulated in a form favorable to it. Another is described in Chapter xxv of Capital, a chapter that is often read as a statement of a dual labor market theory, i.e., that capital in maintaining both an active and a reseJve front in its social organization of labor power creates the mechanism for reducing the value of necessary labor. In fact, the "relative surplus population" is maintained in several different forms, forms determined precisely by the combination of different modes of production. With the reproduction of capital and the struggles against it, that combination constantly changes. The chapter begins with a difficult, apparently technical, section on the value composition of capital that reminds us that the configuration of the working class cannot be analyzed exclusively in terms of its attachments to different "sectors" or "branches" of the social division of labor. Even while accounting for divisions in the class that rest upon its relation to capitals with variant compositions, the political composition of the working class must always be studied from the additional viewpoint of its ability to use these divisions in its attack upon capital. These are divisions whose determinations are not merely the relation to the labor
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process (employed or unemployed), but divisions based upon the quantitative and qualitative form of the value of labor power. Lenin, in his analysis of the development of capitalism in Russia and, generally, in his polemics with the "legal Marxists" of the 1890s, was forced to cover much of this ground. "As for the forms of wage-labor, they are extremely diverse in a capitalist society, still everywhere enmeshed in survivals and institutions of the pre-capitalist regime" (Lenin, 1899:590). In contrast to the Narodnik economists who considered the size of the proletariat exclusively as current factory employment, Lenin was forced to remind militants that the working class must be considered only in its relation to capital and in its ability to struggle against capital, regardless of the forms in which capital organizes it within particular productive settings. From a quantitative point of view the timber and lumber workers of post-Reform Russia were next in importance only to agricultural workers. The fact that these belonged to the relative redundant population, or that they were primarily local (not migratory) workers, or that a proportion of their income did not take the form of the wage made them no less important from either the standpoint of capitalist accumulation or from that of the working-class struggle against it. Although "the lumber industry leaves all the old, patriarchal way of life practically intact, enmeshing in the worst forms of bondage the workers left to toil in the remote forest depths," Lenin was forced to include his discussion of the timber industr,Y in his section on "large-scale machine industry." He did so not on the grounds of the quantitative scale of lumber workers within the proletariat as a whole, but because the qualitative extension of such work remained a condition of large-scale industry in fuel, building, and machine supplies. Under these circumstances it was not possible to consider the two million timber workers as the tattered edges of a dying "feudalism." Forms of truck payment and extra-economic forms of bondage prevailed not as mere remnants from a pre-capitalist social formation, but as terms of exploitation guaranteeing stability to capitalist accumulation. This was made clear in the massive agrarian unrest of the years 1905 -1907 when the illicit cutting of wood was one of the most important mass actions against the landowners (Perrie, 1972:128-29). Let us return, at this point, to the development of capitalism in the Rhineland and, in sketching some elements of the class relation, see if we can throw some light upon the historical movement of which Marx's articles were a partial reflection.
v Capitalist development in Germany, at least before 1848, is usually studied at the level of circulation as the formation of a national market. In 1818,1824, and 1833, at the initiative of Prussia, a series of commercial treaties were signed creating a customs union, the Zollverein, that sought to restore the larger market that Napoleon's "continental system" had imposed. The
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treaties removed restrictions on communications and transport. They abolished internal customs, established a unified external tariff, and introduced a common system of weights and measures. "In fact," as a British specialist stated in 1840, "the Zollverein has brought the sentiment of German nationality out of the regions of hope and fancy into those of positive material interests" (Bowring, 1840:1). In 1837 and 1839 treaties with the Netherlands abolishing the octroi and other Dutch harbor and navigation duties established the Rhine as the main commercial artery of western Prussia (Henderson, 1939:129-30). Indeed, the Zollverein was only the most visible aspect of the offensive launched by German capital, providing as it did the basis for a national banking and credit market, a precondition of the revolutions in transportation of the 1830s and 1840s, and the basis of the expansion in trade that found some of its political consequences in the establishment of Chambers of Commerce, the consolidation of the German bourgeoisie, and the liberal initiatives of the young Frederick William IV. The reforms in internal and foreign commercial arrangements, together with the reforms of the Napoleonic period that created a free market in land and "emancipated" the serfs, provided the foundations not only of a national market but laid the basis within a single generation for rapid capitalist development. Older historians, if not more recent ones, clearly understood that those changes "far from bringing into being the anticipated just social order, led to new and deplorable class struggles" (Treitschke, 1919:vii, 201). The expropriation of the serfs a'nd their redeployment as wage laborers are of course logically and historically distinct moments in the history of capital. During the intermediating period the articulation of the working class within and without capitalist enterprises must present confusions to those attempting to analyze it from the framework established during other periods of working-class organization. A consideration of the working class that regards it only when it is waged or only when that wage takes an exclusively monetary form is doomed to misunderstand both capitalist accumulation and the working class struggle against it. To consider our period alone, those who find class struggle "awakened" only after the 1839 strike of gold workers at pfortsheim and the Berlin cotton weavers' and Brandenburg railway workers' strikes will not be able to understand why, for all their faults, Marx's articles on the theft of wood expressed an important moment in the dynamics of accumulation and class relations. In the following pages we can only suggest some elements of those dynamics. The recomposition of class relations in the Rhineland during the 1830s and '40s was not led, as in England at the time, by the introduction oflargescale machinery. German manufacture was nevertheless deeply affected. From the point of view of class relations, manufacturing capital was organized in two apparently opposite ways. On the one hand the changes in transportation required massive, mobile injections of labor willing to accept short-term employments. Under state direction the great railway boom of the 1830s more than quadrupled the size of the railway system. River transport also changed-steam-powered tugs replaced the long lines of horses
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pulling laden barges on the Rhine. These changes provided, as it were, the material infrastructure to the possibilities made available by the Zollverein. On the other hand, the capitalist offensive against traditional handicraft and small workshop production met setbacks that were partially the results of workers' power in the detail of the labor process or of the obstacles remaining in the traditional, often agrarian, relations that engulfed such productive sites. What Banfield, the English free-trader, wrote of the foremen of the Prussian-owned coal mines of the Ruhr applied equally well to most forms of Rhenish manufacture in the 1840s: "Their business they generally understand, but the discipline, which is the element by which time is played off against money, and which allows high wages to co-exist with large profits, does not show itself" (Banfield, 1848:55-56). Only a visitor from England with two or three generations of experience in the organization of relative surplus value, could ·have so clearly enunciated this fundamental principle of capitalist strategy. In Prussia the height of political economy stopped with the observation that the state organization of the home market could guarantee accumulation. In the silk and cotton weaving districts of Elberfeld where outwork and task payments prevailed, workers' power appeared to capital as short-weighting of finished cloth, "defective workmanship," and the purloining of materials. The handworkers of the Sieg and Ruhr (wiredrawers, nail makers, coppersmiths, etc.) prevented the transition to largescale machinery in the forge industries. Linen workers and flax farmers prevented the introduction of heckling and scutching machines. Alcoholism and coffee addiction were regarded as serious impediments to the imposition of higher levels of intensity in work. Of course, another aspect of this power to reject intensification in the labor process was a stagnation that brought with it low wages and weaknesses in resisting the prolongation of the working day which, in cotton textiles, had become sixteen hours by the 1840s. Such were the obstacles to accumulation throughout Rhenish manufacture-the Lahn valley zinc works, the sugar refineries of Cologne, the rolling mills and earthenware factories of Trier and the Saarbrucken, the fine steel trades of Solingen, as well as in coal, weaving, and forge work. These apparently opposite poles of the labor market in Rhenish manufacturing-the "light infantry," mobile, massive, and sudden, of railway construction, and the stagnant, immobile conditions of small-scale manufactUring-were in fact regulated by the rhythms of agrarian relations. The point needs to be stressed insofar as many tend to make an equivalence between agriculture and feudalism on one hand and manufactures and capitalism on the other, thus confusing a primary characteristic of the social (and political) division of labor under capitalism with the transition to capitalist dominance in the mode of production as a whole. Both the form of the wage and the labor markets of manufacture were closely articulated to agrarian relations. Remuneration for work in manufactUring was in part made either by the allotment of small garden plots or by a working year that permitted "time off" for tending such plots. Other non-monetary forms of
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compensation, whether traditional perquisites in manufacture or common rights in forests, provided at once an obstacle to capitalist freedom in the wage and, at the pivot of the capitalist relation, a nodal point capable of uniting the struggles of workers in both agrarian and manufacturing settings. This mutual accommodation between manufacturing and agriculture could sometimes present bottlenecks to accumulation, as in the Sieg vaHey, where village control over the woodlands guaranteed that timber exploitation would remain more an aspect of working class consumption than a source of industrial fuel for the metal trades. Macadamization of the roads to the foundries allowed owners to buy and transport fuels, at once releasing them from the "parsimony" of village-controlled wood supplies and providing the basis for the re-organization of the detail of the labor process (Banfield, 1846:142). Thus we can begin to see that technical changes in transportation are as much a weapon against the working class as they are adjuncts to the development of circulation in the market. The progressive parcelling of arable and forest lands in the Rhine, the low rates of agricultural growth, as well as the mixed and sometimes subsubsistence forms of compensation provided a dispersed and extensive pool for the intensive and concentrated labor requirements of the railway and metallurgical industries, and concurrently established (what was well known at the time) a form of agrarian relations wherein political stability could be managed (Palgrave, 1912: ii, 814-16; and Lengerke, 1849). The "latent" and "stagnant" reserves of proletarians were regulated, in part, by the institutions designed to control mendicity and emigration. The emigration of German peasants and handicraft workers doubled between 1820 and 1840. Between 1830 and 1840 it actually tripled as on average forty thousand German-speaking emigrants a year jammed the main ports of embarkation (Bremen and Le Havre) awaiting passage mroz, 1957:78). The areas with the most intense emigration were the forest regions of the upper Rhine (Milward and Saul, 1973:147). A lucrative business existed in Mainz for the factors who organized the shipping of the peasants of the Odenwald and the Moselle across the Atlantic to Texas and Tennessee. Pauperization records are no less indicative of active state control of the relative surplus popUlation than they are of the magnitude of the problem. Arrests for mendicity increased between 1841 and 1842 in Franconia, the Palatinate, and Lower Bavaria by 30 percent to 50 percent (Mayr, 1867:136-37. In the 1830s one in four people in Cologne were on some form of charitable or public relief (Milward and Saul, 1973:147). Emigration policies and the repression of paupers alike were organized by the state. The police of western Prussia were directed to prevent the accumulation of strangers. The infamous Frankfurt Assembly of 1848 devoted much of its work to the encouragement and regulation of emigration. What early German criminologists were to find in the inverse relation between the incidence of emigration and that of crime had already become an assumption of policy in the early 1840s. The agrarian proletariat of the Rhine was thus given four possible settings of struggle during this period: emigration,
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pauperization, the immiseration of the "dwarf economy," or the factory. Its history during that period is the forms of its refusal of the last, the least favorable terrain of struggle. Of course to many contemporaries these problems appeared to be the result of "overpopulation," whose solution might have been sought in Malthusian remedies were it not for the fact that the struggles of the Rhenish proletariat for the re-appropriation of wealth had already forced the authorities to consider them as a major problem of "crime and order." The organization of agriculture in the Hhineland during the 1830s and 1840s was characterized by the open-:field system regulated by the Gemeinde or village association on the one hand, and by the progressive parcelling (or even pulverization) of individual ownership on the other (Milward and Saul: 82). Friedrich List called it the "dwarf economy" (Ibid.). Since the time of the French occupation of the Rhine when cash payments replaced labor dues, the first historic steps were taken in the "emancipation of the peasantry." The two forms of agrarian relations were complementary: the Gemeinde tended to encourage parcelling, and thus one would be mistaken to consider the property relation of the Gemeinde opposed to the development of private property. Parcelling and the concurrent development of a free land-market in Rhenish Prussia wrought "devastation among the poorer peasantry" (Treitschke, 1919:vii, 301). The village system offarming, still widespread in the 1840s, was the "most expensive system of agriculture," according to one of its nineteenth century students. It was argued that the distance separating the individual's field from his dwelling. caused a waste of time, and that the tissue of forest and grazing rights and customs caused a dupllication of effort, constituting an impediment to "scientific" farming. Similarly, common rights in the mill were an inefficient deployment of resources and an obstacle to innovations. Side by side with the Gemeinde existed the enormous number of small allotment holders who, living at the margin of subsistence, were intensely sensitive to the slightest changes in prices for their products and to changes in interest rates at seeding or planting time. On ten million arable acres in the Rhineland, there were eleven million different parcels ofland (Cornu, 1958: ii, 78-79). As a result of the opening of the Rhineland to competition from east Prussian grain and the extension of the timber market, small allotment holders could neither live on the lower prices received for their products nor afford the higher prices required for fuel. Under this progressive erosion of their material power, a life and death struggle took place for the re-appropriation of wealth, a struggle that was endemic, highly price sensitive, and by no means restricted to timber and fuel rights. "In summer many a cow is kept sleek on purloined goods" (Banfield, 1846:157). In the spring women and children ranged through the fields along the Rhine and its tributaries, the Mosel, the Ahr, and the Lahn, cutting young thistles and nettles, digging up the roots of couch-grass, and collecting weeds and leaves of all kinds to tum them to account as winter fodder. Richer farmers planted a variety of lucerns (turnips, Swedes, wurzel), but
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they had to be ever watchful against the industrious skills of their neighbors, skills that often "degenerated into actual robbery." It must be remembered that a good meal in the 1840s consisted of potato porridge and sour milk, a meal that depended upon the keeping of a cow and on access to fodder or grazing rights that had become increasingly hard to come by. The terms of cultivation among the orchards were similar to conditions of grazing and foraging-operose work and a suspicious eye. The size of orchards was determined not by the topography of the land but by the walking powers of the gardes champetres who provided "inefficient protection against the youth or loose population of the surrounding country." At harvest time cherries, apples, pears, walnuts, and chestnuts were guarded by their owners who rested on beds of straw during evening vigils. The expansion of the field police in the 1830s did nothing to reduce the complaints of depredations. A "man of weight" in the Moselle valley provides us with this description: The disorderly habits that have such an influence in after life, it may safely be asserted have their root in the practice of sending children to watch the cattle on the (uninclosed) stubbles. Big and little meet here together. The cattle are allowed to graze for the most part on other people's lands; little bands are formed, where the older children teach the younger their bad habits. Thefts are discussed and planned, fighting follows, then come other vices. First, fruit and potatoes are stolen, and every evening at parting the wish is entertained that they may be able to meet again the next. Neither fields, gardens, nor houses are eventually spared, and with the excuse of this employment it is scarcely possible to bring the children together to frequent a summer day-school, or to attend on Sundays to the weekly explanation of the Christian doctrines (quoted in Banfield, 1846:159). We note that in these observations no fine distinction can be drawn between the struggle to retain traditional common rights against their recent expropriation and the endemic depredations that were executed without cover of that appeal to legitimacy. Nor should we expect it. In viticulture, garden, and orchard farming the transformation of the market, the fall of prices, the stringencies of credit, especially during the period of 1839-1842, intensified the immiserations of the Rhenish agrarian population which still accounted for about 73 percent of employments. Traditionally, one of the most important cushions to natural and cyclical disaster was the widespread existence of common rights in private and corporate forests. Despite the relatively high levels of population density and manufacturing development in western Prussia, the proportion of forest to arable lands was three to four, in contrast to Prussia as a whole where it was about one to two. The riches of the forests could provide not only fuel, but also forage, materials for houses, farm equipment, and food. The crisis hitting the Rhenish farming population made these riches all the more necessary to survival. At the same time, access to them was becoming progressively restricted with the inexorable expropriation of forest rights.
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The forest, one knows, had supported a complex society both within its purviews and in the neighboring terrain: woodcutters, charcoal burners, coopers, sabot makers, basket makers, joiners, tanners, potters, tile makers, blacksmiths, glass makers, lime burners--the list is limited only by the limits of the uses of wood. Particular use-rights in the traditional forest economy had a social life of their own prescribed in a "tissue of customary rights" that defy the norms and clarities of private property. All rights were governed by two principles. First, that "no Man can have any Profit or Pleasure in a Forest which tends to the Destruction thereof," in the words of a sixteenth century treatise (Manwood, 1717:2). Second, the forms of human appropriation were designed to guarantee and preserve the stability and hierarchy of class relations which guaranteed to the lord his liberty in the hunt and mastery of the chase and to the poor particular inalienable usages. Assart of the forest, rights of agistment, rights of pannage, estovers of fire, house, cart or hedge, rush, fern, gorze and sedge rights, rights to searwood, to windfalls, to dotards, rights of lops and tops-in all, the overlapping vocabulary of natural and social relations recall a forgotten world, easily romanticized by those first criticizing the simplicities of meum et tuum. Indeed such romanticism is provoked by the harshness of the opposite view that said the existence of such rights "hindered intensive sylviculture, disturbed the progress of orderly cutting, prevented natural regeneration of the forest and depleted the fertility of the forest soil" (Beske, 1938:241). Forest relations in the Rhineland had already changed considerably by the time that Karl Marx took up his angry pen in 1841. The parcelling off of large forest estates, the buying and selling of woodlands, the expropriation of forest usufructs had all well progressed by the 1840s. The movement to abolish forest rights really began with the French Revolution. The Prussian agrarian edict of 1811 removed all restrictions that encumbered the free, private exploitation of forest properties. The first forty years of the century were characterized by a secular appreciation in the value of timber relative to the value of other agrarian products. This may be attributed to the markets encouraged by the Zollverein, to the demands of railway construction, to the increasing demand for machinery (oak was still widely used), and to the burgeoning market for both individual and productive fuel consumption, itself the result in part of the expropriation of forest usufructs. Dutch shipbuilding, traditionally dependent on the wide rafts of oak brought down the Rhine, remained active. British shipbuilding relied in part on Rhenish hardwoods-oak, elm, cherry and ash-for its supply of spars, masts, yards, staves, and knees (Bowring, 1840:137). Industrial and commercial building in Cologne and the Ruhr was dependent on Rhenish timber. The discovery of the deep seams in 1838 that launched the great expansion of the Ruhr coalfields brought with it an equally sudden rise in the demand for mining timbers (Henderson, 1975:54). Timber prices rose no less in the fuel maI'ket where beech was extensively used as an industrial firing fuel, and where timber remained the main source of working-class fuel consumption despite the growing importance
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of coal. The price of beech tripled between the beginning of the century and 1841. Between 1830 and 1841 it doubled, rising in part due to the demand for railway ties (Banfield, 1846:1091. Constructional timber prices rose by 20 percent during the same period. This secular trend in forest prices and the struggle of the "peasant proletariat" against it (Noyes, 1966:231 brought about a real crisis in legitimate appropriation that required the active intervention of the state. That which exports to Belgium and Holland started, the wind and the sun completed, and hundreds of years of soil and mulch in the Rhenish broadleaf forests were destroyed in the first part of the century (U.S. Government, 1887:741. The free alienation of forest lands, their subdivision and parcelling, and the violent, unplanned clearing of the woods threatened both part of the livelihood of an entire class in the Rhineland and sound principles of sustained yield management. Without succumbing to the romanticism of the forest which seems everywhere to accompany its destruction (e.g., Chateaubriand, "forests preceded people, deserts followed them"l, we must note that on the vanguard of the movement to "preserve" the German woods was the Prussian state, anxious to socialize the capital locked up in private forest acres. For a start, the state reduced the clearing of its own forests and expanded the proportion of forests it owned relative to private, corporate and village forests. By the summer of 1841 more than one half of the Rhenish forests were Prussian owned or controlled. Under state encouragement an apparatus, independent of particular capitalists, was developed for the scientific study and management oftimber. G. L. Hartig (1764-18371, organizer of the Prussian Forest Service, and Heinrich Cotta (1763-18441, founder ofthe Forest Academy at Tharandt (the oldest such school in the worldl, pioneered the development of scientific sylviculture. Partially under their influence, the free assart and clearing of the forest was subjected to state supervision in order to prevent the further depredation of the woods. The schools established in this movement produced a forest police expert in soil rent theory, actuarial calculations, afforestation scheduling, and cutting according to age-class composition. Not until the end of the century had the Germans lost their pre-eminence in sustained yield management.s Enforcing the plans developed by these specialists in sustained yield and capital turnover against a working population increasingly ready to thwart them, stood the cadres of the police and the instruments of law. "No state organization was more hated," a Prussian sylviculturist wrote, "than the forest police" (quoted in Heske, 1938:2541. At the end ofthe 19th century the mere listing of the manuals and books of the Prussian forest police filled 61 pages in a standard bibliography (Schwappach, 18941. The law that these cadres enforced, in state and corporate and village forests, was the result of some centuries of development. Nothing could be more misleading than to regard the legislation criticized by Marx as law that with a single stroke cut through the thicket of feudal rights in order to establish the property law of the bourgeoisie. That process had been going on for a long time, at least since the forest ordinances of 1515 which, more than anything else, had
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abolished the unwritten, communal nonns of the Carolingian period. The revisions of the law which Marx criticized were modifications of the main legal instrument concerning Prussian forests, the Forestal Theft Act of 1837 (U.S. Government, 1887:53). Several other Gennan states had recently reorganized their forest police and revised their written codes. That of Baden, for example, enacted in 1833, contained 220 sections establishing rules and punishments for nearly every detail of forest appropriation. In Thuringia and Saxe-Meiningen similar codes were established. Written pennits were required for berry and mushroom gathering. Dead leaves and forest litter could be gathered for fodder only "in extreme cases of need." The topping of trees for May poles, Christmas trees, rake handles, wagon tongues, etc., was punishable by fine and prison. By the 1840s most forests of Prussia had become subject to the police and deputies of the Forstmeister of the Ministry of Interior in Berlin (Banfield, 1846:115). The moment of class relations reflected in Marx's articles was not that of the transition from feudalism to capitalism or even one whose reflection in the law marked a transition from Teutonic to Roman conceptions of property. Each of these had occurred earlier. Nevertheless, it was an important moment in class relations which is to be measured not only by its intensity, for which there is ample evidence, but also by its victories, an aspect of which must be studied in the obstacles placed upon the creation of a factory proletariat in the 1840s. The countryman had a tenacious memory. "The long vanished days when in the teeming forests anyone who wished might load his cart with wood, remained unforgotten throughout Germany" (Treitschke, 1919: vii, 302). Of course, anyone could never have loaded his cart with wood. That some could think so is testimony to the power of the movement in the 1830s and 1840s that was able to confuse the issue of lost rights with the direct appropriation regardless of its ancient legitimacy. Lenin in a similar context warned against accepting those "honeyed grandmothers' tales" of traditional "paternal" relations, a point that must be stressed even while we note that such tales have a way of becoming a force in themselves. One need not be a specialist in 19th century Gennan folklore to recognize that much of the imagination of the forester expressed hostility to the forces transfonning the forests and their societies. In these imaginary worlds the trees themselves took sides with the cotters against their oppressors. Michael the Woodman roamed the forests of the Odenwald selecting trees destined for export on which to place his mark. Such trees were fated to bring misfortune upon their ultimate users: the house built of them would bum, the ship would sink (Hughes, 1910:36). Knorr in the Black Forest played pranks on travellers. The wild Huntress in the same place gave strangers wrong directions. Particular trees were endowed with marvelous powers. A cherry whose loose boughs provided the cradle of a lost infant, a walnut that withstood the sieges of tumultuous gales, these could confer unexpected generosities upon neighboring peasants. Others exercised capricious malevolence against wayfarers, travelers or others strange to the woods. The legends and stories of the forests testified to the fact that poor
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woods-people and the peasants of the purlieus could find friends in the densest regions of the forest against the oppressions not only of princes and seigneurs but also of their more recent enemies-the tax collector, the forest police, and the apostles of scientific forest management. By the end of the 1830s the forests of the Rhineland were haunted by more effectual dangers than the evil spirits of popular imagination. Thus in 1842 a Prussian guidebook warned travelers: Keep as much as possible to the highways. Every side path, every woodway, is dangerous. Seek herbage in towns when possible, rather than in villages, and never, or only under the most urgent necessity, in lonely ale-houses, mills, wood-houses, and the like .... Shouldst thou be attacked, defend thyself manfully, where the contest is not too unequal; where that is the case, surrender thy property to save thy life (Quoted in Howitt, 1842:89-90).
The real dangers in the forests before the revolution of 1848 were not those that Michael the Woodman might effect upon wayfarers but those that a mass movement for the appropriation of forest wealth placed upon capitalist accumulation. In 1836, of a total of 207,478 prosecutions brought forward in Prussia, a full 150,000 were against wood pilfering and other forest offenses (Cornu, 1958: ii, 74; Wilson, 1940:41). In Baden in 1836 there was one conviction of woodstealing for every 6.1 inhabitants. In 1841 there was a conviction for every 4.6 inhabitants, and in 1842 one for every four (Banfield, 1846:111). So widespread was this movement that it would not be much of an exaggeration to say that German criminology cut its teeth in the tabulation of this movement. From the standpoint of later bourgeois criminology their works appear crude methodologically, and in their substance, so many trivialities. Dr. G. Mayr, for instance, one of the first academic statisticians of criminology and the Zollverein, discovered that the more difficult it is to gain a livelihood in a lawful manner, the more crimes against property will be committed. Hence property crimes will vary directly with the price of provisions and inversely with the level of wages. He discovered that wood pilfering was likely to be greater in regions where privately owned forests prevailed over corporate and communal forests (Mayr, 1867: ch, 4). W. Starke studied the theft of wood in Prussia between 1854 and 1878. He concluded that the theft of wood was greater during the winter than the summer, and greater in cold years than in warm ones (Starke, 1884:88). L. Fuld [1881] made painstaking calculations to show that in Prussia between 1862 and 1874 there was a significant positive correlation between the price of rye and the number of convictions for the theft of wood. Valentini, the director of prisons in Prussia, discovered that within the eight districts of Prussia that he studied, the amount of crimes recorded varied according to the forms of land tenure prevalent in each. He found that in the "dwarf economy" of the Rhineland, where the parcelling of land had been carried to its extremes, pauperism was highest and the pilfering of wood the greatest, though these high rates did not hold for other types of crimes" against property" (Valen-
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tini, 1869:58). However, objectionable as such work may appear to the more sophisticated calculators of crime, one must stress that it reflects in part a real social analysis of the wage, or a decisive form of income, for a large part of the western Prussian proletariat. It is just as much an indication of that struggle as the "honeyed grandmothers' tales." In fact, we could say that the development of scientific sylviculture and of positivist criminology were two sides of the same coin: one studying sustained yield and the other the endemic ("moral," as they would say) obstacles to that yield. If we take a glance forward to the revolution of 1848 a number of our problems become clarified. First, the great rural jacqueries of March that swept southwestern Germany were in part united by their common attempts to reappropriate the wealth of the forests, sometimes under the slogan calling for the recovery of lost rights and other times not. The attempts were geographically widespread and common to several juridically distinct sectors of the agrarian population-feudal tenants, day laborers, crofters and cotters alike (Droz, 1957:151-55). Second, this movement defies a rigid separation between a class of "rural peasants" and "urban workers," as the coordination and leadership of them was the responsibility of itinerant handworkers, loggers, rivermen, bargemen, teamsters, and wagoners, precisely those categories of workers with a foot both in the "country" and the "city." Furthermore, the working class that was locked within "backward" settings of manufacture and domestic industry burst out in flashes of destruction against factories and machines, a movement that paralleled the struggle against the forest police, enclosures, functionaries, tax collectors, and forest owners, a movement that in the Rhineland certainly was often united by the same personnel (Adelmann, 1969: passim). This is not the place to consider the strengths and weaknesses of the revolutionary working class of 1848 as a whole, nor do we mean to replace as its revolutionary subject the eastern textile workers or the Berlin craftsmen with the south German agrarian masses. We only wish to indicate that the relation between the "latent" and "stagnant" labor reserves to capitalist development in the Rhineland, some of whose unities we've tried to suggest, had their political analogues in 1848. The Frankfurt Assembly of 1848 found that the work of its Agriculture and Forestry Commission overlapped with that on Workers' Conditions and that the problems of repression of autonomous rural and urban movements were similar (Noyes, 1966:ch. 9 and 13). The defeat of these movements, more than anything else, paved the way for the advanced assault of German industrialization. Only after 1848 do those familiar indices of capitalist power against the working class (spindles per factory, number of steam engines employed, output of pig iron, etc.) begin to "take off." In light of that it is especially poignant to find that it was not until late into the Nazi period that the full expropriation of forest rights was completed, a time, in other words, when they had long ceased to be a principal terrain of struggle (Reske, 1938:240ff). It is a fact worth considering, nevertheless, by those who consider the final expropriation of such rights as the decisive moment in the birth of capitalism!
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VI In sketching the dynamics of the class struggle in western Prussia during the 1840s, we've tried to show that the problem of the theft of wood should be seen neither as a problem of Primary Accumulation in the expropriation of a feudal peasantry nor as a problem of an anarchic, individualized "lumpenproletariat." Instead, we've attempted to present the elements of an analysis that cast the problem in a different light. In particular, we've seen in it a struggle to maintain and increase one of the forms of value of the working class, a form that enabled it for a time to reject those terms of work and exploitation that German capital was seeking to make available in the factory. We recall that the detonators of the working-class explosion in the spring of 1848 were precisely various categories of workers, agrarian and urban, within different forms of the relative redundant population. Marginal, to be sure, from the point of view of Siemens or Krupp, but an historic mass vanguard nevertheless. Other recent examples come easily to mind. We may end by noting that the author of Cap itai, the work that is the starting point of the working-class critique of the capitalist mode of production and that provides us with the concepts for at once analyzing the forms of the divisions within the working class and the conditions for using these within the revolutionary struggle against capital, dedicated his work to a Silesian peasant, Wilhelm Wolff, "the brave, noble fighter in the vanguard of the proletariat."
Notes 1 I have found the article by Paolo Carpignano, ··U.S. Class Composition in the Sixties," Zerowork 1, December 1975, invaluable in the development of this theme. 2 One thinks here of those "deviancy specialists" influenced by Althusser (see, for example, Hirst, 1972:28-56). It may be that Marx "never developed an adequate philosophical reflection of his scientific discoveries." However, some account of those discoveries is in order, especially when by Marx's own account one of his most important contributions over the advances made by Adam Smith and David Ricardo was that of the principle of historical specification of the categories of political economy (Marx, 1867:52-54). 3 I would like to thank E.J. Hobsbawm and Margaret Mynatt at Lawrence and Wishart who kindly assisted me in making available the English translation of these articles before their publication. 4 There does exist a small literature on Marx's articles (see, for example, Cornu, 1958:ii, 72IT., and Vigouroux, 1965:222-33) but its chief interest is in the intellectual passage of Marx's thought from Kant, Rousseau and Savigny to Feuerbach and Hegel. 5 These works will be discussed in more detail below: see section V. See Fuld, 1881: Mayr, 1867: Starke, 1884: and Valentini, 1869. 6 Even at the end of the nineteenth century the Italian, French and English literature on forestry subjects presented a dearth in comparison to the German. This is the conclusion of the American sylviculturist Bernard Femow (1902:492).
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References Adelmann, Gerhard 1969 "Structural Change in the Rhenish Linen and Cotton Trades at the Outset of Industrialization," in F. Crouzel, W. H. Chaloner and W. M. Stem, Essays in European Economic History, 1789-1914. London: Arnold. Banfield, T. C. 1846 Industry on the Rhine: Agriculture. London: C. Knight 1848 Industry on the Rhine: Manufactures. London: C. Cox.
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Bowring, John 1840 "Report on the Prussian Commercial Union," Parliamentary Papers, XXI. Cornu, Auguste 1958 Ka.r/ Marx et Friedrich Engels: Leur Vie et leur oeuvre. 3 vots. Paris: Presses Universit aires de France. Crime and Social Justice Collective 1976 "The Politics of Street Crime." Crime and Social Justice, 5ISpring-Summerl, pp. 1-4. Currie, Elliott 1974 "Review: The New Criminology." Crime and Social Justice 2 (Fall-winter), pp. 109-13. Deveze, Michel 1961 La Vie de fa Foret Franc;aise au XVl e siecie. 2 vols. Paris: S.EVP.E.N. Droz, Jacques 1957 Les Revolutions Allemandes de 1848. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Endres, Max 1905 Handbuch der Forstpolitik. Berlin: J. Springer. Fernow, Bernhard E. 1902 Economics of Forestry: A Reference Book for Students of Political Economy. New York: T. W. Crowell &, Co. Fuld, L. 1881
Der Einfluss der Lebensmittelpreise auf dern Bewegung der StraJbaren Handlunger. Mainz: J. Diemer.
Hamerow, Theodore S. 1858 Restoration, Revolution, Reaction: Economics and Politics in Germany, 1815-1971. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Henderson, W. O. 1939 The Zollverein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1975 The Rise of German Industrial Power, 1834-1'914. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Heske, Franz 1938 German Forestry. New Haven: Yale University Press. Hirst, Paul Q. 1972 "Marx and Engels on law, crime and morality." Economy and Society L 1 IFebruaryi. 1973 "The Marxism of the 'New Criminology.'" The British Journal of Criminology Xlii, 4 (October). pp. 396-98. Howitt, William 1842 Rural and Domestic Life in Germany. London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans. Hughes, C. E. 1910 A Book of the Black Forest. London: Methuen
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Die Rheinische Zeitung von 1842-43 in ihrer Einstellung zur Kulturpolitik des Preussischen Staates. Munster: F. Coppenrath. Lengerke, A.v. 1849 Die Landliche Arbeiterfrage. Berlin: Bureau des Konigl. ministeriums fur landwirthschaftliche angelegenheiter. Lenin, V.1. 1899 The Development of Capitalism in Russia. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. Manwood, John 1717 Manwood's Treatise of the Forest Laws. Fourth edition, edited by William Nelson. London: B. Lintott. 1927
Marx, Karl 1842 Proceedings of the Sixth Rhine Province Assembly. Third Article. Debates on the Law of the Theft of Wood. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Collected Works, Volume 1. New York: International Publishers, 1975. 1859 A Contribution to the Critique ofPolitical Economy. Translated by N.!. Stone. Chicago: Charles Kerr, 1904. 1867 Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, Volume 1. Translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. London: George Allen &. Unwin. Mayr, G. 1867 Statistik der Gerichtlichen Polizei im Konigreiche Bayern. Munich: J. Gotteswinter &. Mosel. Mehring, Franz 1962 Karl Marx: The Story of His Life. Translated by Edward Fitzgerald. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Melossi, Dario 1976 "The Penal Question in Capita/. " Crime and Social Justice, 5 (Spring-Summerl, pp. 26-33.
Milward, Alan S., and S. B. Saul 1973 The Economic Development of Continental Europe, 1780-1870. New Jersey: Rowman and Littlefield. Noyes, P.H. 1966 Organization and Revolution: Working Class Associations in the German Revolutions of 1848-1849. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Palgrave, R. H. 1912 Dictionary of Political Economy. 3 volumes. London: Macmillan and Co. Perrie, Maureen 1972 "The Russian Peasant Movement of 1905-1907: Its Social Composition and Revolutionary Significance." Past and Present, 57 (November). Phillipson, Michael 1973 "Critical Theorising and the 'New Criminology.'" The British Journal of Criminology XIII, 4 (October), pp. 398-400. Schwappach, Adam 1894 Forstpolitik. Leipzig: C. L. Hirschfeld. Starke, W. 1884 Verbrechen and Verbecher in Preussen, 1854-1878. Berlin: T.C.F. Enslin. Stein, H. 1972 "Karl Marx et Ie pauperisme rhenan avant 1848." Jahrbuch des Kiilnischen Geschichtsvereins, XIV.
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Treitschke, H. v. 1919 A History of Germany in the Nineteenth Century. Translated by Eden and Cedar Paul. 7 volumes. New York: McBride, Nast & Co. U.S. Government 1887 Forestry in Europe: Reportsfrom the Consuls of the United States. Washington. D.C.: Government Printing Office. Valentini. H. v. 1869 Das Verbrecherthum in Preussische Staat. Leipzig. Vigouroux. Camille 1965 "Karl Marx et la legislation forestiere Rhenane de 1842." Revue d·histoire economique sociale, XLIII, pp. 222-33. Wilson. Edmund 1940 To the Finland Station. New York: Harcourt. Brace and Co.
Editor'S note Howard Zehr's quantitative study of nineteenth-century theft and violence in Europe finds that crime rates in the period Linebaugh discusses were eorrelated with the price of grain. as one would expect from Linebaugh's analysis. (Crime and the Development of Modern Society: Patterns of Criminality in Nineteenth Century Germany and France [London: Croom Helm. 1976].1 Few other studies of this relationship have been carried out for early-nineteenth-century Germany. though many studies have been carried out for other countries and times. These studies differ in both the measures of crime and the indicators of economic conditions they employ. and not surprisingly. they reach conflicting conclusions. Zehr discusses these other studies. and notes as well that in his own data the relationship between crime and economic conditions in the latter part of the nineteenth century diffel'ed from what it had been in the early part of the century.
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Goths and Vandals: Crime in History Geoffrey Pearson Reprinted from Geoffrey Pearson, "Goths and Vandals-Crime in History," Contemporary Crises 2 IApril 1978): 119-39. © Geoffrey Pearson.
Since the end of the Second World War the understanding ofthe history of the common people of England has been redrawn, even transformed. In particular, the works of Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, Raymond Williams and Edward Thompson have illuminated the critical English transition from a predominantly agricultural economy into the world's first urban and industrial nation.} It would be wrong to think of these writers as constituting a "School": their work is not marred by that kind of tedious scholastic dogmatism. It also contains within it many shifts of emphasis, and some internal inconsistencies. Nevertheless, these writers do share a common direction which is distinctly socialist. And one of their many accomplishments is that they unearth the experience of the agrarian and industrial revolutions as they were lived and felt "from below"-that is, in terms ofthe material experience of the common people, rather than "from above" in the committee chambers of high office. The particular aspect of this work which I will discuss here is its bearing on our understanding of crime. Especially the "senseless" and "irrational" crimes-hooliganism and vandalism, smashing and wrecking-which are thought to be pointless because they do not even submit to the guiding acquisitive principle of theft. Dismissed in a history "from above" as mere "social background" to the allegedly "real" historical events, which are the decisions and opinions of the mighty (judges, manufacturers, rulers etc.), crime emerges in this revitalized social history as something central to our understanding of the historical transformation into capitalism. It is also a body of work which challenges criminology to shake itself out of its ahistorical slumbers, to come to a new understanding of what crime is, an understanding which is concretely situated in real historical time.
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MACHINE-SMASHING AND THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION Come all you cotton weavers, your looms you may pull down And get employed in factories, in country or in town For your cotton masters have found out a wonderful scheme These calico goods they weave by hand, they're going to weave by steam, So, come all you cotton weavers, you must rise up very soon For you must work in factories from morning until noon You mustn't walk in your gardens for two or three hours a day For you must stand at their command, and keep your shuttles in play, (19th century weavers' ballad by John Grimshaw of Gorton)
In the winter of 1842 when young Engels came to live in Manchester-hot volcano city of the industrial revolution-he stepped into a world which had already been transformed by the machine. The cotton industry was the spearhead of the English industrial revolution and machinery had been increasingly employed there since the late eighteenth century. The introduction of the power-driven loom, which accelerated from the 1820s, had virtually displaced the handloom weaver. The factory system of labour which accompanied the mechanization of the textile industry had come to rule over and rule out the small-scale domestic economy which had previously been the dominant form of production in the small towns and valleys of Lancashire. Almost everyone who was anyone, it seems, came to Manchester in the mid-nineteenth century to maIVel at the wonders of the new industrial system-Dickens, Disraeli, de Tocqueville, Carlyle.2 But they usually went home horrified and shocked by the brutality of Manchester. Unless, that is, they were particularly thick-skinned, or blinded by the glitter of wealth which could pour out of the thundering factories. "Manchester is the chimney of the world" is how Major-General Sir Charles James Napier, appointed to command the northern district at a time of massive political disturbances in the manufacturing districts, put the matter. "But who," he added, "wants to live in a chimney?" He might also have mentioned (others did) the stinking, polluted rivers, the excrement piled high in the streets, the squalid cellar homes, or the hordes of unemployed men standing in the streets which greeted Engels' arrival during the depression of 1842. What is truly extraordinary is that the changes which produced this monstrosity-in Ancoats, a working class district, as few as 35 children out of 100 born would survive until their fifth year-can be described by historians with such calm rhetoric. In a history from above the creation of the factory system is described as the steady erosion of inefficiency by the captains of industry and their new rational methods. It is a history of progress and buoyancy. It tells of the enterprising men-Arkwright, Crompton, Peel, Hargreaves-whose inventions (mules, carding frames, spinning jennies, etc.) and whose capital were to transform the world. What a history from above does not tell is that the common people fre-
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quently attacked both the machines and their inventors, tore down and burned their mills, and drove these "great heroes" of the industrial revolution out of the locality. If a history from above does mention this opposition at all, it puts it down to ignorance. The story of this bitter resistance, the sense and meaning of riot and vandalism, is reserved for a history from below. A history, that is, which emphasizes the viewpoint of the common people and how the machine contributed to the destruction of their way of life. Attacks on machines took place from the 1760s when Hargreaves' spinning jenny was repeatedly smashed, and mills which used the jenny were turned over. According to traditional accounts, Hargreaves was chased out of the neighbourhood, and his promoter, the factory owner "Parsley" Peel, retreated from North East Lancashire in disgust, taking his capital to another area where he hoped the work force would be more sensible. Peel's mills near Blackburn and Accrington were completely destroyed, one having been already rebuilt after attacks by machine-smashers only a few years before. There were many more attacks on machines. One of the most famous periods of disturbance was during the War in Europe when from 1811 to 1813 various kinds of new machines were attacked in Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire and Lancashire. The attackers were known as the "Luddites," and they claimed leadership from a probably fictitious "General Ludd." To mention one more instance, there was a great uprising against the machine in North East Lancashire in 1826, when power-looms were destroyed in the cotton towns. Machine-smashing was not restricted to the textile industry, of course. In 1830 there was an explosion of popular discontent throughout southern and eastern England when the rural poor attacked the hated threshing machines and set fire to hay ricks. Known as the Swing Riots, these rioters attacked the machines in the name of "Captain Swing.',a Considerable dispute surrounds the question of how to interpret the activities of the machine-breakers. One dominant traditional form of argument describes these outbreaks of violence as the sporadic, unpredictable and senseless antics of the riff-raff-the mob, "fa canaille." It asks "Why does the mob riot?" And it answers: "For the fun of it," or simply "Who knows?" There is a powerful line of historical continuity between this response to the "mob" and modern accounts of hooliganism and crime as senseless.4 Another traditional line of reasoning suggests that loom-breaking, etc. was the desperate action of people pressured and frustrated by the strains of social change into wild and lawless behaviour. This historical form continues, however, to describe the mob as senseless. Its only concession is that machine-breakers are victims of forces outside their control which cause them to behave senselessly and randomly. For example, Smelser in his Parsonian sociological analYSis of the industrial revolution in Lancashire points to shifts and alternations in the organization of the economy, factory labour and family life which (he argues) released the bind of steady socializing influence and led to pathological and unsocialized behaviour, e.g.
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machine-wrecking. He describes it as "a relaxation of the most basic controls over socialized behaviour" and as "violent and bizarre symptoms of disturbance."s In both cases-whether it is the snobbish refusal to allow any meaning whatsoever to mob riot, or the paternalistic response of judging the behaviour as a pathology-the idea that "the mob" represents purposive, rational conduct is banished, out of sight, out of mind. However, these dismissive accounts inevitably fall prey to a contradiction in that while their controlling argument is that machine-breaking is irrational and pointless, it is exceedingly difficult to portray the factory system in anything other than a dark light. And it is precisely this dark aspect of the factory and its machines which guided machine-breaking and gave it its rationality. Take, as an illustration of this contradiction, some statements by the distinguished historian of the eighteenth century H. J. Plumb. His account of machine-smashing is admittedly schematic, since in the tradition of history from above Plumb is always restless when describing social conditions, anxious to get on with the "real business" of intrigue between the rulers. Nevertheless, his account is plagued with contradiction. At one point he states, for example, how the new machines in textiles "revolutionized the production of yarn and brought to the weaver an age of golden prosperity which was to last for a quarter of a centUIy."6 The statement is not so ridiculously wrongheaded as it might at first appear. The earliest phase of mechanization involved the introduction of improved spinning machinery which greatly increased the output of yarn and hence the demand for weavers-the weaving looms were as yet unmechanized. The complexities of this early period are best set out in Thompson, where he shows that, although the idea of a "golden age" is a myth which overstates the prosperity of the weavers in this period (roughly from the 1780s until the early 1800s) there was, nevertheless, a period of boom in handloom weaving? From then on, however, the condition of the weavers was steadily attacked, so that looking back the earlier period might appear as a "golden age." As Thompson expresses the matter: "The history of the weavers in the nineteenth century is haunted by the legend of better days."s But even in this earlier period of relative prosperity, cotton mills and machines had been attacked, and there is nothing to justity Plumb's rosy optimism of an overall improvement in living standards. The contradictions deepen in Plumb's account as the antagonistic encounter with the factory system progresses. The worsening conditions are inescapable-the increasing exploitation of children in the mines and factories, the erosion of the more intimate and flexible forms of production which preceded the factory, the repression of working class movements and early trade union organizations, the seven year contracts which bound men to their factory masters at risk of imprisonment, the massive increase in the number of capital statutes which could send men to the gallows for a whole number of newly defined crimes, the destruction of the makeshift economy of the poor which followed from the enclosure of the common land which
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robbed the common people of their common rights-"rights" which were often redefined as "crimes" (poaching, trespass, wood theft). Plumb mentions most, if not all, of this. He also writes that workmen "viewed with deep suspicion the barrack-like factories whose long and regular hours savoured to them of the prison."9 Under the preindustrial systems of production, men had been much more in control of the rhythms of their lives. One should not romanticize this state of affairs-as if every man had been an independent, unalienated and free man-but one should recognize, nevertheless, what was involved in the changes in production systems. Before, the factory workers had customarily observed "Saint Monday" as a day of rest, often taking Tuesday as a holiday as well, then working flat out to finish off the week's work. Factory discipline and factory time changed all that. As Plumb describes the factory: The hours of work were fourteen, fifteen, or even sixteen a day, six days a week throughout the year except for Christmas Day and Good Friday. That was the ideal timetable of the industrialists. It was rarely achieved, for the human animal broke down under the burden; and he squandered his time in palliatives-drink, lechery, bloodsports. Or he revolted, burned down the factory, or broke up the machinery, in a pointless, frenzied, industrial jacquerie .10
\Nhat is extraordinary is that Plumb, having explicitly set out the grounds for understanding the discontent of the times, continues to describe machine riots as "pointless." The same contradiction is found in other writings on this period. In Bythell's work on the handloom weavers, he writes about the 1826 power-loom smashings: "Their luddism of 1826 was a blind display of hatred against an improved machine which must be destroyed before it took away the old weavers' livelihood," and he refers earlier to these same riots as an "act of blind vandalism."n We must ask, what is blind about an action which strikes out to destroy something which threatens one's own destruction? What is expressed in these simple contradictions is that it is somehow intolerable to allow rationality to popular resistance and popular violence. It is much more comfortable to write off the machine breakers as a tiny pathological fringe of hot-heads, and to write a cosy history in which the mass of people are said to quietly bear the yoke of the new factory system. That is, as if people understood the superior rationality of the machine, and accepted the injustices which flowed from this superior rationality for the sake of "progress" and "improvement." It is in these ways that historical thought has simply followed the contours of power. Although, as we have seen, even in its language it continued to express-against the will of the author, as it were-the bitter contradictions and struggles which constituted the real history of the period. What is perhaps an even more fundamental difficulty with these accounts is that we know that within their own community the machinewreckers often had a heroic status. In striking out at the machine, they were
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striking out against their oppression within the developing system of factory labour-the relentless monotony of the pace of the machine, the relentless gaze of the factory master and overseer, the relentless tick of the factory clock. Above all, what must be remembered is that just as the human significance of time12 was changed by the new rhythms of the factory and the machine, so were many other aspects of culture. In one sense, the arrival of the machine and the factory was the first direct encounter by working people with the material experience of hard-headed utilitarian philosophy and political economy. The dominating principle of hard cash, of buying cheap and selling dear, also turned the human relations of the factOIY into commodity relations and transformed men into objects or cattle. So that when Plumb writes about the "human animal" breaking down under factory conditions, it is necessary to remember that it was precisely the logic of the new systems which reduced men from human to animal status. Language both mirrored and informed these transformations: so that the men and women who worked the machines came to be called, simply, "Hands." The word "common" also underwent a transformation, away from the sense of things "held in common" or a "commonwealth," towards a revaluation of certain (particularly plebeian) practices and customs as "common," meaning "vulgar."13 The experience of these transformations should not be underestimated. Resistance to the factory and its logic continued well up into the 1840s, and the Chartist movement in some of the Pennine cotton towns at this time carried as one of its demands that each man should receive, as a birthright, a smallholding of land-they began stakiing out Pendle Hill for just this purpose. The logic of the factory and of enclosure worked in an opposite direction. The independence of working men who had access to small patches of land was in utilitarian terms understood as dangerous and wasteful. As late as the Select Committee on Commons Enclosure of 1844 we find the assertion that the enclosure and "improvement" of the land would also bring an "improvement" in the character of the people. and that "the unenclosed commons are invariably nurseries for petty crime."!4 What is meant by this is that if they had access to land, men would tend their pigs, or their cow, instead of turning into the factory. In the Poor Law Reports of 1834, the culmination of utilitarian principle, there are attempts to calculate how big (or, rather, small) an allotment of land should be given to working men. It was agreed that a small allotment for vegetables provided a working man with an innocent and sober amusement, and also enabled him to feed his family, thus keeping down the likelihood of wage demands. But the utilitarian logic also dictated that the Poor Law Commissioners should try to calculate what size of an allotment (that is, a garden) would provide amusement and some food without causing the working man to keep away from work, or without causing him to. waste too much of his valuable body energy, his labour power, which was the rightful property of the factory owner-and not the
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man himself. There was a recognition in these Poor Law debates that food (largely potatoes) equals energy, equals improved labour power; but that digging a potato patch spends energy, and workers might find it more enjoyable to spend energy digging the earth to provide food for their family than to rise at the crack of dawn and watch over a noisy and dangerous machine for someone else's benefit!5 It was a significant moment of illumination of the nature of the contest which was involved in the advancement of the machine and the factory. It is thus in the nature of this historical transition-which involved profound changes in human values as well as a technological break-that it is utterly impossible to go along with Smelser, for example, and describe the machine-breakers as disorganized and unsocialized beings. Instead we need to ask, "Socialized according to what standards?," and in particular, "Socialized according to whose standards?" The machine-smashers were not only courageous and determined in their attacks on the machines, they were also sometimes very discriminating. In early attacks on the spinning jenny during the 1760s, for example, the rioters sometimes spared small machines which had less than twenty spindles-that is, machines which could be operated in small cottages on the established principle of the domestic economy, and which were for this reason regarded as "fair" machines. That is hardly behaviour which could be described as "bizarre," "frenzied," "irrational" or "unsocialized." The great power-loom smashing of 1826 provides other examples of these kinds of rationality.l6 The outbreak was a particularly determined one which was confined to the cotton towns around Accrington, Blackburn and the Rossendale Valley and which was eventually put down by violent Army reprisals. It is even possible that we should think of it as a general insurrection against the machines in these townsP Be that as it may, the rioters had considerable sympathy within the community. Robert Peel, eventually to become Prime Minister, a man whose fortunes were founded on cotton, found it necessary to rebuke local magistrates for not taking sharp action against the rioters-whether he was motivated as a politician, or as a man with property stakes in the towns, is not clear. The reluctance of magistrates to act decisively was not uncommon, reflecting the fact that local opposition to machinery was so widespread. For example, small masters feared and hated the new machines as much as working people. Without sufficient capital to invest in machinery, the machines threatened to kill their small businesses-a fact which could provide some unexpected alliances of sympathy between the poor and the lower echelons of the owning class. Even before the attacks on the power-looms had started, rioters had been stopped by troops-the most solid embodiment of State power. But when the troops heard the complaints of the weavers, instead of opening fire they opened their knapsacks and gave their food to the rioters. The troops then moved on and the weavers held a meeting amongst themselves to decide whether or not to continue: "Were the power-looms to be broken or not?
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Yes, it was decided, they must be broken at all costS."IS Mlen the first mill was attacked-Sykes Mill at Accrington-the first thing to go, smashed by a woman, was the tyrannical factory clock, the hated symbol of the slave rhythms of factory labour.19 By nightfall, it is said that there was not a power-loom left standing within six miles of Blackburn. The riots spread to other nearby towns and within three days more than a thousand looms had been destroyed. It can be argued that 1826 was a year of slump, and that the grievances of the handloom weavers derived from the trade cycle and not from the machine. But, although outbreaks of machine-smashing coincided frequently enough with periods of trade recession, I find the argument an unconvincing one which lends itself too easily to a crude economic determinism which ignores the cultural developments which are decisive for an understanding of machine riot. Nevertheless, it is important to recognize that different outbreaks of machine-breaking could, and did, have different motives. Quite often, for example, what was being contested was not the principle of the machine itself, but the level of wages etc. Attacks on machines provided a way of getting at an employer so as to encourage him to raise wages, improve working conditions, take on more men, or whatever. It is this kind of motive for machine-breaking which Eric Hobsbawm has described as "collective bargaining by riot," a primitive form of trade union struggle. These "primitive rebels," to use another of Hobsbawm's suggestive phrases, are said to be primitive in the sense that they had not yet found a mature political vocabulary, nor a mature political strategy, within which to phrase their discontent and direct their struggle. This line of thinking urges us to conceive of the Luddites and other machine-breakers as precursors of the mature forms of labour organization. Hobsbawm's distinctions are important if only because they caution us not to oversimplity machine-smashing, and not to think of it all as direct resistance to machinery as such. It is nevertheless a form of historical reasoning which can in its own way belittle, discredit and misconstrue the motives and actions of the machine-smashers. In claiming machine-breakers for the history of the labour movement, for example, it causes us to compare their frail outbursts with the more "mature'" forms of struggle-trade union organization, collective bargaining, the strike, the general strike-which only selVes to underline the "primitivity" of the machine-smashers. As working class consciousness emerges, it tells us, men set to one side these infantile forms of resistance to exploitation and "see the light." It is thus an inherent danger of the concept of "primitive rebellion" that it can lead us to think that the intelligibility of the machine-breakers' struggle only emerges as history unfolds; that its intelligibility is derived only from the subsequent history of the labour movement. As if the intelligibility of the machine-breakers emerges only when they are already dead-when they are dead, then we can come to see them in their "true" historical sig-
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nificance, the vanguard of an emerging proletariat. The heart of the matter, however, is that the machine-smashers were not a proletariat. On the contrary, they would as often as not be people from the countryside, with its own distinct inherited traditions. People who looked at the factories-shaking and trembling with their violent energy-and who did not like what they saw. It is an important truth that there were some people around at the time of the Luddite disturbances from 1811 to 1813 who were part of the general mood of insurrection which surrounded the period and who expressed more forward-looking political opinions. People who saw in the machines the possibility of liberating men and women from the burden of physical labour, and who could be thought of as early forerunners of a later working class consciousness.20 But they were the exception rather than the rule. Thompson, with his usual lucidity, expresses the matter thus: "For those who live through it, history is neither 'early' nor 'late.' 'Forerunners' are also inheritors of another past. Men must be judged in their own context."21 For this reason, if we are to set machine-breaking in its full context, it is necessary to tum back briefly to some of the inherited traditions of the machine-breakers' world, a world which was entering a rapid eclipse.
THE TRADITIONS OF THE "CROWD" AND "RIOT" Farmers taek nodistform This time be fore It is to let Before Christ mus Day sum of you will be as Poore as we ifyou Will not seef Cheper
This is to let you no We have stoel a Sheep, For which the resson Was be Cass you sold your Whet so dear and if you Will not loer pries of your Whet we will Com by night and set fiear to your Bams and Reecks gentleman Farm mers we be in Amest now and That you will find to your sorrow soon.
IAn onymous letter fixed to the pillory, Salisbury market
1767)22
Luddism and the other machine-breaking riots were not the first burst of a new class anger from an infant proletariat. Rather than being based on the new, emerging traditions of the men of that new class, they were more likely to be based on older traditions. Traditions, that is, which looked back to the domestic economy, to the common lands, and to former traditions of radicalism. "Riot" and "crime" had been an important feature ofthe social life of 18th century England. The "crowd," or the "mob," could take as its object the
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defence of any number of rights and customs-the fair price of food, fair access to the common lands, or smuggling, which was [sufficiently] common in England, as in most parts of Europe, to be thought of as a "right" rather than a "crime." In fact, where one drew the line in 18th century England between what was a "crime" and what was a "customary right" depended very much on one's position in the social order. For example, an activity called "wrecking" was a common occurrence in those coastal regions where ships most frequently ran aground and were wrecked.23 "Wrecking" was a form of coastal plunder in which local people would salvage what they could of wrecked ships and their cargoes for their own use, and it formed an important part of the local economy in some coastal regions. From the point of view of the local people, "wrecking" was an important, even indispensable, part oflocal life, whereas to shipping merchants it was a criminal nuisance, and merchants petitioned the government throughout the 18th century to act more severely against wreckers. As a result, an Act of 1753 made "wrecking" a crime punishable by death-although that did not halt the activity. It is a similar story in relation to a large number of other customary activities of the poor and the common people-taking hares and rabbits from fields; taking gravel and turf; taking fish from streams; collecting wood in the forests. The notorious Black Act of 1723 was one bloodstained piece of legislation, drawn up with extraordinary speed and carelessness by Walpole and his ruling clique, to contain these kinds of offences. The precipitating factors were complex, as Thompson shows in his masterly analysis of the Black Act, involving amongst other things attempts to curry favour with the new Hanoverian monarch whose deer parks at Windsor were in a state of collapse.24 Local people in that region had begun to reassert their rights in the forest, as opposed to the rights of the deer. Thompson suggests that people may have been looking back to the days of the Commonwealth when "the deer had been slaughtered wholesale, the Great Park turned over to farms, and the foresters had enlarged their 'rights' beyond previous imagining."25 Although there was nothing like an insurrection on that scale in the 1720s, the struggle between men and deter had been reengaged-to the disadvantage of the deer. These conflicts should not suggest simply strong feeling against the monarchy. Deer were a damned pest which ate and trampled on crops. Sometimes it is necessary to resurrect very specific details of the local economy in order to understand these struggles. Around Farnham, for example, timber rights were crucial. Farnham was a hop-growing area, depending on a supply of good, strong poles to support the hops, "but if deer cropped ash saplings they grew up bent and unusuable for poles."26 Men and deer were enemies: unless, that is, the men were privileged men with the right to hunt deer and eat venison. The Black Act, which was a response to these struggles, made at least fifty distinct offences punishable by death including: going about the countryside armed and in disguise with one's face "blacked" (hence the "Black Act," although the Act was obviously black in other respects too); hunting,
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wounding or stealing deer; poaching hares, rabbits or fish; damaging fishponds; cutting down or damaging trees; maiming cattle; sending anonymous threatening letters; and setting fire to houses, barns, etc. Although it was unprecedented in its venom, the Black Act was just one of many similar enactments in this period: during the 18th century there was an astronomical increase in the number of offences punishable by death.27 \Nhereas a history from above might describe this development of Law in 18th century England as the rationalization of property relations, providing a coherent system for the regulation of trade and commerce; "from below" the Law was experienced as the lash of the whip, the threat of transportation, the gallows at Tyburn, and the awful sight of the bodies of convicts swinging in chains. These were the delicate means by which the gentle rulers of Merrie England set out to terrorize the population into conformity with the steady encroachment of the new commercial values and the new property rights. \Nhat precisely did these encroachments involve? To take first the example of land, under a precapitalist arrangement, land was frequently a place where a number of coincident use-rights intersected. This man would have the right to graze cattle here; that man would have the right to take wood from there; this one would have the right to gravel or turf; that one to hares; another would have the right to timber; etc. Sometimes these rights were defined by copyhold-a legal arrangement which might have been established many years before. More commonly perhaps, they were simply honoured as customs which went back, as the people would say, "time out of mind." This messy arrangement of coincident use-rights was anathema to the emerging forms of capitalist ownership through which land was transformed into a commodity: During the eighteenth century one legal decision after another signalled that lawyers had become conveI1ed to the notions of absolute property ownership, and that ... the law abhorred the messy complexities of coincident use-right. And capitalist modes transmuted offices, rights and perquisites into round monetaIY sums, which could be bought and sold like any other property.28
This was also a period in which the great country houses and country seats of England were being built and Thompson jokes that it was not much fun for those being "sat upon." The volcanic wealth of the new commercial interests-based on stock jobbing, or on the slave trade for example-was unimaginable in a traditional agricultural economy. As these new city spivs exported their city wealth into the countryside, building luxurious mansions and parks, local farmers and yeomen were squeezed out. William Cobbett writes in his Rural Rides, for example, about Lord Aylesbury's park: he "seems to have tacked park on to park, like so many outworks of a fortified city. I suppose here are 50 to 100 farms of former days swallowed Up."29 The case was in no sense exceptional. Wealth was beginning to accumulate into lumps, and the land with it. Soon the complaint would be heard, and Cobbett would be one to voice it, that the people were also accumulating into "lumps" or "heaps" in the factories and cities.
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It is a vital historical transition surrounded by conflict amounting almost to guerrilla warfare. But often at the centre of this warfare, it was not the very poor; the poor may have had little to do with the struggles which surrounded the Black Act, for example. It was the middle men-the small farmers and yeomen farmers-who often had most to lose, who were at the centre of the disturbances which surround the Black Act, and who were the "Blacks" who visited the houses and parks of the new rich, who ripped down their fences and attacked their deer: We appear to glimpse a declining gentry and yeoman class confronted by incomers with great command of money and of influence, and with a ruthlessness in the use of both ... [Their] families must have had a rich and tenacious tradition of memories as to rights and customs ... [But] these farmers had no money from sinecures or killings on the stocks with which to manure their lands, and they remained stationalY or declining, with a traditional economy, while the new rich moved in all aI'Ound.3o
Although in this instance the poor may have been marginal to the disturbances (and even so they were drawn into the conflicts, and labourers figure strongly in the prosecutions brought undelr the Black Act) there were other areas of resistance where the poor occupied the hot centre. One such form of resistance was the food riot, a persistent interruption in the history of 18th century England. Thompson has shm\TI how the 18th century food riot was no random, hit or miss affair, but an activity tuned to a precise "moral economy."31 Precapitalist relations between producers and consumers on the local markets had been hedged about with many regulations and customs which safeguarded the tangible rights of the common people and the poor. For example, corn could not be sold standing in the field to a large buyer; nor was it proper form for farmers to withhold their corn in the hope of rising prices. Corn had to be transported to the local market, and there large buyers were required to delay their deals until common people had made their small purchases. Market bells signalled the restricted period in which the poor could buy first, and weights and measures were also supervised. Most of this regulation of the market was based on custom or common law, although it was sometimes regulated by Statute. For example, "an enactment of Charles II had even given the poor the right to shake the measure, so valuable was the poor man's corn that a looseness in the measure might make the difference to him of a day without a loaf."32 The regulations were, naturally, constantly evaded and ignored: it is the "natural" privilege of ruling groups to break their own rules without these infractions being called "crimes" and punished with severity. Although, to press the point further, these were not "their own" rules: they were the rules of an older, dying precapitalist formation which the new men, giddy with the prospect of wealth which the new capitalist values promised, had no interest in enforcing. The temptations to break the market customs were many: particularly with the growing demand from the cities and large towns, such as hungry London. Selling in bulk to a large dealer, seIling corn
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as it stood in the field, or hoarding corn in anticipation of a better pricethese were also more "rational" market principles which maximized the possibilities of gain for the farmer's labour and investment. However, another "rational" and "natural" consequence of these rational and natural developments was that the poor did not see eye to eye with the farmers and millers. In times of scarcity, or when prices rose dramatically, "riot" was a common means of restoring the old regulations. These riots were sometimes highly disciplined affairs in which the people attempted to intimidate farmers into selling at a fair price. Commonly enough, the "crowd" engaged in direct action, taking the corn from the farmers by force and distributing it amongst themselves at a fair price (known as "setting the price," similar to the French "t8}(8.tion populaire") whereupon the money, and in some instances even the sacks, were handed over to the farmer as his rightful due. "Riot," then, was a well established form of resistance in the 18th century. And, as often as not, simply the threat of riot would be enough to remind magistrates of their obligations to enforce the old customs. Preachers might urge the poor that prayer was the most effective means of surviving food shortages or price rises, but as Thompson remarks, "The nature of gentlefolks being what it is, a thundering good riot in the next parish was more likely to oil the wheels of charity than the sight of Jack Anvil on his knees in church."33 Thus, riot or the threat of it formed part of the irregular democracy of the countryside. In his essay "The Crime of Anonymity" Thompson34 argues that anonymous threatening letters provided a means of dialogue between the "crowd" and the millers, farmers and magistrates. Peter Linebaugh35 shows, for example, how often a poor man sent to the gallows by a man of means would threaten to haunt his persecutor. The threat seems laughable by modern standards. But it worked often enough to make sense, and the rich man would call off (or buy off) the long arm of the law in order to avoid being troubled by bad spirits, or a bad conscience. At other times the threats were more blood-curdling, "This will all com true ... kill the over Seeer .. . tom Nottage is a dam Rouge ... kill him for one there is 4 more we will kill .. . sink your Flour to 2 and 6 a peck set fier tu it and burn it down. Burn up all the Mills ... Burn up all ever thing an set fier tu the Gurnray."36 The threats were nothing if not extravagant, and sometimes they even came in rhyme. The continuity of the tradition can be measured by the fact that during riots against the spinning jenny in Lancashire in the 1760s there were threats to pull down whole towns. It was unlikely that anyone would believe such enormous threats but that was the genre. A claim that an army of men was sworn in and ready to fight and kill and maim was a warning shot from the "crowd" which worked often enough to coerce the local authorities into subsidizing food prices on a local basis, or into enforcing other common rights ... at least for a time. However, as far as these forms of popular resistance were concerned, their time was up. So was the time of the forms of social organization from
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which this resistance claimed its legitimacy. If we once more take the arrival of Engels in Manchester as a datemark, both were by then as good as dead. Population changes spell out the scale of the social changes. In 1773 Manchester had been a town of 24,000 people. In 1801 its population had risen to 70,000; by 1831 the figure was 140,000 with almost a 45 percent increase in the decade from 1821 to 1831. And so it went on. In 1841 there were 217,000 people in Manchester; and by 1851-the landmark year when the census revealed that now more than half the population of Great Britain were city dwellers-Manchester's population was a quarter of a million.37 If one takes the whole of the surrounding urban conurbation of Manchester, then the figure is close to half a million people living together in one large "lump." Even more had changed than just the scale of things. Most importantly there had been the emergence of Chart ism demanding a People's Charter involving electoral reform based on universal manhood suffrage which signalled a new kind of consciousness within the working class. The summer of 1842 had also seen a massive industrial and political upheaval throughout the cotton manufacturing districts of Lancashire, with 50,000 workers on strike in Manchester alone. These were the "Plug Riots," so named because striking workers marched into factories and removed the plugs from their boilers and furnaces, thus stopping the factory and enforcing the strike. After considerable political disagreement within their ranks, the Chartist leaders came behind the strike which moved towards a critical political confrontation, demanding the Charter as the condition for returning to work. The Plug Riots strike was a total failure, involving arrests on a wide scale. When Engels stepped into this transformed world, he was stepping into a world where not only was it reported in some of the industrial towns that "numbers kept themselves alive by collecting nettles and boiling them down,"38 but also 1,500 labour leaders were in prison. The men associated with Chartism and the Plug Riots were different kinds of men with different demands from those who had broken machines. For better or worse, many of them had come to accept the factory, and to resituate their politics accordingly. That is to state the transition too abruptly, however, for as I described earlier, in the smaller outlying cotton towns the Chartists still harked back to the "preindustrial" demand that each man should have a smallholding of land. Perhaps the Plug Riots and the time of Engels' arrival stand as a bridge between two traditions: those of the dying crafts and attitudes of preindustrial England, and the emerging de-skilled factory workers. The political heritage with which Engels came to be associated, of course, turned its back on the old traditions, and embraced the new. This is entirely understandable: to do otherwise at that historical conjuncture would in all probability have meant political suicide. Nevertheless, given the nature of what had been involved, we can perhaps only maIVel at the remarkable insensitivity of that well-worn phrase from the Communist Manifesto which celebrated the new system as something which "has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life."
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That, to put the matter bluntly, is not how the machine-breakers would have judged the matter.
THE LAST WORD
... a place called Manchester, which has now disappeared (William Morris, News from Nowhere, 1890)39 The theme of this essay has been historical, and I have argued that the hooligan behaviour of the machine-breakers is intelligible and rational if one listens to their experience in their own terms-that is "from below." However, the direction of the essay hopefully carries some implications for the criminological and sociological study ot contemporary hooliganism-for example, vandalism, fights between rival gangs of youths, attacks on migrant workers, street crime and mugging, and the powerful ritual violence of football hooliganism. In our historical time we have become all too familiar with the ways in which this trouble, particularly amongst young working class men and boys, is shrugged off as utterly irrational, and is portrayed in the mass media as a series of senseless and mindless spectacles. Although the pace of the mass media has quickened the pulse of these "moral panics"40 which surround the violent antics of youth, it is true that the machinebreakers were understood in their historical time in much the same way as the hooligans are dismissed in our historical time. There is consequently an urgent requirement on the part of criminologists to ask themselves: How would" our" hooligans appear if they were afforded the same possibilities of rationality and intelligibility, say, as those of Edward Thompson? A number of directions have already been pointed OUt.41 Elsewhere in one almost certainly too simple an attempt, I have offered a comparative historical account of outbreaks of machine-breaking and hooliganism in the 1960s when migrant workers were attacked by youths in the same Lancashire cotton townS.42 In the postwar period the British cotton industry entered a rapid decline, involving profound dislocations in the working class life of the cotton towns. Migrant workers-principally from India and Pakistan-were employed in increasing numbers in the textile industry in order to facilitate the technological changeover to more intensive forms of shift-working which were introduced to fight off competition from foreign cotton imports. Ironically, these low-cost cotton imports often came from the same countries as the low-cost migrant labour. Intense conflicts and rivalries emerged between local people and the migrant workers over housing, jobs and-as far as young working class men were concerned-girls. The phenomenon of "paki-bashing" as it was called, which was condemned on all sides as an irrational hooliganism, emerges as a rational (if primitive) form of resistance to the dislocations within the cotton towns when it is set in its social and historical context. "From below" the migrant workers appeared to be the cause of much of the distress in the cotton towns in the
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late 1950s and 1960s; just as the machines appeared as the enemy of working people in the earlier historical dislocation of the industrial revolution. I have argued that it is much more useful tOi think of "paki-bashers" in these terms, rather than to conjure with such dubious criminological ephemera as "criminal psychopath" or "chromosome defect" or "unsocialized youth" who are allegedly the products of "broken homes." It is necessary, in other words, to reconnect the fractured political and historical contexts of criminology where it is customary to make an unnecessarily severe distinction between "crime" on the one hand and "politics" on the other.43 In attempting such an enquiry into the motives of contemporary hooliganisms, the Criminologist must confront deeply embedded cultural bans which deny any intelligibility to hooligan conduct, a profound line of historical continuity between our own historical time and the apparently remote historical conjuncture of the machine-smashers. In their day also, the powerful ruling elites of landowners and factory owners afforded supreme rationality to their own actions, and were blind to any others. Who could object to the building of the rational factory? Who could object to the dissemination of the rational machine? Who could object to the rational enclosure and improvement of the land? Indeed, when great men built their great country houses, sometimes tearing down whole villages simply in order to improve the view, who could object? And the answer bounced back: only rogues, vagabonds, men tainted with criminal folly, hooligans and vandals. In what must figure as one of the earliest uses of the word "vandal" to shrug off the implications of working class hooliganism, the Manchester Mercury in 1812 compared a huge crowd who attacked a cotton mill, involving loss of life on their part, with "the very Goths and Vandals of antiquity." It is no longer customary to drag the Goths into the act, but this early use of the term vandal, a word which has now become wholly transformed, carried with it a powerful imagery of barbarian hordes breaking into the precincts of civilization. In that sense, nothing much has changed. When faced with the sometimes desperate energies of young hooligans-and many of the machine-breakers were also young-mainstream criminology, and the culture which throws it up, becomes self-satisfied and witless. The historical fate of the machine-breakers is an unhappy one. History, it is always said, is written by the side which wins. The machine civilization has proved the machine-breakers wrong and won the day. But, the historical clock has a long spring and, to my own satisfaction at least, the historical fate of the machine-breakers has not yet been finally settled. We may have yet to see the last of the machine-breakers. As the industrial world moves towards the historical possibility of a damaging ecological crisis, the machines could come to be understood once more as the enemy of human society. If the prophets of ecological imbalance and collapse are even remotely correct, then the day will come when men and women will attack the machines again. They will, of course, be condemned by public authorities as "mindless hooligans," enemies of civilized progress~just as the
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Luddites and the others were condemned in their time. Their motives will be certainly different from those of the power-loom breakers and the men who wrecked the spinning jennies. Nevertheless, their actions will be equally intelligible. It may even come to pass-when our culture and its preoccupations are as dead and as unthinkable as the Luddites sometimes seem in our time-that the machine-breakers will have the last word.
Notes 1 J am not drawing here on all the work of these authors. The most relevant writings are Thompson. E. P. (19671. "Time. Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism." Past and Present 38. pp. 56-97; Thompson. E. P. (1968). The Making of the English Working Class. Harmondsworth: Penguin; Thompson. E. P. (1971). "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century." Past and Present 50. pp. 76-136; Thompson. E. P. (1975), Whigs and Hunters. London: Allen Lane; Thompson. E. P. (1975). "The Crime of Anonymity" in D. Hay et a1 .• Albion's Fatal Tree. London: Allen Lane; Hobsbawm. E. J. (1964), Labouring Men. London: Weidenfield and Nicolson; Hobsbawm. E.J. (1969). Industry and Empire. Harmondsworth: Penguin; Hobsbawm. E.J. (1971), Primitive Rebels 3rd Edition. Manchester: Manchester University Press; Hobsbawm. E.J. (1972). Bandits. Harmondsworth: Penguin; Hobsbawm, E. J. and Rude. G. (1973). Captain Swing. Harmondsworth: Penguin; Hill. C. (1975), World Vpside Down. Harmondsworth: Penguin; Williams. R. (1961). Culture and Society 1780-1950. Harmondsworth: Penguin; Williams. R. (1973). The Country and the City. London: Chatto and Windus; Williams. R. (1976), Keywords. London: Fontana. My text and argument relies so heavily on these works that I have not made cumbersome footnotes and references at every point, except in the case of direct quotations. Another crucially important historical work on the early industrial period is Foster. J. (1974). Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution. London: Weidenfield and Nicolson. Finally. although some of their interpretations are now disputed (see Note 17) the list would not be complete without mention of the classical and unprecedented labour history of the Hammonds. in particular Hammond. J. L. and Hammond. B. (1919). The Skilled Labourer 1760-1832. London: Longmans, Green. and Co. 2 For a useful account of how Manchester appeard to these distinguished visitors. see Marcus, S. (19741. Engels, Manchester and the Working Class. London: Weidenfield and Nicolson. in the chapter entitled "The Town." 3 See Hobsbawm. E.J. and Rude. G. (1973). op. cit. 4 See Pearson, G. (1975), The Deviant Imagination. London: Macmillan. ch. 6. 5 Smelser. N.J. (19591. Social Change in the Industrial Revolution. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. pp. 227. 246. 6 Plumb. H. J. (1950), England in the Eighteenth Century. Harmondsworth: Penguin. p. 79. 7 Thompson. E. P. (1968). op. cit .• ch. 9. 8 Ibid .• p. 297. 9 Plumb. H. J. (1950). op. cit.. p. 89. 10 Ibid., p. 150. 11 Bythell, D. (1969). The Handloom Weavers. Cambridge: University Press, pp. 198, 199. 12 See Thompson, E. P. (1967), op. cit. 13 Williams, R. (1976). op. cit .• pp. 61-62. 14 Report ofSelect Committee on Commons Inclosure (1844). vol. 5. London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, p. 364.
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15 The Poor Law Report on 1834, edited by Checkland, S. G. and Checkland, E.OAI19741. Harmondsworth: Penguin. For example: "The allotment of larger portions of land than ten rods to an individual, has this evil-if the labourer cultivates it himself with only the aid of his family, he over-forces his strength, and brings to his employer's labour a body exhausted by his struggle," ibid., p. 280. "Nor is this the only e\~1 of the large allotments; a hovel perhaps is erected on the land, and marriage and children follow. In a few years more, the new generation will want land, and demand will follow demand, until a cottier population similar to that of Ireland is spread over the country, and misery and pauperism are every where increased," ibid., p. 280. And again: "A farmer of the parish of Guildsfield, in Montgomeryshire, stated that a labourer could not do justice to his master and the land if he had more than half an acre .... He added that if he wanted a labourer, and two men, equally strong and equally skillful, were to apply, one of whom had a quarter of an acre, and the other one or two acres of land, he should without hesitation prefer the former," ibid., p. 282. 16 1826 was a bad year for utilitarianism. In the same year that the textile workers were rebelling against the material embodiment of utilitarian diSCipline and philosophy, John Stuart Mill at the age of twenty went mad. In his psychic revolt against the utilitarian discipline of his father's educational system, Mill experienced himself as a machine with all feeling drained away from him. See Mill, J. S. (19711. Autobiography. London: Oxford University Press, ch. 5 .... We can only guess at what untold madnesses were produced in the minds of common people by the new forms of [factory) discipline. John Stuart Mill's case demonstrates that even the mighty were not exempt from the ill-effects of the emergent petrifYing life forms. 17 It is difficult in relation to this and other outbreaks of machine-smashing to fully undel'stand the level of organization of the rioters. It is possible, for example, that the Luddite outbreaks of 1811 to 1813 moved in the direction of an organization for a national uprising of the English people. The case is most forCibly argued in Thompson (19681, op. cit., ch. 14 and passim. One major difficulty is that men who are plotting insun'ection leave few traces, especially at a time when labour organizations are legally repressed as they were at the time in England. Most of the evidence for conspiracy, consequently, comes from government spies, informers and agents provocateurs; and it is sometimes argued that spies exaggerated the conspiracies in order to impress their paymasters. This is the line of argument in Hammond J. L. and Hammond B. (19191, op. cit., where the idea of an insurrectionary current is dismissed as the product of spies with lurid imaginations. Thompson answers most of these points coherently and, if he is right, then the Luddite disturbances must certainly be placed in a much broader context of revolutionary agitation than is customaJY. The case is not settled to everyone's satisfaction, however. Compare, for example, Thomis, M.1. 119701, The Luddites. Newton Abbott: David and Charles, who argues, although somewhat unconvincingly, against Thompson. There is a discussion of this conflict in Donnelly, F. K. (19761. "Ideology and Early English Working Class Histol)': Edward Thompson and His Critics," Social History, 2, pp. 219-38. As far as the 1826 outbreak is concerned, even less is known. Traditional accounts describe a "mob" travelling from town to town, wrecking looms and mills. If so, it would have had to be a particularly energetic mob. Imagine the energies of Samson which would have been required to destroy more than a thousand looms and several whole mills in just three days, to have successfully evaded troops throughout this period, and all this involving journeys between towns across rough moorland and hills carrying the equipment necessary for loom-breaking. The whole idea is most unlikely. What is at least equally likely is that the insurrection against the power-looms had been planned beforehand; there had certainly been rumours in the air for a few weeks before the first attack took place. For example, a week before the insurrection proper, a country calico weaver recorded in his diary: "There is a great disturbance at Acclington; they break the windows where the steam looms are; the country is all of an uproar for the poor weaver has neither work nor bread," quoted in Bennett, W. (19481. The History of Burnley 1650-1850.
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Burnley: Burnley Corporation, appendix. A third possibility is that it was a fairly spontaneous affair in which people from one town heard that the mills had been attacked in neighbouring towns, thought that it sounded like a good idea, and decided to have a go themselves. What is certain is that the public authorities did not treat the matter lightly. Accounts vary, but seveJ"a1 dozen people were charged, about three dozen were imprisoned, and ten men and women were sentenced to hanging, their sentences later commuted to transportation for life. As a response to the riots, turnpike roads were built in the area for easier troop movements, garrisons and prisons were built, and in one instance a factory was defended by cannon and a moat. Whatever the final outcome to the puzzle tif there is a final outcome) the recent research by John Foster 11974), op. cit., on working class organization in the cotton belt reminds us that we should not underestimate the level or strength of the English working class in the early 19th century. 18 Quoted in Aspin, C. 11969). Lancashire, the First Industrial Society. Helmshore: Helmshore Local History Society, p. 48. 19 Hargeaves, B. 11882). Recollections of Broad Oak. Accrington: Bowker. 20 See, for example, the letter quoted by Thompson 11968), op. cit., pp. 653-54: "We know that every machine for the abridgement of human labour is a blessing to the great family of which we are a part." The letter was written in May, 1812 at the point when Thompson suggests that Luddism was giving way to revolutionary organization. It was signed "Tom Paine." 21 Ibid., p. 648. 22 From Thompson, "The Crime of Anonymity" in Hay et at. 11975), op. cit., p. 281. 23 For "wrecking," see Rule, J. G. 11975). "Wrecking and Coastal Plunder" in Hay et al., op. cit. For smuggling, see Winslow, C. 11975). "Sussex Smugglers" in Hay et al., ibid. And for smuggling in France, Hufton, O. H. 11974). The Poor ofEighteenth Century France. London: Oxford University Press. 24 Thompson 11975), op. cit., is an extended analysis of the Black Act. There is also a discussion of poaching and the game laws in Hay, D. 11975). "Poaching and the Game Laws on Cannock Chase" in Hay et aI., op. cit. The criminalization of the rights of the poor is, of course, reminiscent of Marx's early essay on the debates ofthe Rhenish Assembly concerning the theft of wood: Marx, K. 11975), "Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood," Mal7' and Engels Collected Works, vol. 1. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Marx also promised articles on poaching and the game laws which never appeared. For the relationship between Thompson's work and Marx, see Pearson, G. 11976). "Eighteenth Century English Criminal Law," British Journal of Law and Society, 3:1, pp. 115-31. For Marx and the question of wood theft as it relates to the situation in Germany, setting the matter in the context of political economy, see Linebaugh, P. 119761. "Karl Marx, the Theft of Wood, and Working Class Composition," Crime and Social Justice, Fall-Winter 1976, pp. 5-16. 25 Thompson 11975), Whigs and Hunters, op. cit., p. 40. 26 Ibid., p. 131. 27 However, the actual number of convictions did not rise correspondingly and capital sentences were frequently commuted. For a brilliant analysis of how the ·'rule of law" in 18th century England operated through a blend of terror and mercy, see Douglas Hay's essay, "Property, Authority and the Rule of Law," in Hay et al. (19751, op. cit. There are some ambiguities in Thompson's treatment of the rule oflaw in Whigs and Hunters, op. cit., for which see Pearson 11976), op. cit. 28 Thompson 11975). Whigs and Hunters, op. cit., p. 241. 29 Cobbett, W. 11912). Rural Rides, vol. 1. London: Dent, p. 17. 30 Thompson 119751. Whigs and Hunters, op. cit., pp. 108, 113, 114. 31 In Thompson 11971), op. cit., and Thompson 119681, op. cit., ch. 3.
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32 Thompson 11971), op. cit., p. 102. 33 Ibid., p. 126. 34 In Hay et al. 11975)' op. cit. 35 Linebaugh, P. 11975), "The Tyburn Riot Against the Surgeons" in Hay et aI., op. cit. 36 Thompson 11975), "The Crime of Anonymity" in Hay et al., op. cit., p. 330. 37 Marcus 11974), op. cit., p. 4. What is usually not noted about the 1826 power-loom smashings is that they took place in small, outlying towns which in many essential respects had not yet been drastically changed by the industrial revolution. Towns whose own population explosion belonged to the later period of Victorian buoyancy from the 1850s until the end of the century. Therefore, the rioters were in many ways still "country people." But they were, crucially, country people who lived only twenty miles away from Manchester which was passing through a period of growth more explosive and catastrophic than anything to be witnessed by Engels. The experience of watching, from the sleepy hollows of the Pennine towns, while Manchester-its steam-driven factories, its chimneys, and its slums-grew at such an alarming rate, provides an important inferential clue for reconstructing the motives of the great power-loom smashing of 1826. Significantly, the riots had few repercussions in the much more developed centres of popUlation and industrialization, and although there was a brief period of excitement in some parts of Manchester when power-looms and mills were attacked, the trouble was easily contained. ISee Hammond and Hammond [1919], op. cit., pp. 127-28.1 The origins of the 1826 riots in the small towns, as opposed to the city, reminds us once again that a simple economic determinism which puts the riots down to "slump" provides an insufficient argument. 38 Fay, C. R. 11920). Life and Labour in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 178. 39 Morris, W. 11973). Three Works. London: Lawrence and Wishart, p. 295. 40 Cohen, S. 11973), Folk Devils and Moral Panics. London: Paladin. 41 In particular, ibid.; Parker, H.J. 11974), View from tile Boys. Newton Abbott: David and Charles; Mungham, G. and Pearson, G., eds. 11976.1. Working Class Youth Culture. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Hall, S. and Jefferson, T., eds. 11976), Resistance Through Rituals. London: Hutchinson; and Taylor, I. 11971). "Soccer Consciousness and Soccer Hooliganism" in Cohen, S., ed.,lmages of Deviance. Harmondsworth: Penguin. For the role of the mass media in generating concern on the hooligan question, see Cohen 11973), op. cit., on the "Mods and Rockers" disturbances of the mid 1960s; and Hall, S. et aI., eds. 11978). Policing the Crisis. London: Macmillan, on the mugging panic of the early 1970s. For an account of the main lines of critical sociology's approach to hooliganism, see Pearson, G. 11976). "In Defence of Hooliganism: Social Theory and Violence" in Department of Health and Social Security, Violence, ed. N. Tutt. London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office. 42 Pearson, G.11976). "Paki-bashing in a North East Lancashire Cotton Town: A Case Study and Its History" in Mungham and Pearson, eds., op. cill. 43 For example, Horowitz, I. L. and Liebowitz, M. 11968). "Social Deviance and Political Marginality: Notes Towards a Redefinition of the Relation Between Sociology and Politics," Social Problems 15:3, pp. 280-96.
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Hunting, Fishing, and Foraging: Common Rights and Class Relations in the Postbellum South Steven Hahn Reprinted by pennission from Radical History Review 26119821: 37-64.
When the Beech Island Farmers' Club, a planter organization in Aiken, South Carolina, met in January 1875, it passed resolutions instructing members to "prosecute all trespassers and violators of the game laws" and prohibit "tenants and laborers" from keeping "stock of any kind on any enclosed or unenclo,.ed land" not "specifically allotted to" them. The club further implored that livestock "trespassing beyond [the] alloted land be impounded" at the laborer's expense "for the first offense and ... forfeited or destroyed" for the second and urged "the adoption and enforcement" of these "conditions by all persons in our community." Three years later the club overwhelmingly supported the enactment of a general stock law that would require the enclosure of animals rather than crops.! Trespassers, enclosures, stock and game laws-the stuff of local skirmishes often obscured by the broader and imposing events of the postbellum era. But in an agricultural society the grid of use rights in the land underlies basic social relationships, and in the turbulent aftermath of the Civil War, skirmishes over such rights helped define the larger meaning of the sectional reconciliation. The Aiken planters and their counterparts throughout the South knew this well enough. Reeling from the twin jolts of military defeat and abolition, though having avoided general land confiscation, they moved to reclaim the labor of ex-slaves who hoped to farm for themselves or, at least, to escape the rigors of plantation life. 2 In the South, as in other postemancipation societies, the fists of coercion and repression came down in efforts to restrict the fi'eedmen's mobility, alternative employment opportunities, and access to the means of production and subsistence, tying them to the land as a propertyless work force. 3 Thus, the all-too-familiar black codes, vagrancy laws, enticement statutes, apprenticeship arrangements, and vigilante
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violence. Yet the appeal for a toughened stance against trespassers, and particularly the agitation for game and stock laws, suggests that the strong arm of compulsion did not easily hold sway, that confrontations and competing claims went into the making of new class relations in the South. And it was a process that soon extended beyond the Plantation Belt, setting the stage for wide-ranging social and political conflict. It is the very breadth of these struggles that compels our attention. For if the high drama-not to mention the historiography-of the Southern transition from slavery focused upon the reorganization of the plantation sector, the repercussions touched all corners of the region.4 Any overall assessment of the nature of this transition must, therefore, link the experiences of planters and Afro-Americiills with those of other social groups, most notably white family farmers. Although the majority of these farmers had owned no slaves and resided in nonplantation areas, the postwar period saw growing numbers drawn into the cotton economy, eventually leaving the South with an unprecedented level of economic integration.5 The connections between Emancipation and the absorption of white yeomen into the market have not been examined fully, but of central importance was the transformation of productive relations. Here, the issue of use rights, of common access to unenclosed land-embodied in the movement for game and stock laws-resonated with a special intensity.6 \Nhat follows, then, is a preliminary exploration of mounting contentions over common rights and their role in the reshaping of Southern class relations. It will raise many more questions than it will answer, partly because the subject has received scant attention and partly because the subject demands highly localized research? \Nhile state assemblies ratified enabling legislation, counties, militia districts, and, at times, individual plantations became the theaters of activity and strife. Enough information is readily available, however, to make for a promising venture, and the obvious comparative implications make the venture all the more intriguing.8
Fee-simple landownership prevailed in the antebellum South. Real property, unencumbered by primogeniture, entail, or other formal obligations, could be bought and sold at will, its purchaser entitled to full possession.9 But from earliest settlement, custom and law circumscribed exclusivity and widened use rights. Unimproved, and thus unenclosed, land, which constituted most of the acreage on Southern farms, won sanction as common property for hunting, fishing, and grazing. "Though it is the broad common law maxim, 'that everything upon a man's land is his own'
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... and he can shut it out from his neighbor without any wrong to him," wealthy South Carolina planter William Elliott grumbled in 1859, "yet custom, with us, forfeited by certain decisions of the court, has gone far to qualify and set limits to the maxim."lO While Elliott, an avid sportsman, disapproved of customary practices, he left little doubt that his sentiments ran against the grain of public opinion. "The right to hunt wild animals is held by the great body of the people, whether landholders or otherwise, as one of their franchises," he obselVed, bemoaning that the land one acquired must be enclosed or it was one's "neighbors' or anybody's." A court case, which Elliott disdainfully recounted, attested further to the nature and tenacity of popular attitudes on hunting rights. An action for trespass, growing out of the conflicting claims of hunter and landholder, came to trial in South Carolina. One of the hunters, himself a landowner, took the stand and was asked by the prosecuting attorney, "Would you pursue a deer if he entered your neighbor's enclosure?" HUNTER:
Certainly.
COUNSEL:
What if his fields were planted, and his cotton growing or his grain ripe?
HUNTER:
It would make no difference; I should follow my dogs where they
JUDGE:
And pull down your neighbor's fence, and trample on his fields?
HUNTER:
I should do it-though I might regret to injure him!
JUDGE:
You would commit a trespass; you would be mulcted in damages. There is no law for such an act!
HUNTER:
It is hunter's law, however!
might.
"And hunter's law is likely somewhat longer to be the governing law of the case in this section of the country," Elliott groaned, "for the prejudices of the people are strong against any exclusive property in game."ll Elliott and like-minded planters feared that unregulated common rights would lead to a depletion in the supply of game and, thereby, threaten one of their favorite sports. Hunting, with its occasional pageantry and ostentatious display, reinforced the cultural prestige of the master class.12 During the 1850s, pressure for game laws began to surface. Legislation was local and the greatest inroads came in Maryland and Virginia, although several counties in Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia also established hunting seasons for deer, turkeys, partridge, and quailP Overall, however, the impact of such laws remained quite limited, for they met with deep popular resistance. As Elliott could again note, the "laboring emigrants" from Britain brought a profound "disgust at the tyranny of the English game laws .... The preselVation of game is thus
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associated ... with ideas of aristocracy--peculiar privileges to the rich, and oppression toward the poor."14 Common right to unenclosed land had even greater significance for livestock raising. Rather than provide pasture, Southerners customarily turned their hogs, cattle, and sheep out in the woods to forage. "The cows graze in the forest ... [and the hogs] go daily to feed in the woods," traveler John Pinkerton found in mid-eighteenth-century North Carolina, and reports of what was known as the "open range" came from allover the nineteenth-century South.1s "Many people in the piney woods of Mississippi are herdsmen," J.F.H. Claiborne recorded, "owning large droves of cattle ... [which] are permitted to run in the range or forest." Northern Alabama, a United States Patent Office correspondent wrote in 1851, had "no system of raising stock ... of any sort. The cattle live halfthe time on Uncle Sam's pasture." So, too, in the South Carolina Piedmont. "We really raise [cattle] with so little care, that it would be a shame to charge anything for their keep up to three years," one resident claimed. "We raise our hogs by allowing them to range in our woods, where they get fat in the autumn on acorns."16 Widespread in Britain, continental Europe, and Africa before capitalist agriculture fully penetrated the countryside, these grazing practices entered Southern statute books during the colonial period in the form of fence lawsP An act passed as early as 1759 in Georgia, for example, established guidelines that would persist throughout the antebellum era. It required farmers to enclose their crops, thereby peImitting livestock to roam freely upon uncultivated land. The specifications were detailed and precise: ... all fences or enclosures ... that shall be made around or about any garden, orchard, rice ground, indigo field, plantation or settlement in this province, shall be six feet high from the ground when staked or ridered and from the ground to the height of three feet of every such fence or enclosure, the rails thereof shall not be more than four inches distant from each other; and that all fences or enclosures that shall consist of paling shall likewise be six feet high from the ground and the pales thereof not more than two inches asunder: Provided always, that where any fence or enclosure shall be made with a ditch or trench, the same shall be four feet wide, and in that case the fence shall be six feet high from the bottom ofthe ditch.
Although Georgia's assembly reduced 1the legal height of fences by a foot during the nineteenth century, the other provisions stood. Should animals break into a farmer's field, his fencing had to measure up to these standards ifhe hoped to collect damages. ''If any trespass or damage shall be committed in any enclosure, not being protected as aforesaid," the Georgia Code flatly decreed, "the owner of such animal shall not be liable to answer for the trespass, and if the owner of the enclosure shall kill or injure such in any manner, he is liable in three times the damages." Other Southern states enacted similar laws. 18
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Decisions rendered by antebellum state courts upheld the dictates of statute law. In a series of damage suits brought against railroad companies by farmers and planters whose animals had been struck by trains, judges invariably found for the plaintiffs on the grounds of legal and customary public access to private, albeit unenclosed, land. Thus, when the Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad Company appealed such a lower court verdict in 1854 by contending that common-law precedent absolved it from responsibility, the Alabama Supreme Court demurred. The common law was not operative in Alabama, Judge J. Ligon declared, noting that the state code prescribed that "unenclosed lands ... are to be treated as common pasture for the cattle and stock of every citizen." The Mississippi High Court of Errors and Appeals issued much the same ruling in an almost identical case two years later, reasoning that "by common consent [the woods and prairies] have been understood ... to be a common pasture." Any shift in the burden of obligations "would require a revolution in our people's habits of thought and action," Judge Stephens of the Georgia Supreme Court proclaimed in 1860. "Our people ... would be converted into a set oftrespassers."19 Dissident voices could be heard. As the antebellum era wore on, agricultural reformers and "progressive" planters blamed the custom of open-range foraging for the poor quality of Southern livestock. They also argued that the fence laws worked a special hardship on farmers as expanded cultivation led to timber shortages and made fencing unduly expensive, not to mention laborious and time-consuming. "In some parts," one critic insisted, "timber is becoming so scarce that it will be a serious question how we are to provide fences for our fields." Another complained that "custom and the example of our fathers have riveted upon us practices, which although they are injurious to our interests, are nevertheless unnoticed, because they are familiar." And, in the words of a Virginia planter, the prevailing fence laws represented the "heaviest of all taxes on farmers." The Southern Cultivator, an agricultural journal, suggested the use of wire fences or thorn hedges, but agitation eventually turned to a call for new statutes requiring the enclosure oflivestock rather than cropS.20 Reformers not only pressed for conservation and agricultural improvement, they challenged the validity of common rights. "Justice and policy have concurred in fixing as a general principle in the laws of civilized nations, that every individual should be compelled to refrain from trespassing on the property [of] ... other persons," one of them told the Virginia General Assembly, but in the case of fencing "the rule is just reversed ... [and] every individual shall guard and protect his property from depredators and everyone is permitted to consume or destroy all that may not be well guarded." More succinctly, another proponent asked, "Why ... should my land which I choose to turn out to improve by rest, be taken possession of and impoverished by other people's stock."21
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These arguments, however, won little support, partly because of the issue's sensitivity. Poorer farmers, the reformers admitted, derived special benefits from common rights and would not surrender easily. "It is notorious," one vocal reformer sneered, "that those frequently have the largest stock who have the least land to graze." The Committee on Agriculture and Manufactures in the Virginia Assembly made the same point in a different way when rejecting petitions for a "Change of the General Law of Enclosures": "Many poor persons have derived advantage from grazing their stock on the commons and unenclosed lands, and to whom the obligation to confine them, or a liability to damages if not confined, would operate as a great hardship." Several Virginia counties made adjustments in the fence law, but limited advance could be seen there or elsewhere in the South before the Civil War.22 The commitment of yeomen and poorer whites to common rights reflected more than strictly economic considerations. The majority of them resided on small farms outside the Plantation Belt where a household economy predominated. Farm families primarily grew food crops, made much of their own clothing and furnishings, and raised substantial numbers of livestock, supplementing their efforlts with local exchanges of goods and labor. Like petty producers in many parts of the United States, these yeomen viewed property ownership as the foundation of independence. Yet, also like other petty producers, they understood that independence could not be achieved through individual enterprise alone. In this regard, common hunting and grazing rights took their place beside other "habits of mutuality"-various forms of "swap work," for instance---as important features of productive organization. Common rights, in short, not only enabled small landowners and the landless to own livestock, but they fit comfortably into a setting where social relations were mediated largely by ties of kinship and reciprocity rather than the marketplace.23 Unquestionably, the planters' desire to mitigate class conflict within the South as the sectional crisis deepened afforded protection to these popular customs. William Elliott and members of the Virginia Assembly were not alone in forecasting explosive consequences should hunting and grazing rights be curtailed. More than political pragmatism was at work, however, for the dominant relations of the Plantation Belt provided essential room. With an enslaved labor force, planters did not have to confront the problems that common property rights posed for labor supply and discipline-problems that, historically, set the economic and intellectual underpinnings for exclusivity.24 Indeed, save for the handful of agricultural reformers and their sympathizers, planters themselves found advantage in the "commons." Thus, Mississippi slaveowner William L. Patton was "in the habit of pasturing [his animals] upon unenclosed lands ... owned by other persons and ... used by the neighborhood generally." It was then with some force that pro-slavery spokesmen
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could argue that black bondage secured the independence of all whites by obstructing the development of market relations. 25
Emancipation effected a fundamental alteration in Southern race relations. In a manner more sweeping and imposing than anywhere else in the Western Hemisphere, forms of racial subordination, nearly two centuries old, were dissolved. Yet, slavery was not simply a system of race relations, it was also a system of labor exploitation and, thus, of class relations. And however much discussions of its aftermath were cast in racial terms, abolition brought planters squarely up against what they themselves called "the labor question." Their fortunes as a class resting on the surpluses that flowed from staple agriculture, the planters understood that the civil, political, and economic status of the ex-slaves were intimately related. Fears of "Negro rule" and "racial amalgamation" notwithstanding, the "question oflabor control," as South Carolinian William H. Trescott put it in 1865, "underlies every other question of state interest."26 The old masters confronted the issue with little optimism. Experience had demonstrated, they believed, that blacks were inherently lazy, indolent, and unreliable and would never submit voluntarily to the demands of a plantation regime. "As a general rule the world over, in freedom or in bondage," the Southern Cultivator declared, "labor can be extracted from the Negro only by compulsion."27 The freedmen had their own version, but it spoke to the planters' dilemma nonetheless. Emancipation saw a largescale black exodus from the plantations as the ex-slaves tested the new waters of freedom. They roamed the countryside, made their way to cities and towns, squatted on unenclosed land. Reluctant to sign contracts and return to regimented field work, they looked to-and felt they had a right to---set up for themselves. "The greater number," a Mississippi Freedmen's Bureau agent reported, "are determined to try farming on their own responsibility." And when the opportunity presented itself, according to another federal official, the blacks acquitted themselves "with good success." "All I wants," one freedman explained, "is to gits fo' or five acres ob land, dat I can build me a little house on and call my home."28 The "labor question," therefore, became linked inextricably with the "land question." Many planters worried, and many freedmen expected, that the federal government would confiscate and redistribute the land of wealthy ex-Confederates. Although prospects for such a radical measure faltered in Congress, the enfranchisement of the freedmen and the struggle to build a Southern wing of the Republican party kept the issue alive and contributed to the surge of white vigilante violence.29 More immediately, planters recognized that customary use rights, along with the availability of
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public domain in some states, jeopardized labor supply and discipline and, by extension, the revitalization of the cotton economy. The travail of the plantation system in much of the postemancipation Caribbean, they were well aware, stemmed largely from the success of ex-slaves in taking up former provision grounds and other uninhabited land that proved unsuited to staple cropS."30 Freedmen in the South evinced similar proclivities: They seemed ready to spurn wage and sharecropping incentives in favor of a rude subsistence on game and raised foodstuffs rather than cotton when able to farm on their own account. Tidewater planters, the Richmond Times charged in 1866, "suffer great annoy,mce and serious pecuniary loss from the trespasses of predacious negroes and low pot hunters, who with dogs and guns, live in the fields . . . as if the whole country belonged to them." A more sedentary independence apparently promised little better. Should "the negroes ... become possessed of a small freehold," Alabama's Clark County Journal warned, they "will raise their com, squashes, pigs, and chickens, and will work no more in the cotton, rice, and sugar fields." The freedmen's "disposition is to be content with the most precarious subsistence," a Louisiana planter complained, "where left to themselves they reside in huts, and live upon small game and com meal."31 Proscriptions against "vagrancy" and the renting of land to freedmen, which some Southern legislatures enacted as part of their "Black Codes" during Presidential Reconstruction, represented the planters' initial, if temporary, steps to use state authority to control the black labor force.32 At the same time, planter spokesmen, citing the "depredations" of "wandering" freedmen, began to press for stricter definitions of and stronger safeguards for private property. "Negroes have a notorious propensity to appropriate what belongs to another," the Countryman lectured, arguing that while under "slavery they could be checked by their masters in the indulgence of this propensity [n]ow ... the strong arm of the law must protect all property-holders." By 1866 the Louisiana and Georgia assemblies had passed "trespass laws," and a bill to the same effect was under consideration in Virginia. The laws imposed stiff fines or prison terms on anyone convicted of entering "enclosed or unenclosed land" to cut timber or collect anything growing without the owner's permission. The Georgia law also prohibited "squatting or setting upon enclosed or unenclosed land of another whether public or private without bonafide claim, title, or consent."33 The perception that a redefinition of traditional use rights was essential for a successful adjustment to free labor gave agricultural reformers and conseIVationists an increasingly receptive audience. Pointing to the "wholesale and ill-seasoned destruction" of fish and wildlife, the diminishing supply of timber, the costs and inefficiencies of fencing practices, and the benefits of improved animal husbandry, they renewed agitation for game and stock laws. And they spirited a substantial following, as newspa-
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pers and agricultural journals filled with similar refrains. In the face of "straitened circumstances" and "the altered system of labor," planters from Mississippi, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Georgia cried that the "old habits" were too "expensive" and "burdensome," and demanded that "every person who owns any kind of stock" be required "to keep such stock within their own enclosures." "Why in the name of common sense," one asked, "am I compelled to maintain 12 or 13 miles of hideous fence around my plantation at an annual cost of upwards of a thousand dollars, in order to prevent the cattle and hogs which my neighbors tum loose . . . from destroying my crops and robbing my property?"34 The concerns for conservation and agricultural rehabilitation were quite genuine, as before the war. But it was the connection between these concerns and new labor relations that won growing numbers of large landowners to the cause. South Carolina planter Henry Hammond thus voiced his support for game laws by asserting that while he "was not opposed to amusements," hunting and fishing only "demoralized man, and in many cases led to crime." A contributor to the Countryman heartily agreed, insisting that "stringent trespass laws" be supplemented with "stringent game laws." "We are just as much entitled to the possums, rabbits, squirrels, and partridges on our land, as we are to our chickens and turkeys," he proclaimed. Strict observance of such laws "would remove many temptations," another South Carolinian believed. "It would keep the negroes more confined."35 Much the same was said in regard to fencing. According to the Beech Island Farmers' Club, "the present laws of enclosure," which permitted common grazing, weighed heavily upon "the landed interest," protecting only "whites and blacks, poor, lazy, worthless people ... living mainly off to themselves, who eke out a living on a few hogs and other stock running at large." John H. Dent, the Georgia planter and agricultural reformer stated it bluntly: "Our greatest trouble is Labor and Fencing." Indeed, the Memphis Southern Home and Farm included the regulation of hunting, fishing, and foraging on a list of "needed laws" that could serve as an agenda for restoring the plantation system. Along with preventing any person from "ranging livestock . . . hunting, fishing, trapping, netting, or seining on another's land without permission," the journal called for measures enforcing all labor contracts, outlawing the enticement or hruboring of any laborer who had broken an agreement, giving landlords first lien on the crops of laborers and tenants, restricting merchants' transactions with laborers, taxing dogs, and prohibiting "any person from tampering with fences."36 The laws were easier to discuss than implement, however. Black Belt advocates initially met a cool reception from the Hill Country, where commercial agriculture had made limited inroads, and from the Wiregrass and Pine Barrens, where open-range stock raising assumed considerable importance, making statewide statutes unfeasible. As one Low
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Country planter admitted, "No uniform fence law throughout the state can operate justly. The present law is very well adapted to the pine and sand country and also to the mountain country, but ruinous to the middle country."37 Consequently, legislation was localized, authorizing counties, or militia districts within counties, to carry out the law or provide for some means of public deliberation, whether by petition or ballot. And the early postwar years saw a scattered and tentative beginning. In 1865 the Mississippi General Assembly passed two bills: one enabling the "Citizens of Hinds County," where 70 percent of the population was black, to require the fencing of livestock, and one making it a misdemeanor to hunt on privately owned land without consent in all counties outside the southeastern piney woods and the northeastern hills. The next year the Virginia assembly followed suit, establishing procedures for "any county" to deem "land boundaries legal fences" for crops, thereby prohibiting stock from "running at large," and defining as a trespass the act of hunting on unenclosed land without permission. Coincidentally, game restrictions took hold in parts of South Carolina, and between 1866 and 1868 several counties in the Alabama Black Belt obtained the right to adopt a new fencing, or stock, law. 38 Yet, planters bent upon limiting public access to landed property met another challenge-this time from within their own locales. Although the social structure and relations of the Plantation Belt had linked the fortunes of many whites through slave ownership, economic interchange, aspiration, and kinship, the campaign on behalf of conservation, progressive agriculture, and the sanctity of private property did little to win the support of numerous small landholding and landlless farmers who depended on common hunting, fishing, and grazing for sustenance.39 To be sure, these poorer whites feared that abolition would unleash "thieving negroes" and often rode with vigilante bands to keep the freedmen in check. But the game and stock laws struck at their own welfare and sense of justice. A planter from Greene County, Georgia, found that the "stock law would meet with much opposition, if it could pass at all. The opposition is bitter, made up more of prejudice than reason." A similar report came from Sumter County, Alabama: "We have a class of farmers and stock owners among us [who] ... are opposed to any innovation on the practice of their fathers, from the use of the subsoil plow to the enactment of a no-fence [stock] law." Not simply economic interest but, from the planters' point of view, "strange ideas of individual rights" appeared to inspire opponents.40 Poorer whites were joined in this battle by their long-acknowledged adversaries, the ex-slaves. Antebellum law prohibited slaves from freely using he forests to hunt, from carrying firearms and other weapons, from owning property, and from marketing produce. Formal law did not necessarily reflect day-to-day reality, however, and what masters might have seen as paternal indulgences the slaves transformed into expecta-
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tions and rights. Slaves commonly hunted and fished, both to supply the plantations and augment their provisions, acquiring a reputation for their skill. If unable to use guns, the blacks relied on dogs to trap prey and, in the words of one historian, enjoyed "indiscriminate permission to fish at large." Indeed, so proficient were the slaves that in certain areas they "monopolized all the good fishing holes" and sold their catches, despite the grumblings of some locals.41 What is more, scattered evidence suggests that the slaves were not only familiar with open-range grazing, they had livestock and other possessions recognized by their owners as personal property. Most impressive was the situation in the rice districts of coastal South Carolina and Georgia where the task system provided special room for slave accumulation. But as far away as Louisiana a group of recently liberated slaves could ask a prospective employer if they might "keep their pigs." Seeking to curtail their dependence on whites, the freedmen thus rankled at the prospect of game and stock laws. Traveler Edward King observed that the blacks "are fond of the same pleasures which their late masters gave them so freely-hunting, fishing, and lounging." And one ex-slave remarked: "I tell you one thing. This here no fence law was one of the lowest things they ever did."42 The opposition of the white and black lower classes came to notable effect with the advent of Radical Reconstruction. Holding newly conferred political rights, the freedmen-along with Unionist whites-flocked to the Republican party standard and made their presence felt. They voted in large numbers, soon sat in state legislatures, and, in many parts of the Black Belt, took command of county government. The momentum of restrictive legislation wound down during their tenure and, in some cases, laws already on the books were repealed.43 The proliferation of Republican local officials, of both races, had especially telling repercussions. Now in a position to adjudicate labor contracts and oversee the implementation of coercive statutes, these officeholders and judges often clipped the planters' wings. One South Carolinian fretted that the game laws "would be of great benefit ... but with such trial justices as we now have, they are not enforced." The adoption of stock laws stood in doubt, another believed, for "the negroes will defeat any [such] measures." Small wonder that a planter spokesman could declare that penalties for various forms of trespass "should be definite and certain, and not be left to a court to decide what the damages are." Small wonder, too, that a Georgia proponent of fencing reform could insist that the issue be decided by "the freeholders of each county" who "alone have a direct interest."44 The Black Belt counteroffensive proved short-lived. By the early 1870s white conservatives had "redeemed" most Southern states and even in Louisiana, South Carolina, and Mississippi the Republicans tread a thin balance.45 Taking their cue from national developments which signaled a declining commitment to the protection of black civil and political rights,
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planter-dominated legislatures moved forcefully to recapture the initiative in regulating labor relations. In the process, the attack on common hunting, fishing, and grazing privileges intensified. Game laws multiplied in Black Belt counties of Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia; by the end of the decade they operated on a statewide basis in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas.46 The laws prescribed hunting seasons for deer and fowl, prohibited certain methods of trapping game and fish (some of which had West African roots), and curtailed access to woods and waterways. In Georgia, for example, where Republican rule ended in 1871, three plantation counties enacted game laws in 1872, six in 1875, eighteen in 1876, six in 1877, and six in 1878. An act passed for Burke, Taylor, and Jefferson counties was typical, deeming it a misdemeanor to "kill or destroy" deer or partridges between April and October, to "trap, snare, or net" partridges, to catch fish by means of drugs or poison, and to "hunt, trap, or fish" on an individual's land without permission.47 Alabama witnessed a similar trend. The Reconstruction legislatures repealed game laws adopted by several counties before 1874. That year brought "redemption" and by 1877 most of the Black Belt had such laws in effect.48 The progress of new fencing laws also received a boost in the latter years and aftermath of Reconstruction, as local and state agricultural societies, the Grange, and railroad companies joined to press the issue. 49 In response, the Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina assemblies ratified local-option stock laws in 1872, 1873, and 1877 respectively.50 Elsewhere, individual counties petitioned for enabling legislation. Procedures for implementation were not uniform. In some areas the matter was left to the discretion of local officials; in some to the decision of landowners; and in some to the deliberation of all eligible voters. Although it is impossible at this point to determine the results with precision, it can be said that by 1880 the stock law was under active consideration, if not in operation, in at least thirty Georgia, seventeen Alabama, twenty-six North Carolina, twelve Mississippi, and eighteen South Carolina counties, most of which had black majorities.51 Further signs of the mounting attack on common rights could be seen in the rulings of Southern judges. Thus, when the Georgia Supreme Court heard a relevant case for damages in 1876, it found the plaintiffs claim "that he had in the woods ... the right of common pasture for his cattle which are numerous and which have been accustomed to range heretofor . . . wholly insufficient," as "he does not set forth any contract, prescription, or other lawful basis for the right." In a dramatic departure from previous policy, the justices expressed incredulity "as to common of pasture upon lands which are all private property" and ruled that "citizens generally have no strict right of common pasture in the 'woods' or upon the unenclosed lands of others." Courts in other states moved with greater caution, hedging on the question of general principle while
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upholding the constitutionality of legislative statutes. "The common-law doctrine, which requires the owner of stock to keep them off the land of others ... does not prevail in this state," the Supreme Court of Mississippi could announce in 1887. "But the subject is within the power and control of the legislature; and no legal right is violated ... when one is required by law to keep his stock off the land of others." Judges in Alabama, North Carolina, and South Carolina rendered similar decisions. 52 The resistance to game and, especially, to stock laws that surfaced in the Black Belt during Reconstruction by no means entirely collapsed. North Carolina's Charlotte Democrat observed that the prospect of a "no-fence law" in one county prompted threats by local freedmen "to leave." The Atlanta Constitution found numerous counties "unfriendly to the stock law" due primarily to the fact that "blacks opposed." And in South Carolina a major political controversy was stirred. As an Aiken County planter exclaimed: "The passage of the 'stock law' by our legislature is creating much excitement and angry comment. Threats of a new party are made and fears entertained by some that it will unharmonize the Democratic party." The planter's fears were justified, for independent candidates seized the issue and rallied noteworthy support among poor whites and blacks.53 Nonetheless, much of the Black Belt, in South Carolina and other states, came to heel by the early 1880s. Indeed, South Carolina, where planter power loomed particularly large, stood alone among Southern states during the nineteenth century in passing a "general" stock law-which eliminated local prerogatives-in 1881.54 On an elementary level, the spread of game and stock laws attests to the planters' efforts, and success, at reasserting their authority over black labor-attests, in short, to the reestablishment of economic power relations in the Black Belt despite Emancipation and Reconstruction. Even Henry Grady, the leading spokesman for a new, industrial South, conceded in 1881 that a "landholding oligopoly" lorded over vast acres "through all the cotton states."55 But from a wider vantage point, the movement to eradicate common rights pointed, as well, to an important metamorphosis in the character of the planter class and of basic social relations. And the metamorphosis came as the result of intense social conflict. If the planters had had their way, a formal system of dependent labor would have been erected in the postwar South, giving "the landowner an absolute control over the freedman as though he was his slave." Planters believed it beneath their dignity to bid for the labor of ex-slaves. The federal government made such a repressive system difficult to install; the freedmen made it impossible. Resisting gang labor, withdrawing women from the fields, seeking their own land and subsistence, and moving from plantation to plantation to strike better contracts, blacks forced their old masters to come to terms with free labor. For some members of the elite,
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this was too much to bear: They sold out and, perhaps, left for Brazil or Cuba. Others met the challenge.56 It was an unequal confrontation, to be sure, yet one that gradually brought forth a structure of market relations in agriculture. The redefinition of property rights, which strengthened the planters' control over productive resources and eroded the claims of their laborers, paved the way. Lien laws limited tenants' property in their growing crops; court decisions fully eliminated such property for sharecroppers and categorized them as wage laborers; constitutional and legislative reforms ended protections that certain property had from levy for debt. 57 And, of course, the game and stock laws greatly narrowed use rights in landed property, further circumscribing access to the means of subsistence and threatening ownership of livestock and draft animals among the poor. The planters were increasingly transformed into agricultural employers and the freedmen into agricultural employees. The compulsions of necessity replaced the compulsions of the lash. The metamorphosis of Black Belt social relations, which the game and stock laws highlighted, also had significant cultural and ideological ramifications. The Southern defense of slavery always rested, in large part, on doctrines of racial inferiority. Over time, however, Southern intellectuals and politicians alike linked the racial defense of slavery with the defense of slavery in the abstract: with notions that inequality was the natural condition of humankind, that natural inequalities were reflected in social stratification, that free society left the poor and inherently disadvantaged to the mercy of the labor market, and that organic relations of dependency and mutuality offered the best means for security and social peace. The most conservative theorists argued that slavery was the proper status for the poor of both races. 58 But even those who spoke the language of "Herrenvolk democracy" mixed conservative theory with racism and insisted that only Ithe enslavement of blacks stood between poorer whites and the ravages of the marketplace. It seemed to strike a responsive chord among the majority of white Southerners who were outside the mainstream of the staplle economy and who cast their votes for a political party that depicted the expansion of commerce and the market as a threat to independence.59 With Emancipation the planters' outlook and worldview, much as the relations they entered into, were gradually transformed. The racism remained and grew more vociferous. Yet, drawing upon ideas previously advanced by the small brigade of antebellum agricultural reformers, the planter class slowly embraced the market, not dependency or reciprocity, as the proper arbiter of social relations. The new ideology began to surface with special force in the agitation for game and stock laws, as advocates dismissed the "strange ideas" associated with common rights in favor of the logic of absolute property. "The land outside a farm is as
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much the property of the farmer as that he may cultivate," a Georgia newspaper proclaimed, "and truly in essential justice [no person] ... has any right thereon without express permission." Similarly, a Virginian maintained that "we are just as entitled to [the wildlife] on our land as to the domestic animals." Or, as an Alabama planter asked rhetorically, "Is there any reason or right that A should furnish land for B's cattle to graze upon?"60 The logic melded easily with the dominant bourgeois currents of postwar America, suggesting the dimensions of the emerging postwar settlement. But the "strange ideas" held on and helped thrust the South into deeper social and political turmoil.
The locus of contention over common rights, and particularly over common grazing rights, shifted from the Black Belt to the Hill Country during the late 1870s and 1880s, reflecting the advance of commercial agriculture into areas previously dominated by semisubsistence farming. Indeed, the absorption of the Southern Hill, or Up country, into the cotton economy was one of the significant developments of the postwar period. Inhabitants of this region had been hard hit by wartime privation, drought, and pillaging; destitution was widespread in 1865 and for a while thereafter. Local officials of the Freedmen's Bureau spent much of their time distributing needed rations to whites, not blacks. By the first years of the next decade, however, a new orientation seemed evident. "Cotton," a county newspaper reported in 1872, "formerly cultivated on a very limited extent, has increased rapidly in the last few years in production." And the trend would continue so that by century's end white labor raised most ofthe cotton in the South.61 The initial thrust toward market production likely came from yeomen farmers hoping to avail themselves of relatively high cotton prices and recoup war-related losses. Railroads, which began to penetrate the Up country during the 1870s, offered added inducement by easing access to supralocal markets. But most importantly, the transition came as a product of new social relations and credit arrangements. Like many peasantries, Vpcountry yeomen normally cultivated a limited cash crop along with foodstuffs; the dynamic of the household economy, itself, encouraged the pattern. Even in 1873, a Black Belt paper could note that these farmers attended to "their grain, provender, and provisions and then bestowed their surplus labor on cotton."62 What turned cotton from one item in a crop mix into a defining feature of the region's economy was a process that tied yeomen firmly to the export market, made vulnerable their productive property, and eventually reduced many of them to tenants and laborers. Expanded lines of transportation and communica-
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tion and legislation bearing on production and exchange laid the foundation for the transformation; supply merchants carried it through. The 1870s witnessed a considerable influx of merchandisers into Upcountry towns and hamlets. Prospects of a large clientele along with the developing lien system provided the lure and enabled them to establish a foothold. The Southern lien laws, passed after Emancipation, permitted suppliers to obtain mortgages on the crops of their customers to secure advances of money and provisions. After a series of twists and turns, most legislatures gave landlords superior lien rights for both rent and advances; merchants could get first lien only on the crops of proprietors. Since the majority of Black Belt customers were tenants and croppers and since landlords began to move into the supply business to bolster sUIpluses, the opportunities of landless merchants diminished. In the Upcountry, on the other hand, the majority of customers were freeholders, and the planter element was small. Growing numbers of merchants, thereby, hoped to capitalize on the legacy of wartime hardship and short food crops. As one Upcountry resident recalled: "When the lien law was passed the town merchant became an important factor in farming."63 Merchandisers decisively shifted the energies of Upcountry producers to commercial agriculture. Farmers wishing to purchase goods on credit-the norm-now had to mortgage their crops as security, and storekeepers made plain their preference for cotton, it being the most likely to bring a return. High interest rates charged for credit further impelled yeomen to raise the staple, if only to keep their heads above water.64 Soon, by virtue of legislative initiative, real and personal property could also serve as collateral, thus placing land, tools, and livestock in jeopardy of attachment and offering merchants greater control over the productive process. As cotton prices slid in the 1870s and 1880s, the auction block became the resort for the hopelessly indebted, and a new class of merchant-landlords, based in the Upcountry towns, began to emerge.65 It is not surprising, then, that merchants, landlords, and other interests associated with these towns seized upon the stock law as they pushed to consolidate their command of the developing cotton economy. By 1880 the law was being discussed "fiercely," and during the next decade a bitter struggle erupted over its adoption. Hill counties in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi entered the fray.66 While little more is known about the episode on a South-wide scale, the story in Georgia is rich and revealing and, in its main lines, probably representative. Following their counterparts in the plantation districts, advocates in the Georgia Up country linked the stock law to the cause of agricultural improvement and the ideals of exclusivity in property, which they saw as fitting hand in glove. Open-range foraging, they submitted, was "sad evidence of old fogyism, general ignorance, and backwardness of agriculture," contributing to timber scarcity, inefficiency, and the proliferation of
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"useless, scrubby stock."67 It was a custom dignified by no more than peculiar circumstances and hardheadedness, a sap on economic progress and prosperity, and a violation of "natural rights." Indeed, many supporters of fencing reform viewed common grazing as a "privilege or favor" bordering upon theft. "My neighbor has as much right to pasture my enclosed land as my unenclosed," one of them put it, "as his stock robs it of its vegetable matter ... making it poorer everyday."6B Compelling as these arguments appeared to be, they failed to win much popular acceptance. The Georgia local-option statute of 1872 provided for county elections, and when the vote came, the stock law met resounding defeats. Only the towns and militia districts boasting the highest per capita wealth and the largest farm units lent the law substantial backing; elsewhere it was routed. 69 Opponents had no objection to the cause of agricultural progress per se. Rather, they perceived it as window dressing for class exploitation. "The law would benefit the extensive landowners," one insisted, and, in tum, "would be the greatest curse to the poor laboring men that ever befell them." Not prosperity but expropriation and dependency would be in store for yeomen and tenants alike, who "will be relieved ofthe privileges ourfathers established, ofthe care and use ofthe hog, the cow, and all the necessities, only as they are furnished by the" large landowners and merchants. Thus, one Up country smallholder predicted that "the stock law will divide the people into classes similar to the patricians and plebians of ancient Rome." Another concluded that it "would be proof of insanity for a poor man that don't own as much as 100 acres ofland to vote" for the measure?O The stuff of popular resistance ran deeper. Opponents not only challenged the stock law on economic grounds, they "controverted" the principles of ownership upon which it rested, "the proposition that 'What is mine I have a right to do as I please with.' " "The woods were put here by our Creator for a benefit to his people," they declared, endowing "custom to the range" with "legal, moral, and bible" sanction-sanction that could not be abrogated by private title.71 Arguing that stock-law supporters were "men who never split but few, if any rails" and that no man was properly a "farmer until he does keep his fields fenced," they expressed the abiding logic of the open range: "While my cow is on my neighbor's land eating grass, his is on mine, that makes it alright." Reciprocity, not exclusivity, promoted "equal rights, equal liberty, and equal privileges," and sustained the community of producers.7Z In sum, stock-law opponents began to articulate the values of cooperative commonwealth and counterpose them to the hegemony of the marketplace. Finding in such attitudes "the spirit of communism fully displayed," disappointed reformers attributed their defeats to the workings of "pauper" democracy. "Agrarianism rules," one of them cried, and "nothing but a restriction on the voters' qualifications will ever protect capital from
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such injustice and wrong."73 Disfranchisement did not come to pass in this instance, but since legislation made additional contests possible, stock-law proponents prepared themselves to carry the issue. Utilizing the machinery of the Democratic party, which they had come to dominate, and particularly the vehicles of local agricultural clubs, they waged a campaign throughout the counties. Electoral fraud and coercion, so familiar to postbellum politics, also came into play. While neither side could claim innocence, most of the complaints emanated from opponents who cited cases of bribery, threats, ticket fixing, ballotbox stuffing, and the tossing out ofvotes74 Yet, even these efforts failed to bring victory. Despite increasing its share of the vote somewhat, the stock law w.as beaten again and again in countywide elections during the 1880s, as white yeomen and tenants, along with blacks, scotched the drive of commercial interests. In the words of one landlord, "the Niggers and white trash" voted against the law75 Agitation then shifted to individual militia districts \vithin counties, where reformers made some headway. Not surprisingly, town and village districts, which included many of the largest farms and most highly assessed acres, often led the way, followed by wealthier rural districts. Other rural areas proved far more troublesome, and adversaries locked horns in a battle that saw voting results overturned, district boundaly lines changed, lawsuits rued, and outbreaks of violence before formal resolution76 And although by 1890 a majority of districts in most Upcountry counties had come under the law's jurisdiction, enforcement was another matter. County newspapers charged that "outlaws" occasionally tore newly constructed enclosures "to smash," and that in a few places opponents were "doing their best to evade the law and warning that if any man takes up their stock, they will use their little guns on him." It would be another sixty-five years before a blanket, statewide stock law entered the books77
IfUpcountry farmers resisted the attack on common rights more successfully than did poorer whites and blacks in the Plantation Belt, the conflict in both regions illuminated the new relations and fissures spreading throughout the postbellum South. Quite significantly, it suggests that the struggle for control of production may be the key link between the postemancipation experiences of diverse Southern locales: from the Upper to the Lower South, from the plantation to the small farming districts78 In an important sense, too, the conflict suggests how much a part of Gilded Age America the South had become. Landlords, merchants, and other commercial types remained junior and, at times, disgruntled partners, but they came to share with Northern elites a language, outlook,
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and set of concerns that increasingly put them on one side of a great historical divide. The Southerners, of course, handled these concernsmost conpicuously the "labor question"-in what seemed to be their own peculiar way, to a certain extent because race inteIvened at so many levels. Yet, it should also be remembered that this very period saw Northern industrialists rely on force, or the threat of force, to settle labor disputes, saw the "best men" call for voting restrictions and other political reforms designed to "cleanse" government, and saw segregation become institutionalized nationally. At the same time, petty producers in the South came to share with their Northern counterparts another language, outlook, and set of concerns. However different their backgrounds and specific circumstances, they faced similar problems and joined, at least in spirit, in defending a version of the Revolutionary heritage that associated freedom with economic independence and tyranny with massive concentrations of wealth and power. One cannot read arguments opposing the stock law and not be reminded of the Greenbackers and the Knights of Labor.Bo Thus, a dirt farmer in the Georgia Up country could declare that "we as poor men and negroes do not need the law but we need a democratic government and independence that will do the common people good." And the inhabitants of northwestern Alabama and northeastern Mississippi could celebrate the maintenance of open-range grazing by dubbing their locales "freedom hills."BI Such sentiments and sensibilities formed the heart of an emergent popular radicalism that would be harnessed by populism.
Notes 1 Beech Island Farmers' Club, Aiken, South Carolina, Minutes, January 1875, 210, 279, South Caroliniana Library. 2 As a consequence of the Second Confiscation Act of 1862, federal taxation, and General WIlliam T. Sherman's Field Order No. 15 of 1865, the federal government had control of nearly 900,000 acres of Southern land at war's end. President Johnson subsequently restored most of this land to its former owners. While a handful of Radical Republicans hoped to carry out a general program of land confiscation and redistribution, they met defeat in Congress. Only on the seaislands and coast of South Carolina and Georgia, where freedmen had established claims and defended them even against Federal troops, did a significant shift in the structure oflandownership take place. See Claude F. Oubre, Forty Acres and a Mule: The Freedmen's Bureau and Black Landownership !Baton Rouge, 1978), 1--45; James M. McPherson, The Strugglefor Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Princeton, 1964), 246-259; Willie Lee Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal El'-periment (New York; 1964), 320-331: Eric Foner, "Thaddeus Stevens, Confiscation, and Reconstruction," in Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, eds., The Hofstadter Aegis: A Memorial (New York, 1974), 154-183; Manuel Gottlieb, "The Land Question in Georgia During Reconstruction," Science and Society 3 (Summer 1939),356-388.
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3 For comparisons from Latin America and continental Europe, see C. Vann Woodward, "The Price of Freedom," in David Sansing, ed., What Was Freedom's Price? (Jackson, Miss., 1978), 93-113; Wilhemina Kloosterboer, Involuntary Servitude Since the Abolition ofSlavery: A Survey of Compulsory Labour Throughout the World (Leiden, 1960); William A. Green, British Slave Emancipation: The Sugar Colonies and the Great E;
Carolina Sports by Land and Water Including Incidents of Devil-Fishing, Wild-Cat, Deer, and Bear Hunting, Etc. (New York 1859), 254--255. For statistics on improved and unimproved acreage, see Donald B. Dodd and Wynelle S. Dodd. Historical Statistics of the South, 1790-1970 (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1973),2,18,26,34,38,50, 54,58.
10 William Elliott,
11 Elliott, Carolina Sports, 254--255, 257-258. See also Sam B. Hilliard, Hogmeat and Hoecake: Food Supply in the Old South, 1840-1860 (Carbondale, Ill., 19721, 71-83; "Fox Hunting Fever," in B. A. Botkin, ed., A Treasury of Southern Folklore: Stories, Ballads, Traditions, and Folkways of the People of the South (New York, 1949), 610-611. 1.2 Dickson D. Bruce, Violence and Culture in the Antebellum South (Austin, 19791, 197. 13
Fur, Fin and Feather: A Compilation of the Game Laws of the Principal States and Provinces of the United States and Canada (New York, 1871), 112, 141-147; Augusta
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(Georgia) Chronicle and Sentinel quoted in Athens (Georgia) Southern Watchman, April 29,1858. 14 Elliott,
Carolina Sports, 250-253, 260.
15 Pinkerton quoted in Rupert P. Vance, Human Geography of the South: A Study in Regional Resources and Human Adequacy (Chapel Hill, 1932), 146--147; Lewis C. Gray, History ofAgriculture in the Southern United States to 1860 (2 vols: Gloucester, Mass., 1958), I, 146; Terry G. Jordan, Trails to Texas: Southern Roots ofWest ern Cattle Ranching (Lincoln, Neb., 1981). 16 J .F.H. Claiborne, "A Trip Through the Piney Woods," Publications of the Mississippi
Historical Soctety 9 (Oxford, Miss., 1906), 521; U.S. Patent Office, Report to the Commissioner of Patents for the Year 1851 (Washington, D.C., 1851), 331; Report to the Commissioner of Patents for the Year 1850 (Washington, DC., 1851) 233-234. See also Gray, History of Agriculture 2, 836, 843; Hilliard, Hogmeat and Hoecake, 98-100; Cornelius o. Cathay, Agricultural Developments in North Carolina, 1783-1860 (Chapel Hill, 1956), 28, 159; Alfred G. Smith, Economic Readjustment of an Old Cotton State: South Carolina, 1820-1860 (Columbia, S.C., 1958), 76; McDonald and McWhiney, "Antebellum Herdsman," 156--158. 17 McDonald and McWhiney, "Antebellum Herdsman," 156; Herbert Heaton, Economic
History of Europe (New York, 1936), 406, 415, 428-429: Eugen Weber, Peasants Into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914 (Stanford, 1976), 128; Blum, End of the Old Order, 123-125; J. L. Hammond and Barbara Hammond, The Village Labourer, 1760-1832 (London, 1911), 2-18; Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina From 1670 Through the Stono Rebellion (New York, 1974), 30; Jordan, Trails to Texas, 1-15. 18 Thomas R. R. Cobb, A Digest of the Statute Laws of the State of Georgia (Athens, 1851),
18-19; R. H. Clark, T.R.R. Cobb, and David Irwin, The Code of the State of Georgia (Atlanta, 1861), 271-272; David J. McCord, The Statutes At Large of South Carolina (Columbia, S.C., 1839), 331-332; A. Hutchinson, Code ofMississippi, 1798-1848 (Jackson, Miss., 1848), 278-280: John J. Ormond, Arthur Bagby, and George Goldwaite, Code of Alabama (Montgomery, 1852), 250-251; Williamson S. Oldham and George W. White, A Digest of the General Statute Laws of the State of Texas (Austin, 1859), 217-218. 19 Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad Company v. Peacock, 25 Alabama Reports, 229;
Vicksburg ard Jackson Railroad Company v. Patton, 31 Mississippi Reports, 156; Macon and Western Railroad Companyv. Lester, 30 Georgia Reports, 911. 20 Southern Agriculurist quoted in Southern Cultivator 2 (October 30, 1844), 173; Farmer's Register 1 (January 1834) 450-452; Farmer's Register (May 1834), 753-754; Southern Cultivator 3 (January 1845), 10; Southem Cultivator 8 (April 1850), 55-56. In Demopolis, Alabama, the president of the State Agricultural Society won a prize for "An Essay on the Propriety and Policy of Abolishing Fences" in 1859. He pointed to the "large and unnecessary expense of fencing" and argued that improved stock required enclosures rather than the practice of turning them out "to make their subsistence on the public commons or pasture." He, thereby, urged the legislature to pass special or private laws establishing fence law districts. See Thomas McAdory Owens, History ofAlabama and Dictionary ofAlabama Biography (4 vols; Chicago, 1921), 2, 895. 21 Farmer's Register 1 (December 1833), 388-396; Farmer's Register, 1 (January 1834),
450-452. 22 Farmer's Register 1 (January 1834), 450-452; Farmer's Register 2 (April 1835), 712; Smith, Economic Readjustment, 73, 106. It is not incidental that pressure for new fence laws
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was more pronounced in the Upper South. Virginia, in particular, saw a declining slave population and an extended transition, dating back to the eighteenth century, from tobacco to grain crops. 23 For a more detailed discussion see Steven Hahn, "The Yeomanry of the Non-Plantation South: Upper Piedmont Georgia, 1850-1860," in Robert C. McMath Jr. and Vernon Burton, eds., Class, Conflict, and Consensus: Antebellum Southern Community Studies (Westport, Conn., 1982) and The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeomen Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850--1890 (1983, Oxford University Press). 24 C. B. Macpherson, "Capitalism and the Changing Concept of Property," in Eugene Kamenka and R. S. Neale, eds., Feudalism, Capitalism, and Beyond (New York, 1975), 112-113; Richard Schlatter, Private Property: The History of an Idea (New Brunswick, NJ., 1951), 205-249. 25 Vicksburg and Jackson Railroad Company v. Patton, 31 Mississippi Reports, 156. 26 Trescott quoted in Eric Foner, "Reconstruction and the Crisis of Free Labor," in Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War (New YOI'k, 1980), 98. See also Darlington County Agricultural Society, Darlington, South Carolina, Minutes, August 29, 1865, South
Carolina Library. 27 Southern Cultivator quoted in Paul S. Taylor, "Slave to Freedman," Southem Economic History Project 7 (Berkeley, 1970), 27. Also see James L. Roark, Masters Without Slaves: Southem Planters in the Civil War and Reconstruction (New York, 1977), 157-169. 2S Whitelaw Reid, After
the War: A Southern Tour (New York, 1866),564--565; John Eaton, Grant, Lincoln and the Freedmen: Reminiscences of the Civil War (New York, 1907), 163-164; John Moore to Lt. Merritt Barner, Lauderdale, Mississippi, February 29,1868, Bureau of Refugees. Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, Records of the Assistant Commissioner, Mississippi, Record Group 105, Nalional Archives. Also see Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermllth ofSlavery (New York, 1979), 292-335. 29 W. R. Brock, An American Crisis: Congress and Reconstruction, 1865-1867 (New York, 1966), 284--304; Foner, "Thaddeus Stevens," 154--183; Gottlieb, "The Land Question," 356-388. 30 Vernon Burton, "Race and Reconstruction: Edgefield County, South Carolina," in
Edward Magdol and Jon L. Wakelyn, eds., The Southern Common Peoplej Studies in Nineteenth Century Social History (Westport, Conn., 1980),216-217: Robert A. Gilmour, "The Other Emancipation: Studies in the Society and Economy of Alabama Whites During Reconstruction" (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1972), 119-120. On the postemancipation Caribbean, see Green, British Slave Emancipation, 99-228; Phillip D. Curtin, Two Jamaicas: The Role of Ideas in a Tropic1l1 Colony, 1830-1865 (New York, 1970), 106-112; Woodward, "The Price of Freedom," 105-106; Stanley L. Engerman, "Economic Aspects of the Adjustments to Emancipation in the United States and the British West Indies (Unpublished paper courtesy of the author). 31 Richmond Times quoted in Southern Cultivator 24 (February 1866), 29; Clark County Journal quoted in Gilmour, "The Other Emancipation," 119-120; U.S. Department of Agriculture, Report of the Commissioner ofAgriculture for the Year 1867 (Washington, D.C., 1867), 421. See also Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction, 79-84; Lawrence Powell,
New Masters: Northern Planters During the Civil War and Reconstruction (New Haven, 1980),73-122; Foner, "Reconstruction and the Cliisis of Free Labor," 106-112. 32 Theodore B. Wilson, The Black Codes of the South (University, Ala., 1965). 33 The Countryman quoted in Southern Cultivator 24 (April 1866), 86; Albert Voorhies, Revised Laws ofLouisianll (New Orleans, 1884), 136-137; Athens Southern, Watchman,
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April 18,1866. Violations of the trespass laws brought fines ranging between $100 and $200 or jail terms between one and two months. 34 Hinds County (Miss.) Gazette, May 10, 1867; Rural Carolinian 2 (April 1871), 381-382; Rural Carolinian 2 (May 1871), 516-519; Southern Cultivator 25 (June 1867), 172; Southern Cultivator 25 (September, 1867), n.p.; Memphis Southern Home and Farm 3 (December, 1871),52-53: Acts and Resolutions of the General Assembly of the State of Georgia, 1873 (Atlanta, 1873),235. 35 Beech Island Farmers' Club, Minutes, June 1875, June 6, 1876,221-239; The Countryman quoted in Southern Cultivator 24 (April 1866), 86. 36 Rural Carolinian, 2 (May 1871), 516-519; Beech Island Farmers' Club, Minutes, April 2,
37 38
39
40 41
4.2
1881,318-320; The Plantation 2 (December 27,1871), 755; Memphis Southern Home and Farm 3 (January, 1872), 90-91. Rural Carolinian 2 (June 1871), 593-594. See also Southern Cultivator 31 (May 1873),164. Laws of . .. the State of Mississippi, 1865-1866 (Jackson, Miss., 1866), 199-200, 289-290; Acts of . .. the State ofVirginia, 1865-1866 (Richmond, 1866), 202-204;Acts of . .. the State ofAlabama, 1866-1867 (Montgomery, Aia.,1867), 586-587; 1868, 473-474, 557-560. In 1866 Mississippi extended provisions for adopting the stock law to seven additional Plantation Belt counties, and in early 1867 increased the fine for violating restrictions on hunting. See Mississippi Laws, 1866, 141-142; 1867, 271. Studies have shown that a majority of whites in many counties of the antebellum Plantation Belt owned slaves. Participation in the cotton economy and, perhaps, the hope of one day becoming a slaveholder brought others within the plantation orbit. But relations between rich and poor could have explosive qualities and even within such counties there existed relatively isolated enclaves of slaveless whites who seem to have forged a culture of their own. See Eugene D. Genovese, "Yeomen Farmers in a Slaveholders' Democracy," Agricultural History 49 (April 1975), 331-342; Hilliard, Hogmeat and Hoecake, 151; James D. Foust, The Yeomen Farmer and the Westward ElCpansion of United States Cotton Production (New York, 1975); Wright, Political Economy ofCotton South, 55-56. Southern Cultiuator 30 (May 1872), 176; Southern Cultivator 28 (July 1870), 203; Southern Cultivator 27 (September 1869), 274. Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974), 486-490; Wood, Black Majority, 28-83, 122-123, 127; Guion Griffis Johnson, Antebellum North Carolina: A Social History (Chapel Hill, 1937), 555-556. Edward King, The Great South: A Record of Journeys (Hartford, Conn., 1875), 274, 371; George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (19 vols; Westport, Conn., 1972), Arkansas Narratives, X, Part 5,105; Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long, 393. See also Thomas Holt, Black Over White: Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina During Reconstruction (Urbana, Ill., 1977), 190-191. I am greatly indebted to Professor Leslie Rowland, presently at the University of Virginia, for sharing her pioneering research on Emancipation in the coastal rice areas with me, for it promises to recast the way we think about the Afro-American experience before and after slavery. Rowland has found that despite legal restrictions, many of the slaves accumulated personal property Ilivestock, furnishings, tools, and even carnages) and established a system of inheritance which the planters formally sanctioned. Furthermore, the slaves seem to have dominated local marketing networks by selling some of the produce from their garden plots, thereby obtaining cash much in the way their Jamaican counterparts did. Rowland makes no claim that this marketing system had much importance beyond the coast and, indeed, attributes its vitality to the task system associated with
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rice production. But my own work with postbellum tax records in Georgia suggests that slave property ownership, including livestock, may have been more widespread. Rowland's preliminary findings are presented in "Rice and Freedom: Emancipation in the Georgia and South Carolina Lowcountry" (Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, Washington, D.C., December 1980). I should also like to thank Professor Vernon Burton, of the University of Illinois, for drawing my attention to relevant material in the W.PA. ex-slave narratives. 43 See, for example, Alabama Acts, 1870, 93--94, 96-97; Mississippi Laws, 1873, 200. Holt, See
also Black Over White, 9--40, 95-151. 44 Foner, "Reconstruction and the Crisis of Free Labor," 115-117; Southern Cultivator 24 (April 1866), 86; Georgia Department of Agriculture, Annual Report of Thomas P. Janes, Commissioner ofAgriculture of the State of Georgia for the Year 1875 (Atlanta, 1876), 66. See also Burton, "Race and Reconstruction," 21!:l-222.
45 Joe Gray Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed 18113-1877 (Baton Rouge, 1974), 253-313, 480-505; Holt, Black Over White, 173--207; William C Hams, The Day of the Carpetbagger: Republican Reconstruction in Mississippi (Baton Rouge, 1979), 623--690. 46 Georgia Acts and Resolutions, 1872, 469; 1875, 296-303; 18711, part II, title IV; 1877, part II, title II; 1878-1879, part III, title V; Alabama Acts, 1870, 96-97; 1871,171; 1876-1877, 136, 226; Acts and Resolutions of . .. the State of South Carolina, 1871 (Columbia, S.C., 1871), 660; 1879, 84; General Statutes of South Carolina (Columbia, S.c., 1882), 491-498; Acts of the State of Tennessee ... 18119--1870 (2 vols; Nashville, 1870), 2, 68--£9, 152, 159: 1871, 3; 1873, 121; 1875, 19, 214--215; 1877, 39; 1879, 241-242; W A. Milliken and John V. Vertress, The Code of Tennessee (Nashville, 1884), 385-388; George W. Munford, The Code of Virginia (Richmond, 1873), 80S; Mississippi Laws, 18711, 49-51; Acts of the . .. State of Louisiana, El(tra Session, 1877 (New Orleans, 1877), 10D-l01; 1880, 64--65; Acts, Resolutions, and Memorials ... ofthe State ofArkansas, 1875 (Little Rock, 1875), 158--159; 1879,60-61. 47 Georgia Acts and Resolutions, 1875, 296-303. 48 AlabamaActs, 18711-1877, 136, 226. 49 The Plantation 2 (June 17, 1871), 323--324; Southern Cultivator 28 (May 1870), 137; Southern Planter and Farmer quoted in Southern Cultivator 30 (May 1872), 172; Edgefield (S.C.) Aduertiser quoted in Southern Cultiuator 35 (August 1877), 300; Darlington County Agricultural Society, Minutes, August 14, 1877, 41; Patrons of Husbandry, State Grange of South Carolina, Minutes, January 15, 1873, South Caroliniana Library; Proceedings of the State Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry ofAlabama, 1874 (Montgomery, 1875), 25; Memorial of the State Grange, Atlanta, February 4, 1874, Legislative Department, Petitions, Record Group 37/Series 12, Georgia Department of Archives and History; Carroll County (Ga.) Times, January 10,1873. 50 Georgia Acts and Resolutions, 1872, 34--35; Laws and Resolutions of the State of North Carolina, 1872-1873 (Raleigh, 1873), 314--316; South Carolina Acts and Resolutions, 1877, 251-254. 51 Atlanta Constitution, November 11, 1833; Alabama Acts, 1880-1881, 163--165, 175-177, 223, 26D-263; North Carolina Laws and Resolutions, 1874-1875, 7D-77, 267-269; 1879,252; Mississippi Laws, 1871, 693--696; 18711, 294--298; 1878, 305-310; 1880, 376-380; South Carolina Acts and Resolutions, 1878, 361-362, 484--485, 689-691, 733; 1879, 41-42, 10D-101, 243-244, 247-248; 1880,323--236,401-404,473-474: Spartanburg (S.C.) Carolina Spartan, February 17,1875; Anderson (S.C.) intelligencer, August 23,1877; Yorkville (S.C.) Enquirer, December 18, 1879. I am grateful to Lacy Ford of the University of South Carolina for sharing some of his research on the South Carolina Upcountry with me. 52 Harrell v. Hannum and Coleman, 56 Georgia Reports, 508; Anderson v. Locke (Miss.), 1
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Southern Reporter, 251; Spigener v. Rives IAla.), 16 Southern Reporter, 74; Rose v. Hardie IN.C'), 4 Southeastern Reporter, 41; Utsey v. Hiott IS.C.), 9 Southeastem Reporter, 338. 53 Charlotte Democrat quoted in Southern Cultivator 34, (May 1876), 178--179; Atlanta Constitution, November 11,1883; Beech Island Farmers' Club, Minutes, January 7, 1882 New York Times, January 2, 1882; William Watts Ball, The State That Forgot: South Carolina's Surrender to Democracy !Indianapolis, 1932), 175; David D. Wallace, History ofSouth Carolina (3 vols; New York, 1935), 3, 328.
54 Southern Cultivator 34 (May 18761, 178--179; Atlanta Constitution, November 11,1883; South Carolina Acts and Resolutions, 1881, 591-594. 55 Grady quoted in Jonathan M. Wiener, "Class Structure and Economic Development in the American South, 1865-1955." American Historical Review 8410ctober 1979),986. 56 Foner, "Reconstruction and the Crisis of Free Labor," 103; Roger Ransom and Richard Sutch, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation ICambridge, 19771, 56-78, 81-87; Michael Wayne, Antebellum Planters in the Postwar South: The Natchez District, 1860-1880 !Baton Rouge, 1983); Roark, Masters Without Slaves, 120-131. 57 Woodman, "Post-Civil War Southern Agriculture and the Law," 319-337. The so-called "homestead exemption," which prevailed until the 1870s, secured varying amounts of real and personal property from attachment. Post-Reconstruction reforms whittled the homestead's coverage and gave debtors the option to waive its protection entirely. 58 Eugene D. Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essavs in Interpretation (New York, 19691, 156-234; William S. Jenkins, Pro-Slavery Thought in the Old South IGloucester, Mass., 1960). 285-295; C. Vann Woodward, "A Southern War Against Capitalism," in American Counterpoint Slavery and Race in the North-South Dialogue IBoston, 1971), 107-139. 59 JD.B. DeBow, The Interest in Slavery of the Southern Non-Slaveholder (Charleston, 18601; Milledgeville IGa.1 Federal Union, December 11, 1860; J. Mills Thornton III, Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama, 1800-1860 !Baton Rouge, 19781, 58--59, 273-274. On "Herrenvolk democracy," see George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (New York, 1971), 30--60. 60 Jefferson (GJ Forest News, April 23, 1880; Southern Cultivator 24 IApril 1866), 86;
61
62 63
64
Proceedings of the Second Annual Session of the Alabama Agricultural Society, 1885 (Montgomery, Ala., 1885), 18--22. Carroll County Times, February 2, 1872; Roger W. Shugg, Origins of Class Struggle in Louisiana: A Social History of White Farmers and Laborers During Slavery and After, 1840-1875 !Baton Rouge, 19391, 269-272; Robert P. Brooks, The Agrarian Revolution in Georgia, 1865-1914 IMadison, Wis., 19141; Ransom and Sutch, One Kind of Freedom, 104-105; Wright, Political Economy of Cotton South, 164-184; Engerman, "Economic Aspects of the Adjustment to Emancipation," 19. Columbus IGa.l Sun quoted in Carroll County Times, October 10,1873. Testimonv ofH. J. McCormick in Robert P. Brooks, Inquiries Concerning Georgia Farms, I, UniveI'slty of Georgia Archives.; Jonathan M. Wiener, Social Origins of the New South: Alabama, 1860-1885 (Baton Rouge, 1978), 77-102; Michael Schwartz, Radical and Protest and Social Structure: The Southern Farmers' Alliance and Cotton Tenancy, 1880-1890 INew York, 19761, 62; Woodward, Origins of the New South, 180-184; Woodman, "Post-Civil War Southern Agriculture and the Law," 327-332. Harold D. Woodman, King Cotton and His Retainers: Financing and Marketing the Cotton
Hunting, Fishing, and Foraging
65 66
67
68 69
70
71 72
167
Crop of the South, 180a-1925 ILexington, Ky., 1968),295-314; Ransom and Sutch, One Kind ofFreedom, 106-148; Woodward, Origins of the New South, 18a-18l. FOI' a more detailed discussion, see Hahn, Roots ofSouthern Populism. King, "Closing of the Southern Range," 63-713; Alabama Acts, 1882-1883, 538-609; Mississippi Laws 1884, 366-372; 1888, 199; Yorkville Enquirer, December 18, 1879; Spar1:anburg Carolina Spartan, November 26, 1879. Forthcoming dissertations on the South Carolina and Alabama Vpcountries by Lacy Ford and Michael Hyman will be important contributions in this regard. Cherokee ICounty) Advance, April 21, 1880; Carroll County Times, September 1,1882; Jefferson Forest News, April 23, 1880; Jackson (County) Herald, March 20, 1885; Cottage Home Farm Journal, Floyd County, January 14, 1878, John H. Dent Papers, Georgia Department of Archives and History. Jackson Herald, May 27, 1881, April 3, 1885; Carroll ICountyl Free Press, May 8, 1885; Carroll County Times, January 6,1882; Gwinnett ICountyl Herald, August 30, 1882. Carroll County Times, January 11, 1882; Jackson Herald, July 8, 1881; Cartersville lBartow County) Express, July 15, 1880; Gwinnett Herald July 14, 1885; Carroll County Tax Digests, 1880, 1890; Jackson County Tax Digests, 1880, 1890, Georgia Department of Archives and History. Thus, when Carroll County voters went to the polls in 1882, they defeated the stock law by 1616 to 1620. Yet two districts turned majorities in its favor: the Tenth District where the largest town of Carrollton was located and the Second District which contained the town of Villa Rica. Over half the countywide votes came from these two districts alone. All the town and village districts together provided the stock law with 80 percent of its votes. The eight remaining rural districts collectively defeated the statute by a margin of over 6:1, with some delivering over 90 percent of their votes to the retention of common grazing rights. Although ('ace and land tenure bore less direct relation to voting alignments, strong anti-stock-law districts had fewer large landowners (500 or more acresl and these large landowners controlled a smaller share of the total acreage than was true in districts more favorably inclined to the stock law. Gvvinnett Herald, September 20, 1882, June 29, 1885, October 18, 1882; Carroll Free Press, June 19, 1885, June 26,1885, May 15, 1885; Jackson Herald, June 17, 1881, August 3, 1883; Cartersville Express, June 21, 1880; Carroll County Times, May 17, 1878, September 8, 1882, August 25, 1882; Cherokee Advance, July 1, 1882. Carroll Free Press, May 8,1885, June 5, 1885, June 25, 1885. Jefferson Forest News, January 14, 1881; Carroll Free Press, n.d.
73 COllage Home Farm Journal, Floyd County, January 14, 1878, December 15, 1881, October 24,1883, November 17,1886, Dent Papers; Georgia Department of Agriculture, Report of Thomas P. Janes, 66; Jackson Herald, April 3, 1885, June 24, 1885; Can'oll County Times, May 3, 1878, June 7, 1878. 74 Carroll County Times, September 23,1881, October 7,1881; Carroll Free Press, June 19, 1885, April 8, 1887, April 15, 1887; Gwinnett Herald, January 3, 1891; Jefferson Forest News, November 19,1880; Jackson Herald, September 2,1887. 75 Gwinnett Herald, July 14, 1885, July 7, 1891; Jackson Herald, July 8, 1881, September 14, 1883; Carr'oll Free Press, July 3, 1885, July 8, 188'7, June 4, 1890; Carroll County Times, September 9, 1882; Cottage Home Farm Journal, Floyd County, December 15, 1881, October' 24, 1883, Dent Papers.
76 Carroll Free Press, July 4, 1884, March 26, 1886, September 23, 1887, March 1, 1889, July 4, 1890; Jackson Herald, March 27, 1885, July 1, 1887, November 11, 1887; Gwinnett
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Herald, October 17,1883, October 14,1884, September 27,1887, August 29,1890, July 7, 1891; Cherokee Advance, April 16, 1886, November 4, 1887, August 9, 1890, August 26, 1887. 77 Publications of the Georgia Department of Agriculture, XV (1889( 117-123; Carroll Free
Press, July 12, 1889, March 26, 1886, February 3, 1888, March 14, 1890; King, "Closing of the Southern Range." 60-6l. 78 See, for example, Barbara Jeanne Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground:
Maryland during the Nineteenth Century (New Haven, 1985), 167-93; Joseph P. Reidy, From Slavery to Agrarian Capitalism in the Cotton Plantation South: Central Georgia 1800-1880 (Chapel Hill, 1992), 136--60, 215-41; Lacy Ford, "Rednecks and Merchants: Economic Development and Social Tensions in the South Carolina Upcountry, 1865-
1900," Journal ofAmerican History 71 (September, 1984), 294-318; John Scott Strickland, "Traditional Culture and Moral Economy: Social and Economic Change in the South Carolina Low Country, 1865-1910," in Steven Hahn and Jonathan Prude, eds., The
Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation: Essays in the Social History ofRural America (Chapel Hill, 1985), 141-78; Stephen V. Ash, Middle Tennessee Society Transformed: War and Peace in the Upper South, 1860-1870 (Baton Rouge, 1988), 175-225. 79 Woodward, Origins of the New South, 321-395 and passim; John G. Sproat, "The Best Men": Liberal Reformers in the GildedAge (New York, 1968). 80 Leon Fink, Workingmen's Democracy: The Knights of Labor in American Politics IUrbana, Ill., 1983); David Montgomery, Beyond Equality: Labor and Radical Republicans, 1862-1872 (New York, 1967), 340-447; Lawrence Good'""Yfi' Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America (New York, 1976). 81 Carroll Free Press, May 15, 1885; Robert R. Madden, "Freedom Hills," Alabama Historical Review (1965), 196; Marie B. Owen, Alabama: A Social and Economic History (Montgomery, Ala., 1938), 102; King, "Closing of the Southern Range"; Hahn, Roots of Southern Populism, chap. VII.
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4
Organized Crime and Class Politics Frank Pearce Adapted by permission from Frank Pearce, Crimes of the Poweiful: Marxism, Crime and Deviance (London: Pluto Press, 19761, pp. 124-52, 161-64.
THE UNDERWORLD
'~S
SERVANT: CHICAGO
Capone's domination of Chicago is legendary. Kobler begins his recent biography with an account of Capone's ability to decide whether or not there should be a clean election in 1928. Allsop sees part of his task to explain "the genesis of this eventual domination of a city by a criminal dictator ... whose authority extended, through the State of Illinois and beyond."l This occurred in part because of the subservience of powerful aldermen such as Kenna and Coughlin to Capone and Torrio.2 Eventually, "As the vicious criminal elements and their political counterparts became more strongly organised, government was growing more and more disorganised, until it virtually fell apart and capitulated to a ruthless and defiant underworld."a This account of the Prohibition years in Chicago is quite inadequate. It fails to explain why Capone,. for all his power, had no choice in 1927 but to obey the Chief of Police's instructions that he should leave Chicago so as not to embarrass the city's mayor Big Bill Thompson in his bid for the Republican presidential candidacy.4 Nor does it explain Capone's fall from power and eventual imprisonment in 1932. In order to understand the events in Chicago it is necessary first to look at Prohibition itself.... The Volstead Act-the legislative instrument for putting into effect the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution-forbade the manufacture or importing of liquor. It did not forbid its purchase nor was the purchaser liable for conspiracy. Thus the poor who drank and socialised in bars were liable to find their meeting places padlocked whereas the rich carried on
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entertaining at home from the abundant cellars they had stocked between the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment and the passing of the Act or from liquor supplied at only the bootlegger's peril. ... Chicago was a wet city. Very few of its citizens supported Prohibition, although the working-class immigrants were its strongest opponents. Gangsters ,"'ere already busy in the city running prostitution and some were brought in by big business for use in the class war-AI Capone had "helped" settle a newspaper strike. Rival factions of the local political parties used the gangsters to settle disputes, and by the early 1920s a "perceptible pattern of bold collaboration between politics, business and gangsters was becoming apparent."s In Chicago local capitalists were at best ambivalent about Prohibition and it had little direct effect on their everyday lives. Some chose to make money from it. Johnny Torrio was in partnership with "the youngest of four brothers who were rich brewers before the Prohibition .... The brewer knew the methods of modern business and applied them to syndicated beerrunning. Torno knew the gangsters and recruited them:'s There was a more general involvement with gangsters when labour racketeering became important in the late 1920s. In 1928 Capone is thought to have made $10 million of his $100 million (gross) from the "protection" of small businesses and union corruption. It is hardly surprising that Capone, as an example of the freest "free enterprise," should be ideologically an ideal partner. Claud Cockburn reports the following conversation with him: "Listen," he said, "don't get the idea I'm one of those goddam radicals. Don't get the idea I'm knocking the American system ... " " ... This American system of ours," he shouted, "call it Americanism, call it Capitalism, call it whatever you like, gives to each and every one of us a great opportunity, if we only seize it with both hands and make the most of it."7 In other cities like San Francisco clear alliances were made:
[The] underworld element, professional politicians and corporations, these all supported the District Attorney, Flickert, who had refused to clean up the red light district, when he was opposed by a respectable reform group with union and lWW backing.s
Despite local corruption in Chicago and elsewhere, law-enforcement agencies had found no difficulty in indicting, convicting and often deporting socialists and anarchists. The American socialist movement of the time was recognised as a very real threat by the ruling class.9 By 1919 the Socialist Party reached a membership of 109,000, only a few thousand below its 1912 total, and Chicago was one of the strongholds of the movement. At that time, Chicago was one of the sites chosen to give a legal gloss to the persecution of the Wobblies, who had been harassed, misrepresented and illegally intimidated by press, vigilante mobs and police.tO In the 1920s the FarmerLabor Party had extensive trade union support in the city and in the thirties the unemployed workers movement was to be strong there.l l The use of
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Chicago's police for political ends was infamous. The late John Williamson, a communist victim of the Smith Act, made this comment: Chicago's factories spilled their dirt and soot over miles of flat land inhabited by their workers. The stockyards and railroads added their stench, and the polluted river cut through its center. The South Side housed the nation's second largest concentration of urban negroes; near the stockyards was virtually a Polish city. Here the first strike fol' an eight hour day took place; here the Haymarket martyrs met their death, here was the founding place of the Social Democratic Party, led by Eugene IJebs, the Industrial Workers of the World and the Communist Party .... Nowhere was police terror so bad as in Chicago during those years. Corrupt to the core and in alliance with the gangsters, the police arrested hundreds of workers at meetings, demonstrations, and strikes and beat them into insensibility :in the local police stations.12
Although there had been the alliances between gangsters and capital, if racketeering was seen to be against capitalist interests it was soon attacked. This can be seen in the early twenties when in the case of "labour racketeering" the opportunity was also taken to undermine union organisation. In 1921-22 the Chicago building trades were controlled by an alliance of corrupt union leaders and the suppliers of building materials. This proved expensive to the construction companies, and promoters were unwilling to go ahead with building. At the same time militant trade unionists were opposing attempts to cut their wages and impose an "open shop," as had been recommended during one dispute by an arbitrator, Judge Landis, who was against corruption but was also anti-union. To meet this situation of union opposition and to make the Chicago construction industry 100 percent Landis there was formed the Citizens' Committee to enforce the Landis award-the first organised and large-scale inteIVention in the affairs of Chicago building trades by parties outside the industry. The Committee was organised under the auspices of the Association of Commerce, with the support of many architects and bankers, and its membership was made up of persons having no direct interest in the construction industry, however much interest some of them may have had in the issue of the open versus the closed ShOpl3
This was a clear case of the interests of particular capitalists being subordinated to that of the class as a whole. It also provides the key to Capone's later downfall. By 1926 some business leaders, la\\yeI's and academics had become sufficiently concerned with the breakdown of law and order to form the Illinois Association for Criminal Justice, which commissioned the Illinois Crime Survey (in print in 1929). In addition, the Chicago Crime Commission, founded in 1919, became ever more active and citizens' groups were formed, the most famous of these being the Chicago Association of Commerce SubCommittee for the Prevention and Punishment of Crime. This was known as the "secret six" because the chairman, the President of the Chamber of
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Commerce, Colonel Randolph, refused to reveal the names of the five other businessmen on the Committee.14 Many businessmen had begun to feel that City Hall could no longer be relied upon to provide the "rational legal" form of administration that they required to run their businesses. Chicago's judges were corrupt, her administration was inefficient, civic contracts were awarded to the highest briber; the infrastructure was starting to break down. The true magnitude of the city's crisis became clear in 1930 when it was found to be $300 million in debt. Mr. Silas Strawn, a civic finance expert who headed a Rescue Committee formed under an emergency measure to save the city from ruin reported: Mismanagement by Mayor Big Bill Thompson and his friends, and lethargy on the part of the public, have reduced Chicago to bankruptcy, the chaotic plight of the public services is now revealed. Unless citizens put money in the till on a large scale, hospitals will shut, inmates oflunatic asylums will be left without food, heat or light, prisons will be unable to house their tenants and the police and fire brigade will have to be disbanded.
This situation prompted a deputation of "prominent" Chicago citizens, led by newspaper publisher Frank Knox, to appeal to President Hoover to intervene. He was sympathetic, possibly in part because of the links between local businessmen and the Republican Party: in 1928, the Chicago civic reformer Julius Rosenwald of Sears Roebuck had contributed $50,000 to Hoover's campaign fund. Is In 1929 federal proceedings were started against Capone for income tax evasion and Elliot Ness and his Department of Justice Raiders started to destroy his breweries. Capone tried to reach an accommodating detente with the authorities-including big business interests-but failed,16 and three years later, much to his surprise, he was given a ten-year sentence. There was no doubt who really controlled Chicago. As one of Capone's contemporaries said to Allsop: Capone and the others really believed that they were running the city, but I don't believe they were. They were the executives and the technicians. The city was being run by the politicians and by City Hall, and the big bosses weren't interested if the gangsters killed each other, providing they kept delivering the money.t 7
Although Prohibition had been supported initially by much of big business, its unintended consequences-and Chicago was only an extreme example-made many change their mind. The depression was an important factor, for, as Andrew Sinclair wrote: This lawlessness, spawned by prohibition, now threatened to spread with mass unemployment, and shake the roots of SOciety. The same employers who had supported the Eighteenth Amendment a decade earlier to benefit themselves and their workers now advocated repeal to protect themselves from their workers. They hoped that legal beer would relieve some of the social tensions of the time and lessen class hatred .... There were other
Orgilnized Crime and Class Politics
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reasons for the manufacturers to change over to the side of repeal. The first was that prohibition seemed to have lost them more than it had gained. The deficiency in government revenue from the liquor tax had been made up by a tax on the incomes of the wealthy and of corporations. The restoration of these incomes would be an incentive to business in the depression. Moreover, the labour unions still existed outside the saloons, and were strengthened when their members attended sober labour meetings. The failure of federal law enforcement showed that private laws of the major companies against drinking by employees, which were widely used before prohibition was sufficient to prevent industrial accidents: indeed it was preferable for the workers, if drink they must, to drink good beer rather than bad hooch. Also the increased consumer market promised by prohibition had not materialised. ls
The publication in 1931 of the Wickersham Report on the enforcement of Prohibition provided extensive documentation of its impracticability and harmful effects and in 1932, the year after Hoosevelt's election to the presidency, it was repealed. I have analysed Capone's career in Chicago because I think that it shows clearly how much is ignored by most conventional accounts. There is no doubt that Capone was a powerful man, but there is equally no doubt that when he started to interfere with the interests of corporate capital, the limitations of his power became clear. This point is still valid today in Chicago. No matter how corrupt its local politics, civic decisions always take into account the interests of the ruling class!9 In law enforcement this is clear too. In 1968, during the Chicago Democratic Convention, those so brutally attacked and beaten on Mayor Daley's orders were explicitly opposing the power of the corporations. Law enforcement has always been taken very seriously when its goal has been the suppression of radicals. Yet opponents of syndicated crime often write as if the state does not have sufficient power to cope with it. Kefauver recommended a strengthening of the immigration laws despite the extensive powers already available and despite their frequent use against Italian socialists.20 Cressey categorically states: "Organised Crime, in all its varieties, flourished in the United States because the criminal law cannot effectively be used to attack organisations.,,2! Although Cressey expresses concern over legislation that might undermine traditional freedom, his failure to examine American history critically makes such statements mystifying since America has one way or another always denied such "freedoms" to socialists. Having dealt here with syndicated crime I will now turn to the analysis of labour racketeering. It must be treated in some depth because it is here that conventional accounts of organised crime fail most miserably. RULING CLASS SPONSORSHIP OF SYNDICATED CRIME
Industrial racketeering
In the 1920s, in Chicago, New York and elsewhere, many gangsters turned to industrial racketeering as a fruitful source of income. Al Capone, Arnold
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Rothstein, Little Augie, Louis Buchalter and a myriad of others had been introduced into labour relations as strikebreakers. They soon offered their services as insurance against upsets of any kind, from the unions, from competition or from bombing.22 This usually involved businesses joining some trade association and/or negotiating contracts with mobstercontrolled unions. Although some of the businessmen were far from happy about these arrangements, the cost of protection was usually passed on to customers in higher prices. In Chicago racketeering involved most consumer goods and services with a consequent rise in prices. The Employers Association of Chicago estimated the annual cost to consumers at $130,000,000 or about $45 per inhabitant. ... Towards the end of 1928 the State Attorney's office compiled a list of ninety-one Chicago unions and associations that had fallen under racketeer rule.23
Similarly in New York: "By the early thirties, Louis Lepke dominated a widely assorted number of industries including bakery and pastry drivers, milliners, garment workers, leather workers, motion-picture operators and fur truckers."24 Most of these were service or small-scale manufacturing industries. Daniel Bell has suggested an explanation for this: Industrial racketeering ... performs the function-at a high price-which other agencies cannot do, of stabilising a chaotic market and establishing an order and structure in the industry; industrial racketeering can exist in a specific type of economic market. It does not exist in steeL auto, chemicaL rubber, etc., where a few giant firms acting in oligopolistic fashion, establish an ordered price structure in the industry. It has existed in small-unit size, highly competitive local product markets, such as trucking, garment, baking, cleaning and dyeing, where no single force other than the industrial racketeer was strong enough to stabilise the industry. This was especially true in the 1920s when industrial racketeering flourished. In the early 1930s legalised price fixing by the New DeaL through the NRA, undercut the role of the industrial racketeer. What had hitherto been a quasi-economic but necessary function now became outright and unnecessary extortion. And in the garment area (dominated by Lepke and Gurrah Jacob Shapiro), in the restaurant field, and in similar industries infested with industrial racketeers, the employers and the union appealed to government for help.25
Bell qualifies this assessment admitting that the New York docks were exceptional in that racketeer control persisted there at least into the fifties (when he was writing). This was because they still fulfilled a useful economic function, the maintenance of an abundant supply of compliant labour available for the irregular loads coming into the harbour. His treatment of this exception will be examined below. But first I wish to deal with his more general statements within the socia-historical context of America in the thirties and forties. Whilst he is accurate on certain details, his account overall is so partial as to be quite misleading. There is little doubt that as soon as gangsters were no longer of
Org,;mized Crime and Class Politics
175
any use to businessmen efforts were made to eliminate them. It is also accurate to point to their regulative function in "cut throat" competitive conditions. However, it is not true that the New Deal tended to eliminate labour racketeering or that gangsters were not used by the large corporations. Exbootlegger Roger Touhy points out that with the end of Prohibition in sight (it was finally repealed in 1933) many gangsters looked longingly at the lucrative union funds because: In the late 20s and early 30s the biggest and most solvent treasuries in the world were the labor unions. Some of the old-time labor skates didn't trust banks. They packed the union's cash away in safe-deposit boxes or invested in US Govemment bonds. The top Amel'ican Federation of Labor unions in the Chicago area had about $10,000,000 in their treasuries.26
Getting control of unions provided an easy, safe way of making money. Some years later Dan Sullivan, Operating Director of the Miami Crime Commission, was told how this was done by another gangster who had switched to that field of operations. First of all, when you have a check-off system [in which employers deduct union dues from paychecks and send the money directly to the union], you have a fool-proof system of collections. It doesn't cost you anything to operate. Secondly, if you run into one of these insurance companies or welfare outfits you don't pay any money out and you take it all in. And thirdly, you have no inspection on the local, county, state or federal levy. So your funds are not audited.2 7
Bell claims that such corruption was no llonger "functional" to employers because Roosevelt's National Recovery Administration allowed for legal price-fixing: gangster-dominated employers' associations were no longer required to stabilise industries. However, as Touhy's comments show, industrial racketeering was still prevalent during the New Deal and, as I will show below, not only in the service industries. VVhy this was so can only be lnderstood by looking at the New Deal itself. For Bell, as for other corporate liberals, What the New Deal did was to legitimate the idea of group rights, and the claim of groups, as groups, rather than indi"iduals, for govemment supp0l1. Thus unions won the right to bargain collectively and through the union shop, to enforce a group decision over individuals. the aged won pensions, the farmers gained subsidies; the veterans received benefits; the minority groups received legal protections. None of these items, in themselves, were unique. Together they added up to an extraordinary social change. Similarly, the govemment has always had some role in directing the economy. But the permanently enlarged role, dictated on the one hand by the necessity to maintain full employment, and on the other, by the expanded military establishments, created a vastly different set of powers in Washington than ever before in our history.28
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Such a view which sees America as being a society of different interest groups exercising countervailing power against each other refereed by a neutral state, albeit one that tends to develop its own interests, is inaccu· rate. As Tony Woodiwiss has shown, the New Deal was a part of the process by which monopoly capitalism achieved hegemonic domination over Amer· ican society.29 There was never any doubt of Roosevelt's commitment to capitalism, but in order to save it from itself he was forced to give it some rather unpalatable medicine.30 Roosevelt came to power three years after the Great Crash promising a New Deal which would produce" a true concert of interests."31 This was to be achieved through various bodies known by their initials, such as the AAA, the CCC, the FERA, the TVA, the PWA and the NRA (National Recovery Ad· ministration). It is important to realise that: "In essence the NRA embodied the conception of many business men that recovery was to be sought through systematic monopolisation, high prices and low production."32 One of the provisions of the National Recovery Act, Section 7a, stated that "employees shall have the right to organise and bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing and shall be free from the interfer· ence, restraint or coercion of employers."33 This concession helped win the support for Roosevelt of many trade unionists and initially encouraged many workers to form union locals. But the Act did not ban individual bar· gaining, company unions or the open shop and the NRA (nicknamed the National Run Around) administrators supported employers in their opposi· tion to working·class militancy. After the whole NRA was declared unconstitutional in 1935 the President approved the Wagner Act, which made Clause 7a more of a reality, in order to gain the trade unionists' support. At the same time, as Radosh has ar· gued, certain fractions of the ruling class, particularly corporate capital, recognised that by doing so they could contain working·class militancyboth by limiting its political content and by making its expression predict· able.34 As mass producers they were very conscious of the need for a mass market, and with governmental approval of their monopolistic practices they would be able to pay high wages and still make a good profit. They felt it imperative that the worker "desire a larger share in the mental and spiritual satisfaction in the property from his daily job much more than a larger share in the management of the enterprise whichfornishes that job" [emphasis added] .35 Overall, "the New Deal's recognition of potentially antagonistic social groups served a conservative integrating purpose.',a6 This is perhaps the fundamental criticism of the corporate liberal position. The idea of counter· vailing power in American life fails to explain the historical movement of American society both at home and abroad, because, whatever groups exist, whatever elites there are, "The men at the top must heed the basic law of our society; the need to expand corporate profit."37 Ideally, then, for employers during Roosevelt's administration company unions were best; failing that came unions which eschewed fundamental
Orgilnized Crime and Class Politics
177
questions concerning the organisation of the economy and particularly the organisation of individual enterprises. Although the American working class compared to the British was neither as extensively unionised nor as generally politically self-conscious about the class nature of society and industrial organisation, the socialist organisations, rank-and-file militancy, the Wobblies, and the various regional general strikes underlined a dangerous radical potential. One way to cope with the NRA and Wagner legislation was to allow unionisation but to keep it as rilght-wing as possible. Whereas gangsters had long been used to stop any unionisation, they were now also used to tl)' to emasculate any locals that were set up. They would set up "paper locals" (local branches only in name, with no control by their rankand-file members) and negotiate "sweetheart" contracts. The relationship between the Chicago Hestaurant Association and the syndicate-manipulated unions since the thirties is a good example of this. It was an ideal shakedown racket. There was little book-keeping involved, only names and dues were important, not animated members agitating for union benefits, welfare, meetings, elections or any other kind of legitimate union practises. It was strictly a paper organisation. Meanwhile, the assoociation members were pushing syndicate beer, liquor, meats and pl'Oduce and were utilising its myriad services: laundlY, dly cleaning, garbage disposal, vending machines, juke boxes and buying its fixtures and appliances. The association members contributed to a "voluntary fund"--aside from its regular membership dues-for use when labor troubles arose, which happened with increasing regularity .... It was a classic "sweetheart" arrangement, for the restaurateurs were still coming out ahead by paying below-scale wages, the lowest in most instances in the counlIy. Them was something in it for evelybody but the workers,3s
Again, it was after the repeal of Prohibition that mobsters Willie Bioff and Frank Nitto (the enforcer) moved into the movie industl)'. In 1934 their man, George E. Browne, became President of the AFL union, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees. Soon on the East Coast "the wages of union members were slashed and stagehands were laid off."39 Then they moved to Hollywood but the contract that they wanted this time was not too sweet. The movie companies had to pay $75,000 a year indefinitely and got vel)' little benefit from their association with the racketeers: so, following the typical pattern, Browne, Bioff, Nitto and the other members involved soon fell foul of the law.4lo Although I have provided some evidence to show that labour racketeering was alive and well during the thirties, the examples I have given are still primarily in the marginal areas of employment, in service rather than in the central manufacturing industries. But this gives a misleading impression of its importance, because even when racketeers operate in such fields as car delivel)' this may be because they have rendered "services" to the major manufacturers. I have already mentioned that racket-dominated unions do not, as a rule, negotiate tough wage contracts. In the heavy industries they
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have had the additional function of stopping the growth of a strong, militant, socialist trade union movement. The concessions made to labour in the 1930s made only too possible the democratic election of socialists to union positions and the spread of socialist ideas amongst the working class, particularly those in such large-scale enterprises. United Steel battled against unionisation as SUCh;41 other employers reluctantly accepted the unions and then attempted to control their policies by having either AFL unions (committed to Gompers's business unionism) and/or corrupt unions. The best documented case of this is in the centre of America's manufacturing industry, Detroit.
Detroit: opposition and co-option The Kefauver Commission found that syndicate men Anthony D'Anna and Joe Adonis had been given monopolistic franchises in Detroit and New Jersey for the haul-away business at Ford. This was part payment for service rendered to Harry Bennett, who had been labour boss at Ford's Detroit plant. When Michael D. Whitty followed through the story, partially revealed in Kefauver's book, he uncovered a plot which demonstrated the utter ruthlessness of corporate capitalism: gangsters were to be used to gain control of the unions in all auto work in Detroit. The struggles to organise the autoworkers in America were some of the most heroic in American union history. The large corporations involved used every weapon in the employers' vast armoury to stop unionisation. Company spies were used; in 1934 General Motors alone spent $839,000 on detective work, and Chrysler gave $211,000 to the Corporation Auxiliaries Co. which provided spies and stool pigeons.42 General Motors was also a member of the National Metal Trades Association which, besides supplying labour and scabs, helped set up company unions and worked with the Justice Department and Naval and Army Intelligence. Workers sympathetic to unionism were either laid off or terrorised. Gangsters were used, particularly by Ford; General Motors "used the forces of notorious Black Legion, a Dupont financed terror group that beat, tarred and feathered and murdered active trade unionists. General Motors foremen were actually seen donning black robes inside the plant in preparation for a Black Legion raid."43 Although the AFL had made half-hearted attempts to organise the autoworkers, it was not until 1936 with the UAW-CIO that any headway was made. Once the union started to recruit members it became ~nstoppable and use was made of the sit-down strategy which was sweeping America at the time. At the end of December, the "Great Flint Sit-Down Strike" began. As a result, in February 1937 General Motors recognised the UAW as the sole bargaining agent and agreed to no reprisals. General Motors was organised.44 This did not necessarily mean that other auto companies would also capitulate. Ford held out until 1940, using its own private army to oppose unionisation. This was the 3,000 men in Harry Bennett's Service Depart-
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ment. He employed ex-pugs, policemen who had been fired from their jobs, gangsters, and mf:lO released from prisons: men like 'Legs' Laman, who had a record as a gunrunner, kidnapper and squealer and who, after six years in prison, was paroled in the care of the Ford Motor Co. Another was Chester La Mare, a powerful Detroit gang leader who in 1929 was granted the fruit and vegetable concession worth $100,000 a year, at River Rouge. Still another was Sam Cuva, who was jailed for shooting his mother-in-Iaw.45 From 1937 to 1940, when attempts were made to organise the company, the Service Department beat up many union organisers including Walter Reuther. However, in 1940 after union and NLRB pressure, the Ford Motor Co. gave in. "Harry Bennett agreed to a union shop, dues check-off, grievance machinery, seniority, time and a half for overtime, premium pay for night workers, and two hours pay for employees called in but not given work."~ There has been much speculation about why Ford capitulated. Was it, as some observers felt, a move dictated by the simple business considerations that it might be cheaper to work with the union than to fight it? Was it a manoeuvre to gain time for a later fight? Or was it, as Emil Mazey believes, based on the hope that "the company might be able to take over the Ford local from the inside"?47
The evidence points to Mazey's interpretation. As early as 1938 Homer Martin, the right-wing President of the UAW, "had been bargaining secretly with Harry Bennett, perhaps in an attempt by Ford to convince Martin, in exchange for union rerognition, to lead the auto union back into the more conservative American Federation of Labor."48 Actually Martin did not have the influence to do so and was expelled from the union. In 1940 another attempt was made to use his services when, describing himself as an AFL organiser, he urged 3,000 black workers to break the strike. But it is the activities of Santo Perrone, a gangster who served six years for violating Prohibition laws in the Detroit area, which gives most support to Mazey's views. In 1934 J. A. Fry, President of the Detroit Michigan Stove Co., employed Perrone to recruit strikebreakers and stop the unionisation of the plant. Mazey had succeeded in organising the factory while Perrone was imprisoned for illegally manufacturing whisky: on Perrone's return the union organisation disappeared. Perrone was important in other companies in Detroit, notably in Briggs Manufacturing. In the 1940s Briggs, Perrone and Melvin Bishop (a regional director of the UAW) seem to have made a deal which involved the intimidation of radical unionists, such as Mazey and his Socialist Workers Party followers. In March 1945 four members of Mazey's group were severely beaten; and soon after Perrone's son-in-law, Carl Ronda, received a scrap-hauling contract from Briggs, identical to that Perrone had been granted by Michigan Stove in 1934. Despite pressure from the unions nothing was done by the Detroit police. Mazey commented: "We [the UAW] believe that law enforcement agencies were not really interested in solving some of the crimes committed against our union because they were paid off by the organised rackets."49 Violence continued, including the
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shooting and wounding of Walter Reuther. The UAW hired Ralph Winstead and Herbert Blankerhern, former NLRB special investigators. Years later in 1957, just a few days before Winstead was due to use his massed information on the underworld at the UAW trial, his body was found in Lake St. Clair. The cause of his death was never satisfactorily explained. Ironically the plot at Ford failed and the Ford Local 600 was controlled by the Communist Party.50 Although America was not officially involved in the Second World War until Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Roosevelt had already long been calling his country the "arsenal of democracy." Many of the trade-union leaders whose membership had been increasing through the Wagner Act were suggesting, particularly early in 1941, a no-strike pact. Although initially opposed to these ideas, with Germany's invasion of Russia in June of that year, leading Communist Party trade-unionists became as dedicated as many more right-wing trade-unionists to containing working-class militancy. This was their policy at the August 1941 conference ofthe UAW. At that time Walter Reuther, already a major figure in the union, although an opponent of communist and the other major left-wing tendencies in the union, was a strong supporter of the no-strike pledge. However, Many rank-and-filers opposed that plan, but in 1943 Reuther found a way to win back support. The communists announced "their support for piecework, a means of incentive pay. Reuther, sensing that the rank and file was against piecewOl'k, which would tend to speed up the work rate, announced that he opposed the plan, and at the union convention at Buffalo in 1943, his proposal against piecework was passed.51
As a result "Reuther emerged from the war years with his reputation as a militant intact."52 The massive confrontation with General Motors in 1945 resulting from Reuther's demand for a 30 percent wage increase without a
price increase seemed to confirm this. Moreover the period from 1945 to 1946 saw "American labor's greatest upsurge." There were 41,750 strikes in 1945 involving 3,470,000 workers, and 4,985 in 1946 involving 4,660,000 workers (in the previous ten years the average annual number of strikes was 3,551 and the number of workers involved averaged 1,586,000). The disputes involved among others the United Auto Workers, the United Mineworkers, the International Longshoreman's Association, as well as lumber workers, glass workers, textile workers, oil workers, steelworkers and the railway brotherhoods.53 There were general strikes in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Stamford, Connecticut, Rochester, New York, and Oakland, California.54 At the same time there was discussion about the need for a party like the British Labour Party, which had just come to power. This was still thought by many American politicians and businessmen to be dangerously radical. In the 1948 preSidential election ex-New Deal administrator Henry Wallace, supported by the Communist Party, only just missed UAW ratification, thereby losing the necessary working-class base; he still polled over a million votes. (He described himself as an "American capitalist, a progressive Tory.")
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There was a real cause for concern over the political loyalties of the organised working class, particularly since Russia had been America's ally during the war. However the combined assault on anti-radical activities by the government, by the major political parties and by the right-wing tradeunionists in the context of the developing cold war policies of the Truman administration succeeded in negating any such potential. Although Truman had in 1945 been forced to abandon his plan to introduce conscription against the "red threat," in 1947 he signed the anti-union and anti-radical Taft Hartley Act. In 1948 the 1940 Smith Act was used against leading Communists, and in 1950 the McCarran "Anti-Subversive Activities Act" was passed. Reuther's anti-communist attacks in the UAWand in the CIO were becoming ever more clearly linked with these cold war policies. At the same time major companies, particularly General Motors, were beginning to recognise him as a reasonably acceptable trade-union leader. Charles P. Wilson, Chairman of General Motors, joined him on a Detroit citizens' committee so as to get to know him and they developed a liking for each other as the years passed. Two pro-business-unionism journalists said of one of his contracts with General Motors: The 1950 contract embellished Reuther's already considerable reputation within the labor movement and in the nation at large, as an imaginative union leader who could win major gains without strikes. Fortune summed up the VAW achievement: "In the year beginning June, 1950, his auto workers got about 24 cents added to their basic hourly rates; there was not a single strike of consequence in the indusuy. Most labor leaders are accustomed to puffing and heaving, and sometimes striking, for the pennies per hour they get for their men, but Walter Reuther makes it look easy."55 As Serrin points out in his study The Company and the Union, Reuther justified such faith, and the union's willingness to discipline wildcat strikers and to engage in ritualised conflict allowed for the removal of one of the manufacturers' greatest problems, unpredictable interference in the production process by the workers. He also continued his support for cold war policies, being at the founding conference for the CIA front, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and later in 1966, by channelling $50,000 from the CIA to the weak European labour unions which were "especially vulnerable to Communism."56 The changed political climate and the neutralisation of the radical potential in the union through men like Reuther made gangsters unnecessary. This, rather than "a freak of coincidence" (as Whitty puts it), explains why the plan to extend gangster control from Briggs to Ford to Chrysler and then to industries in other states was not implemented. Indeed, since gangsters may attempt to "muscle" their employers they are a poor substitute for compliant right-wing trade-unionists. Their services no longer required, the underworld servants were disposed of. A Ford salvage official, tipped off by Herbert that the Perrone invasion was forthcoming and having learned that the Bennett regime was at the edge of collapse, took it upon himself to run Ronda and Perrone out of River Rouge.
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This stopped the Chrysler arrangement and would indicate that Bennett was pivotal in the plan's broader scope.57 The New York docks
I have spent some time on the operations of syndicated crime in the Detroit area to show that Bell was wrong in saying that labour rackets were limited to marginal industries. However, he himself admits one important exception-the "racket ridden longshoremen." He argues that racketeers were important in the New York docks because they performed certain important functions. In New York Harbour the narrow piers and grid-iron street layout made congestion a continuous problem. The long waiting time for loading and unloading freight increased the costs to both the steamship companies and the truckers. From the point of view of the shipping companies the ideal situation was one where casual labour was in abundant supply, so allowing for speedy unloading and low wages. Such labour conditions were best guaranteed by a union that was racket-dominated, such as the International Longshoreman's Association (ILA). Besides the usual sweetheart contract, the racketeers benefited in other ways. Control of a union local means control of a pier, and control of the host of rackets that are spawned on the docks. A victorious clique has a number of concessions it can parcel out. These include bookmaking, loan-sharking, kickbacks for jobs, etc .... But the biggest prize of all was the loading racket.58 Because of the long waits involved, drivers did not bring their own loaders but hired them at the pier. These could only be hired through the "loading" bosses, who were union members and indeed dominated the lLA. They charged high prices for the privilege of using the labour that they controlled. With the institutionalisation of these bosses in a strong-arm organisation known as Varick Enterprises Inc., all truckers had to pay a tax per ton whether they used loaders or not, and if they were very short on time they could pay a "hurry up" fee and go to the head of the line. However, the rates were unpredictable, causing resentment among the truckers, who found it difficult to work out their costs accurately when charging customers. Consequently the truckers, led by Joseph Adelizzi, Managing Director of the Motor Carriers Association, brought pressure to bear and more standardised rates were worked out. The truckers were reasonably happy, the steamship companies were happy. There was also a close political tie-up between the lLA and Tammany Hall; Joseph P. Ryan, who in 1943 had been made President for Life of the lLA, had political connections with businessman William J. McCormack, who was "one of the silent powers in Democratic politics,"59 and Mr. Big on the waterfront. The lLA supported the Democrats and were in tum protected by them. These detentes nevertheless fail to explain the persistence of racketeer domination in New York. Instead Bell focuses on ecological factors.
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The real significance of the racket, for sociological investigation, is that "loading" is to be found only in the New York waterfront. There has never been a loading racket in San Francisco, in New Orleans, in Baltimore or Philadelphia-the other major maritime ponts in the lIS. There are many indigenous or historical factors to account fOl' this lack, but the key fact is that the spatial arrangements of these othe!' ports is such that loading never had a "functional" significance. In all these ports, other than New York, there are direct railroad connections to the piers, so that transfer of cargoes is easily and quickly accomplished; nor is there in these pOliS the congested and choking nan'ow streets which in New York forced the trucks to wait. ...60 How can one break this vicious cycle? One answer is the "regularisation" of work ... But is not enough. The matrix of the problem is the dilapidated physical condition of the port ... and the fulcrum is still time.61 Bell is right to argue that a crucial difference between New York and the other docks is the congestion produced by the narrow piers and grid-iron streets. He is wrong, however, in arguing that racketeering was a necessary consequence of this. A strong socialist union would have soon eliminated the racketeers, and in America as a whole such socialist influence was a real possibility up until the late 1940s. In the case of the longshoremen there are additional reasons for arguing this. There was the precedent of the clean radical West Coast union, the International Longshoreman's and Warehouseman's Union. This had been formed in 1937 under the leadership of Harry Bridges when the Pacific seaboard longshoremen rejected the ILA-AFL and went into the CIO.62 There was also the strong radical tradition in New York itself. One reason why events turned out as they did in New York was that dissidents were "dealt with," by refusing them employment, a powerful weapon given the large numbers of casual workers, and by violence. Bell admits that when in the thirties "the Communists sought to gain a foothold among the Italian workers,"63 such rebellions were dealt with summarily. In 1939 Peter Panto, an "insurgent leader of the longshoremen on the Brooklyn Docks,"64 was murdered by Albert Anastasia. "Although a former killer for the mob, Allie Tannebaum, testified that Anastasia had personally supervised the killing, District Attorney William O'Dwyer unaccountably failed to press the indictments."65 In fact, he had intimated to Marcy Potter, a member of the Brooklyn-Queens Labor and Citizens Committee and of the American Labor Party, that he might do so if he received the support of the American Labor Party at the forthcoming elections.66 Such support being refused he would gain nothing and possibly antagonise the syndicate if he were to prosecute. The canvassing of the ALP is yet another indication that socialist ideas were iimportant in the dockland area. Despite intimidation the influence of left-wingers increased. In 1945, the rank and file rejected one of J. P. Ryan's sweetheart agreements. The opposition was led by Local 791, pressurised "by a rank-and-file committee in Brooklyn headed by a man named William E. Warren, but guided actually by the Communists."67 The men won their demands and returned to work.
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Ryan then expelled WaITen from the union for allegedly not paying his dues. Later when he still reported for work he "fell and hurt himself." After exposure to such teITorising tactics and needing to earn a living, Warren not surprisingly repudiated his Communist associates. During this period too there was a powerful New York socialist movement. This was made clear in evidence presented in the report of the Investigation of Communism in New York City Distributive Trades, June-August 1948. One witness, a department store executive, complained about massive demonstrations by the many left-wing unions. This certainly caused concern, for most of these unions were later "investigated." In fact in 1950-51 over a million trade unionists in 12 unions, one fifth of its membership, were expelled from the CIO. These unions included Bridges' ILWU, the International Fur and Leather Workers' Union, the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers and the American Communications Association.68 In 1953 because of growing internal dissension the ItA called a genuine strike. Faced by normal union demands the steamship companies lost any advantages from their detente with the ILA. Ed Reid wrote at the time: "Longshoremen working in a regularised port (decasualised and properly unionised) can earn more money over the year. In San Francisco the majority of longshoremen earn more than $3,500 a year. In New York the majority earn less than $2,500 a year."69 Bad publicity about the waterfront also made some attempt at a clean-up necessary. As a result, the AFL expelled the ILA in 1953, chartered a new union and the men were asked to vote for which they wanted to represent them. The IIA won by a narrow majority. Bell lists many reasons for thisincluding a distrust of the AFL union as a real alternative. Again, he mentions, but underplays, the most important. "Years of racket control ... had eliminated the independent leadership among the men."70 The political climate in America after seven years of McCarthyism and the cold war made the development of radical unionism unlikely then. I have shown that a radical potential existed; it will strengthen the argument if I demonstrate the awareness that existed of the relationship between why and how it was pre-empted. The clue to this is given in Ed Reid's work. He points out the effects of decasualisation of labour in Britain's dockland in 1946: Waterli'Ont crime has been reduced, but frequent strikes have harassed shipping in British ports. Since 1946, thirty-four dock strikes have closed ports in England and Scotland for periods up to forty-two days .... Most were not authorised by the union. The British scheme for dock reform, therefore, seems hardly a solution for labour leaders in this country.71
Given the narrow piers, etc., tremendous economic and political power would be in the hands of workers who worked there. At city level this was recognised in 1950 by Governor Thomas E. Dewey, originally elected in 1942 on a racket-busting ticket, who sent this letter to J. P. Ryan, President of the lIA:
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Dear Joe, I would surely be delighted to come to the annual affair of the Joseph R. Ryan Association on Saturday May 20th, if possible. As it happens, Mrs. Dewey and I have accepted an invitation to the marriage of Lowell Thomas's only son that weekend and we just can't possibly make it. It is mighty nice of you to ask me and I wish you would give my regards to all the fine people at the dinner. On behalf of the people of the entire state, 1 congratulate you and 1 thank you for what you have done to keep the Communists from getting control of the New York waterfront. Be assured that the entire machinery of the Government of New York State is behind you and your organisation in this determination
[emphasis added]. With WaIm regards, Sincerely yours. Thomas E. Dewey?2 There is also evidence of Federal acceptance of the racketeers. In 1941 rank-and-file members had begun a legal suit challenging the validity of wage agreements, alleging that true overtime had not been paid. "Their claim was upheld by the Wage and Hour Administrator, by seven different courts (including three US Circuit Courts of Appeal) and finally, in 1948, by the US Supreme Court which held that the longshore contracts violated the Wage and Hour law."73 The UA and the steamship companies colluded to avoid the implications of this judgement, which included opening the books to public inspection, thus showing that frauds had been perpetrated against the Federal government during the war. When there was industrial action by the rank and file in August 1948 Truman slapped down an eighty-day Taft-Hartley injunction. In March 1949 a congressional bill reversed the Supreme Court decision. There was here a high degree of tacit government support for the "working arrangements" between the corrupt union and the dockland bosses. Bell's inability to recognise this, despite the pointers to such a possibility to be found in his own essay, is symptomatic of his general position. He has such a strong antipathy to "extreme" leftwing ideas that it produces a state of conceptual blindness. For Bell, like most bourgeois social scientists, men cannot rationally be revolutionary socialists and therefore to become so would not provide a meaningful solution to any of their problems.
RACKETEERING IN AN INTERNATIONAL CONTEXT Earlier I pointed out that a Marxist analysis of crime entailed an international dimension. Events within any society are affected to a greater or lesser extent by their political, social and cultural relationship with other countries. In any examination of the international context, care must be taken to deal with what is actually being done, by governments and by international corporations and agencies such as the International Monetary
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Fund, as well as what is presented by various governments as the rationale for their action. Thus in both Britain and America, opposition to communist Russia has inspired much of their foreign policy from 1917 until the present day. Direct British intervention in Russia was only stopped by the threat of working-class political action, and President Wilson sent American troops into Siberia to aid anti-Bolshevik forces from 1918 to 192074 During the 1920s and 1930s the anti-Russian policies continued although America was less fierce in this opposition than Britain. During the Second World War America concentrated against Japan, leaving Russia to bear the brunt of the war against Germany. From early 1941 until the Normandy landings of June 1944, the entire strength of the British Empire and Commonwealth engaged between two and eight divisions of the principal Axis power, Germany. During all but the first six months of the same period, the Soviet Union withstood, contained and eventually repulsed, an average of about 180 German divisions?5 It seems likely that the decision taken by Churchill and supported by Roosevelt not to open a second front until 1944 was politically motivated. ("Western experts expected a rapid capitulation of Russia before the German onslaught."76) Kolko has shown that particularly from 1943 onwards the alliances on which the war was conducted were extremely complex. Britain, America and Russia were all fighting Germany. In addition, Britain and America wished to see Russia rendered ineffective as a world power and to limit the spread of the revolutionary anti-capitalist movements springing up allover Europe. At the same time America and Britain were competing for world mastery of capitalism.77 This hot and cold war context makes more comprehensible the Federal collusion in the maintenance of racketeer control of the waterfront already mentioned. In 1942:
Accurate information on sailing dates and cargoes of ships leaving New York was reaching the cordon of German submarines which then virtually controlled the Eastern seaboard and sank our and British shipping almost at will. At a meeting of the harassed Naval Intelligence staff, at 90 Church Street, one day someone advanced the idea of enlisting the tightly organised New York-New Jersey dock underworld in the struggle. The Annapolis professional police officers saw the possibilities at once. No force could patrol the vulnerable piers and ships as effectively as the tough, alert long-shoremen, truckers and watchmen who knew every inch of them. The waterfront prostitutes and their pimps could be a counter-intelligence corps, if properly organised on the first order .... There was only one man who had sufficient authority to solve the problem-and that was Lucky Luciano .... Every few weeks a small group of naval officers in civilian clothes headed by his old friend and la~er, Moses Polakoff, would go to visit him .... The details are conjecture and always will be. In any case, the arrangement seems to have been effective. There was surprisingly little sabotage or any other trouble on the docks of the 3rd Naval District during the remainder of the war?8
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In 1945 Luciano went before the Parole Bo,ilI'd and because of his contribution to the war effort was granted parole and exiled for life. Because of difficulties of corroboration and because of official secrecy, this story is contentious-on balance, though, the evidence seems strong. It is clear that rather than have a "clean union" that might have communist sympathies-a possible solution to both problems since Russia was then at war with Germany-Federal authorities preferred to legitimate racketeer control of the docks. They were fighting the cold war during the Second World War, this time at home. The connection with organised crime did not end there since Sicilian Americans and local Mafiosi were used by the Allies in their 1943 invasion of Italy. When the Allied armies landed: "The basic premise of American occupational planning prior to the conquest of Italy was to maintain existing governmental structures, laws, and even official personnel so long as they did not conflict with military needs or ultimate political objectives."79 Their appointment of well-known Mafiosi as mayors all over SicilyBO is also compatible with "ultimate political objectives," their anti-socialist role in Italian politics being well known.B1 Since then the Mafiosi have justified such confidence by their dedicated opposition to socialism in any of its forms.B2 There is also evidence of Italian-American activity. Vito Genovese, the New York mobster who had earlier escaped to Italy when under indictment for murder, worked" as an unofficial adviser to the American military government." A special agent for Military Intelligence arrested him when he was found to be a strong supporter of fascism and a black-marketeer. No help was received from the military authorities or the FBI and, indeed, when Genovese was brought back to America he was never tried for murder because of "lack of witnesses."83 American cold war interests had helped create the organisation which was to be primarily responsible for smuggling heroin into that country for the next 20 years. Cold war policies had a similar effect in France. In the late forties there was worldwide opposition to America's Marshall Plan, which was seen by many as part of the attempt to divide Europe and also to give direct aid in the fight against communism. "Thus more than half the military and economic assistance to the French under the Marshall Plan and NATO was not to protect metropolitan France against the mythical soviet threat, but to restore her colonial control in Algeria and Vietnam."84 France at this time was riven by conflict between the working class, who supported the communists and other left-wingers, and right-wingers like de Gaulle and his anti-communist party. In 1947 there was a massive general strike, eventually called off in December. The major confrontation in the struggle took place in Marseille and at that time: Victory in Marseille was essential to US Foreign Policy for a number of reasons. As one of the most important international ports in France, Marseille was a vital beach-head for Marshall Plan exports to Europe. Continued Communist control of its docks would threaten the efficiency of the Marshall Plan and any future aid programmes. As the second largest city in France, continued Com-
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munist domination of the Marseille electorate would increase the chance that the Communist Party might win enough votes to form a national government .... The CIA ... sent agents and a psychological warfare team to Marseille, where they dealt directly with Corsican syndicate leaders through the Guerini brothers. The CIA's operatives supplied arms and money to Corsican gangs for assault on Communist picket lines and harassment of the important union officials. During the month-long strike the CIA's gangsters and the purged CRS police units murdered a number of striking workers and mauled the picket lines.8s
In 1950 when Marseille dockers refused to move arms shipments for France's war in Indochina, the CIA moved again. This time, as well as the Guerinis another Corsican gangster, Pierre Ferri-Pisani, was paid to recruit an elite criminal terror squad to work in the docks. He received $15,000 from Irving Brown, then head of the AFL mission in Europe, money which he, in turn, received from Thomas Braden of the CIA. The successful attack on communist control of the waterfront made Marseille wide open for the Corsican smugglers. Their most profitable commodity was heroin, refined in Marseille and then clandestinely exported to the United States. The CIA had helped build the French connection. Yet another country sympathetic to gangsters, in part because of American foreign policy, was Cuba. From the time of America's intervention in the war between the nationalist movement in Cuba and her colonial master, Spain, the United States government abrogated to itself the right to veto Cuban governments. With massive US investments in the country, this meant that no left-wing government would be tolerated. From the first days of independence the governments were invariably corrupt, plundering the treasury and organising rigged lotteries. From 1933 until 1959 the dominant political figure was Batista; this was equally true whether he was bearing the title of President or in the background. He willingly adopted Meyer Lansky-America's most important gambling magnate-to set up operations in the 1930s and it was not long before Lansky owned most of Havana's casinos. His Miami connections stood him in good stead, for the Cubans had much of their capital invested in Miami, and Luciano was able to complete one of his routes for the shipping of heroin.86 In the forties and fifties lansky'S interests in Cuba seem to have been seen to by the Santo Trafficantes, father and son. "As his father's financial representative, and ultimately Meyer Lansky's, Santo Jr. controlled much of Havana's tourist industry and became quite close to the pre-Castro dictator, Fulgencio Batista."87 In 1957 ten new lush gambling casinos were opened "under the auspices of the Batista government, which had waived certain taxes, lent money, permitted professional gamblers to enter Cuba for two years as 'technicians' and presumably was taking a cut in the profits."88 This paradise was disturbed by the successful Cuban revolution of 1959: "Rumours regarding the abolition of gambling circulated throughout the island during the first days of the new government. Substance was given to these reports as notorious US racketeers-those who had not yet escaped
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-were rounded up by rebel troops for questioning."89 Although there was a small respite, gambling and the gamblers were banned from Cuba. However, they retained their connections with the prominent right-wing Cubans exiled in Cuba, as did pro-Batista politicians like Richard Nixon. The final example of American government "sponsorship" of gangsters again involves heroin, but in this case the intermingling of political corruption and cold war policies is far more naked. Southeast Asia-the major theatre of American military operations in the sixties and early seventieshas become the major supplier of heroin to the American market. It has done so because of America's military policies and, at least in part, because of CIA involvement with the transportation of opium in their own airline Air America.90 In doing so they have followed the spirit of the British and French colonial adventurers. The former fought the Opium War of 1839-42 for the right to peddle the drug which had been decreed illegal in their main market, China. The French financed their administration in Indochina through opium sales and later helped finance their war against the liberation forces, as well as gaining political support from their allocation of the opium franchise. After the French pulled out there was a lull in the traffic until, in 1958, the American-supported Diem administration was faced with large-scale insurgency and so revived the opium trade with Laos to finance counter-insurgency operations. Faced with similar problems in 1965, Premier Ky's adviser, General Loan, used the same methods. Saigon in South Vietnam and Bangkok in Thailand are the major distribution centres for the opium grown in Southeast Asia's "Golden Triangle." This stretches across 150,000 square miles of northeast Burma, northern Thailand and northern Laos. All of the countries involved have been subjects of the anti-communist policies of the major Western powers, and ironically Saigon became the major exporter Ito the American and European markets.91 The CIA involvement in the propagation of a commodity that another governmental bureau was committed to fighting requires some explanation. It is possible that there has long been a combination of ignorance and a simple conflict of interest. Narcotics agents tended to concentrate on Europe but, when they did look to Laos, because of GI addiction "investigations were blocked by the Laotian Government, the State Department and the CIA.,,92 It may be good for American foreign policy to allow the traffic in heroin but it is bad for the homeland if many of its middle-class youth are strung out. However, there may be more to lthe problem, as one black minister commented: Heroin and other drugs are seen by some blacks in the ghetto as the white man's way of exercising social control over ghetto dwellers. EvelY time there has been a major disturbance in a disadvantaged community, heroin has become readily available. Black leaders believe and rigidly accept the idea that the enemy places heroin in the community to prevent them lium rising above their situation.93
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I think that this tour of American foreign policy from the Second World War and over much of the globe must forestall the premature dismissal of such a view. It is a frightening possibility.
Notes 1 Kenneth Allsop, The Bootleggers, London: Arrow Books, 1970, p. 75. 2 John Landesco, Organized Crime in C/licago: Part III of the Illinois Crime Survey 1929, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968; see also John Kobler, Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone, London: Michael Joseph, 1971, p. 203. 3 Virgil Peterson, Barbarians in Our Midst, New York: lillIe, Brown, 1952, excerpted in Gus Tyler led.), Organized Crime in America: A Book of Readings, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967, p. 160. 4 John Kobler, op. cit., p. 208. 5 Kenneth Allsop, op. cit., p. 279. 6 Ibid., pp. 80-81. 7 Claud Cockburn, I Claud ... the Autobiography of Claud Cockburn, Hannondsworth: Penguin, 1967, 118-19. 8 William Preston, Aliens and Dissenters, New York: Harper and Row, 1966, p. 134. 9 See particularly James Weinstein, The Decline of Socialism in America, 1912-1925, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967, but also Jeremy Brecher, Strike, San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1972. 10 Alan Wolfe, The Seamy Side of Democracy, New York: McKay, 1973, pp. 26-29. 11 William Z. Foster,American Trade Unionism, New York: International Publishers, 1947, p. 82. 12 John Williamson, Dangerous Scot: The Life and Work ofan American Undesirable, New York: International Publishers, 1969. 13 John Landesco, op. cit., p. 134. 14 John Kobler, op. cit., p. 266. 15 John M. Allswang, A House for All Peoples, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1971, p.179. 16 Kenneth Allsop, op. cit., p. 338. 17 Ibid., p. 332. 18 Andrew Sinclair, Prohibition: Era of E}(cess, New York: Harper &. Row, 1964, p. 362. 19 Todd Gitlin, "Local Pluralism as Theol)' and Ideology," in Hans P. Dreitzel led.), Recent Sociology no. 1. New York: Macmillan, 1969; bearing in mind M. Banfield, Political Influence, New York: Free Press, 1961, and Mike Royko, Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago, London: Paladin, 1971. 20 Estes Kefauver, Crime in America, New York: Doubleday, 1951, pp. 236-54. 21 Donald R. Cressey, Criminal Organization, New York: Harper &. Row, 1972, p. 83. 22 John Landesco, op. cit., p. 107-47. 23 John Kobler, op. cit., pp. 231-33. 24 Gus Tyler, op. cit., p. 207. 25 Daniel Bell, The End ofIdeology, New York: Free Press, 1960, p. 147; see also Walter lippman, "The Underworld as Servant," Forum Jan. 1931 and Feb. 1931, reprinted in Tyler, op. cit., pp. 58-69.
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26 Roger Touhy and Ray Brennan, The Stolen Years, Pennington Press, 1959, excerpted as "The Labor Skates and 1," in Gus Tyler, op. cit., p. IH3; see also Gus Tyler, op. cit., pp. 189-93, 197-205. 27 From the Final Report, Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor and Management Field, U.S. Senate 1960, excerpted in Gus Tyler, op. cit., p. 32. 28 Daniel Bell, op. cit., pp. 68-69. 29 Tony Woodiwiss, "Law, Labour and the State in the United States," in Mike Hayes and Frank Pearce (eds.l, Crime, Politics and the State, London: Routledge &. Kegan Paul, 1976. 30 Brad Wiley, "The Myth of New Deal Reform," cyclostyled, n.d. 31 Ibid., p. 330. Thurman Arnold, a major New Deal philosopher, said the following in his book The Symbols of Government: "The writer has faith that a new public attitude towards the ideals of law and economics is slowly appearing to create an atmosphere where the fanatical alignments between opposing political principles may disappear and a competent. practical, opportunistic governing class may rise to power," quoted in Howard Zinn, The Politics of History, Boston: Beacon Press, 1970, p. 121. 32 Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradifion and the Men Who Made It, London: Jonathan Cape, 1967, p. 329. 33 Cited in I"~ng Bernstein, Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker 1933-1941, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970, p. 171. 34 Ronald Radosh, "The Corporate Ideology of American Labor Leaders from Gompers to Hillman," originally published in Studies on the Left vol. 6, no. 6, Nov.-Dec. 1966, reprinted in David Eakins and James Weinstein (eds.), For a Ne'W America: Essays in History and Politics from "Studies on the Left," 1959-1967, New York: Random House, 1970. 35 Stuart Ewan, "Advertising, Selling the System," Radical America vol. 3, May-June 1969, reprinted in Milton Mankoff, The Poverty of Progress, New York: Holt. Rinehart &, Winston, 1972, p. 436. 36 Brad Wiley, op. cit., p. 133. 37 Karsten StruhL "From Civil Disobedience to Revolution," unpublished paper, Department of Philosophy, Long Island University, n.d. 38 o-dd Demaris, Captive City, New York: Lyle Stuart, 1969. 39 Malcolm Johnson, Crime on the Labor Front, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1950, reprinted in Gus Tyler, op. cit., p. 202. 40 Ibid., pp. 203-5. 41 Staughton Lynd, "The Possibility of Radicalism in the Early 1930s: The Case of SteeL" in Radical America vol. 2, no. 6, Nov.-Dec. 1972. 42 See William Linder, "The Great Flint Sit-Down Strike Against General Motors 1936-1937," Solidarity Pamphlet No. 31, London, 1969, p. 5, and Irving Howe and B. J. Widick, The UAW and Walter Reuther, New York: Random House, 1!l49, p. 31. 43 William Linder, op. cit., p. 8. 44 There is a discussion of the general wave of sit-down strikes, including this one, in Jeremy Brecher, op. cit. 45 Irving Howe and B. J. Widick, op. cit., p. 92. 46 Ibid., p. 105. 47 Ibid., p. 105. [At the time of the sit-down strike, Mazey was an organizer for the union; later he became a national officer of the union.) 48 William Sherrin, The Company and the Union, New York: Knopf, 1973. 49 Quoted in Michael D. Whitty. "The United Auto Workers Face Detroit·s Underworld," Criminology vol. 8, no. 2, Aug. 1970, p. 132.
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50 Irving Howe and B. J. Widick, op. cit., p. 157. 51 William Sherrin, op. cit., p. 135. 52 Ibid. 53 Art Preis, Labor's Giant Step, New York: Pathfinder Press, 1972, pp. xi, 283. 54 Jeremy Brecher, op. cit., p. 229. 55 F. Cormer and W. J. Eaton, Reuther, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1970, p. 299, 56 See Christopher Lasch, The Agony of the Amercian Left, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973, p. 65, and William Sherrin, op. cit., p. 147. 57 Michael D. Whitty, op. cit., pp. 141-42. 58 Daniel BelL op. cit., p. 183. 59 Ibid., p. 194. 60 Ibid., p. 187. 61 Ibid., p. 208. 62 Clarence P. Larrowe, Harry Bridges: The Rise and Fall of Radical Labor in the USA, New York: Lawrence HilL 1972, p. 126. For a Trotskyist assessment of Bridges, see Ed Harris, "The Trouble with Harry Bridges," International Socialist vol 34, no. 8, Sept. 1973. 63 Daniel Bell, op. cit., p. 197. 64 Ibid., p, 192. 65 Ibid.
66 Ed Reid, The Shame of New York, London: Gollancz, 1954, pp. 209-11. 67 Daniel BelL op. cit., p. 198. 68 Clarence P. Larrowe, op. cit., p. 323. 69 Ed Reid, op. cit., p. 323. 70 Daniel BelL op. cit., p. 205. 71 Ed Reid, op. cit., p. 156.
72 Quoted in Allen Raymond, Waterfront Priest, New York: Holt, Rinehart cerpted in Gus Tyler, op. cit., p. 317.
&,
Winston, 1955, ex-
73 Daniel Bell, up. cit., p. 208. 74 See William A. Williams, "American Intervention in Russia; 1917-1920," in David Horowitz led.}, Containment and Revolution, London: Blond, 1967. 75 John Baggueley, "The World War and the Cold War," in David Horowitz, op. cit., 1967. 76 David Horowitz, Empire and Revolution, New York: Vintage, 1969, p. 180. 77 Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War: Allied Diplomacy and the World Crisis of1943-1945, london: Weidenfield &, Nicolson, 1969. 78 Francis Sondern, Brotherhood of Evil, London: Gollancz, 1959, excerpted in Gus Tyler, op. cit., pp. 309-11. See also Estes Kefauver, op. cit., pp. 36-38. 79 Gabriel Kolko, op. cit., p. 69. 80 Norman Lewis, The Honoured Society: The Mafia Conspiracy Observed, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967, p. 19. 81 Joe L. Albini, The American Mafia: Genesis of a Legend, New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1971, p. 83. 82 Ibid., p. 139, and Norman Lewis, op. cit., pp. 145-47. See also Michael Pantaleone, The Mafia and Politics, New York: Coward-McCann, 1966. 83 Peter Maas, The Canary That Sang: The Valachi Papers, New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1968, pp.135-39. 84
Da\~d
Horowitz, op. cit., 1969, p. 91.
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85 Alfred W. McCoy. The Politics of Heroin in South East Asia, New York: Harper & Row, 1972. pp. 44-46. See also "Footnotes." Private Eye 11 April. 1969. [The CRS was the Compagnies Republicaines de Securite; in 1947 the Socialist mayor of Marseille ordered Communists purged from the CRS.) 86 See R. Scheer and M. Zeitlin, Cuba: An American Tragedy, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964, p. 29; Afred W. McCoy, op. cit., p. 25; and Hank Messick, Lansky, New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1971. 87 Alfred W. McCoy, op. cit., p. 27. 88 Hispanic American Report vol. 10, no. 12, Dec. 1957, p. 663.
89 Hispanic American Report vol. 12, no. 1, Jan. 1959. 90 Alfred W. McCoy, op. cit .• p. 247. 91 Ibid., p. 150. 92 Ibid., p. 350. 93 James H. McMeam, "Radical and Racial Perspectives on the Heroin Problem," in Da\1d E. Smith and George R. Gay leds.l, It's So Good Don't Even Try It Once: Heroin in Perspective, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. 1972, p. 123.
Editor'S notes 1 Several other authors have written about organized crime's involvement with labor from a Left perspective, e.g., Sidney Lens, Left, Right and Center: Conflicting Forces in American Labor IHinsdale. III.: Henl)' Regnel)', 1949, pp. 68--931 and Alan A. Block and William J. Chambliss, "Miners, Tailors and Teamsters: Business Racketeering and Trade Unionism," Crime and Social Justice 11:14-27, 179. 2 Paul A. Weinstein attempts to develop an economic analysis of certain forms of labor racketeering ("Racketeering and Labor: An Economic Analysis," Industrial and Labor Relations Review 19(3), reprinted in Lawrence J. Kaplan and Dennis Kessler, eds.,An Economic Analysis of Crime: Selected Readings [Springfield, III.: Charles C Thomas, 1966)1.
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5
Urban Crime and Capitalist
Accumulation, 1950-1971 Don Wallace and Drew Humphries
INTRODUCTION Since the Second World War, urban crime rates have increased steadily in most Western democracies (Gurr, 1977), and especially in the United States (Jacobson, 1975), but not in the Socialist nations (see Freiburg, 1975; Mosciskier, 1976). This contrast suggests that aspects of capitalism may have causally significant effects on the crime rate. Marxists see high urban crime rates, in the United States in particular, as one consequence of capitalist crisis, the result of recurrently high rates of unemployment and underemployment (see Crime and Social Justice, 1976). This tradition, which views crime as systemically tied to economic crises in the form of depressions or recessions, overlooks the possibility that economic exPansion may also generate high rates of crime. By considering crime in relation to economic expansion and contraction, we confront accumulation, the organizing process of capitalism. Accumulation is a complex economic process that harnesses production and social life to the extraction of surplus value. An accumulation cycle begins when workers produce greater quantities of value than they receive in the form of wages; the difference is called "surplus value," and becomes profit when capitalists exchange commodities produced by workers for money in the marketplace. A cycle ends when a capitalist reinvests a portion of the profits for further extraction of surplus value; whenever there is more capital at the end of the cycle than at the beginning, capital has been accumulated. Innumerable accumulation cycles contribute daily to the regional and metropolitan investment trends that in tum shape patterns of urban crime.
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We will show below that since 1950, in the United States, variation in the rates of urban crime can be traced to shifts in patterns of business investment.1 What typically happens is as follows. In areas from which capital is withdrawn, the emigration of highly paid workers and the marginalization! of the remainder, accompanied by the absorption3 of low-paid workers, mostly women and youths, intensify central city distress and exacerbate intergroup conflict over the distribution of shrinking resources. Metropolitan settings in which this happens are characterized by comparatively high rates of interpersonal conflict, registered by the police as "violent crime." On the other hand, in areas benefitting from investment, the absorption of new workers generally depresses the crime rate, while comparatively more even patterns of urban-suburban development magnify contradictions implicit in individual accumulation. We predict that, in this pattern of urban development, wants rather than needs are individualized; people see their own and others' products as alien objects which they must nevertheless acquire for survival (Wexler, 1977). Excessively high rates of property-threatening acts, recorded as "property crimes," result.
Historical background Our approach to crime and accumulation is grounded in two historical processes: the incorporation of the periphery into the core region of the domestic economy after the Second World War; and the transition, reaching back to the tum of the century, from industrial to corporate capitalism. The core-periphery distinction is commonly employed to distinguish between industrially developed nations such as the United States, England, and Japan (the core), and underdeveloped nations in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America (the periphery). On a world scale the growth of capitalism occurred historically through the establishment of economic and political relationships linking peripheral and core regions (Amin, 1974; Wallerstein, 1974; Mandel, 1976). Our usage departs from this international context and refers instead to regional differences in industrial development within the United States. Core cities tend to be located in the Northeastern and North Central states, peripheral cities in the South and West. Historically, wage scales have been higher in the unionized Northeastern and North Central industrial regions than in the Southern and Western peripheral regions, where unions have been weaker (Bonacich, 1976). Because of this difference in wage costs, returns on investment have been higher in the periphery than in the core. In response to the lure of higher profits, industrial capital has gradually been withdrawn from the Northeast and reinvested in the periphery. This process has transformed the South and West from exporters of surplus products to centers of corporate and industrial accumulation (Hill, 1977:43-44J. The transition from industrial to monopoly capitalism greatly influenced metropolitan social organization. Industrial accumulation is characterized by competitive units producing and marketing products, while corporate,
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or monopoly, accumulation is marked by the concentration, or centralization, of capital and the rise of monopolies and oligopolies (Baran and Sweezy, 1966). In the course of this transition, patterns of urban land use shifted as corporations attempted to maximize profits and to structure and control the urban work force (Gordon, 1978). Under early industrial capitalism, cities were organized around downtown factory districts and adjacent workingclass neighborhoods, a pattern of work and residence that enhanced labor solidarity and facilitated unionizing efforts. To reduce labor strife and to establish greater control over the production process, turn-of-the-century industrialists relocated manufacturing plants in outlying suburban areas (Braverman, 1974; Gordon, 1978). In cities that reached maturity during the industrial phase of capitalism, the decentralization of industry gradually emptied factory districts and contributed to the deterioration of housing stock. Corporate accumulation brought administrative headquarters downtown. These trends persisted in the core cities from which capital withdrew in the postwar period, intensifYing pre-existing conditions of poverty and increasing the marginalization of sectors of the labor force. In short, mature cities in the industrial core became obsolete as sites of capitalist production. Under these conditions, class struggle shifted to a defense of established gains. Where class, racial, ethnic, or sexual divisions within the working class became acute, class struggle took on individualistic and destructive forms, which increasingly came to include personal conflict and acts of economic desperation. By contrast, cities in peripheral regions that matured during corporate accumulation attracted industrial investment and developed along rational-technical lines. That is, by applying principles of decentralization and separation of function, residences and factories were scattered throughout the city, reducing the potential for labor agitation (Gordon, 1978). In these cities, class struggle aimed at unionizing newly absorbed workers. At the same time, economic development, by heightening the importance of acquisition, generated atypically high rates of property crime. This paper summarizes a study undertaken to determine the relationship between urban crime rates (both personal and property crime) and the process of accumulation, as measured by variables defined below. A more complete report of our research will appear elsewhere. Because we are interested in crime in advanced capitalism, we have restricted the study to the post - World War II period, 1950-1971, in the United States.
CONCEPTS AND MEASURES
To determine the effects of accumulation on the distribution of crime, we rely on five economic, social, and law enforcement indicators (manufactur-
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ing labor force size, central city hardship, region, population density, and police force size) and the official crime rates in 23 cities in modeling the causal relationships. Our measures of crime and other variables are aggregated at the city level.4 Crime and its measurement
Our estimates of crime rates in 1950 and 1971 are based on the number of "crimes known to the police," as compiled by the Uniform Crime Reporting Program of the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 1949-51; 1970-72). In particular, we will be concerned with the rates of homicide, robbery, and aggravated assault (all crimes against persons) and burglary, grand larceny, and auto theft (property crimes) per 100,000 population (measured by 1950 and 1970 census figures).5 Although the validity of these official statistics has been widely questioned, researchers have concluded that the more "serious" offenses tend to be known to the police (Howard, 1975; Skogan, 1977; Block, 1979). Our analysis will be predicated on the assumption that the official numbers are not so badly distorted by under-reporting as to invalidate a causal analysis. Manufacturing labor force size
We take changes in the size of the manufacturing labor force to indicate regional accumulation, reasoning that an increase or decrease in urban jobs approximates the migration of capital from one site of profitable investment to another. Since the 1950s, approximately 33 percent of the national labor force has been engaged in industrial production (Castells, 1976). But the older "core" cities have lost manufacturing jobs while the newer "peripheral" cities have gained them. This measure, then, captures the migration of capital from the core to the periphery as well as the marginalization and absorption processes affecting the labor force. All three processes have important consequences for the urban community, the neighborhood, and crime. The availability of industrial employment determines urban residential and community stability (Yancey and Ericksen, 1979:261). It reinforces a "community environment which mitigates against those offenses which become part of the official crime record" (Schuessler, 1962:321). Thus we expect cities that are gaining manufactUring jobs to have lower crime rates and cities that are losing manufacturing jobs to have higher crime rates.6 The Central City Hardship Index
We compare the economic level of the central city to that of its surrounding suburbs to examine the effects of accumulation within the metropolitan area. We use the "Index of Central City Hardship" developed by the Brook-
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ings Institution (Nathan and Adams, 1976). The index measures the severity of social and economic disadvantage within the boundaries of the central city relative to its suburbs. Its components include unemployment, age structure and dependency, educational level, income level adjusted regionally, crowded housing, and poverty. Newark's score of 422 on the index denotes a central area more than four times as disadvantaged as its suburbs. San Diego's score, 77, shows that its central city is relatively advantaged? We expect disadvantaged cities to generate high rates of personally violent crime because shrinking resources exacerbate class contradictions and personal conflicts over resources (Wright, 1978). The relocation of industry to the suburbs and development of outlying industrial parks depletes the central city, making it little more than a domestic colony (Savitch, 1970). Raciat ethnic, and class distinctions between central city and suburban residents are underscored by the role of the central city as a repository for low-wage workers and welfare dependents "contained" by the police and provisioned by welfare institutions (Hill, 1978). In the impoverished central cities, the fiscal crisis results in cutbacks in services and institutions of social support, intensifying contradictions over housing, jobs, and education (O'Connor, 1973). We expect proportionately more property crime to occur in advantaged cities. Their relative affluence indicates an expanding resource base and relatively even resource dispersal across a broad suqurban-urban area. Affluent cities therefore lack the acute contradictions associated with domestic colonization and, given their more recent corporate histories, they escape the loss of private resources. They are characterized by an even pattern of urban-suburban development that, we suggest, intensifies individualistic, self-seeking behavior patterns and heightens the importance of acquisition within a social structure marked by the unequal allocation of the social product.
Region
Using Sale's categories (1975), we classified each city according to its geographical position in the Snowbelt (the Northeastern and North Central states) or the Sunbelt (the Western and Southern states). Because the Snowbelt and Sunbelt correspond roughly to the core-periphery distinction, we introduce these geographical categories to distinguish the effect of uneven economic development on crime from the effect of other regionally related variables, such as a southern subculture of violence (see Lundesgaarde, 1977). We hypothesize that incorporating the periphery into the core minimizes regional differences in the rate of urban crime. Accordingly, we expect changes in manufacturing labor force size and the degree of central city hardship to outweigh regional variations as explanations for urban crime rates.
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199
Population density
We use census data to measure the 1970 urban population, and consider popUlation per square mile to be a consequence of a city's location in the system of capital accumulation: cities at the dense end of the spectrum tend to correspond to older manufacturing centers, while dispersed cities tend to have newer corporate histories. Urban density is a function of the spatial development of the two forms of accumulation, industrial and corporate, as well as a consequence of the transition between the two (Gordon, 1978). Thus, we expect that the indicators of accumulation influence crime rates more than population density. To the extent that high density cities are also obsolete sites of capitalist production, we expect that density will be associated with excessive rates of violent crime; and to the extent that less densely populated cities are active sites of production, we expect to find high rates of property crime. The claim that crime increases with d'Emsity per se is not consistently supported in the literature. One reviewer concludes that any relationship between density and crime, if significant at all, is a negative one (Kvalseth, 1977:109). Another recent analysis, however, shows a strong and positive relation between density and one violent crime, robbery (Booth et al., 1977). Such discrepant findings do not support propositions that crime is a function of intolerable interactional stress, differential association, or illegitimate opportunities in high-density cities (see Booth et al., 1976; Higgins et al., 1976). In addition, the density-crime association requires a specification of the causal direction. Does high density cause crime or does crime reduce popUlation density? Guterbock's (1976) conclusions tend to confirm that urban crime is a consequence of popUlation deconcentration, not vice versa.8
Police force size
We include changes in police force size between 1950 and 1970 to introduce a crude control for the impact of criminal justice development on crime. \'Vhile some analysts consider increases in police personnel a reaction to rising rates of theft and underlying economic distress (Center for Research on Criminal Justice, 1975), there is as yet no incontrovertible evidence linking police force size to crime (Jones, 1973). In the analysis reported below changes in police force size are statistically controlled. To summarize: We derived several testable hypotheses from a theory of crime based on the dynamics of capital accumulation. We test the following propositions: (1) changes in manufacturing labor force size are generally associated with higher crime rates under conditions of job loss and with lower crime rates under conditions of job gain; (2) the Central City Hardship Index predicts personally violent crime under conditions of disadvantage
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and property crime under conditions of advantage; (3) region does not influence crime rate variations, permitting us to rule out the effects of regional culture; and (4) the relationship between population density and the crime rate is primarily due to the effect that accumulation has on both density and crime. If we can show that core-periphery aspects of accumulation influence the crime rate to the exclusion of region and independently of police force size, and if we can demonstrate that personal and property offenses vary with measures of metropolitan accumulation, then we confinn in part the role of accumulation in generating high rates of urban crime.
ANALYSIS
To test the four propositions just stated we consider the effects of accumulation, region, density, police force size, and the 1950 crime rates on the 1971 crime rates. To do this we first compute the correlation coefficients among these variables, and then use these coefficients in a multiple regression analysis. This procedure permits us to assess the direct effect of each independent variable on the 1971 crime rate when the other independent variables are statistically controlled (held constant). Although the independent variables are related to one another, they are not so highly correlated with one another as to preclude our assessing the independent effects of each of them. For instance, even though city characteristics conform to the regional pattern of industrialization, the independent variables are not necessarily tied to region. Increases in manufacturing labor force size occur in the least dense cities (r = -.45), while central city hardship is associated with a decline in the manufacturing labor force (r = - .34) and high popUlation density (r = .58). Police personnel increases tend to occur in Snowbelt cities (r = - .37), disadvantaged cities (r = - .42), and densely popUlated cities (r = .32). Since information for two of the independent variables was available for both 1950 and 1970, we could assess the independent effects of the shortrun values of these variables, and also the effect of long-run (twenty year) change in these variables. Thus we could examine both static and dynamic effects of manufacturing labor force and police force size. The regressions were carried out in two stages. In the first stage, the effects of all predictor (independent) variables on the crime rates were assessed. Whenever a regression coefficient failed to achieve statistical significance at the 0.10 level it was dropped from the regression and the estimation was repeated. Only final estimates of regression coefficients are reported below. Since the coefficients are standardized, they can be directly compared with one another.
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FINDINGS The effects of region
We hypothesized that region would not affect the distribution of crime, and our data confirm this proposition. Table 4.1 shows that personal violence is not a characteristic of geographical areas. We can dismiss explanations such as the "southern culture of violence" thesis, then, on the grounds that increases in urban violence are not a function of region (see Erlanger, 1976; Jacobson, 1975). Although the table shows that the rates of grand larceny are higher in Sunbelt cities (beta = .51), we can place little confidence in this finding, since it is not supported by similar results for other police-measured property crime. We can thus disregard a regional explanation for variations in the rates of property crime as well. The effects of changes in police force size
The table shows that police force size (i.e., number of police per 1,000 people) and homicide rates are related in the short run (.32). In 1970, cities that had large police forces also had relatively high rates of homicide. The table also specifies the effects of changes in size of police force on crime rates. Cities that increased their police forces from 1950 to 1970 have comparatively low property crime rates in 1971: specifically, they have relatively low rates of robbery (-.39), auto theft (-.75), grand larceny (-.41), and burglary (- .36) in 1971. The effects of central city hardship
City-suburban differences, as discussed above, are grounded in the relocation of industry, but they also reflect important demographic shifts. After the Second World War, highway development and state-guaranteed mortgages facilitated migration to the suburbs. In response to the mechanization of Southern agriculture, Southern blacks and whites migrated to Northern cities. Here, long-term job losses marginalized workers. Central city hardship transcends problems of temporary unemployment, revealing instead the postwar exclusion of minorities from productive roles. Our results, then, confirm the social costs of such trends, namely, the relative deterioration of social life under sustained conditions of economic decline (see Crime and Social Justice, 1976). The table shows that two crimes against persons-homicide and robbery-tend to be associated with the most extreme hardship levels (.37 and .51, respectively), indicating that formerly active sites of industrial accumulation are now the sites of high rates of interpersonal violence. Central city disadvantage is also associated with high rates of auto theft (.55) and burglary (.35). Contrary to our expectation, no such effect was found for as-
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Table 4.1 Regression of Crimes Known to Police (per 100,000 populationl on Independent Variables
1971 Crimes Known to Police (CKPJ a Personal Homicide
1950 CKP/ 100,000a
.66
Robbery
.43
Property Assault
.55
Auto Theft
.12
Region Dummy>
Larceny
.09
Burglary
.79
.51
1970
Police/ 1000e
.32
1950-70
Police Change" Central City Hardshipd
.37
-.39
-.75
-.41
-.36
.51
.55
.35
-.78
-.46
1970 Mfg. Labor
Force (%f
-.51
1950-70 Mfg. Labor
Force Change"
1.55
1970
Pop. Density/ Square Mile"
.55 .84
.75
.68
.38
.48
.50
Note. All coefficients are standard regression coefficients (Beta weights). All are significant beyond Alpha = .10, except 1950 CKP/l00,000 for auto theft and larceny. N = 23 cities ·Source: Unifonn Crime Reports, deSignated years. Assault rates are averaged (1949-51; 1970-721. Rates are per 100,000 population. bThese are coded using dummy variables. South and West regions were coded 1, others O. • Source: Unifonn Crime Reports, designated years. Rates are per 1000 population. dSource: Nathan and Adams (19761. High scores denote relative central City/suburban disadvantage. 'Source: U. S. Census, designated years.
Urban Crime and Capitalist Accumulation
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sault. Theft as well as violence, then, is associated with the metropolitan pattern of accumulation that relocated industry in the suburbs and that despite replacement by corporate headquarters, turned parts of central cities into repositories for low-paid workers, the unemployed, and welfare dependents. Under these conditions, we suggest, subsistence becomes problematic, increasing property crime as well as personal violence. Lower rates of both kinds of crime follow the corporate pattern of accumulation that developed cities more evenly. Under these conditions, we argue, relative urban affluence resolves problems of subsistence. But the persistence of crime even at comparatively lower rates leads us to argue that affluence also individualizes wants, as people come to see their own and other's products as alien objects, subject to both legal and illicit types of acquisition. The effects of changes in the manufacturing labor force
We expected to find high crime rates in cities where the manufacturing labor force declined and low crime rates where it increased. The table confirms that decreases in the manufacturing labor force are causally linked with both personal and property crime rates. An examination of the beta weights in the table shows that manufacturing job losses lead to high rates of auto theft ( -.78) and burglary (-.46). The old industrial centers bear the cost of the abandonment of obsolete production sites in favor of more profitable investment sites. These deteriorating cities not only lose employment, but suffer high property crime rates along with community decline and neighborhood disruption. Conversely, the increase in the size of the manufacturing labor force connected with the shift in investment patterns decreases the rate of crime. This result supports our hypothesis as well as earlier studies linking industrial employment, community stability, and low crime rates. The table also shows a relationship between the size of the manufacturing labor forces and aggravated assaults. Cities with relatively small manufacturing labor forces in 1970 have higher aggravated assault rates (- .51) although cities with manufacturing job losses over time tend to have lower rates for assault (1.55). We can place little confidence in the finding, however, since it rests on a single measure of violent crime. The effects of population density
If the association between population density and crime were brought
about entirely by the impact of capital accumulation on both variables, the association between them would be spurious. Under this circumstance, the regression coefficient for the effect of density on crime rate would vanish when labor force indicators were included in the regression. The table
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shows that this is not the case: urban density has an independent effect on the rate of aggravated assault (.55): in densely populated cities, the assault rates are high. Again we can place little confidence in the finding, as it rests on a single measure of violent crime.
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
In interpreting the evidence presented here, we cannot attribute an increasing incidence of person and property crimes to unital)' conceptions either of industrialization (Schuessler, 1962; Wilks, 1967) or of urbanization (Lodhi and Tilly, 1973). Theoretically, the more broadly conceived process of accumulation determines the sites of industrialization and restructures the urban setting, shaping the urban and industrial correlates of crime. Within this framework, North-South differences in the rates of crime should diminish (Jacobson, 1975) because of investment shifts, and crime should be increasingly correlated with urban density (Skogan, 1977). Our findings are consistent with these predicted trends and indicate in more complex ways than we expected that increased personal conflict and crimes of acquisition measure the social costs of accumulation. In cities that matured as centers of industrial accumulation, high rates of some types of property crime and violence have their origins in individualized and destructive aspects of class struggle-those conditioned by central city hardship. Central city hardship reflects the near colonial status of marginalized groups concentrated in ghettos and subjected to racial oppression. We note Szymanski's (1976) generalization that racial oppression, in dividing the working class, increases the economic exploitation of all workers. Long-term manufacturing job losses marginalize portions of the urban working class and, wherever such losses occur, increase the rates of burglal)' and auto theft. In these same cities, high density exercises an independent effect on crime, notably assault. But density may reflect untapped aspects of the transition to corporate capitalism such as the proximity of marginal and affluent groups, racial discrimination, and income stratification. Block (1979) shows that the proximity of low and high income groups is highly correlated with personal violence and robbeI)'. As Molotch (1979) argues, urban real estate is a profitable area for investment, and it benefits local rentier classes and finance capitalists. We need not belabor the point that highdensity land use provides high rates of return on capital. In cities that matured as centers of corporate accumulation, low rates of certain property crimes seem to be explained by central city affluence and the absorption of workers into the manufacturing labor force. Relative urban affluence is one consequence of corporate development that generalizes the individual model of accumulation by alienating workers from their products and the products of others. Here, acquisition replaces control over the production and labor processes and underpins consumerism and theft,
Urban Crime and Capitalist Accumulation
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although the rates of theft are lower than those associated with marginalization processes. One suggestive analysis (Burawoy, 19761 distinguishes the long- and short-term needs of capital with respect to the costs of labor force renewal. Labor force renewal denotes alI the social and biological processes that reproduce the labor force. This includes eating and sleeping so that workers can come back to work day after day (meaning that workers must be paid enough and given short enough working hours so that they can do this), medical and psychiatric care when needed, and over the long run, the education needed to supply the next generation of workers with appropriate motivations and skills. Low-profit, competitive industries depend on institutions (e.g., social service agencies) that reduce the cost of labor renewal for segments of the working class. High-profit, monopoly industry depends on increasing levels of consumption and generates increased costs of labor force reproduction (e.g., the costs of a coiliege education). As capital develops unevenly, the contradiction between long and short-term needs intensifies, and the following schism widens within the working class: one segment devotes more time and money to consumption while the other struggles to maintain itself from day to day. The importance of acquisition and the difficulty of subsisting both sustain high rates of property crime, although distinctive stages in the accumulation process generate each. We began this study as a preliminary effort to link accumulation processes to the spatial organization and economic development of a city and, in turn, to a city's crime pattern. We tested causal propositions using techniques of multiple regression analysis and found the results consistent with the causal argument stated at the level of theory. Thus, in demonstrating that crime rates fluctuate with broadly conceived processes of accumulation, we contribute to a political economy of urban crime. This study points the way toward examining labor force dynamics as the complex set of factors mediating crime and accumulation. Such an analysis would consider labor force participation rates, the renewal costs of competitive and monopoly workers (Burawoy, 1976), and residential proximity between high and low income groups (Block, 1979) as a way of operationalizing the ensemble of relations intervening between the political economy and social life.
Notes 1 This analysis is historically specific. Since patterns of accumulation differ in different historical periods, it would be unwarranted to generalize from our analysis to other periods. 2 Marginalization is an economic process that excludes classes or portions of a class from work and thereby reduces the capacity of workers and their families to subsist. 3 Absorption is an economic process through which eJasses or portions of a eJass gain employment; it thus increases the capacity of workers and their families to subsist. 4 Our original study analyzed both crimes known to thE! police and crimes reported by victims in surveys conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice. The sample of cities utilized in the
206
5
6
7
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study was that utilized by the Justice Department in its sUlveys, but three cities had to be dropped because some ofthe data needed for the analysis were not available. The 23 cities in our study were Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Newark, New Orleans, Philadelpbia, Pittsburgh, Portland (Oregon), San Diego, San Francisco, and St. Louis. To minimize error, assault rates are averaged for three-year periods: 1949-51 and 1970-72. Rape rates are excluded since they do not appear in the Unifonn Crime Report compilations for the early 19508. Although labor force participation rates are not considered directly, our data show that losses of manufacturing jobs are associated with increased participation in the laborforce by women. These data are evidence of complex longitudinal alterations in the urban division of labor that have consequences for women's involvement in crime and their chances of being victimized by crime (Giordano, 1978; Cohen and Felson, 1979). Flitcraft and Stad (1978) argue that violence within domestic units increases with the accumulation processes we have outlined here. With respect to the violence directed against wives by husbands, Easton (1978:33) argues: "as the 'legitimate' fonns of male dominance are undennined, illegitimate fonns become more prominent. Increasingly women are confronted by fonns of male control that lie outside the traditionally accepted definitions." The Central City Hardship Index correlates with a variety of urban structural traits in late capitalism. Disadvantaged cities have incurred increasing expenditure obligations (see Gordon, 1978) which are direct indicators of urban fiscal crisis, in part attributable to welfare dependency and eroded tax bases (Fainstein and Fainstein, 1978). Disadvantaged cities, archaic as sites of capitalist production, nevertheless provide finance capitalists with profits in the fonn of municipal debt seIVice, notably (but not exclusively) in the case of New York City (Alcaly and Bodian, 1977). The index measure is highly correlated with a measure of black population increase from 1950 through 1970 for the 23 cities we studied (r = .87). The settlement of central cities by minorities after the Second World War occurred simultaneously with the accelerated relocation of industry to the metropolitan periphery, concentrating the hard-core unemployed in Northern ghettos (Bonacich, 1976). The ghettoization of Northern cities, therefore, is an indirect result of the mechanization of Southern agriculture (Piven and Cloward, 1971); it is viewed here as the transition to an industrial mode of accumulation, with resulting export of marginalized populations from the South to the North (Fainstein and Fainstein, 1978). that is, from the periphery to the core. A recent analysis of 39 standard metropolitan statistical areas between 1960 and 1970 shows a negligible association between urban crime, measured by police-estimated crime rates, and white population migration toward suburbs (see Frey, 1979). Guterbock's (1976) conclusion that crime increases as a function of urban "deconcentration" of whites is consistent with the class-based interpretation advanced for violent crime.
References
Alcaly, Roger E., and Helen Bodian 1977 "New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Economy." In Roger E. Alcaly and David Mennelstein (eds.), The Fiscal Crisis of American Cities. New York: Vintage Books. Amin, Samir 1974 Accumulation on a World Scale. New York: Monthly Review Press, Baran, Paul, and Paul Sweezy 1966 Monopoly Capital. London: Monthly Review Press. Block, Richard 1979 "Community, Environment, and Violent Crime." Criminology 17 (1):46-57.
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Bonacich,Edna 1976 "Advanced Capitalism and Black/White Relations in the United States: A Split Labor Market Interpretation." American Sociologicin Review 41:35-51. Booth, Allan, David R. Johnson, and HalVey M. Choldin 1977 "Correlates of City Crime Rates: Vicitimization SUlVeys versus Official Statistics." Social Problems 25 (2):187-97. Booth, Allan, Susan Welch, and D. R. Johnson 1976 "Crowding and Urban Crime Rates." Urban l\t/,airs Quarterly 11:291-308. Braverman, Hany 1974 Labor and Monopoly Capital. New York: Monthly Review Press. Burawoy, Michael 1976 "The Functions and Reproduction of Migrant Labor: Comparative Material from Southern Africa and the United States." American Journal of Sociology 81 (5):1050-87. Castells, Manuel 1976 "The Service Economy and Post-Industrial Society: A Sociological Critique." International Journal of Health Services 6 (4):595-607. Center for Research on Criminal Justice 1975 The Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove: An Analysis of the U.S. Police. Berkeley, California: Center for Research on Criminal Justice. Cohen, Lawrence, and Marcus Felson 1979 "Social Change and Crime Rate Trends: A Routine Activity Approach." American Sociological Review 44:588-608. Crime and Social Justice Collective 1976 "The Politics of Street Crime." Crime and Social Justice. 5 (Spring-Summer):1-4. Easton, Barbara 1978 "Feminism and the Contemporary Family." Socialist Review 8 (3):11-36. Erlanger, Howard S. "Is There a 'Subculture of Violence' in the South?" Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 66:483-90. Fainstein, Susan S., and Norman I. Fainstein 1978 "National Policy and Urban Development." Social Problems 26 (2):125-46. Federal Bureau of Investigation 1949-51 Uniform Crime Reports. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. 1971-72 Uniform Crime Reports. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. F1itcraft, Ann, and Evan Stark 1978 "Notes on the Social Construction of Battering." Antipode 10 (March):79-84. Freiburg, Arnold 1975 "Juvenile Delinquency in the German Democratic Republic." Kolner Zeitschriftfur Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie (Cologne) '~7 (3):489-537. Frey, William H. 1979 "Central City White Flight: Racial and Nonracial Causes." American Sociological Review 44 (3):425-48. Giordano, Peggy C. 1978 "The Economics of Female Criminality: An Jmalysis of Police Blotters, 1890-1976." Paper presented at the annual meetings of the Society for the Study of Social Problems, San Francisc... Gordon, David M. 1978 Capitalist Development and the History of American Cities. In William K. Tabb and
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Lany Sawers leds.), Mar}(ism and the Metropolis: New Perspectives in Urban Political Economy. New York: Oxford. Gurr, Ted Robert 1977 "Contemporary Crime in Historical Perspective: A Comparative Study of London, Stockholm, and Sydney." Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 434 INovember):114-36. Guterbock, Thomas M. 1976 "The Push Hypothesis: Minority Presence, Crime, and Urban Deconcentration." In Barry Schwartz led.), The Changing Face of the Suburbs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Higgins, P. c., Pamela J. Richards, and J. H. Swan 1976 "Crowding and Urban Crime Rates: A Comment." Urban Affairs Quarterly 11:309-22. Hill, Richard Child 1977 "Capital Accumulation and Urbanization in the United States." Comparative Urban Research 4:39-60. 1978 "Fiscal Collapse and Political Struggle in Decaying Central Cities in the United States." In William K. Tabb and Lany Sawers leds.), Mar}(ism and the Metropolis: New Perspectives in Urban Political Economy. New York: Oxford. Howard, Margaret 1975 "Police Reports and Victimization Survey Results: An Empirical Study." Criminology 12 (4):433-47. Jacobson, Alvin L. 1975 "Crime Trends in Southern and Nonsouthern Cities: A Twenty-Year Perspective." Social Forces 54 (1):226-42. Jones, E. Terrence 1973 "Evaluating Everyday Policies: Police Activity and Crime Incidence." Urban Affairs Quarterly 8 (3):267-79. Kvalseth, T. O. 1977 "A Note on the Effects of Population Density and Unemployment on Urban Crime." Criminology 15:105-10. Lodhi, Abdul Q., and Charles Tilly 1973 "Urbanization, Crime, and Collective Violence in 19th-century France." American Journal of Sociology 79 (2):296-318. Lundesgaarde, Henry P. 1977 Murder in Space City: A Cultural Analysis of Houston Homicide Patterns. New York: Oxford University Press. Mandel, Ernest 1976 "Capitalism and Regional Disparities." Southwest Economy and Society 1 (1):41-47. Molotch, Harvey 1979 "Capital and the Neighborhood in the United States: Some Conceptual links." Urban Affairs Quarterly 14 (3):289-312. Mosciskier, Andrzej 1976 "Delinquency in Poland and the Processes of Industrialization and Urbanization." The Polish Sociological Bulletin 1:53-63. Nathan, Richard P., and Charles Adams 1976 "Understanding Central City Hardship." Political Science Quarterly 91:47-62. O'Connor, James 1973 The Fiscal Crisis of the State. New York: St. Martin's Press. Piven, Frances Fox, and Richard Cloward 1971 Regulating the Poor. New York: Pantheon.
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Sale, Kirkpatrick 1975 Power Shift: The Rise of the Southern Rim and Its Challenge to the Eastern Establishment. New York: Vintage Books. Savitch, H. V. 1970 "Black Cities/\'Vhite Suburbs: Domestic Colonialism as an Interpretative Idea." Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 439 ISept.I:118-34. Schuessler, Karl 1962 "Components of Variation in City Crime Rates." Social Problems 9 ISpringl:314-23. Skogan, Wesley G. 1977 "The Changing Distribution of Big-City Crime: A Multi-City Time-series Analysis." Urban Affairs Quarterly 13 111:33-48. Szymanski, Albert 1976 "Racial Discrimination and White Gain." American Sociological Review 41131:403-14. Wallerstein, Immanuel 1974 The Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Si}(.teenth Century. New York: Academic Press. Wexler, Philip 1977 "Comment on Ralph Turner's 'The Real Self: From Institution to ImpUlse.'" American Journal of Sociology 83 111:178-85. Wilks, Judith A. 1967 "Ecological Correlates of Crime and Delinquency." Appendix A in Crime and Its Impact: An Assessment. Task Force Report of the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office. Wright, Eric Olin 1978 "Race, Class and Income Inequality." American Journal of Sociology 83161:1368-97. Yancey, William L., and Eugene P. Ericksen 1979 "The Antecedents of Community: The Economic and Institutional Structure of Urban Neighborhoods." American Sociological Review 44121:253-62.
Editor'S notes 1 Multiple regression is a statistical technique that aE,sesses the effect of a change in a set of independent variables lin this case, size of police ~orce, size of manufacturing labor force, etc.) on a dependent variable or variables lin this case rates for homicide, robbery, etc.1. The quantity R2 indicates how much of the variation in the dependent variable is explained by the independent variables; it can take any value between 0 and 1. Beta weights lreported in Table 4.11 represent the impact of each independent standardized variable when all other independent variables are held constant. The correlation coefficient r measures simple association, not a causal relation, between variables; it can vary between -1 and 1. 2 Criminology is just now seeing a growing interest in the use of longitudinal data Idata collected at mUltiple points in timel to address complex questions of causality Isee David F. Greenberg and Ronald C. Kessler, "Panel Models in Criminology," in James Fox led.), Mathematical Frontiers in Criminology [New York: Academic Press, 1980]1. Wallace and Humphries use such data here, a strategy that allows them to examine change in crime rates over a period of two decades. Conventional methods of statistical analysis based on data collected at a single time can also be used to analyze causal relationships, but require more stringent assumptions on the part of the investigator regarding the causal ordering of variables. Future work extending the analysis presented here might fruitfully make use of the methods developed for analyzing data of this type to explore what may be reciprocal causation among the
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variables. The positive effect that size of police force has on homicide rates in the table in this article suggests that crime rates may influence the size of police forces as well as being influenced by them. If that is the case, the coefficients estimated here will be biased though probably not so badly as to invalidate the conclusions regarding the effect of other variables on crime rates (see Alfred Blumstein, Jacqueline Cohen, and Daniel Nagin, Deterrence and Incapacitation: Estimating the Effects ofCriminal Sanctions on Crime Rates [Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences, 1978] and David Greenberg, Mathematical Criminology [New Brunswick, NJ.: Rutgers University Press, 1979], pp. 36-501. 3 A point touched on in Wallace and Humphries' work that warrants further investigation concerns the effect of investment on geographic mobility. When investment takes place in a given region, some people who already live in that region may be drawn into the labor force, but others may relocate to take jobs. The United States has received immigrants from Europe, the Orient, and Latin America attracted by relatively high wages. Internal immigration, such as the migration of Southern blacks to Northern cities, can be understood in the same way. Some criminologists have suggested that high mobility fosters crime by reducing the social cohesion of an area, though usually without seeing the economic basis for migration. The argument has also been made that some facets of the criminal law have their origin in nativist responses to the cultural traits of immigrants (see article 7 by Humphries and Greenberg). 4 Cohen and Felson have recently argued that crime rates have risen since the Second World War not because motivation to engage in crime increased, but rather because some forms of crime became easier to carry out. For example, burglary is easier now because homes are more likely to be unattended for much of the day than in the past. Cohen and Felson do not deal specifically with regional differences in crime rates, and do not relate the life-style changes they note to changes in investment and labor-force participation, but their ideas seem quite consistent with those presented here. For example, if homes are more often unattended now, it is probably because women who used to be housewives now hold jobs away from home (Lawrence E. Cohen and Marcus Felson, "Social Change and Crime Rate Trends," American Sociological Review 44 [1979]:588-608).
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6
THE SOCIAL ECONOMY OF ARSON: VANDALS, GANGSTERS, BANKERS, AND OFFICIALS IN THE MAKING OF AN URBAN PROBLEM James Brady Reprinted by permission from Research in Law, Deviance, and Social Control, vol. 6, edited by Steven Spitzer and Andrew Scull (Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1984), pp. 199-242.
Not since our towns were built of wood and Mrs. O'Leary's graceless cow resided in downtown Chicago have Americans feared fire as a collective danger. Today, grieving families standing beside their smoldering homes draw our sympathies, but we do not feel ourselves imperiled by their misfortune. Gleaming new hook-and-ladder engines and fire-resistant building construction reassure us that the great city-devouring blazes that swept Chicago in 1877 and San Francisco in 1906 are a menace safely past. Yet, in the space of fifteen years arson has grown to proportions far surpassing any of the so-called index crimes and now looms as a major new cause of public fear and community deterioration. As fire and police officials wring their hands in frustration, it is obvious that existing control measures have utterly failed and that the physical survival of many neighborhoods is at peril. Our long-held idea that arson is an isolated act of sexual peIVerts or juvenile vandals has not prepared us for the extraordinary increase in fire setting or the growing sophistication of incendiary techniques. Nowhere have the limitations of "deviancy" theory proved to be such a costly straitjacket.
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THE MOUNTING ARSON THREAT Approach and argument This study will continue the development of a sociology of arson that I have recently begun elsewhere (Brady, 1982a, 1982b, 1983a, 1983b), based on the methods of demography, urban political economy, and criminology. An initial assessment of the arson problem in the United States and comparisons with other industrial nations is offered along with a critique of the relation among deviance theory, law enforcement, and current policies. The social and economic context for arson is described in an analysis of banking and insurance practices and urban demographic shifts. This if followed by a case study of arson in the fire-ravaged city of Boston, with discussions of local enforcement policy and types of arson racketeering, followed by specific examples of arson-prone real estate syndicates. Finally, an assessment of recent reform measures is offered along with conclusions as to the likely future for arson and arson control. Two central arguments are advanced here. First, the traditional view of arson as irrational acts of maladjusted individuals or deviant "subcultures" cannot explain the empirical facts of urban arson and has locked us into enforcement policies which have been singularly unsuccessful. Second, the alternative explanation is that arson is primarily an outcome of routine business practices in the banking, insurance, and real estate industries-practices which destabilize neighborhoods and provide the motive and means for several varieties of arson. This becomes a form of organized crime to the extent that unscrupulous property owners, insurance brokers, corrupt housing inspectors, lawyers, professional "torches," bank loan officers, and others form conscious conspiracies. In advancing these two arguments I will offer national and crossnational data and will briefly review the existing deviancy literature on the subject. In the main I will rely on original materials drawn from my research on arson, neighborhood economics, and organized crime in the city of Boston. The Boston data include both an array of publicly available documents and a series of interviews with key fire and law enforcement officials, urban policymakers, neighborhood activists, executives in banking and insurance, and state administrators charged with the regulation of those industries. Sources of documentation include local and national press, and property records on file for fire histories, property sales, insurance policies, corporate papers and real estate trusts, tax statements, building and fire code inspections, housing and land court decisions, and mortgage lending by banks. These public records are drawn from the Boston Housing Authority, the Boston Redevelopment Authority, the Boston Rent Control Administration, the City Real Property and Buildings Departments, the Boston Office of Community Develop-
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213
ment, the Boston Fire Department, the Massachusetts State Department for Banking and Insurance, and the Massachusetts Secretary of State. The Boston research arises from my role as a scholar and community activist in the fire-scarred Dorchester ghetto, where I work and live. I am also serving as director of the City of Boston Arson Strike Force, a special combined team of civilian experts and picked police detectives appointed by the mayor and charged with the investigation of organizedcrime arson syndicates. We have recently presented our collected evidence to the Suffolk County grand jury and are confident that as a result indictments will be issued shortly against one of the largest suspected arson rings in the city. For obvious reasons, neither the targets of the strike force nor any of the confidential evidence collected in our work will be disclosed in this article. The new urban fear: Arson in the United States
Arson is, as will be discussed later, a much underreported crime, but even the most conservative official statistics are alarming. During the 1955-75 period, the reported incidence of arson increased more than 2,800 percent, with a further 250 percent increase between 1975 and 1981 (Karter, 1982). Though arson accounted for only 3 percent of all fires in 1964, by 1981 it was the cause of 40 percent of all fire losses. In 1981 local fire departments estimated that these fires caused more than $1.5 billion in structural damage, while insurance industry estimates that it paid approximately $3.5 billion in incendiaJY fire claims during 1979-80 (LeBlanc and Redding, 1982; Carter, 1980). Arson deaths and injuries now surpass the toll from any single form of natural disaster, with about a thousand civilians and another 120 firefighters killed in each of the last two years. Another 30,000 civilians and 4,000 firefighters are injured each year in arson fires (FAI, 1981; Carter, 1980; LeBlanc and Redding, 1982) Table 1 summarizes these losses, based on the reports of local fire departments. Arson statistics carry a strong bias toward understatement. Only those fires adjudged as "incendimy" or "suspicious" in origin are counted as "arson" by local fire departments. A much larger number of fires described as "undetermined" in origin are discounted by local officials, even though most independent investigators agree that most ofthese are also arson.1 Indeed the federal Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) studies count half of all "undetermined" fires as arson (Campbell, 1981). Many other fires are wrongly classified as "electrical" or resulting from "careless disposal" (as in trash piled against a building and set afire), though there is wide agreement among experts that many of these are also, in fact, arsons. Local fire departments continue to underreport arson because they are embarrassed by their utter failure to control
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Table 1 Arson Losses in the United States
Year
Number ofArson Fires
Structural Damage ($ million)a
Arson Deaths
1981
155,500
1,663
920
1980
173,934
1,034
1,406
1979
149,000
1,328
675
1978
167,000
1,125
702
1977
177,000
1,159
720
1975
144,000
633
1971
72,100
233
1967
44,100
142
1961
21,400
38
1955
9,600
27
1951
5,600
16
Source: National Fire Protection Association, annual reports from Fire Journal (September 19821. "Actual insurance payments are some three to five times the structural damage estimates made by local fire departments.
the rising rates. Fire chiefs are also under great political pressure from local mayors to show that fire protection has not declined despite major budget cutbacks (Harvey, 1981; Radin, 1981). The fiscal crisis has unfortunately coincided with the arson wave in the older eastern cities (Brady, 1982a). The reputation of a city's fire protection services affects both insurance premium rates and the bond ratings for municipal securities which must be sold to balance mounting budget deficits (NFPA, 1976). "Death by Fire" is a pauper's epitaph, for most of those killed are poor people-with the longest fire tolls in farm communities of the rural South or the slums of the older eastern cities (Karter, 1982). Arson fires are particularly concentrated in the older tenement districts of the central cities, and there the typical victims are children and old people who are not quick enough to escape the sudden flames in the darkness. TYPically they die choking in their beds or trapped on the staircases, which are a favorite spot for fire setters because they provide easy egress for arsonists and good updrafts for spreading flames (ABC, 1978). New York City ranks easily as the nation's "arson capitol," with more than 10,000 incendiary fires and 150 civilian deaths in each of the years since 1975. The scale of destruction in the South Bronx, site of more than 30,000 fires in the 1970s, can only be compared with that of blitzkriegs or earthquakes. In New Jersey, 168 people died in 1980 alone, with over $96 million in arson damage, concentrated in the ghettoes of Hoboken and
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Patterson (Carter, 1980; Schall, 1977). Los Angeles and Chicago report 1975-80 arson increases of 500% and 380%, respectively (Hanson, 1980; Carter, 1980). Efforts to rebuild Detroit have been crippled by a massive arson pattern, leaving 10,000 homes destroyed in the last decade (Catalina, 1979). Truly we face a threat not only to the quality of life, but to the very survival of many urban neighborhoods (U.S. Congress: Senate, 1979a, 1979b, AP, 1981).
Comparative perspectives: Arson in the advanced capitalist nations Arson is more an intense problem in the United States than in any other major industrial nation in terms of the absolute number and proportion of total fires adjudged arson and in terms of human and financial costs. However, it is a growing problem throughout the urbanized industrial capitalist nations. In 1978 the United Kingdom reported that arson accounted for 33 percent of the total losses in large fires, and in France, arson was the cause of 20 percent of all losses in industrial property during 1973-79. In West Germany, arson fires were listed as the cause of nearly 30 percent of total fire damages; in Japan, 8 percent of all fire claims were due to suspected arson (NFPA, 1982). Within urban centers arson is a greater threat than is implied by these overall national statistics. The Tokyo Fire Department (1982), for example, lists arson as the leading cause of major fires, with, 1,796 major incidents in 1981. The modern capitalist cities show a mounting incidence of arson and arson losses, though accidental fires have been reduced (Schilling, 1981). In TOkyo, arson increased by 40 percent during 1975-81, while the other causes, including smoking, children playing with combustibles, faulty appliances, and burning rubbish, have all declined (Tokyo Fire Department, 1982). Stockholm reported that national fire losses have increased by 30 percent in 1976-77, with by far the greater part of this due to a dramatic surge in the number of arson fires (Brandforsvar, 1977). In Canada, arson losses have increased from $35 million in 1976 to $160 million in 1980, accounting for 30 to 50 percent of all fires losses and 150 deaths in each of the last five years (Cripps, 1982). Arson losses are a mounting concern in Toronto, with a 40 percent increase between 1980 and 1981. In Quebec Province, incendiary tires have increased 81 percent in 1976-81, with insurance losses mounting 145 percent. Most of these fires have been in the city of Montreal, where a record number of small-business bankruptcies in the last several years is linked to the fires, and insurance companies have been staggered by unprecedented losses (Arpin, 1982). A comparison of national arson trends in the last decade (1969-79) shows that the rate of increase in the United States was over 500 percent, in the United Kingdom over 425 percent, in West Germany over 250
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percent, in Japan over 250 percent, and in France (for 1973-78 only) over 60 percent. In Sweden there was a jump of 23 percent in arson fires in 1976-77, and Switzerland also reports mounting incendiary fires, which now account for over 25 percent of all fire damages (Schilling, 1981).
THE FAILURE OF ARSON CONTROL AND DEVIANCE THEORY Hardly playing: Contemporary arson control in the United States Though officials in the United States grudgingly admit that the "War on Crime" has been lost (Caplan, 1976), they seem hardly aware ofthe growing arson threat. Throughout the mounting incendiary wave of the 1970s, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) continued to list arson as a lowpriority "Part II" offense alongside drunk driving and gambling (Campbell, 1981). Arson was only added to the "Part I" list of "Index Crimes" in 1981 (and only on a provisional basis) as a result of congressional pressure. Less than 9 percent of all reported arson incidents result in an arrest, and less than 2 percent result in a conviction (Boudreau, 1977). Federal budget allocations also indicate inattention to the problem. In 1977 the $2 billion LEAA budget included only $1.7 million for antiarson efforts, or less than one-tenth of one percent of that budget (U.S. Congress: Senate, 1979b; ABC, 1978). A U.S. Senate investigation in 1979, led by Sen. Charles Percy of Illinois, sharply criticized LEAA for its failure to appreciate the situation and for its ineffectiveness in formulating arson control strategies (U.S. Congress: Senate, 1979b). The Senate Government Affairs Committee was angered that LEAA had delayed for nearly a year before releasing their natural report on arson which was so embarrassing to that agency. Senator Percy sharply confronted LEAA Acting Director James Gregg, charging (U.S. Congress: Senate, 1979b): You have a report. You commissioned it. You gave the money. Just boil it down, get it out, this is not a competing priority. What you are really saying to me is this thing is far down at the bottom of the barrel.
When later questioned in a national television documentary, Joseph Kochanski, then associate director of the LEAA, acknowledged the weak record oflaw enforcement as follows (ABC, 1978): KOCHANSKI:
It's a matter of priorities. Really, I think, [with] some more basic data, positive data, you might logically expect to present a case that would cause us to increase our concentration [on arson].
ABC:
Now with arson having grown to such dimensions in the past years, you wouldn't regard this as American law enforcement's finest hour, would you?
KOCHANSKI:
No, we can't take too many credit lines for this one.
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217
A series of congressional hearings in 19177-79 spurred the U.S. Department of Justice to take more serious action, and by 1980, antiarson allocations had been augmented to $17 million. The Reagan administration has, however, slashed this and reduced antiarson efforts to $5 million in the 1982 budget (Gest, 1983).
Hunting the phantom pyro: The deviant individual as fire setter In the United States, as in virtually all industrial Western nations, the investigation of arson is mainly the responsibility of fire departments rather than police. The historically inadequate specialized training given to fire department arson squads has in recent years been upgraded, particularly with the opening of new in-seIVice workshops and courses sponsored by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) or the National Fire Control Administration (NFPA). This training, however, has remained largely a technical matter of forensics and pyrotechnics. Investigators concentrate almost entirely on identifYing the means and the method of "ignition" found in the rubble on the morning after, along with inteIViewing any eyewitnesses. The strategy is to find the modus operandi or identity of the "torch" and then to wait in concealment hoping to catch that individual in the act (Associated Press, 1981). In looking for the "torch," investigators are heavily influenced by popularized images tracing back ultimately to deviance theory and particularly to psychoanalytic literature on "pyromania." The classic "pyro" is a well-recognized figure who watches flames from the shadows while engrossed in gleeful masturbation. The portrayal has been slightly amended to include also the "juvenile vandal," but arson is still widely regarded as a crime of rage, jealously, mental disorder, and especially sexual perversity (Battle and Weston, 1975). Sigmund Freud examined very few flesh-and-blood fire setters, but he wrote extensively on the subject, describing them as sexually immature or homosexually inclined. His analysis was based largely upon pure speculation, arising from his reading of mythology, as exemplified below (Freud, 1932; 405-6): The acquisition of fire is a crime. It is accompanied by robbery or theft. This is a constant feature in all the legends about the acquisition of fire. The punishment of fire bringer is ... also characteristic of all myths .... [S Juch punishment as that of Promethus was the appropriate one for a criminal swayed by instinct, who had committed his offense at the prompting of evil lusts.
Freud's "insights" have been the starting point for the work of most modern psychiatrists and criminologists. Carl Jung confirmed Freud in his own analysis of fire-sex links in mythology and in tribal legends. Yarnell (1940) examined sixty juvenile fire setters and concluded that arson was essentially" a reawakening of Oedipal and homosexual tenden-
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cies." He described the typical fire setter as a slow learner, a truant, runaway or orphan, often given to sodomy and other homosexual behavior. More recently Macht and Mack (1968) developed a modified pyromaniac theory, based on the study offour juvenile fire setters. While disagreeing with some of Freud's emphasis on homosexuality, Macht and Mack (1968) argue that [fire setting) is a highly determined behavior complex or syndrome with important instinctual or adaptive aspects, tied to fantasies which accompany fire setting. It is a behavior syndrome midway between the neurotic and the psychotic.
Hurley (1969:4) does not like the term "pyromania" but informs us that "arson is often a manifestation of mental abnormality ... the result of unconscious sexual conflict or as obsessive-compulsive or passive aggressive behavior." Scott (1974) also discusses arson as a crime of revenge or peIVersion usually committed by psychotics, alcoholics, homosexuals and maladjusted children (though two paragraphs in his five-chapter treatise suggest that "arson for profit" might be the motive for a few offenders) . The criminologist Inciardi (1970), after studying the records of 138 imprisoned arsonists, concludes that the crime is primarily motivated by sexual excitement or the desire for revenge, whereas only 7 percent of his sample burned buildings in "arson-for-profit" schemes. Inciardi regarded these few "professional" torches as an anachronism harking back to the 1930s "when arson was associated with organized crime." MacDonald (1977) also cites the characteristics of those imprisoned for arson to support his portrayal of fire setters as compulsive pyromaniacs, sexually excited by fire, but otherwise impotent, prone to bed-wetting, transvestite behavior, and often collectors of obscene magazines. Controlling the "deviant subculture": The lower class as fire setter
Arson, like street crime or drug abuse, has now reached such enormous proportions as to undermine the credibility of the traditional psychological explanations. Not even the most compulsive "pyro" or energetic juvenile vandal could account for the scale of incendiary devastation in some poorer neighborhoods. Consequently, the more ambitious and wide-ranging theories of deviance as a "subcultural" phenomenon have been brought into play. Most prominent among the subculture theorists have been Wolfgang and Ferracuti (1967), Walter Miller (1968), Moynihan (1969), and especially Edward Banfield and James Q. Wilson (discussed below). Banfield (1974) builds his "Unheavenly City" with neo-Freudian timbers, though he means to enclose whole social aggregates, as he substi-
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tutes "class culture" for individual "personality" and identifies the "lower class," rather than the primal "id," as the destructive force which civilized society must somehow contain. The middle and upper classes are described as the upholders of "conventional morality ... doing one's duty . . . following laws and moral rules . . . even in the absence of an enforcement apparatus" (182). By contrast, he asserts that "the morality of lower class culture is preconventional, which means that the individual's actions are influenced not by conscience, but only by a sense of what he can get away with" (184-85). This "lower class culture" is characterized by a "taste for risk," a "willingness to inflict injury," and "taking prestige in being vicious" (185-86). Though disclaiming any racist sentiments, Banfield's (1974) castigation of the "lower class" becomes most strident when applied to "the Negroes." He asserts that "the Negro crime rate appears to have increased far more than can be accounted for by changes in the age distribution of the population" (194). He blames this on "the rhetoric of the civil rights movement" which "may have spread the impression, especially among the young, that, as victims of oppression. Negroes had, if not a license to break law, at least reduced responsibility for breaking it" (195). Irrational violence and senseless destruction (including arson) are seen as special propensities of Negroes "rioting mainly for fun and profit" (211-22); he notes that "lower class youths are more apt than others to be caught up in frenzies of mob activity, and even adults of the lower class are, by comparison with those of the other classes, highly susceptible to the same influences" (215). James Q. Wilson not only shares Banfield's ideas but as a chief adviser to the Reagan administration on law enforcement has helped to incorporate them into federal justice policy. Wilson (IB77) lumps criminality together with illegitimate births, mother-headed households, and welfare dependence as features of what he calls the "breakdown of community" among wban blacks (36-37). For Wilson, as for Banfield, it is poor culture and not material poverty which lies at the root of our social problems, and indeed he asserts that real poverty is fast waning in this country. Wilson concludes in a tone not unlike the Old Testament lawgivers: 'Wicked people exist. Nothing avails except to set them apart fium innocent people" (235).
THE BURNING OF BOSTON Translating theory into policy: The Bostolll fire department These varieties of deviance theory resonate in the official pronouncements and arson control policies of the Boston Fire Department. Incendiary fires in Boston have grown to such a scale recently as to attract national media
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attention (Levey, 1982; Gest, 1983; Vennochi, 1982), with more than a thousand 1982 fires leaving ninety-seven people dead or seriously injured along with $20 million in structural damages and probably four times that much in insurance losses. Previous years were almost equally devastating, with nearly a thousand reported arson fires and over $15 million damage for each of the last ten years (Boston Fire Department, 1983). Though the Boston Fire Department has made arrests in less than 9 percent of all reported arson incidents, officials in the department feel certain that they know what sort of people are setting the fires. In the midst of an unprecedented series of fires last summer, Fire Commissioner Weston Paul informed the public that "bored kids idled by summer vacation" were responsible, and later expanded this to include "crazies and sickies setting fires for kicks" (Jahnke, 1982; McMillan, 1982:23). The department's "Arson Watch" program, designed to enlist citizens as potential lookouts and eye witnesses, list "pyromania, teenage vandalism, juvenile fire setting, and revenge seeking" as the chief motives for arson. Widely distributed booklets call on citizens to report "teens or others hanging around buildings ... tenants who have conflicts ... people fighting and using threats, local gang fights ... racial tensions" (Boston Fire Department, 1983). The image of the arsonist as an irrational deviant is symbolized by the fire department in its widely distributed literature and posters which call for vigilance against the "Arson Rat." The Rat wears the classic trenchcoat of the sexual "flasher" and is depicted as a person with long ears, beady eyes, and a mouselike face, who carries a can of gasoline and a cigarette lighter (Boston Fire Department, 1983). The problem with the traditional firebugivandalJbored juvenile theory is that it cannot explain the timing and distribution of arson fires in the city. The fires continued unabated after the reopening of schools in the fall, and year after year arson has been concentrated in the same neighborhoods, particularly Roxbury, North Dorchester, Eastern Jamaica Plain and the waterfronts of South Boston and East Boston. (See Map 1 for location of 1977 and 1982 fires during the nationally renowned "arson summer" in Boston.! Are we to assume that juveniles are "bored" to the point of fire-setting in Jamaica Plain but not in nearby Roslindale? Are we to believe that irrational pyromaniacs are for some reason systematically careful, year after year, to operate within neighborhood boundary lines? More recently, Fire Commissioner George Paul and the commander of the Boston Arson Squad, John White, have shifted to a "subculture" theory in their efforts to explain the scale and concentration of fires in these neighborhoods (many of which have largely minority populations). The commissioner observed in our recent headquarters interview that "Arson is usually the act of angry people who set fires as some kind of protest." Arson Squad Commander White elaborated: "Arson is a tool used by some ethnic groups as a means of showing their disfavor. The
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'::
,-"" .."'-.,......,.".'" .. ~-..".-.->-.~
~
I
L-=."_","~--"""","~=",~~""-"",""""",.,,,,c_ "~""."""""""'~' Map 1
Areas Where Boston's Public Housing Tenants Live and Location of Suspicious Fires. Sources: u.s. Census, 1980, provided by the Boston Housing Authority. Fires plotted by Michael N. Moore from Boston Fire Department records.
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people that are causing the arson problem are coming into the city looking for welfare payments. It's a migratory problem. The Irish move out, the blacks move in. We're probably gonna have trouble with Vietnamese and Cambodians next" (Brady, 1983b:53). Apart from the obvious racism in such sentiments, does this official explanation account for the observable arson pattern in the city? Disproving traditional views: The arson experience in public housing
A review of the fire experience within public housing managed by the Boston Housing Authority (BRA) is particularly informative. The BRA provides permanent shelter to over 55,000 Bostonians (including people in both the large BRA project complexes and leased apartments in small conventional residential buildings). The BRA tenants account for approximately 10 percent of Boston's total population, and they are disproportionately blacks, Hispanics, and Asians, with a heary concentration of single-parent families, teenaged youths, and unemployed males. These are all the classic "subculture" ingredients for "social problems." Street crime has indeed been a troublesome issue within BRA and was cited as a major reason for the federal district court's 1981 decision to take the BRA into court receivership (Boston Housing Authority, 1981:85-90; 1982:18-22). The large BRA projects and the bulk of the BRA-leased apartments are centered squarely within Boston's arson belt, as can be readily seen in Map 1. Most of the large BRA projects were constructed at least twentyfive years ago, and the leased units are within ordinary residential buildings, often wooden three-decker apartment houses. In sum, if we believe the "conventional wisdom" of the fire department officials or the arguments of deviant subculture theorists like Banfield or Wilson, then the location, construction, demography, and "class culture" of the BRA buildings would make them prime candidates for arson. The facts show otherwise. In 1982 the large BRA projects with over 35,000 people experienced only 16 structural arson fires, only 2 of which resulted in more than $5,000 estimated structural damages. There has not been a single death or serious injury from a fire in one of these buildings during the last five years. The BRA's leased apartments hold nearly 20,000 additional tenants, and these units have been hit by only 20 fires in the last year, 3 of these being racially inspired fire bombings against black tenants in Dorchester. Thus, with more than 10 percent of the city's population (and a much larger portion of the people living within the "arson belt" of the city), the BRA has experienced less than 3 percent ofthe total arson fires. These have been without exception minor blazes (Boston Housing Authority, 1983). Earl Bolt, chief of public safety at the BRA, takes sharp exception to the fire chiefs theories on arson (Brady, 1983b:52):
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They assign a lot of stupidity to people by virtue of the mere fact that they're poor. It's my opinion that poor people are acutely aware of how limited is their access to housing. People aren't going to endanger themselves with fire. You have to assume people are homicidal maniacs to believe the Fire Department's explanation for arson. They make the case that poor people bum down their buildings out of some malicious social protest, but that's not the case. Our properties don't show this. The fact is that we don't have an arson problem in our buildings and the reason is very simple-that there's no gain, no profit to be made in burning down public buildings of the BHA.
See no evil, stop no evil: The non investigation of arson for profit
Fire-fighting officials insist that profit is not a major motive for arson in Boston. Commissioner Paul did not recall that his department had ever initiated a major investigation of arson for profit, and he acknowledged that not a single individual among the 350 arrested for arson since 1970 was a Boston landlord or person with insurable interest in a torched building. The commissioner is not troubled by this, since he is convinced that "no more than 10 percent" of the city's arson fires were motivated by economic gain. His opinion is shared by Joseph O'Keefe, the state fire marshal, who stressed in an interview that he is "absolutely certain" of his estimate that less than 5 percent of all Massachusetts arson fires are for profit (Brady, 1983b:53). The views of these Boston fire officials are not unlike those of other fire chiefs whom I have encountered in the course of my own professional work, but their denial that arson for profit is a major problem is contradicted by federal law enforcement authorities or experts from the insurance industry. The U.S. Department of Justice (LEAA) estimates arson for profit at approximately 20 percent (Webster and Matthews, 1979; Boudreau 1977); the NFPA estimates that such fires account for 25-30 percent of the total arson blazes (Carter, 1980); and the industrywide Insurance Committee for Arson Control gives the figure of 23 percent (ICAG, 1983). The U.S. congressional hearings devoted to the subject in the last five years have concluded that economic gain or fraud is the motive for about a third of all arson fires (U.S. Congress: Senate, 1978a, 1978b, 1979b, 1979b, 1981). It is ironic that the last arson-for-profit investigation which touched the Boston Fire Department or the state fire marshal's office actually involved personnel from those agencies as targets of a probe mounted by Attorney General Frances Bellotti (HaIVey and Connolly, 1977; Zanger, 1980). At the close of the nationally reowned 1977-78 Symphony Road case, Capt. Leo Weisentaner of the Boston Fire Department's Arson Squad and Lt. James DiFuria, commanding the state fire marshal's arson unit, were both indicted along with thirty other white-collar criminals as part of a $6 million
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arson conspiracy (Cullen, 1977; Jones, 1978), which caused several deaths. DiFuria, who was sentenced to prison, admitted taking bribes from landlords and falsuymg fire reports for many years (Cullen, 1977). The denial of arson for profit, like the insistence on the traditional "pyro/juvenile vandal/angry ethnic" explanations, bespeak the failure of officials to understand the larger process which has lead to the destabilization of urban neighborhoods. It is rapid changes in property values, not in the color of the inhabitants, that set the stage for arson. If we are to understand arson and devise workable methods to control it, we must begin by understanding the forces that destabilize communities-by economic collapse and abandoned buildings, on the one hand, or by economic boom, gentrification, condominium conversion, and redevelopment, on the other. Arson-for-profit conspiracies and the work of professional torches is apparent in many cases (perhaps 30-40 percent); but even the pattern of classic vandal fires can only be accounted for by reference to economic conditions in a neighborhood.
THE SOCIAL ECONOMIC CONTEXT: BANKING, INSURANCE, AND ORGANIZED CRIME Arson, abandonment, and the banks: Redlining and regulation
More than half of the arson fires in Boston since 1977 have occurred in abandoned buildings (Weber, 1982; Axelrod, 1982b). Property damages in such buildings are estimated at $3.5 million, with additional costs of over $400,000 in fire fighting and $200,000 in lost property taxes for 1981 alone (Gold, 1982). The quite logical relation between arson and abandonment has been reported in New York (Newfield and DuBrul, 1977:98-101) and many other cities (Axelrod, 1982a, 1982b). During the 1965-75 period alone, New York City lost 199,000 household units; Chicago, 64,500; Detroit, 62,000; Philadelphia, 33,161; Newark/Camden, 37,962; and St. Louis, 43,900 (Salins, 1980:35). The dominant view espoused by planners at the u.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is that abandonment is a manifestation of "urban blight" which may by attributed to "the influx of minority populations" and "increasing numbers of mother headed households" (RERIHUD, 1975). Such prominent contemporary planners as Sternleib (1974) argue that "abandonment is a contagion problem" which is "most frequent in structures inhabited by Blacks and Puerto Ricans." This is not so subtle reappearance of the "deviant subculture" idea. The persistent use of language borrowed from biology (such as "blight," "contagion," or "decay") gives the impression that abandonment and neighborhood decline are somehow "natural" or inevitable, or that the
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poor and minority peoples somehow carry this problem like an infection and are therefore responsible for it. The simple correlation of abandonment rates and minority census figures in fact proves nothing about why housing deteriorates. Another explanation that is increasingly popular in this era of laissezfaire Reagonomics is the view that social reform legislation and especially rent control cause abandonment by undermining the profitability of rental housing. Banfield is a leading proponent of this position as he attacks rent control laws from a paternalistic posture (1974:267-68): Another immediate but somewhat indirect injury to the poor is the lowering of maintenance standards and services that occurs when the landlord is bound to get the same [fixed] rent no matter how much or how little he does for his tenants, [leading] to the formation of slums as buildings go unrepaired ... and the decrease in the total housing supply because investors, who in the absence of rent control would build new units or rehabilitate old ones, decide to put their money elsewhere.
There is a seeming logic to this argument, but it is undone by reference to documented facts. First, abandonment is no more severe in cities with strong rent control than in those without (Kushkin, 1981). Second, the greatest increase in abandonment has occurred simultaneously with the weakening of rent control laws and tenants organizations across the country in the last decade (Sheltenorce, 1981a, 1981b). In Boston, for example, abandonment has accelerated since the weakening of rent control laws and the passage of "vacancy decontrol" statutes which deregulate apartments once former tenants move out (Lorant, 1982; Larrabee, 1982). Moreover, the cities with the strongest rent control statutes in the greater metropolitan area, Brookline and Cambridge, have virtually no abandonment whatever, whereas Boston officials estimate that nearly 8 percent of all residential units in the city proper are now derelict (Moore, 1981). The decision of so many property owners to abandon their buildings is in fact a rational response to declining property values and mounting small-business bankruptcies. There are many reasons for such declining conditions, but studies of abandonment in New York, Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angeles show clearly that the most fundamental factor has been the increasing scarcity of credit capital in faltering neighborhoods. The major banks in these and other cities have for decades been engaged in discriminatory mortgage lending practices, known as "redlining," which have effectively denied loan capital in certain districts (particularly minority and poor neighborhoods) of the inner cities in order to invest in higher-yielding real estate ventures in the suburbs (Linton, 1971; National Urban League, 1971; Loyola Law Journal, 1975). There is a substantial body ofliterature which documents the systematic and devastating patterns of bank redlining in virtually every major
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....._ _ _ _ Nclrth Dorchester
----South Dorchester
u[t~nd.·
$O.2()...().3S ill conventional mottgagn per dollar deposited·
6. IS-(). 19 in conventional mortpges per dollar deposittd 0.10-0.14 in conventional mortgagel per dotlar de:posi1ed 0,0$-0.09 in conventional mortgages per doUar depot-iled
Eacb dot rf:pteSCnts Jocalion or one • ('ious fire in 1980,
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Map 2
Arson and Redlining in the City of Boston. Sources: -City neighborhood divisions according to Boston Redevelopment Authority. -Arson fire locations plotted by Michael N. Moore from annual tabulated reports of all fires provided annually by Boston Fire Department. -Bank reinvestment patterns according to statistical evidence in Greenwald (1978). *Various shadings represent relative level of disinvestment by the ten largest banks reporting to the state commissioner of banks in 1975--78.
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Ugt'nd: Each dot represents the locallon
II
of one lOuspkious fire in 1919.
, "rt
0-49 b.>!dong. ,"'n<Juned' 50-99 bUIJdll'lgs abandoned
100-199 ""dong' ....nduned
200-550 buildings abandoned
Map 3 Arson and Abandonment in the City of Boston. Sources:
-Oty divided according to ward boundaries as used by buildings department reports. -Arson fire locations plotted by Michael N. Moore from annual tabulated reports of Boston Fire Department. -Abandonment data compiled by author from monthly and annual reports of buildings and community development departments, Boston City Hall. 'Various shadings represent ",dative frequency of abandonment in the city's various ward divisions, based on the number of buildings razed or boarded up by city authority in 1975-82.
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city. Some of the most prominent case studies include Los Angeles (Bradford and Rubinowitz, 1975) New York (Devine, 1973; Newfield and DuBrul, 1977:101-14, Chicago (Berwyn, 1974), and Washington, D.C. (PIRG-D.C., 1975). In Boston, studies by Greenwald (1978) and Taggert (1977) show the same situation, with many poor and minority districts receiving less than 10¢ in conventional mortgages for every dollar deposited in banks in those same areas. The correlation between bank disinvestment and abandonment or deterioration of urban property is apparent upon a comparison of the data presented in Maps 2 and 3. The map of redlining by the city's banks closely corresponds to the rates of demolition and "boarding up" of buildings left abandoned in the city's various neighborhoods. Thus, while the city average for buildings razed or boarded up in 1975-82 was approximately 45 per ward, the heavily redlined districts of North Dorchester and Roxbury had rates running from 5 to 10 times that average.z The fires in these redlined districts quite often fall into two related arson categories: escape fires and vandal fires. The "escape" fire is one arranged by landlords and small businessmen desperate to dump unprofitable properties and losing investments by "selling to the insurance company." The "vandal" fire occurs after owners simply walk away from their properties, take a tax write-off on losses, and leave their buildings to become a hangout for juvenile gangs and ultimately a target for vandalism. Of course, bank redlining is not the only cause for the process oflocal decline that leads to vandal or escape fires, but redlining tremendously accelerates the downward spiral and makes recovery almost impossible (Greenwald, 1980; Duncan, 1975; PIRG-D.C. 1975). Racketeers make good customers: The dumping of foreclosed properties
While the banking industry as a whole contributes indirectly to arson through redlining, some individual banks are far more directly involved through their transactions with property owners engaged in large-scale arson for profit. The banks have a pressing need to dispose of undesirable foreclosed properties which accumulate especially in depressed redlined areas. Racketeers buy these, often at an inflated price, on condition that the banks provide equally inflated mortgages for nearly the full purchase price. It is an easy matter to obtain insurance coverage once such a mortgage had been granted, since the insurance companies generally rely on the bank's assessment of a property's value and a customer's character. A professional torch is then contracted to burn such overmortgaged and overinsured buildings, sometimes in a series of escalating blazes which earn a number of partial insurance payments before the building is
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finally gutted. It is not uncommon for racketeers to hire phony contractors (or even their own company) to "repair" the damage, the noncompletion of which is concealed by false reports filed by a bribed city inspector. The banks profit handsomely from this scheme, since state laws stipulate that any insurance settlements are first paid to the holder of the mortgage. Thus the bank converts the potential loss of undesirable foreclosed properties into profits, as the new mortgage written to the gangster is larger than the old bad debt. This can become a well-oiled arrangement, since gangsters typically return over and over again to the same bank. Of course, there is nothing illegal in these transactions, so long as the bank officers do not enter into a conscious conspiracy. The handling of foreclosed properties by the South Boston Savings Bank in the 1970s illustrates this point. Journalist Mark Zanger found a remarkable pattern of 79 fires in 39 of the 76 buildings foreclosed upon by the bank in the period 1970--77. Normally one would expect fires to occur just before foreclosure, when owners facing the imminent seizure of their properties for unpaid mortgages might torch them to collect the insurance. (This is precisely the pattern observed in 36 fires at 26 buildings foreclosed under federally guaranteed Veterans Administration (VA) and HUD mortgages written by the same bank.) But the 79 fires in buildings with conventional mortgages (where the bank's own money was at risk) mainly occurred shortly after foreclosure and resale, when the new owners seemed to have especially "bad luck" with fires (Zanger, 1977, 1978a, 1978b). The bank's clients have included many of Boston's most arson-prone property owners, such as Carroll St. Germaine, convicted arsonist and murderer; George Lincoln, confessed torch who turned state's witness in the famous 1978-79 Boston arson conspiracy case; Nicholas Shaheen, convicted arsonist; and Russell Tardanico, convicted arsonist. Together these men received nearly $2 million in mortgage credit which enabled them to purchase scores of properties which later burned in more than fifty suspicious fires (Zanger, 1978a). Elsewhere, I have described in detail the transactions and fires of the Tardanico syndicate, which has relied almost entirely upon this bank for its financing (Brady 1982b, 1983a). The bank's official explanations are worth noting here. Tardanico was convicted of arson in 1970, and while still under a suspended prison sentence, he received mortgages worth $137,500 from the South Boston Savings Bank to purchase four buildings. All four of these subsequently burned, three of them within a year of purchase. When asked about Tardanico, who had received over $730,000 in mortgages by 1978 for buildings which had burned twenty-one times, bank president Alfred Archibald stated that he "was not aware that Taroanico was that type of owner" and that if he had known, "I'd have cut him off" (Zanger, 1978a).
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The records in the Suffolk Country Registry of Deeds show that Tardanico obtained another mortgage from the bank (in order to purchase 50 Lyon Street in Dorchester) less than a year after President Archibald made these comments in 1978. Another series of fires in Tardanico buildings brought television cameras to the South Boston Savings Bank in 1981. President Archibald was again interviewed and again expressed shock upon learning that Tardanico was a convicted arsonist with a long history of suspicious fires, stating (WBZ, 1981): "I am amazed that Mr. Tardanico has had a serious problem with fires on his properties." The quiet victim: Arson and the insurance industry It may seem surprising that the efforts of the insurance industry to
combat arson fraud have been so sporadic, fragmented, and low-keyed, especially since they now report $2 billion dollars in annual losses to suspicious fire claims (ICAC, 1983). The reasons for their ineffectiveness have everything to do with the structure of the industry itself. The first and most fundamental fact is that the insurance companies, like the banks, have for decades engaged in systematic redlining in urban areas in order to maximize profits (McDonough, 1980). In 1968 the insurance lobby persuaded the u.S. Congress to create the legal framework for a new network of "FAIR Plan" insurance consortiums to take over the high-risk districts of the major cities (U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 1968). The FAIR Plans protect individual companies by spreading out arson losses within the industry, and to a large extent FAIR Plan losses have been passed on to customers living in the high-risk urban districts, who cannot easily obtain cheaper coverage from conventional companies. The effect is to take much of the sting out of the arson problem and to enable the conventional companies to concentrate on writing policies in the more profitable low-risk suburbs and towns. The insurance companies are reluctant to publicize the full extent of the arson problem, lest such disclosures provoke sweeping new regulations on their most privileged of industries. Insurance is the only sector of the economy not restricted by federal antitrust laws, and the confidentiality of client-company communications is a treasured legal preserve. The weak restraints imposed by state insurance commissioners leave the companies unusual latitude for transactions and investments and are part of the reason why insurance companies are consistently high in profits (Lima, 1980; Weese, 1971). The weakness of internal industry checks and local state regulations has prompted many antiarson activists and federally sponsored investigations to call for the imposition of tough new federal regulations (U.S. Comptroller Generat 1979; U.S. General Accounting Office, 1978; U.S. Congress: Senate, 1963).
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FAIR Plans across the country admitted arson losses of more than $275 million in 1968--77, and they have been roundly criticized for their inadequate controls against arson for profit (Economist, 1977). In Massachusetts, it was the presence of organized activists concerned about higher FAIR Plan premiums and neighborhood destruction that finally pushed through antiarson legislation and prompted the FAIR Plan to devote more staff and funds to arson investigation and to the screening of potential clients (Brady, 1982a, 1982b, 1982c). The Massachusetts FAIR Plan did adopt some very effective new measures, including the requirement that all prospective clients submit an "arson application" detailing their entire fire history for every building in which they held any interest. FAIR Plan also initiated serious investigations of arson claims in 1976 and contributed to the successful 1977 prosecution of the largest organizedcrime arson ring in the country (the Symphony Road case). FAIR Plan officials have kicked out a number of arson-prone landlords and denied them coverage since 1979-80. The Plan's arson losses have declined appreciably, from an estimated 60 percent of all fire losses in 1975 to less than 30 percent in 1981 (Golembeski, 1980, 1982). Surplus lines insurance: A new frontier for arsonists
But, unfortunately, as any beat cop will inform you, it is much easier to move criminal activities than to eliminate them. Arson-prone landlords have another available form of insurance coverage in the unlicensed "surplus lines" companies. FAIR Plan's Golembeski notes: "We began to see many of these fire-prone people leaving the FAIR Plan in the late 1970s. They went to the surplus lines carriers rather than the conventional companies because they probably realized that the conventional companies wouldn't tolerate as much abuse and are more tightly controlled in terms of underwriting and claims." Golembeski shows obvious satisfaction in concluding that "the arsonists have decided that they'd prefer to take their chances elsewhere" and considers their exodus from FAIR Plan a major "success" (Brady, 1983b:60). State Insurance Commissioner Michael Sabbagh is not nearly so assured, pointing out: "There was a great deal of money poured into arson investigation from the insurance industry seven or eight years ago. A whole group of us from industry and law enforcement used to meet regularly on this. But I haven't seen that level of activity in recent years. If there has been this rapid shift to the surplus lines companies, then maybe selfishly the conventional companies say 'we've done our job.' They see the surplus lines companies serving a purpose that they don't want to serve" (Brady, 1983b:60). The shift of landlords who are Boston's most prominent arson "victims" from one type of insurance to another doesn't much help those who live in or near their buildings; nor are the
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surplus lines companies thrilled by the prospects of mounting fraud as these customers come their way. The surplus lines are a vulnerable new hunting ground for arson racketeers, since those companies are unregulated by state laws, have scant familiarity with the methods and identities of racketeers, and will insure virtually anyone at levels of coverage not possible elsewhere (Lima, 1980; Daenzer, 1980). The only formal check on them is that their local brokers must swear in filed affidavits 3 that their clients have been rejected by several conventional companies and are therefore eligible for "surplus" coverage (Bawcutt, 1978; Kwitney, 1973:158--78). These local brokers are largely unsupervised by the company's home office-which may be no more than a post office box in the Bahamas or may be the gargantuan Uoyds of London, which alone underwrites half of all surplus lines policies for fire (NAIC, 1979, 1980). The growth of surplus lines has been erratic over the last twenty-five years but most explosive since 1977 and the onset of FAIR Plan antiarson reforms. In 1980 the surplus lines reported $2 billion in premiums (Brenner, 1978; Daenzer, 1980; Chaput and Faxon, 1981). The potential for arson fraud is well illustrated by the 1978 Sasse syndicate conspiracy in New York. The Sasse surplus lines brokers, together with gangster speculators and professional torches, defrauded Uoyds of London of some $60 million dollars that year (Coppack, 1980). The brokers sold grossly inflated policies for properties in the South Bronx, sometimes backdating these documents to cover previous fires or contracting with torches for arson fires shortly after policies were written (Brenner, 1978; Lima, 1980, Brenner, 1980). Boston wholesalers, representing the major surplus lines companies, are frankly worried about the impact of intense competitive pressures on some brokers and the arrival of arson-prone customers chased out of the FAIR Plan. Neil E. Rice, president of J. J. Rice Co., who is a major wholesaler for Uoyds of London, his firm handling some $3-4 million in Boston fire insurance each year, points out: "There are brokers who will deal with a snake. All they are interested in are the dollars-the premiums-and if they blow a company out of the water, they'll find another company. No matter how shady a customer is, someone will write the risk because of the dollars." Even the most careful underwriters can be taken in by sophisticated arson racketeers. As Rice observes, "We write a policy in good faith, but you never know what you're going to get involved with. These guys have straws, aliases, trusts, etc." (Brady, 1983b:62). Hamilton Bailey, president of the Surplus Lines Dealers Association and a central figure in the industry agrees: "You have to rely a lot on intuition and common sense. But brokers get hungry sometimes. If someone offers them a big commission, they don't mind taking a chance. After all, it's the company's money" (Brady, 1983:62).
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The surplus lines companies are forced to rely on "common sense" and "intuition" in part because they, like the conventional insurance companies, are reluctant to challenge suspicious claims in lawsuits (U.S. Congress: Senate, 1979a). Neil Rice observes (Brady, 1983b:62): It's difficult and frustrating for me to see a company pay a claim that I think they shouldn't pay. Lloyds is concerned about punitive damage: awards given customers after claims were denied and the company lost a subsequent lawsuit. A company has to decide whether it's worth it to try to fight a claim. Legal costs are high and it's difficult to prove arson. Companies are concerned with their image. They don't want to be known as tough on claims. Even if a claim isn't legitimate they'll pay it. As long as I've been in the insurance business, I can't remember a claim where arson was proven. I've suspected it in numerous cases. I've felt it.
There are of course entirely legitimate reasons for using surplus lines coverage (if, for example, one wanted to insure a vacant building which the conventional companies and the FAIR Plan will not touch); and most of the brokers, clients, and companies are undoubtedly honest. Nevertheless, it is disturbing to note that an examination of surplus lines policy affidavits on file with the Insurance Commission shows that the feared entrance of fire-prone property owners into this market is indeed a reality. Since the FAIR Plan antiarson reforms of 1978--79, this pattern has become most apparent. The records show that 31 individuals and trusts with serious fire histories have contracted for new surplus lines policies in 1980 and 1981. Buildings belonging to these 31 customers burned more than 160 times, mostly in suspicious fires, during the past four years, with total structural damages estimated to be in excess of $2 million. Insurance payments for these claims are estimated at several times that amount.
URBAN PROPERTY VALUES AND VARIETIES OF ARSON RACKETEERING
One can discern three distinct varieties of arson for profit operating within the economic context created by bank lending, insurance underwriting, and government urban renewal policies. These three forms of racketeering were first termed "upscale," "downscale," and "developer" arson by Moore (1980). Each of the three is significant in Boston and reflective of the destabilization of neighborhood property values in recent years. Together these forms of arson for profit probably account for about 40 percent of the arson fires, with planned "escape" fires accounting for perhaps 25 percent more and "vandal" fires about 35 percent. The fire histories and transactions of several arson-prone landlords and syndicates illustrate these arson variations. As "downscale" exam-
234
James Brady
pIes, I have recently (Brady, 1983a) discussed the operations of the Tardanico syndicate in Dorchester (27 fires) and the Spanos family, which owns a number of tenements in the Lowell Hispanic ghetto (86 fires, 8 fatalities). Similarly described is the "Sarah Cutler Trust" (23 fires, in which an eccentric local "bad lady" served as a "straw" (dummy owner) for silent beneficiary John Kerrigan, former member of the Boston City Council and a leading local politician (Brady, 1982a). A prominent "upscale" arson example is apparent in the properties of Frederick Rust III, a director of the manlmoth Suffolk Franklin Savings Bank and vice president of the Boston Rental Housing Association. Rust's buildings have burned repeatedly in suspicious fires at the onset of conversions to condominiums, a process aided by hea'Y multiple mortgages from major local banks, including Suffolk Franklin (Brady, 1983a, 1983b). Downscale arson and the Simon/lnsoft properties
Maurice Simon died in 1981, but his real estate empire lives on-and continues to bum, suspiciously. Today Simon's widow, Jeanette, and his former partner, Sidney Ins oft, control hundreds of apartment units, concentrated in the black ghetto of Roxbury. This is a heavily redlined area where property values are collapsing and abandonment is epidemic-a "downscale" situation. Simon and partner Insoft bought many of their buildings at bargain basement rates in the 1960s from HUD. In 1968 HUD announced a massive rehabilitative program for Boston in conjunction with the "Model Cities" initiative. The program was supposedly designed to encourage "neighborhood homesteading," with particular attention to the shelter needs of poor and minority people who had been removed from their previous homes to make way for massive "Urban Renewal" projects which razed large parts of the city's West and South ends (Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, 1964). However, a review of Boston Urban Renewal Program records shows that Simon and Insoft together owned 1,800 of the 2,000 units whose rehabilitation was subsidized by the federal government (King, 1981 :98). Despite the fact that Simon and Insoft were repeatedly sued by tenants in subsequent years and forced by the courts to pay record fines for housing code violations, the two real estate magnates were awarded another federal renovation subsidy of $5 million dollars in 1972 (King, 1981:94). The city buildings department files show that Simonllnsoft properties continue to be cited for frequent code violations, and tenant organizations continue to challenge the landlords in the courts. The fire record for SimonlInsoft properties is quite remarkable-even in Boston, where suspicious fires are far from uncommon. Boston Fire Department records show that more than fifty suspicious fires have
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occurred in their buildings since 1978, with structural damages estimated by the department in excess of $fi30,OOO and insurance company payments probably four to five times that amount. Table 2 presents some specific evidence on these fires in Dorchester and Roxbury. Many of the SimonlInsoft properties were covered by Massachusetts FAIR Plan insurance until the institution of antiarson reforms by that agency in 1978-79. Since then, SimonlInsoft have become major customers in the unregulated surplus lines market. An examination of state Insurance Commission affidavits shows that the SimonlInsoft-controlled corporations have contracted over $5 million dollars in surplus lines coverage for 1981 and over $18.4 million dollars in coverage for 1982. A number of foreign companies were tapped for these enormous policies, and the affidavits submitted by the selling brokers are remarkable for their brevity. One $10 million policy affidavit for 1982, for example, says only that the policy covers "various buildings" whose locations and individual liabilities are nowhere specified. Other SimonlInsoft policies are said to cover "various Roxbury propel1ies" or "community housing in Boston," with no addresses or coverage details. The arson fires continue, the most recent at the time of writing [B84] having caused an estimated $10,000 in structural damages. Upscale arson and condominium conversion: The Coppola brothers
The South Huntington Avenue district is an island of old rooming houses surrounded by fashionably renovated townhouses and recently constructed luxury apartments. Young professionals are moving into the area, though the old rooming houses. owned by Joseph and John Coppola, are largely inhabited by students, poor people, and minority families. Amid the overall local patterns of "gentrification," property values are soaring, and so are the flames of suspicious fires in the Coppola-owned buildings, as is summarized in Table 3. While some of the fires in Coppola properties have gutted buildings entirely (such as the one at 35 Corinth Street in Boston), more often these are small blazes-a pattern observed in upscale arson where the intent is to drive out tenants rather than collect the full value of insurance. The local banks have both contributed to and responded to the rapid rise in property values associated with gentrification, as is most evident in the remarkable mortgage arrangements they have made with the Coppola brothers (Tenants Organizing Committee, 1980a). The transaction history of several Coppola properties illustrates how the "pyramiding" of multiple mortgages can inflate the paper value (and insurance coverage) of a building, even though no major renovations have taken place. For example, in 19fi9 Joseph Coppola purchased 49-51 South
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James Brady
Table 2
Fire History of SimoniIns oft Properties, 1975-1983"
Address 1 Forest Pl., Rox. 1 Forest Pl., Rox. 168 Seaver St., Rox. 90 Columbia Rd., Dor. 422 Columbia Rd., Dor. 475-77 Columbia Rd., Dor. 16 McLellan St., Dor. 53 Ruthven St., Dor. 63 Washington, St., Dor. 69 Washington, St., Dor. 103 Washington, St., Dor. 490 Blue Hill Ave., Dor. 165 Columbia Rd., Dor. 101 Dale St., Rox. 72 Elm Hill Ave., Rox. 2 Maple Court, Rox. 1 Maple Court, Rox. 2 Maple Court, Rox. 1 Maple Court, Rox. 172 Seaver St., Rox. 503 Blue Hill Ave., Rox. 36 Crawford St., Rox. 38 Crawford St., Rox. 361 Walnut Ave., Rox. 363 Walnut Ave., Rox. 20 Castlegate Rd., Dor. 50 Columbia Rd., Dor. 418 Columbia Rd., Dor. 183 Harvard St., Dor. 714 Blue Hill Ave., Dor. 144 Geneva Ave., Dor. 145 Homestead St., Dor. 145 Homestead St., Dor. 46 Cheney St., Dor. 55 Brooldedge St., Dor. 79 Maple St., Rox. 'Data compiled by Michael N. Moore.
Date ofFire 4/20178
8/27/80 8/31179
4/22/78 2/17177 11118/76
12/2/79 2/14/74 3/18/80 4/25/80 3/14/80 5113/77 4/21178
8/19/75 2/3178
3/27/76 2/1179 5112/78 10/3178
9/15/77 6/9/79 10/23/78 118179
2/9/79 5/22178
9/18/78 2/3/77 12/7/80 3/20/81 9/5/82 2115/83
2/18/82 3/2/82 11/19/82 3/28/83 5/11/81
Estimated Damage ($)
Origin
1,500 2,000 4,000 1,500 125,000 70,000 28,500 2,000 1,700 1,500 3,500 6,000 4,000 4,000 85,000 6,000 10,000 5,000 4,000 5,000 3,000 4,000 3,500 25,000 2,500 5,000 2,000 8,500 3,500 35,000 25,000 50,000 50,000 5,000 10,000 4,000
Suspicious Suspicious Incendiary Suspicious Undetermined Undetermined Undetermined Incendiary Suspicious Suspicious Suspicious Incendiary Suspicious Suspicious Undetermined Suspicious Undetermined Incendiary Suspicious Suspicious Suspicious Incendiary Undetermined Undetermined Suspicious Suspicious Suspicious Suspicious Suspicious Undetermined Suspicious Undetermined Suspicious Suspicious Suspicious Suspicious
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Table 3 Fires at Coppola-Owned Propertiesa
Address
Registered Owner
Date of Fire
Estimated Damage ($)
Origin
1/9/81
60,000 1,000 5,000 5,000
Suspicious Undetennined Suspicious Incendiary
John Coppola
118/80
50,000
Suspicious
53 S. Huntington
John Coppola
11/18/79
5,000
Incendiary
49 S. Huntington
Coppola Properties, Inc.
2/24/79
27,000
Suspiciousl Fatal
53 &55 S. Huntington Ave.
Coppola Properties, Inc.
12116/78
9,000
Suspicious
172 St. Botolph
Coppola Properties, Inc.
4/29/78
1,000
Suspicious
19 Garrison Ave.
Coppola Properties, Inc.
1117/78
1,000
Rubbish set afire
12 Hayden
Coppola Properties, Inc.
3/7/77
1,000
Suspicious
339 Marlborough
Coppola Properties, Inc.
3117/77
1,000
Undetennined
94 St. Botolph
Coppola Properties, Inc.
4/23/77
100,000
Undetennined
35 Corinth 15 Vancouver
Joseph Coppola Joseph Coppola
8/4/75 1112/74 1117174
175,000 3,500 12,500
Undetennined Undetennined Undetennined
8/28/75
4,300
Undetennined
90 St. Botolph 6 Wait St. 16 Wait St. 140 St. Botolph
Joseph Coppola Joseph Coppola Joseph Coppola Ninety Six Corp. (Joseph Coppola)
51 &53 S. Huntington Ave.
10 Wait
st.
Joseph Coppola
3115/82 2/20/82 11/16/82
'Data compiled by James Brady and Michael N. Moore. Arson Strike Force.
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James Brady
Huntington Avenue for $38,000 under a $22,000 purchase mortgage with a local lawyer. This was liquidated with the writing of a new $75,000 mortgage from Shawmut Bank, which in turn was replaced over the next five years by a series of multiple mortgages ultimately rising to $215,000 by 1976. The Union Federal Savings and Loan foreclosed on the property in 1977, and within months there were two suspicious fires at these buildings resulting in $77,000 in structural damages along with the death of one tenant who was suffocated and then charred almost beyond recognition (Moore, 1979; Tenants Organizing committee, 1980b). Following the fires and insurance settlements, the bank returned property title to the Coppolas. Other Coppola properties have similar histories. In October 1968 Joseph Coppola purchased 94 St. Botolph Street for $40,000, and within four years he had been granted mortgages worth $150,000 on the building. In January 1977 the Volunteer Cooperative Bank foreclosed on its mortgage. The fire which broke out there on May 23 of that year was reported by the Boston Fire Department to have spread from the basement to all floors "via a concealed shaft and center stairway." Four firefighters were injured in the fire. Five months later the bank returned possession of the building to Coppola (Moore, 1979). Similarly, Coppola was able by 1975 to arrange a series of mortgages worth seven times the $18,000 he paid for 339 Marlborough Street in 1967. The Volunteer Cooperative Bank also foreclosed on this property on January 5,1977. A fire erupted on March 17 on the second floor. Nine months later the property was returned to Coppola by the bank (Tenant Organizing Committee, 1980b). The Coppola brothers bought 8 and 10 Wait Street in 1970 for $12,500 apiece, and by 1975 they had mortgaged the two properties for a total value of $250,000. That year a fire broke out on the third floor at 10 Wait. Elsewhere on the street, the records show that on September 9, 1977, John Coppola purchased 6 Wait Street from Robert Colbert for $1 and assumption of the mortgage. On the same day, one Joseph Washington purchased 12, 14, and 16 Wait Street from Robert Colbert for $1 and assumption of the mortgage. Both transactions were notarized by John C. Whitten. The meaning of this becomes clear when we consider that Joseph Washington is a janitor for the Coppolas, and tenants report that they were instructed to make out rent checks to "John Coppola," although Washington was the owner of record. Washington's role as a "straw" (dummy owner) is confirmed by his subsequent resale of the three buildings to Pequot Realty corporation, for the sum of $1. The president and treasurer of Pequot is Joseph Coppola (Moore, 1980b). The notary here, John Whitten, is also the attorney for Sarah Cutler, a landlord who was indicted for several arson deaths in New York City (New York Times, 1953) and who was the figurehead for the "Sarah Cutler Trust" operation which I have discussed
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239
elsewhere (Brady, 1982a) as one of Boston's most prominent examples of "downscale" arson (lJ\\yer, 1979; Zanger, 1981). The reasons for the banks' confidence and generosity in their dealings with the Coppolas have eve:ryt:hing to do with those landlords' great success in taking advantage of changing local demographics through the conversion of rooming houses into condominiums, as shown particularly with their buildings along st. Botolph Street. The Coppolas bought some 17 rooming houses on that street in the early 1970s. These had been inhabited by students, unemployed, poor people, and minorities. The Coppolas proceeded to empty the buildings, and court records show a shrup upsurge in tenant complaints about plumbing, breakdowns, neglected structural repairs, electrical failures, and ultimately a series of suspicious fires (Axelrod, 1982b). As tenants have vacated the buildings, they have been converted into luxury condominiums, winning hugh profits for the Coppolas and also for banks involved, which financed conversions and resales at higher rates of interest than had been paid for the older, smaller mortgages (Keva, 1982; Jurkowitz, 1982). Despite organized tenant protests, lawsuits, extensive local press coverage, and an investigation by the Massachusetts attorney general's arson unit, the pattern of suspicious fires in Coppola properties continues (Welch, 1982; MHPC, 1982). Development arson and the siege of Roxbury
Another sort of arson scheme seeks to profit not from insurance or condominium conversion but from clearing land for future development. Districts in which the land is more valuable than the buildings upon it are prime targets, with the most prominent current examples being the South Boston Fort Point channel area, and large parts of Roxbury, including the construction zone around the proposed Southwest Corridor, the border zone near the South End, and Highland Park. Often these fires occur in vacant buildings, many of which were seized by the city for unpaid taxes (Jahnke, 1981b; Jordon, 1982c). Examinations of the residue at these fires show that many of them have been the work of professionals, considerably more sophisticated than fire setters elsewhere in the city. Robert Carter, arson expert for the National Fire Protection Association, is one of the country's leading fire scene examiners who has testified at many trials and written leading pyrotechnic texts. Carter is convinced that "vandals" cannot be blamed for many of the recent fires in prime development areas along the waterfront and the Southwest corridor, noting: These fires have been some of the most professional jobs we've seen in the city. Extensive quantities of hard to detect accelerant have been used-typically placed in several wax paper containers positioned at key points beside structural
Origin Suspicious Suspicious Suspicious Suspicious Undetermined Suspicious Suspicious Undetermined Suspicious Suspicious Undetermined Undetermined Suspicious Suspicious Suspicious Undetermined Undetermined
Estimated Damage ($) 100,000 20,000 15,000 10,000 30,000 50,000 5,000 75,000 5,000 10,000 150,000 125,000 10,000 20,000 100,000 140,000 50,000
Date ofFire
8/18/82 11/13/82 6/27/82 6/6/82 8/13/82 114/81 12/26/80 4/15/80 9/18/81 7/21182 12/2/81 4/24/81 8/6/82 6/7/82 8/6/82 6/27/82 1111/80
'Data compiled by Michael N. Moore, April 22, 1983. bBoston Redevelopment Authority.
68-70 Bartlett St. 68-70 Bartlett St. 71-73 Centre St. 14-16 Clarendon St. 355 Columbus Ave. 108 Dartmouth St. 110 Dartmouth St. 65-71 E. Berkely St. 69A E. Berkely St. 77-79 E. Berkely St. 1-3 Eliot Sq. 905 Harrison Ave. 161 Northampton St. 116-18 Roxbury St. 1160 Washington St. 2401 Washington St. 32 Wellington St.
Address
(See Map 1)
South End-Lower Roxbury Community Development Incendiary Attacks, 1980-1982"
Table 4
Roxbury Roxbury Roxbury BRAb BRA BRA BRA BRA BRA BRA BRA BRA BRA BRA BRA Boston BRA
Owner
Rox. Action Program Rox. Action Program Rox. Action Program Several proposals Tent City Corp. Tent City Corp. Tent City Corp. Tenant Dev. Corp. Tenant Dev. Corp. Tenant Dev. Corp. Historic Boston, Inc. Tenant Dev. Corp. Great. Rox. Dev. Corp. Several proposals Tenant Dev. Corp. Tenant Dev. Corp. Tenant Dev. Corp.
Community Group
II CI.. 0<
."
ID
1/1
CD
""51 II
8
The Social Economy of Arson
241
members of the building and linked together with trailers [streams] of accelerant, leading to a single ignition point-sometimes using photographic paper as a fuse device which leaves little residue.
In many cases local nonprofit community groups had been granted title to these abandoned properties and had begun to convert them into low- and moderate-income housing or into community recreation and cultural centers (Yudis, 1982a, 1982b, 1982c). The increasing value of the land in these central or waterfront districts also makes them attractive sites for the construction of more expensive condominiums or shopping and office complexes. These recent 1982--83 fires destroyed buildings set aside for renovation by the Tenant Development Corporation (TDC), Tent City, Inc., Roxbury Action Program, Greater Roxbury Development Corp., and United Community Development, all nonprofit neighborhood groups (see Table 4). The Director ofTDC, Josephine Jolley, is convinced that developers were responsible for these fires, as she told South End News reporters after one such recent event (Smith, 1981): "This is another instance of a person or group who do not want to see any more low or moderate income housing in the South End and have found a way of stopping it through arson." LIKELY FUTURE PROSPECTS: DIRECTIONS FOR REFORM
Fires may scar a city, but the mortal wounds are self-inflicted in the form of blundering policies born of misunderstanding. As long as Boston's fire commissioner and the state fire marshal insist that juvenile vandals and "angry ethnics" are the main problems, while minimizing arson for profit, investigative failure will continue. As long as banks deny mortgage credit to poorer districts and city tax foreclosures are subject to long delays, we will see more and more streets lined with abandoned buildings which will turn to blackened hulks before they can be put to constructive use. This is not to say that arson is an inevitable feature of life in the big city, like noise or traffic jams. The situation can be improved, but it is important to understand that there are also powerful institutions that stand opposed to any structural changes which might erode their autonomy or restrict profit taking. Attacking the institutional roots: Issues and constituencies
Short-term solutions to the economic causes of arson might begin with closer restriction of continuing redlining practices by the banks. The Neighborhood Reinvestment Act could be tightened and given sharper teeth, such as greater investigatory powers and punitive sanctions. The antitrust laws might be more energetically applied against the process of
242
James Brady
bank mergers which has, in recent years, resulted in the gobbling of so many small Boston banks. At present five financial holding companies formed by recent bank mergers control more than 80 percent of all deposits in the state (Flad and Jones, 1982). The evidence shows clearly that larger banks are less sensitive to local community needs and more systematically guilty of redlining than are smaller financial institutions (Taggert, 1977). In Massachusetts the bankers still speak resentfully of former Banking Commissioner Carol Greenwald, who in 1974-78 authorized the publication of research documenting the banks' long-denied redlining practices and who vigorously used the regulatory powers of her office. As she notes in her book Banks Are Dangerous to Your Wealth, the Boston bankers refused to float state bonds unless Governor Michael Dukakis fired Greenwald, and the state was ultimately forced to sell 1977-78 bonds to bankers in the Midwest (Greenwald, 1980). Since his reelection in 1982, Governor Dukakis has sought to reassure the financial elites by pledging that he "would not appoint another Greenwald" (Ball, 1983:23). The newly appointed banking commissioner, Paul Bulman, sees his role quite different from Greenwald's, and he has flatly refused to publish updated studies on redlining and bank reinvestment. He explains that "we will enforce the Community Reinvestment Act, but will not issue short synopses of reinvestment, because I don't believe that those say anything. I don't believe that we can do that and satisfY both parties-the banks and the community groups" (Brady, 1983b:56). The problem of abandoned housing has yet to be met with a systematic or effective policy in Boston or in most other eastern cities. Bernard Shadra\!\}" commissioner of real property for the city, points out that while there are perhaps 6,000 derelict tax-delinquent buildings slated for foreclosure and redevelopment, only 28 are presently available for auctions by the city. Delays of two years or more in the land courts are common; and, he notes, "in the end, 90 percent of what I get is vacant land-since the buildings have been stripped and usually burned at least once." Keeping arson-prone speculators out of city property auctions is also difficult, as the commissioner complains: "These guys use dozens of 'straws' to hide their involvement and it's impossible to know all their names. The banks, however, know who's behind these deals. They see the same guy coming in for mortgages. They don't deal with the straws" (Brady, 1983b:59). Clearly, cities like Boston should devote more legal resources to the tax foreclosure process and must streamline the land court procedures. Much more effective information sharing among city agencies is also required to track arsonprone speculators and to prevent them from buying buildings at city auctions. But the reluctance of the fire officials to admit the seriousness of arson-for-profit operations makes it unlikely that
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243
such intelligence will be gathered or shared, and the pattern of convicted arsonists repeatedly buying properties cheaply from the city will likely continue (Axelrod, 1982a;Weber, 1982; Mayall, 1982). The insurance industry has shown itself incapable of seriously inhibiting arson fraud, and public interest requires that far more extensive regulations be imposed. The doctrine of "confidentiality" which protects the relationship between the brokers, customers, and companies could be limited to require far more public disclosure of policy underwriting. Similarly, companies must be protected against libel by customers who would keep such matters secret. The local FAIR Plans might be given longer grace periods for investigation before payment of suspicious fire claims. Since the insurance companies have not been forthcoming in providing sufficient money or expertise to combat arson, and in view of their enormous profits, it seems appropriate that states hard hit by arson should impose heavy tax assessments on the licensed companies to support law enforcement investigations and prosecution. The unlicensed "surplus lines" companies are especially problematic. This control would entail far more disclosure of underwriting (including addresses and liabilities for insured properties), as well as the public filing of "arson applications" specifying whether customers have arson convictions, indictments, or serious fire histories.4 The immunity of the insurance industry to federal regulation has left us with a plethora of state regulations and insurance commissions too weak to effectively control this mammoth industry. Moreover, the enactment of tighter regulations in one state may simply prompt, and has in several instances already prompted arson racketeers to arrange coverage from companies in another state. It is clearly time to reexamine ways of bringing the insurance industry under closer control. The one constituency with an unqualified interest in combating arson is, of course, the population living in the fire-ravaged districts. This is especially the case for the poorer tenants who not only face the danger of death and loss of their largely uninsured personal property but are also displaced by the housing squeeze brought on by fires, abandonment, and condominium conversion. Just as the abandonment problem is related to the issue of housing deterioration, which has traditionally pitted tenants against slum lords, so condominium conversion is an extension of the long contest over rent control and occupancy rights. Arson, whether of the upscale, downscale, escape, or development variety, is both a consequence of larger economic processes and a localized expression of class struggle between the owners and occupiers of arson-prone properties. The fact that landlords and developers have turned increasingly to fire as the solution to real estate problems (such as condominium conversion or lUXUry redevelopment of select urban plots in the face of organized community opposition) is in part due to the past legal and legislative
244
James Brady
victories of tenants unions and neighborhood associations. Arson not only imperils the physical and social smvival of poorer neighborhoods, it also throws a long shadow over the hard-won political power of grassroots organizations in these neighborhoods. Tenants and neighborhood groups have grown increasingly aware of this multiple threat and have played an aggressive role in combating both arson and cutbacks in fire-fighting protection (Brady, 1981a, 1982a). In Boston they have scored some impressive success particularly against arson of the upscale and downscale varieties. Tenants' unions have researched suspicious property transactions, building conditions, and fire histories and have focused media attention on fire-prone landlords. Every single major arson-for-profit investigation of which I am aware in the last five years has involved tenants and community groups, both in initiating official probes through publicity campaigns and in advancing documentary evidence and testimony for the prosecution. These initiatives have taken place despite frequent threats and harassment from targeted landlords (Barry, 1979; Blank, 1978; Johnson, 1981; Wyrough, 1981). On the other hand, the grass-roots organizations have found it far more difficult to combat arson of the vandal, escape, and development varieties, where the links between fires and immediate profits are less obvious and where there may be no actual owner of record. The media and law enforcement authorities are much less likely to inteIVene, and the public is inclined to view these sorts of fires as simply part of the "urban blight" pattern. Moreover, the efforts of nonprofit neighborhood groups to secure control of abandoned buildings for renovation as low-cost housing or community centers often conflict with official plans to encourage the construction of luxury apartments and shopping centers as a way to swell property tax revenue and ease the city's fiscal crisis (Brady, 1983b). One last institutional policy implication of this paper is that public housing, for all of its manifold problems, does have a certain durability with respect to arson, and not by reason of its construction materials. The relatively arson-free history of the BHA buildings situated right in the heart of the Boston arson belt is a powerful argument in favor of more construction or leasing of public housing by city, state, and federal authorities.
Reforms in law enforcement: Putting deterrence to work Criminal statutes for fraud and malpractice by insurance brokers and adjusters now carry maximum penalities of one year in prison and $100 to $500 fines. Given the enormous profits made in arson fraud and the scale of such conspiracies as the 1978 Sasse syndicate case in New York, such penalties are far from sufficient. The courts have been remarkably
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245
lenient in the punishment of convicted members of arson rings-as exemplified in the sentences passed down in the nationally renowned Boston Symphony Road case, which I have discussed elsewhere (Brady, 1982a, 1983a). Arson for profit is both a "white-collar" and an "organized" crime, but it has more violent and costly consequences than any of the "street" crimes which are far more severely punished. If we are to protect our cities and grant any semblance of "equal justice," more significant penalties for arson racketeers-whether they be landlords, lawyers, brokers, corrupt officials, or "torches"-are clearly in order. The Boston Arson Strike Force, with which I serve, is an innovative law enforcement response to the problem of arson for profit. It is a combined team of picked police detectives skilled in discreet surveillance and the collection of testimony and evidence, working together with a staff of civilian specialists who are skilled in analysis of urban demography, real estate, mortgage, insurance transactions, and the structure of organized crime. The strike force was specially constituted by the mayor and reports to that office and to the district attorney. The Boston Fire Department and its Arson Squad are excluded from the strike force, though BFD records are available for our use. Computers have tremendous potential in arson prevention and control. They have made a decisive contribution to efforts in several cities. The Aetna Insurance Company has provided funds for the establishment of the Arson Warning and Prevention System (AWAPS) in New Haven, Connecticut. The AWAPS system collects raw data on the histories of buildings allover New Haven, with data drawn from the city tax collector, buildings inspections, the fire department, and land courts. The computer searches these raw data and makes notation of buildings whose history fits a composite "arson profile." Specifically, properties with unpaid taxes, building code violations, debt liens, and previous structural fires are singled out (P. Miller, 1978). Owners of buildings with all of these characteristics are officially advised that the property has drawn the notice of law enforcement authorities (New Haven Fire Department, 1981). In 1980 New Haven reported a 40 percent decline in total fire losses and a 20 percent decline in arson fire incidence, one year after the program was initiated (Security World, 1981). However, since only a total of eleven buildings were actually targeted by the AWAPS computer that year, the direct impact of the program was limited (Sauertieg and O'Connor, 1980). Boston was the site of the ground-breaking Comprehensive Arson Prevention and Enforcement System (CAPES) program in 1980-81. A federal grant from LEAA established CAPES in the aftermath of the Symphony Road case to continue and systematize the partnership between community antiarson activists (who founded CAPES) and the Massachusetts attorney general's (AG) office. The community activists
24&
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and the AG's staff were largely responsible for the successful prosecution of the Symphony Road arson ring. The CAPES program sent staff specialists into fire-ravaged neighborhoods of Boston, where they trained local activists in the methods of property research and helped identify arsonprone landlords for warning letters of prosecution by the AG. After one year of operation, the CAPES target neighborhoods showed a 38 percent decline in arson incidence, while the surrounding districts and the city as a whole continued to show increases averaging about 17 percent (Moore, 1981; Wyrough, 1981; Jordan, 1980). Unfortunately, the federal LEAA cut off funds to the AG's arson unit in 1981. State funding designed to continue the CAPES program was diverted to the state fire marshal's office, where it has been spent on chemists and laboratory equipment utilized in the traditional pyrotechnics approach to arson. While the CAPES program is embroiled in legal and political battles with the state fire marshall, the proven community outreach strategy of arson prevention has been abandoned (Rezendes, 1982; Scharfenberg, 1981; Jordon, 1982a). Conclusion
No one openly advocates arson, and virtually all urban politicians have recently added this issue to the list of social problems which they decry at election time. However, the assumed universal consensus around arson, like the assumed agreement on "motherhood," evaporates when discussions shift from abstraction to concrete social policies. Just as agreement on motherhood breaks down in bitter disputes over abortion, day-care facilities, and aid to families with dependent children (AFDC), the most intense controversies rage over what are the sources and solutions to the arson problem. The mythology of the blissful nuclear family, like the insistence on images of the "Arson Rat" as an individual or "subcultural" deviant, hampers the enactment of effective and humane policies. More than misunderstanding is involved here-for there is an invisible "arson lobby" which benefits directly or indirectly from the fire pattern. This "lobby" includes significant sectors of the banking and real estate industries, insurance brokers, public adjusters, corrupt inspectors, and wrecking companies. In some instances this normally disparate network assumes the form of organized racketeering; but it is the routine practices of legitimate businesses, especially banks and real estate brokers, that make the greatest, if unintended, contribution to arson. There is also the potential for a powerful "antiarson alliance" among tenants unions, neighborhood associations, law enforcement agencies, and the powerful insurance industry, but conflicts of interest or self-perception among these groups have thus far been insurmountable. The neighborhood
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associations have a parochial outlook and are typically filled by more comfortable homeowners, as compared to the poorer, often nonwhite renters who form the more radical tenants' unions. Law enforcement officials are often isolated by their own rigidified professionalism, and the insurance industry, for its part, fears that public activism may lead to greater regulation of their own lucrative business activities. The recent course of reform efforts in Massachusetts and the nation indicates that governments are far more willing to augment law enforcement measures against individual arsonists than to attack the institutional roots of this problem in the urban economy. Arson squads across the country have been greatly expanded in the last several years and given improved forensic training in federally sponsored courses and seminars. Boston officials are currently debating whether to follow New York's lead in arming fire fighters assigned to arson investigation, and it is likely that judges will begin to impose stiffer penalties on convicted arsonists in the wake of mounting publicity and public concern. However, arson racketeers have yet to be identified as a priority target, as federal and, especially, local literature, as well as local arrest reports, still emphasize vandals, pyromaniacs, and, to a lesser extent, desperate small-business owners as the main culprits (see O'Brian, 1983). Most discouraging for reformers are the dim prospects for action against the more fundamental sources of arson and neighborhood decline, particularly with respect to urban speculation, condominium conversion, the handling of tax-delinquent properties, abandoned buildings and bank redlining, and insurance underwriting practices. City administrators worried about maintaining municipal bond ratings and attracting corporate investment are less likely today than yesterday to closely scrutinize bank lending patterns or the banks' resale of problem properties to fire-prone customers. The generation of progressive state bank commissioners, exemplified by Carol Greenwald of Massachusetts, has passed with the waning of the consumer advocacy movement and the relaxation of corporate restrictions in an era of government which now promotes laissez-faire. The insurance industry has successfully resisted legislative reforms, preferring to deal with arson quietly through limited industry-sponsored internal studies. The attempt by local state insurance commissioners to restrict the "surplus lines" companies through enaction of a mild "model law" developed by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC, 1979) has been effectively blocked in most states. The conventional companies and the local FAIR Plans have not supported such efforts, for fear that closing the surplus lines frontier might bring arsonists back to them. The surplus lines companies are apprehensive that new regulations would lead to greatly increased administrative costs and loss of business. Their concerns may be well-founded, since the enaction of tight
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regulations in New York State in the wake of the Sasse syndicate arson scandal of 1978 (New York Insurance Department, 1980) was almost immediately followed by a virtual collapse of the surplus line industry. Real estate speculation and condominium conversions have been targeted by neighborhood groups with some success. In Massachusetts a strong tenants' movement recently won passage of the "Condo Bill," which bans eviction of renters for purposes of condominium conversion. Such efforts must, however, contend with the relentless opposition of powerlul real estate lobbies, and tenants' protections are quickly eroded or abolished once tenants groups relax or weaken. Speculation by arson-prone entrepreneurs in the purchase of abandoned or foreclosed properties is difficult to prevent, since ownership may be well hidden in a maze of trusts and holding companies. City officials, worried about falling property tax revenues, are often prepared to ignore such shady purchase arrangements if redevelopment plans hold the prospect for an increased tax base. In short, the institutional sources of urban arson are enmeshed with powerlul corporate interests, and the mounting fiscal crisis of the cities makes the correction or even official acknowledgment of arsonogenic business practices most unlikely in the foreseeable future. Should a broad-based coalition of tenants, homeowners, and small-business owners arise, it could conceivably challenge the corporate elites and press for policies which might slow or reverse the process of neighborhood deterioration and destabilization, of which arson is a most visible index. I have written elsewhere that "the sociology of arson takes us right into the heart of the city" (Brady, 1983a). It is equally true that a probe of the forces and institutions which are implicated in urban arson takes us right into the heart of sociology-past the biased conjectures of deviance theory and toward a mature Marxism. A mature Marxism must reject any simpleminded instrumentalist conception of class and state and must point to activist strategies which can politicize working-class communities through organized defense of their concrete social and material interests (see Brady, 1981a, 1981b). The study of arson demonstrates the importance of intraclass cleavages (as between capitalist entrepreneurs in banking, insurance, and real estate or between working-class tenants' unions and neighborhood associations). Likewise, the state must be understood dialectically, strained as it is between its need to maintain legitimacy (arson is a crime which the public wants controlled) and its support of capitalist accumulation (arson is an integral consequence of routine profiteering in real estate and finance, and particularly of practices such as redlining, condominium conversion, and private redevelopment ventures). The imperiled urban communities are both a constituency and an arena for action by progressive intellectuals, and in the folds of political and social contradiction, one can find potential allies.
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The ultimate outcome of the present pattern of speculation, racketeering, and misinformed control policies is already visible in the ruins of New York's South Bronx and Boston's Roxbury. There, streets lined with blackened hulks divide great open fields of rubble, and even the rat holes are empty. The "invisible hand" of the "free market" is swiftly creating a new geographic morphology: the urban desert. NOTES 1 Based on presentations made by James Scollins (former chief, Lynn Fire Department). William Murphy (federal ATF-arson unit) at the Massachusetts Attorney General's Conference on Arson held at Worcester, Massachusetts, February 23, 1983. In addition, I have interviewed these experts repeatedly during January and February 1983, in the course of liaison responsibilities for the Boston Arson Strike Force. Robert Carter of the National Fire Protection Association was the subject of an extensive interview at the National Fire Protection Association at Quincy, Massachusetts, on November 17,1982. 2 Statistics on razed and boarded up properties are drawn from tabulated monthly reports filed by the Boston Buildings Department and the Boston Office of Community Development at Boston City Hall. Note that these statistics are compiled by ward divisions, while the bank reinvestment statistics computed by Greenwald (1978) and presented in Map 2 are compiled with "neighborhood" districts drawn by the Boston Redevelopment Authority. 3 Surplus line insurance affidavits are public records on file at the Massachusetts Insurance Commission Office, Boston. Fire incidence and cause records are also public documents (though follow-up investigation reports of the Arson Squad are not). The public fire records may be obtained from Central Headquarters, Boston Fire Department. Copies of insurance affidavits are available on request from the author. 4 I should point out that the sUIplus lines wholesalers, including Neil E. Rice and Hamilton Bailey, have taken an active role in promoting these reforms--through joint meetings with myself and representatives of other law enforcement and regulatory agencies, and also independently in meetings of the surplus lines wholesalers association.
References ABC (American Broadcasting Corporation) 1978 "Fires for profit." Sixty Minutes Special (August 3). Arpin, Claude 1982 "Arson in Quebec soars with recession." Montreal Gazette (May 29). Associated Press (AP) 1981 "Arson detection: part science, part art." Tulsa World (February 15):11. Axelrod, Joan 1982a "Auction program vulnerable." Boston Ledger (December 6):1,3,4. 1982b "People could get killed." Boston Ledger (March 22):1, 3. Ball, Joanne 1983 "Dukakis announces two more cabinet posts." Boston Globe (January 4):23. Banfield, Edward 1974 The University City Revisited. Boston: Little, Brown.
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Barry, Bill 1979 "Fair share carries its fight to city hall." Worcester Telegraph (August 9). Battle, Brendan, and Weston, Paul 1975 Arson: A Handbook for Detection and Investigation. New York: Arco. Bawcutt, Paul 1978 "Offshore locations for captive insurance companies." Risk Management (October):32-38. Berwyn,Robert 1974 "Urban disinvestment in Chicago." In Redlining: Discrimination in Residential Mortgage Loans. Chicago: Report to Illinois General Assembly, Legislature Investigation Commission. Blank, Joseph 1978 "They're burning our neighborhood." Reader's Digest (October) :130-35. Boston Fire Department (BFD) 1983 "Annual statistical summary of fires and losses." Unpublished mimeo, available from BFD Headquarters, Boston. Boston Housing Authority (BHA) 1981 "Third semi-annual report ofBHA receivership." BHA, Boston. 1982 "Fifth semi-annual report ofBHA receivership." BHA, Boston. 1983 "Report of Public Safety Department-Fire Incidence." Unpublished mimeo, BHA, Boston. Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) 1974 "Abandonment: executive summary" (October 21). Unpublished mimeo, BRA, Boston. Boudreau, John, Quon Kwan, William Faragher, and Genevieve Denault 1977 Arson and Arson Investigation. Washington, D.C.: National Institute for Law Enforcement, Law Enforcement Assistance Administration. Bradford, Calvin, and Leonard Rubinowitz 1975 "The urban-suburban investment-disinvestment process; consequences for older neighborhoods." Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (November):77-86. Brady, James 1981a "Towards a popular justice in the United States: dialectics of community action." Contemporary Crisis 5:155-92. 1981b "Sorting out the exiles' confusion: dialogue on popular justice." Contemporary Crisis 5:31-38. 1982a "Arson, fiscal crisis, and community action: dialectics of urban crime and popular response." Crime and Delinquency 28(2) :247-70. 1982b "Is Boston burning?" Boston Observer (October 16):5-8. 1982c "A different kind of insurer fans the arson flames." Boston Globe (August 31):15 (editorial page). 1983a "Arson, urban economy and organized crime: the case of Boston." Social Problems 83 (October):10-35. 1983b "Why Boston is burning: the conditions that create a climate for arson." Boston Sunday Globe Magazine (October 23):8-11,49-67. Brandforsvar, editors 1977 "Fire losses, fire protection, and rescue in Sweden" Brandforsvar (14).
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Brenner, Lynn 1978 "Lloyds syndicate cancelling U.S. commerdal fire policies." Journal of Commerce (May 15):8-11. 1980 "Why reinsurers have the jitters." Institutional Investor (January):115-82. Campbell, Colin 1981 "FBI begins collection of national arson statistics." Fire Chief (October):10-13. Caplan, Gerald 1976 "Criminology, criminal justice and the war on crime." Criminology 14(1):3-14. Carter, Robert 1980 "Arson and arson investigation in the United States." Fire Journal (July) :40-47. Catalina, Frank 1979 "From the legislatures: New York's attack on arson." Real Estate Law Journal 7(3):22-31. Chaput, James, and Paul Faxon 1981 "The potential for arson in the field on non-admitted insurance." Boston National Fire Protection Administration (unpublished report). Coppack, Lee 1980 "Sasse affair: disciplinary action starts." Lloyd's List, London (July 14):13-14. Cripps, Roland 1982 "Arson takes economic toll." Canadian Fire Fighter (May). Cullen, John 1977 "Over 100 probed in a 2 million dollar arson scheme." Boston Globe (September 22):1,10. Daenzer, Bernard 1980 Surplus Line Manual. Santa Monica, Calif.: Merritt Company. Devine, Robert 1973 "Where the lender looks first: a case study of mortgage disinvestment in Bronx County." New York: National Urban League, 1-24. Duncan, Marcia 1975 "Redlining practices, racial resegregation and urban decay." Urban La\\yer 7(3):510-39. D\\}'er, Timothy 1979 "Fear lives these nights on Hecla and Lyon streets." Boston Globe (November 23):23,28. Economist 1977 "The arsonists." Economist (May 27):11. Epstein, Sidney 1978 "LEAA and arson control." Fire Chief (November) :16--18. FAI (Fire and Arson Investigator) 1980 "Dowsing arson rackets." Fire and Arson Investigator 30(3):3-8. 1981 "Analysis of arson and socio-economic backgrounds." Fire and Arson Investigator 31(3):3-16. Flad, David, and DeWitt Jones 1982 "Where credit is due." Boston Observer (October 29):12-14. Flynn, Ray 1982 "Residential Rehabilitation Act." Proposed City Ordinance. November 30, Boston City Council.
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Freud, Sigmund 1932 "The acquisition of power over fire." International Journal of Psycho-analysis (13(4):399-413. Gest, Ted 1983 "Are Boston's fires an omen for other cities?" u.S. News and World Report (February 7):55-56. Gold,Paula 1982 "Statement on behalf of Frances Bellotti." Presented to Boston City Council, June 25. Golembeski, John 1980 "The insurance mechanism and arson control." Arson Control Conference, Massachusetts Property Insurance Underwriters Association, Boston, May (unpublished). 1982 "Mass FAIR Plan and arson control" (editorial response). Boston Globe (September 4) :editorial page. Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce (GBCC) 1964 "Boston renewal," Unpublished pamphlet (January), available from GBCC. Greenwald, Carol 1978 "Home mortgage lending patterns in metropolitan Boston." Boston: Publ. No. 10252-45-300-2-78-CR (December). Banking Department, Commonwealth of Massachusetts. 1980 Banks Are Dangerous to Your Wealth. Englewood Cliffs, N J.: Prentice-Hall. Hanson, Frank 1980 "Arson: its effects and control." Fire Surveyor 9(3):32-36. Harvey, Joseph 1981 "Paul says fire department cuts have not effected response time." Boston Globe (April 14):6. Harvey, Joseph, and Richard Connolly 1977 "A huge conspiracy to bum Suffolk County for profit." Boston Globe (October 18):1,3,4. Higgins, Richard 1979 "Arson strike force." Boston Globe (October 18):18. Hoyt,Homer 1939 The Structure and Growth of Residential Neighborhoods in American Cities. Washington, D.C.: Federal Housing Administration. Hurley, Ward Monahan 1969 "Arson: the criminal and the crime." British Journal of Criminology (9):4-13. lCAC (Insurance Committee for Arson Control) 1983 "A continuing commitment to fight arson." Pamphlet, ICAC, New York. Inciardi, James 1970 "The adult firesetter." Criminology 8(2) :132-49. Jahnke,Art 1981a "Upscale arson." Real Paper, Boston (January 1):4-6. 1981b "South End arson battle." Real Paper, Boston (May 21):7-9. 1982 "Who's burning Boston?" Boston Magazine (December):144-49, 185-90. Johnson, Eric 1981 "Roger Smith gets 5 years in Concord." Community News, Boston (October/ November):1.
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Jones, Arthur 1978 "Ex-officer pleads guilty in arson case." Boston Globe (March 8) :2, 11 Jordan, Robert 1980 "Coalition wields new weapons in Boston's battle with arson." Boston Globe (October 13) :4, 12. Jordon, James 1982a "State's arson fighters await decision on renewed funding." Bay State Banner, Boston (February 11) :6. 1982b "Old guard fights new in arson money tussle." Bay State Banner, Boston (June 17):7. 1982c "Nine fires ravage Roxbury." Bay State Banner, Boston (August 26):1. Jurkowitz, Martha 1982 "Fire story." The Tab, Boston (March 24):6. Karter, Michael 1982 "Fire loss in the United States during 1981." Fire Journal (September):68-86. Keva, Bette 1982 "Lawsuit preceded latest Coppola fire." Fenway News, Boston, (April) :2-3. Kilbanoff, Hank, and Eileen McNamara 1981 "The condo squeeze." Boston Globe (March 29-April 4):seven-part series in "Focus" section. King,Mel 1981 Chain of Change. Boston: South End Press. Kushkin, Judith 1981 "Rent control fights spread coast to coast." Shelterforce 6(1). Kwitney, Jonathan 1973 The Fountain-Pen Conspiracy, New York: Knopf. Larrabee, John 1982 "City council rent control vote," Dorchester Community News (November 16):5. LeBlanc, Paul, and Donald Redding 1982 "Large loss fires in the United States: 1981." Fire Journal (September):32-52. Levey, Robert 1982 "Boston as others see us." Boston Globe (September 23):28. Lima, Alfred 1980 "The influence of the non-admitted insurance market on arson for profit." Washington, D.C.: U.S. Fire Administration. April (unpublished document). Linton, Ron, J. Mields, and W. Coston 1971 "A case study of the problems of abandoned housing and recommendations for action by the federal government." Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Lorant, Richard 1982 "The agony and the ecstasy of rent control." Boston Ledger (December 20-22) :1-7. Loyola Law Journal 1975 "Redlining: the light against discrimination of mortgage funding." Loyola Law Journal 6(1):79-83. MacDonald, John 1977 Bombers and Firesetters. Springfield, Ill.: Thomas.
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McDonough, John 1980 "Redlining in Boston." The Phoenix (May 16):5-7, 18, 22-26. Macht, Lee, and John Mack 1968 "The fire setter syndrome." Psychiatry 31(3) :277-78. McMillan, Gary 1982 "A plague with no cure in sight." Boston Globe (October 14):11,23. Mahoney, Frank 1982 "Arson squad may get police powers." Boston Globe (November 19):1,11. Mayall, Marge 1982 "Tear them down, not burn them down?" Dorchester Community News (October 19):1,10. MAPC (Metropolitan Area Planning Council) 1980 Mortgage Risk in Metropolitan Boston. Boston: MAPC. MHPC (Mission Hill Planning Committee) 1982 "Coppola tenants organize." MHPC Newsletter, Boston (March 4). Miller, Peter 1978 "Preventing arson." Washington post (September 14):18, E33, E39. Miller, Walter 1968 "Lower class culture as a generating milieu of gang delinquency." Journal of Social Issues 14:5-19. Moore, Michael N. 1979 "A report on the vicinity of Huntington and South Huntington Avenue." Unpublished mimeo, July 12, available from James Brady. 1980a "Deeds and fires of Frederick Rust III." Unpublished (based on documents compiled from Suffolk County Register of Deeds and Boston Fire Department). 1980b "Coppola update." Unpublished mimeo to A. G.-CAPES program. August 3, available from James Brady. 1981 "The socio-economics of arson in Boston." Unpublished report, June, Boston. 1983 "Notes on surplus line clients with significant fire histories." Memorandum to Arson Strike Force. February 12, Boston. Moynihan, Daniel 1969 On Understanding Poverty. New York: Basic Books. NAIC (National Association of Insurance Commissioners) 1979 "Plan of operation for alien non-admitted insurances and reinsurers." NAIC Proceedings No.2. 1980 "A background study of the surplus line market." NAIC Proceedings No. 2:84-93. National Urban League 1971 The National Survey on Housing Abandonment. New York: Center for Community Changes. Newfield, Jack, and Paul DuBrul 1977 The Abuse of Power: The Permanent Government and the Fall of New York. Englewood Cliffs, N J.: Prentice Hall. New Haven Fire Department 1981 "Arson warning and prevention strategy." Unpublished paper, April, New Haven, Conn. New York Insurance Department 1980 "Regulation No. 41-Excess Lines Brokers and Insurance." New York Insurance Department. Albany.
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New York Times 1953 "Trial in fatal fire opens: Mrs. Honig faces manslaughter." New York Times (April 14):39. NFPA (National Fire Protection Administration) 1976 America's Malignant Crime. Washington, D.C.: NFPA. 1982 "International arson statistics summary." Unpublished notes from NFPA Arson Conference, April, NFPA, Quincy, Mass. O'Brian, Dave 1983 "The right and wrong burning questions." Boston Phoenix (November 8):8-9. PIRG-D.C. (Public Interest Research Group-District of Columbia) 1975 "Redlining: mortgage disinvestment in D.C." Washington, D.C.: PIRG-D.C. Institute for Policy Studies, 1-26. Radin, Charles 1981 "Study: 2'h won't cripple protection." Boston Globe (April 29) :3. RERIHUD (Real Estate Research Corp. for U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development) 1975 The Dynamics of Neighborhood Change. Washington, D.C.: HUD. Rezendes, Michael 1982 "Playing with fire: preventing arson prevention." Boston Phoenix (June 8) :1, 5, 16. Salins, Peter 1980 The Ecology of Housing Destruction. New York: New York University Press. Sauerteig, Ross, and Martin O'Connor 1980 "New Haven's AWAPS program." Firehouse (August):43-44, 48. Schall, Dennis 1977 "Neighborhoods bum across the country." Guardian (October 5):7. Scharfenberg, Kirk 1981 "The best cure is .. ." Boston Globe (November 2): editorial page. Schilling, Rubo 1981 "World wide extent of fire losses." Contact: Property Underwriters News, Geneva, Switzerland, February. Scott, Donald 1974 Fire and Fire Raisers. Bristol, Eng: DuckwOIth. Security World 1981 "The New Haven arson program--one year later." Security World (March) :26-27. Shelterforce 1981a "Housing groups respond to attacks." Shelterforce 6(2). 1981b "Keeping the heat on" and "Rent control threatened." Shelterforce 6(2). Smith,Jane 1981 "Fire hits BRA building." South End News (May 9):3, 8. Sternleib, George, Robert Burchell, James Hughes, and Franklin James 1974 "Housing abandonment in the urban core." American Investment Planners Journal (September):321-32. Stone, Michael 1978 "Housing, mortgage lending, and the contradictions of capitalism." In William Tabb and Larry Sawyer, eds. Marxism and the Metropolis, New York: Oxford University Press.
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Taggert, Tee 1977 "Home mortgage lending patterns in metropolitan Boston." Report No. 11286, Massachusetts Banking Department Boston (unpublishedl. Tenants Organizing Committee-City Life 1980a "South Huntington fires worry hillites." Mission Hill Good News, Boston IFebruaryl:2. 1980b "Coppola South Huntington buildings bum again." Jamaica Plain Community News (March):3. Tokyo Fire Department 1982 "Fire facts of Tokyo." Unpublished data summary presented at NFPA Arson Conference. ApriL Quincy, Mass. U.S. Comptroller General 1979 "Report to the Congress: issues and needed improvements in state regulations of the insurance business." Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. U.S. Congress: Senate 1963 "Surplus lines insurance." Hearings Pursuant to Senate Resolution 56 before Subcommittee on Anti-Trust and Monopolies of Senate Committee on Judiciary, April 4, 88th Congress, first session. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. 1978a "Arson for hire." Hearings before Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, August 23-24, September 13-14, 95th Congress, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. 1978b "Arson for profit: its impact on states and localities." Hearings before the Subcommittee on Intergovernmental Relations. Committee on Government Affairs, December 14-15, 95th Congress. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. 1979a "Arson in America." Committee on Government Affairs, Permanent Subcommittee on Investigation, Report 96-535, December, 96th Congress, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. 1979b ''The Anti-arson act of 1979." Hearings before the Subcommittee on Intergovernment Relations, Committee on Government Affairs, April 26, May 4, 96th Congress, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. 1981 "Arson for profit." Hearings before the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Committee of the Judicimy, September 10, 96th Congress, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development mUDI 1968 Urban Property Protection and Reinsurance Act of1968, Washington, D.C.: HUD. U.S. Fire Administration 1979 "Report to Congress: arson, the fedel'al role in arson prevention and control." Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. U.S. General Accounting Office (GAOl 1978 Arson for Profit. Washington, D.C.: GAO, Community and Economy Division, May 31.
Vennochi, Joan 1982 "Arson worst since 1977." Boston Globe (August 61:2-3. WBZ-TV 1981 "Eye team report: arson for profit in Dorchester." WBZ-TV, Boston, news report (November 9-101.
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Weber, David 1982 "Rehabilitation called key in arson fight." Boston Globe (September):14. Webster, Stephen, and Kenneth Matthews 1979 A Survey of Arson and Arson Response Capabilities. National Institute for Law Enforcement, Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, Washington, D.C.: U.S Government Printing Office. Weese, Samuel 1971 Non-admitted Insurance in the U.S. Homewood, Ill.: Irwin. Welch,Ezra 1982 "Demand investigation." Boston Ledger (April 12-19):19. Wilson, James Q. 1977 Thinking About Crime. New York: Random House (Vintage). Wolfgang, Marvin, and Franco Ferracuti 1967 The Subculture of Violence. London: Tavistock. Wyrough, Nancy 1981 "Group's success story: fewer fires." Dorchester Community News (June 23):4. Yarnell, Helen 1940 "Firesetting in children." American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 10(2):272-86. Yudis, Anthony 1982a "Tent city site proposed." Boston Globe (October 10):9. 1982b "BRA plans to sell." Boston Globe (November 20):21. 1982c "BRA will raze old hotel." Boston Globe (December 16) :42. Zanger, Mark 1977 "Arson at the top." Fire Chief (February) :19-20. 1978a "Playing with fire." Real Paper, Boston (Apr1l22):1-7. 1978b "The fire a month club." Real Paper, Boston (May 16):1-5. 1980 "The fire last time." Real Paper, Boston (April 16):11. 1981 "Cutler: I never lit no fires." Boston Herald American (November 26) :6.
Editor's Note Further work on arson for profit has been done by John L. McMullan and Peter D. Swan (1989), "Social Economy and Arson in Nova Scotia," Canadian Journal of Criminology 31:281-308. This article traces the history of arson llaw, whose purpose evolved from the protection of human life, to the protection of agricultural property from saboteurs, to the protection of UIban buildings. Only in the nineteenth century did it become illegal to bum one's own building. McMullan and Swan found that in rural Nova Scotia, burning one's own possessions to collect insurance was a common strategy in times of economic hardship. Most people seemed to find this behavior acceptable; in some families it was a traditional practice in which parents and grandparents had engaged.
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Wealth. Crime. and Capital Accumulation Harold Barnett Reprinted from Harold Barnett, "Wealth, Crime and Capital Accumulation," Contemporary Crises 3 (April 19791:171-86.
WEALTH AND THE GENERATION OF ILLEGAL INCOME Illegal potential may be thought of as the limit of one's ability to generate an illegal income. While labor power is relevant for defining the illegal potential possessed by the majority of the population, our concern here is with illegal potential as related to wealth. In particular we are concerned with the illegal potential associated with that majority of privately-held wealth which represents ownership of capital. The illegal potential possessed by the owners of this wealth reflects capital's ability to illegally appropriate income. In this section we will show that there is a basic inequality in illegal potential among groups defined as competitive and monopoly sector wealth holders. This inequality will be seen to reflect the characteristics of competitive and monopoly sector production and the fact that there is a highly concentrated ownership of monopoly sector capital. We begin with a consideration of competitive and monopoly sector production.1 Competitive sector production is organized around a large number of small firms. Some 98 percent of the total number of corporations may be defined as competitive sector. These corporations account for 15 percent of total corporate assets and for a minority share of total manufacturing outI wish to thank James Starkey, Richard Quinney, and William Chambliss for their criticism of earlier versions of this article.
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put. The presence of intra-industry competition in this sector enhances price flexibility and, thus, contributes to low profit margins and average or below average returns to invested capital. Output is generally expanded through additions of labor. In contrast, monopoly sector production is organized around a relatively small number of large corporations. Accounting for 85 percent of all corporate assets, these corporations appear as monopolistic or oligopolistic entities in the markets for manufactures, transportation, communications, energy and finance. In the absence of competition, the administration of price yields average or above average rates of return to invested capital. Expansion in output occurs mainly through technological innovation and additions to the stock of capital. Because monopoly sector corporations are both large in absolute size and large relative to the markets in which they operate, they are distinguished by their ability to exercise market power, i.e., the power to control economic events or the power to act without the constraint imposed by the market forces of competition. Market power may be used to generate illegal income in violation of the extra-market constraint imposed by antitrust law.2 Specifically, firms possessing such power have the potential to illegally expand or segment markets, create barriers to entry, eliminate competitors, and control wages, other costs and prices. \tVhen corporate market power is so used, monopoly sector capital receives rates of return greater than those resulting from economies of large scale production, patents or innovative activity. Competitive sector corporations may also attempt to acquire or protect a degree of market power through collusive activities prohibited by antitrust statutes. Such violations are motivated by a desire to reduce the impact of competition on profits. However, the absolute and relative size of these firms will often frustrate any sustained attainment of this goal. Market power represents the ability to exclude others from a share of profits (legally or illegally generated) and the ability to avoid the incidence of harm. e.g., the harm associated with effective sanction. Therefore, while market power may be used to violate antitrust statutes, it may also be expected to increase the gains associated ,,\lith illegal activities unrelated to antitrust. (We will return to this point in the last section.) Since market power emerges from the structure of monopoly sector production, monopoly sector corporations should have the potential to receive long run illegal rates of return greater than those available to competitive sector firms. And since the stock of monopoly sector capital exceeds the stock of capital invested in competitive sector production, it is apparent that monopoly sector corporations as a group have a potential to generate illegal income far in excess of that which may be generated by the aggregate of competitive sector firms.3 One can conceive of distributional systems in which the social gains and losses associated with monopoly sector violations would be spread evenly
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over the entire popUlation. However, a brief examination of data on the distribution and characteristics of wealth holdings indicates that the gains associated with monopoly sector violations accrue to a limited group of monopoly sector wealth holders. And, as we will argue below, the losses tend to be borne by the larger population of competitive sector wealth holders. An overall inequality in the distribution of wealth holdings is indicated by the fact that the top 8 percent of families hold over 60 percent of total wealth while the bottom 25 percent hold no wealth. In addition, the top 1 percent of wealth holders are estimated to account for over 75 percent of all privately held corporate securities. Therefore, the assets held by this group of monopoly sector wealth holders may be taken to represent near total ownership or effective control of the capital which provides the basis for monopoly sector production. By way of contrast, we can identify the vast majority of the population as those whose minority share of total wealth is held in the form of housing, pensions, insurance and minor equity.4 This competitive sector wealth holding population includes the organizers and owners of competitive sector business, the unskilled, skilled and whitecollar employees of competitive, monopoly and government enterprise, and the unemployed. To summarize, it can be seen that monopoly sector wealth holders possess an inordinate potential to generate illegal incomes. This potential reflects their claim over the income which can be appropriated through the illegal use of monopoly sector capital and market power. Wealth holders who are the organizers of competitive sector business possess a lesser potential as a consequence of their minor capital ownership and their limited ability to benefit from the exercise of market power. And those members of the competitive sector wealth holding population whose assets are minimal, non-existent or otherwise yield no individual influence over economic affairs are limited to the illegal returns which can be generated through an application of labor power to the illegal acquisition of transferable wealth. The degree of realization of these unequal potentials will depend on the manner in which state police powers are used to constrain violations by competitive and monopoly sector wealth holders. Since monopoly sector potential exceeds competitive sector potential, we can expect that a relatively limited monopoly sector enforcement will result in a disproportionate percentage of total illegal income accruing to the owners of monopoly sector wealth.*
·In a part of this article reprinted in Part 3 (article IS), Barnett shows that enforcement of antitrust legislation against monopoly sector corporations is weak and ineffective. This permits violations in this sector to continue, unchecked by legal threat. In the end of the article, reprinted here, Barnett discusses some of the consequences of the monopoly sector's relative immunity from enforcement.-ED.
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THE REALIZATION OF ILLEGAL POTENTUllL An insulation of monopoly sector producers from antitrust enforcement
contributes to the conditions generating traditional crime [such as burglary and robbery-Ed.] in the competitive sector. Current lavels of monopolization are estimated to account for an annual reduction in national income of at least 6 percent.5 They could, in tum, add 2 percentage points to the basic rate of unemployment, thereby increasing inequality and the incidence of traditional crime.6 While the wealth status of traditional offenders limits the gains which any single offender can realize, and while the magnitude of income transferred is a small percentage of total competitive sector income, the aggregate income transferred is large relative to competitive sector profits. For example, in 1972 an estimated 12.4 billion dollars was lost to business through traditional crime with disproportionate percentage of this loss falling on small business? This measured loss could be as large as 50 percent of total competitive sector profits. Therefore, enforcement is necessary to sustain competitive sector accumulation and to legitimize the state relative to competitive sector wealth holders in general and the organizers of competitive sector business in particular. We may then draw a conclusion: limited monopoly sector enforcement [of antitrust law] intensifies criminogenic conditions in the competitive sector and consequently requires that enforcement resources be used to constrain an illegal redistribution of income which victimizes the owners of competitive sector capital.s While traditional crime imposes a drain on competitive sector profits, antitrust violations by competitive sector business contributes to that sector's profit income. However, as noted above, a disproportionate allocation of enforcement resources to prosecute competitive sector business violations is a corollaI)' of limited monopoly sector enforcement. What makes this socially inefficient allocation acceptable? Since the knowledge that violations have occurred is often consequent on public enforcement, this allocation may contribute to a public impression that competitive sector producers are more prone to engage in illegal activilties. This would reduce pressure for monopoly sector enforcement. It would also yield an increased conflict between competitive sector producers (who generally oppose state interference with intra-industry price competition) and a public which stands to gain from enhanced competition. As a consequence of this use of antitrust powers, monopoly sector firms retain the absolute size and market power which provide a relative insulation from loss due to other production related prosecutions. For example, enforcement of environmental standards may place a relatively large burden on competitive sector profits regardless of the fact that most manufacturing output (and, therefore, much environmental damage) originates in the monopoly sector. First, monopoly sector producers can utilize their market power to diminish the impact of enforcement on profits by passing
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increased costs on as price increases. Second, given the absolute size of monopoly sector producers, effective constraints on their violations of environmental standards are argued to have adverse effects on growth and employment. Thus, state support for enforcement of environmental standards which place a relative burden on the competitive sector becomes a means to promote legitimacy while at the same time diverting enforcement resources and attention from the illegal environmental acts of monopoly sector producers-a result similar to that found in antitrust enforcement. In general, these arguments support a conclusion that the use of enforcement resources to prosecute violations by competitive sector business is out of proportion to that sector's relative potential for generating illegal returns to wealth. While this tends to reduce realization of competitive sector illegal potential, it simultaneously sustains realization of the relatively greater illegal potential possessed by monopoly sector wealth holders. In diminishing an unlawful redistribution which benefits some owners of competitive sector capital, the structure oflawand enforcement sustains unlawful redistributions from competitive to monopoly sector wealth holders. James O'Conner has argued that increased social expenditures to ameliorate the adverse impacts of monopoly sector growth generate increased strains on the state's budget.' In this regard we have seen that the state is reqUired to make social expenditures to ameliorate the impact of limited monopoly sector enforcement on competitive sector business profits, the linkage being via increased traditional offenses. We have also seen that expenditures to constrain competitive sector antitrust violations are out of proportion to the relative negative impact of these violations on the efficient employment of social resources. It has been argued elsewhere that the presence of competition, per se, would eventually eliminate the long run gains which result from such violations. If true, then expenditures to constrain competitive sector business violations are also social expenditures in the sense that they purchase legitimacy as opposed to social gain. Taken together, competitive sector wealth holders suffer the costs of crime and the cost of taxation to support social law enforcement expenditures. The existing structure of law enforcement thus intensifies the state's fiscal crises and sustains illegal monopoly sector profit income. While monopoly sector enforcement is expensive, its impact would be to retard the forces generating such fiscal strain by lowering structural barriers to growth, reducing criminogenic conditions in the competitive sector and, therefore, moderating the need for competitive sector enforcement. William Shepherd has calculated benefit-to-cost ratios for antitrust enforcement under Sector 2 of the Sherman Act, i.e., prosecutions in response to monopolization, attempts to monopolize, and combinations or conspiracies to monopolize. The costs considered include the agency costs and the firm's adjustment costs. The benefits include increases in efficiency, innovative activity and equity. The average ratio of long-term benefits to total costs for 7 major cases was 43 to 1 (the high was 67 to 1; the low, 4.7 to 1).10 While such socially harmful monopoly sector activity restricts the
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achievement of potential growth and employment, correction through legal sanction has been limited by the political power held within the monopoly sector and the fact that the monopoly sector's role as an engine of growth implies that "excessive" enforcement would yield social harm. Out of this situation emerges the ability of monopoly sector wealth holders to realize iHegal gains. In sustaining the structural basis for overall inequality in the distribution of income, law and enforcement minimize the difference between potential and realized illegal returns to monopoly sector wealth holders. Gains from limited enforcement are distributed as dividend income and as appreciation in the value of equity holdings. Shepherd estimates that current levels of market power may account for some one-quarter of the total value of corporate stock held by the 4 million top wealth holders and offers the conservative estimate that in any year at least 3 percent of national income is redistributed toward greater inequality because of market power.l1 Since this estimate is based on measures of industrial concentration and the distribution of assets over the corporate sector, we can assume that the majority of this transfer is received by monopoly sector wealth holders. If we were to assume that 50 percent of this redistribution was directed to monopoly sector wealth holders through economic activities in conflict with the intent of existing antitrust law, we would find that over 9 percent of the income reported by the top 5 percent offamily income units represented illegal gains. The loss which accompanies this illegal contribution to an unequal distribution of income is borne by the competitive sector wealth holding population. It appears as reductions in the real value of incomes, in increases in unemployment and crime, and in increases in the tax burden required to finance the cost of welfare and law enforcement.
Notes 1 The basic distinctions between competitive and monopoly sector production are drawn from O'Connor, James (19731. The Fiscal Crisis of the State, New York: SI. Martin's, pp. 13-16. Data on the distribution of corporate assets from U.S. Internal Revenue SeIVice 119701. Statistics of Income, Corporation Income Tal' Returns for 1969. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office. Cf. Hunt, E. K. and Howard J. Sherman 119751. Economics: An Introduction to Traditional and Radical Views. New York: Harper and Row, p. 253. Data on oligopolist structure from Kaysen, Carl and Donald F. Turner 119591. Antitrust Policy, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, pp. 26-37. Cf. Scherer, F. M. 119701. Industrial Market Structure and Economic Performance, Chicago: Rand McNally, p. 60. 2 Antitrust laws have a traditional presumption in favor of an open economy with a greater dispersal of decision-making centers and economic power. Blake, Harlan M. 119741. "Legislative Proposals for Industrial Concentration," in Goldschmid, Mann and Weston (eds.l. Industrial Concentration: The New Learning, Boston: Ultle Brown, p. 360. The growth in market power inhibits achievement of this goal. For an extensive survey of antitrust literature, see Scherer, op. cit. For a discussion of market power, see Shepherd, William G.119701. Market Power and Economic Welfare, New York: Random House; Shepherd, William G. 119751. The Treatment of Market Power, New York: Columbia University Press.
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3 The illegal return lor incomel to capital equals the value of the stock of capital times the relevant rate of return. 4 Wealth statistics from Projector, Dorothy S. 119641. "Survey of Financial Characteristics of Consumers," Federal Reserve Bulletin 50:285. Cf. Thurow, Lester C. 119751. Generating Inequality, New York: Basic Books, pp. 5-14. Data on corporate ownership from Lampman, Robert J. 119591. "Taxation and the Size Distribution of Income," in U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Ways and Means, Tax Revision Compendium, vol. 3, Washington, D.c.: Government Printing Office, p. 2237; cf. Scherer, op. cit.. For additional comparative statistics, see Bates, Timothy 119761. Economic Man as politician: Neo-classical and Marxist Theories of Government Behavior, Morristown, N.J.: General Learning Press. 5 As estimated by Scherer, op. cit.. p. 408.
6 Based on a loose interpretation of Okun's Law which states that a 3 percent increase in output will yield a 1 percent point reduction in the rate of unemployment. For discussion of inequality and crime, see Gordon, David M. 119711. "Class and the Economics of Crime," Review of Radical Political Economics 3:50-75; Danziger, S. and D. Wheeler (19751. "The Economics of Crime: Punishment or Income Redistribution," Review of Social Economy 33:113-31; and Barnett H. C. 119761. "The Economics of Crime: A Comment," Review of So-
cial Economy 34:86-87. 7 Bureau of Domestic Commerce, U.S. Department of Commerce 119721. The Economic Impact
of Crimes Against Business, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Commerce. 8 For additional discussion of these relationships, see Quinney, Richard 119771. Class, State
and Crime, New York: David McKay. 9 Strain on the state budget results from the need for revenues to support increased social capital expenditures which underwrite monopoly sector accumulation and to support increased social expenses which ameliorate some of the consequences of growth in the monopoly sector. At the same time, growth in state revenues is constrained by a general resistance to suffer increased taxation (what is commonly referred to as the tax-payer revoltl. For an analysis of this fiscal crisis of the state, see O'Conner, op. cit. 10 Shepherd 119751, op. cit., pp. 314-20.
11 Shepherd 119701, op. cit., pp. 210-12.
Editor's note Barnett asserts that the large corporations have higher than average rates of earning. This is substantiated in data on the economic performance of manufacturing corporations. In 1968, the 78 companies with assets in excess of a billion dollars owned 43 percent of all manufacturing assets and earned 49 percent of total profits, a disproportionate return on capital IRichard C. Edwards, "The Impact of Industrial Concentration on Inflation and the Economic Crisis," in Radical Perspectives on the Economic Crisis of Monopoly Capitalism [New York: Union for Radical Political Economics, 1975], pp. 40-451.
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AUTO THEFT AND THE ROLE OF BIG BUSINESS Harry Brill Reprinted by permission from Harry Brill, "Auto Theft and the Role of Big Business," Crime and Social Justice 18 (1982): 62-68.
It has been well established that legitimate businesses as well as the underworld sector engage in a variety of criminal activities. Among these, bribes, kickbacks, income tax fraud, and falsifying information about products are routinely practiced. The implications extend beyond the prosaic fact that the illegitimate sector enjoys no monopoly on crime. More significantly, legitimate businesses, by behaving immorally and illegally, frequently create and promote opportunities for underworld exploitation, and therefore play an important and even indispensable role in the commission of numerous crimes. The paper focuses on one such crime: auto theft,! Although it has not received as much attention from criminologists as other property crimes, it is nevertheless statistically important and poses serious economic consequences. My purpose is not so much an assessment of the problem of auto theft as it is an analysis of the socioeconomic context and structural conditions which make auto theft an all-American crime. We will see how both the major automobile manufacturers and the nation's property insurers in the pursuit of the most reputable of business goals-higher rates of profit-bear a major responsibility for auto theft. It should become clear that the distinction between legitimate business and underworld activities often contains more fiction than fact, and therefore tends to obfuscate the actual causes of crime. The cost of auto theft crime is staggering. About a million vehicles are stolen each year, amounting to a loss of approximately $4 billion (Subcommittee on Consumer Protection and Finance, 1980:2, 116). This does not include the economic costs of lost days from work, to say nothing of the personal trauma and inconvenience, that auto theft entails. The rates in the short run have fluctuated somewhat, but the long-term trend is clearly upward. The incidence of auto theft more than doubled in the decade of the 1960s (Statistical Abstract, 1974:147). It declined in the very early 1970s, but beginning with the deterioration of the economy in 1973-74, auto theft has resumed its long-term climb, reaching a million vehicles stolen in 1975. It dipped again the year after, but from 1976 to
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1980, the number of offenses increased at an average annual rate of 4 percent (Statistical Abstract, 1981:173). For the rest of this decade, auto theft threatens to be a most serious problem. Although motor vehicle owners from every sector of the population are victims, the risks vary considerably from one group to another. For young motorists (nineteen and under), the auto theft rate is more than three times the average (U.S. Department of Justice, September 1981:38). Also, they generally pay exorbitant and even prohibitive premiums. Black and Hispanic motorists suffer about twice the victimization rates of whites (U.S. Department of Justice, September 1981:3,38). Since they tend to be poor and to reside in areas where insurance costs are higher than average, they are less likely to carry theft coverage. For those who do, their greater vulnerability as a result of being both poor and of minority status makes it much more difficult for them to be properly reimbursed. The victimization studies of the Department of Justice show that the incidence of auto theft varies directly with income. Its most recently published survey on victimization indicates that the auto theft rate among the highest income bracket surveyed is 70 percent greater than for the poorest (U.S. Department of Justice, September 1981:39). In actuality, however, the victimization rate is highest among the poor, and lowest among the higher income brackets. The survey report computes the theft rate as a percentage of vehicles stolen per 1,000 households. However, among the poorest surveyed, the majority do not own automobiles (Statistical Abstract, 1981 :628), and therefore their inclusion in the survey is both inappropriate and misleading. For to include a high proportion of households from which there are no vehicles to steal appreciably understates the theft rate. Conversely, most households in the upper income bracket own two or more automobiles, which certainly increases the vulnerability to theft on a household basis. The problem is that when comparing such communities to those that are less affluent, according to thefts per 1,000 households (which is the yardstick generally used), this criteria tends to exaggerate the differences with regard to the extent of property crime. It makes more sense, then, to compute the auto theft rate according to 1,000 vehicles owned for different income brackets. The victimization studies provide these rates for different race and age groups. Fortunately, since car ownership patterns according to income are available elsewhere (Statistical Abstract, 1981:628), we are able to compare the theft risk to motorists of different incomes. Based, then, on the number of vehicles owned, motorists with family incomes under $7,500 experience an auto theft rate at least 50 percent higher than for those earning $25,000 and more. 2 Not only auto theft victims suffer. Insured motorists are generally victimized by paying exorbitant insurance premiums that continue to escalate as theft increases. The premium costs fall heaviest upon the poor, for along with minorities, they are segregated into communities
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where they are more vulnerable and least protected. Also, insurance premiums constitute a regressive tax imposed by a private industry. Wholly aside from paying more, the poor are compelled to pay a higher percentage of their income for insurance protection. Although thieves and theft rings are the ones who are most directly implicated in auto theft, they certainly are not the only participants. Most stolen vehicles are sold either in the used car market or dismantled for parts. Auto body shops need crash parts, which they generally obtain from salvage yards, and many of these are operated by or have close connections to theft rings. Since their parts come from stolen rather than purchased vehicles, these salvage yards can offer more competitive prices than the legitimate outlets. And they are certainly far less expensive than parts ordered directly from the automobile manufacturers, who in addition are slow to deliver. Even many of the legitimate yards place orders with the illegal operations. An estimate given by a car thief testifying before a congressional committee is that about 50 percent of the salvage yards deal in stolen parts (Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, 1979:64). Many of the cars stolen for resale are fenced through used car dealers and new car dealers with used car operations. Yet the small effort made to thwart auto theft is directed almost exclusively toward apprehending the auto thief. Those who fence stolen vehicles or parts are generally untouched by the law. This decidedly unbalanced approach to the auto theft problem, occasionally embellished with dramatic arrest episodes, reflects a public relations rather than a public protection policy. For as long as legitimate businesses continue to fence with impunity, an ample work force can always be recruited to engage in this highly lucrative crime. As one might expect, the liberties enjoyed by the small business sector also apply to big business. Both the auto manufacturers and the insurance industry are among the major participants, and they too operate without any serious intrusion from the criminal justice system. The auto industry contributes by making highly theft-vulnerable autos, although at a minimal cost-and as we'll see, even at a profit-they can install fairly effective theft-preventive devices. The insurance industry refuses to provide incentives to motorists who theft-proof their vehicles. And incredibly, they provide thieves with the means to legitimize the identity of stolen cars. Most automobiles can be stolen in less than one minute, almost all within two. In a test demonstration, an auto thief was clocked by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts stealing 20 cars. He averaged only 43 seconds: 3 to enter, and 40 to remove the ignition lock and drive away (Whittier, 1978:68). Some thieves under certain circumstances use tow trucks, but this is more conspicuous and entails greater risk. It is the ability to steal a vehicle swiftly and surreptitiously that has made auto theft a very tempting and attractive crime.
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Car theft tools are readily available and easy to use. To enter a car, a thin metal contraption called a slim jim is employed to slide down the door to trip the door lock. Numerous tools are available to defeat the ignition system. Among them, for example, is a dent puller, which is a body shop tool to pull out dents. It also pulls out ignition locks (Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, 1980:10, 11). Using these and other tools properly and facilely requires very little training. The automobile industry's record for protecting motorists is abysmal. It has been generally successful in combating legislative and regulatory attempts to make vehicles more theft-resistant. Strong regulations have been periodically proposed by the Department of Transportation, but due to industry lobbying, they have been either deleted or diluted. So even General Motors' own remarkably modest goal, which is to build automobiles that would take as long as three minutes to steal, has not been attained (Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, 1979:438). The automobile manufacturers, like businesses generally, are unwilling to spend money in ways that would adversely affect their profits. The fact is that theft-proofing vehicles would reduce automobile sales. This, indeed, has occurred to members of a Senate subcommittee investigating the auto theft problem. There have been several congressional probes into auto theft. The most extensive hearings were conducted by the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Governmental Affairs. Its chairman, Senator Nunn of Georgia, could not have been more direct in his remarks to an auto manufacturer representative-the more stolen, the more you make; the more you make, the more you sell; the more you sell, the more money you make" (Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, 1979:340). The number of new car sales that are actually generated as a result of auto theft must be considerable. The subcommittee requested Chrysler to submit its own estimate of the impact of auto theft on the sales of its own cars. Using the company's own calculations (Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, 1979:341) and then applying them to the industry as a whole would yield about 50,000 new car sales per year. However, this estimate is much too low. Remarkably, Chrysler assumed that new cars are purchased exclusively by owners of other late-model automobiles, although the overwhelming majority of new car buyers have previously owned older vehicles. Also, the number of recovered vehicles that were still usable was grossly overestimated. Law enforcement officials count an automobile as recovered as long as any part that is retrieved clearly belongs to the particular vehicle. A completely stripped automobile, or just a discarded transmission or engine, counts a vehicle as recovered. The official police statistics look better, but the unfortunate motorist is still without a drivable car. A more accurate estimate of the stimulant effect of car theft would undoubtedly amount to several times Chrysler's figuressomewhere in the hundreds of thousands.
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Of course, cost considerations alone can be sufficient to deter improvements. The auto industry has opposed a proposed regulation requiring it to place vehicle identification numbers (VINs) on various crash parts-in particular, the front end, doors, and rear body sections (Subcommittee on Consumer Protection and Finance, 1980:422). Although this would facilitate the efforts of police agencies, the proposal was dropped. Also scuttled was a Department of Transportation proposal requiring the automobile manufacturers to affix the VINs so that the removal or alteration ofthe number would show evidence oftampering (Department of Transportation, 1967:20866; 1968:10207-10208). The VINs of vehicles stolen for resale are frequently substituted. Any obvious tampering would provide law enforcement officials with an important clue. Even though the costs per car would be small (Subcommittee on Consumer Protection and Finance, 1980:422) in the aggregate, the figures would be in the millions of dollars for the large companies. So we would expect the auto manufacturers to oppose these changes regardless of the impact on auto sales. Nevertheless, the overriding commitment is to making cars that are minimally resistant to theft. The auto manufacturers successfully opposed a regulation requiring that a shield be inserted over the door lock mechanism so that it could not be directly contacted by external devices. This would have been quite inexpensive, and in fact, General Motors did place a shield on some of its models. However, since it did not take the trouble to design an effective one, the shield has proven to be completely useless (Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, 1979:85). Apparently reacting to criticism, it at least wanted to convey the impression that it was doing something. This was only a public relations maneuver. What is really significant is that General Motors preferred to spend some money on a device that would not work, rather than on one that actually would. Particularly revealing is that the auto manufacturers refuse to install effective antitheft devices, although it would clearly increase their profit on each car. It has generally been the practice of the industry to load automobiles with amenities to improve their earnings on each unit they sell. From the manufacturers' perspective, these costs represent investments, not onerous expenses. Especially, but not only, in high-theft areas where car theft is on the public mind, a reasonably priced security system would be very attractive to buyers, who are anxious to protect their investment in this highly expensive piece of machinery. A nationally known research organization, Arthur D. Little, developed an effective antitheft device under a grant from the Department of Transportation. After being thoroughly tested, it could not be defeated by even highly experienced and technically adroit thieves. According to Arthur D. Little, if the system was installed by the manufacturer, the cost to the consumer could be as low as $17! (Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, 1979:327). The auto companies could even charge more and thereby earn a greater profit margin than Arthur D. Little was
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anticipating. Moreover, sales would not suffer, because the costs added onto the car would be too insignificant. If anything, car sales might increase slightly because some motorists, whose anxiety over high theft rates dissuades them from purchasing new vehicles, might reconsider if the manufacturers installed an effective, low-priced antitheft system. Nevertheless, the auto producers have been uninterested (Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, 1980:16-17). Building stealable vehicles stimulates sales not only by encouraging theft. Theft vulnerability, which also means cars can be readily repossessed, promotes sales indirectly by prompting lending institutionsbanks, finance companies, and credit unions-to adopt more lenient loan policies and to charge relatively lower rates of interest. For when debtors are not meeting their loan obligations, the credit granting institutions, including the finance subsidiaries of the major automobile manufacturers, can bypass the courts and swiftly take away the vehicle. In fact, about a million vehicles are repossessed each year (Bureau of Consumer Protection, 1980:260, 292-93J. This remedy for creditors, which is legally sanctioned, is of course preferred over resorting to the courts. The judicial route is more expensive, takes longer, and risks the possibility of an unfavorable outcome. Not least, since automobiles depreciate rapidly, the sooner a vehicle can be retrieved for resale, the better. Also, credit institutions are particularly neIVOUS about making loans to applicants in the lower income brackets. The ability to readily and swiftly retrieve their collateral is indispensable to approving their credit. The stealable car, then, along with the repossession laws, promotes more liberal loan policies, thereby stimulating sales. The right to repossess merchandise without resorting to the courts is allowed in almost all states, provided that it is done without breaching the peace (Bureau of Consumer Protection, 1980:252-53). Referred to as "self-help" repossession, this collection mechanism has been recognized, by the courts as valid for over one hundred years, well before the automobile was invented. Since then, the National Conference of Commissioners for Uniform State Laws, which is an organization of mainly pro-business representatives selected by each state's executive branch, has successfully lobbied for legislative enaction of self-help at the state level (National Commission on Consumer Finance, 1972:28). Although self-help applies to consumer purchases generally, the major beneficiaries in recent years have been the creditors who make automobile loans and the automobile manufacturers themselves, whose sales benefit from the resulting liberal terms. The losers, of course, are the debtors whose rights to due process are being trampled upon. They are being denied the legal opportunity to defend and negotiate their own interests. What is more, there is abundant evidence of serious abuse. Numerous vehicles have been deliberately repossessed hastily, this manner of repossession intended to produce
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excessive profits rather than seIVe the intended purpose of protecting creditors against losses. Such unfair practices are inevitable when due process is denied. The "free market" is politically as well as economically very expensive for those who purchase automobiles. Due to the impoverished public transportation system, for which the automobile industry is largely to blame, car ownership has become a necessity. Since consumers are generally unable to purchase a vehicle outright, they are compelled to seek credit. To obtain automobile loans requires the additional large interest expense, and also the sacrifice of some of their legal rights. It appears that automobile consumers are entrapped in a virtually totalitarian economy. The automobile manufacturers have certainly accommodated both creditors and thieves alike. The one industry that is capable of countering their irresponsibility is the nation's insurers. They are in a position to entice motorists to install antitheft devices by offering premium reductions. Theft-proofing vehicles on an individual-car basis is far more expensive than if mass-produced and installed by the automobile manufacturers. Still, a reasonable and realistic incentive for theft-proofing late-model cars could subsidize the costs over several years of the life of a vehicle (AAA, Massachusetts Division, 1979:2). Since curtailing auto theft would reduce claims costs, one might expect the insurance companies to be quite interested in some kind of incentive system. Instead, the insurers have been antagonistic. They refuse to voluntarily adopt any system and have vigorously lobbied against legislative efforts to mandate lower insurance rates for theftprotected vehicles. In Illinois, which is among the few states where such legislation has been approved, the insurance industry has been attempting its repeal (National Underwriter, February 27,1981:56). Massachusetts, the nation's theft capital, has adopted a similar law, implementation of which the industry, through delaying tactics, was able to postpone but could not stop (Hunt, 1977:6-7). The industry defends its opposition to preferred rates on the grounds that they would not reduce auto theft. It claims that thieves who are unable to steal one vehicle would simply move on to the next one. However, for those thieves who are seeking only late-model automobiles, or certain particular models, the next car may be neither nearby nor accessible (National Underwriter, July 18, 1980:1). Still, the insurers do make a valid point, since the oVeIwhelming majority of vehicles have no protection against theft. So the difficulties in stealing one car are most unlikely to be experienced with the next one, which for most thieves would probably be in short reach. However, this problem can be dealt with by actively promoting, not discouraging, the widespread use of antit antitheft mechanisms. On this score, the insurance companies are clearly an important part of the problem. In those states that offer preferred rates, the program is neither
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promoted nor even publicized. Few motorists are even aware of it. In fact, the insurers could realistically offer larger incentives than these states require, which would make theft-proofing even more tempting. But their preference is to offer nothing at all. A determined insurance industry could turn the odds against the auto thief. But this is not what it is interested in doing. This is particularly surprising if we take into account that the industry could entice motorists with lower rates without passing on the entire gain that would result from smaller underwriting losses. Their rate of return would be improved. The catch, however, is that a higher profit rate would be traded off for lower aggregate earnings. In other words, substantial premium reductions that yield only a slightly higher rate of profit would appreciably reduce the aggregate cash flowing into the industry. This would violate an important business principle. The purpose of a higher rate of profit, after all, is to increase the level of aggregate income, which is what ultimately determines the ability of business to expand and modernize and to allocate higher salaries and bonuses to its executives. For the insurance industry, there is a particularly pressing reason for maximizing income. Insurance premiums provide capital for investment, which is mainly how the insurance companies earn a profit. Auto theft insurance earns a profit. But last year, the overall losses of the insurance companies (life and health insurance companies excluded) for writing insurance reached about $6 billion. Investment income, however, surpassed $13 billion (National Underwriter, January 8, 1982:1). Reducing premiums, even if somewhat advantageous to the insurance end of the business, would not appeal to the investment-minded insurance industry. To the insurance industry, a higher auto theft rate is better than a lower one. The more cars stolen, the higher the insurance premiums climb, and the more money the insurance companies accumulate to invest. So, the industry's propaganda notwithstanding, their self-interest is not only different from that of the consumers whom they insure; they seriously clash. The industry attempts to create an illusion that there is a harmony of interests between themselves and the public. One recent and important example is the campaign in Massachusetts of the Coalition for Auto Insurance Reform (CAIR). CAIR, which projected itself as a consumeroriented organization, was actively promoting state deregulation of auto insurance. It claimed that by setting overall rates for the industry, the state virtually abolished competition and the lower insurance rates that would result. According to CAIR, the pressure of competition would force the insurance carriers to adopt cost-saving strategies. Among other changes, more resources would be expended on their auto theft investigative units, which in turn would reduce theft claims and, therefore, the costs of insurance. In reality, when competitive rating was attempted several
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years ago in Massachusetts, auto insurance premiums skyrocketed. That, in fact, was why the industry had pressed for deregulation. There is no reason to believe that the same would not occur again. Why, then, would a public interest organization campaign for state deregulation of the industry? The answer is that CAIR was not a public interest group. It was financed by a major insurance company seeking changes in the rating structure. CAIR was created to convey an image that the insurance companies themselves could not-a decidedly consumer-oriented bias (The Standard, May 9, 1980:1). To improve their bottom line, the insurers have demonstrated that they are not beyond actively promoting theft, even if it requires resorting to equally questionable means. Vehicles stolen for resale require a new, legitimate identity to minimize the risk of being identified. The insurers, who are in a position to undermine the efforts of thieves, have actually been assisting them. In particular, the successful fencing of a stolen vehicle requires a legitimate title and vehicle identification number. Expanded recently to seventeen characters, the VIN provides in code form such information as the manufacturer, model, and year of vehicle and also identifies the specific vehicle (NATB, 1981:39). Auto theft rings generally obtain both .a legitimate title of ownership and VIN by purchasing a wrecked car similar to the stolen one. They may also first purchase a particular wreck and then afterward search for a similar vehicle to steal (Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, 1980:4). For those thieves who utilize legitimate outlets for fencing purposes, it is crucial to provide the stolen vehicles with legitimate identities. Theft rings want to avoid jeopardizing their fencing contracts. Thieves obtain wrecks either directly from lots operated by the insurance companies or from salvage yards that purchase them from the insurers. The insurance companies could dispose of these vehicles as junk, making certain that the VIN is removed or crushed along with the vehicle. There are additional steps that could be taken to assure that the title and the VIN are permanently buried. The problem for the industry, however, is that junked vehicles yield at best no more than a few hundred dollars. Instead, the insurers prefer to sell these vehicles under the fictitious pretext that they can be rebuilt, which can instead command for a new car as much as several thousand dollars (Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, 1979:363). Actually, many of these vehicles have been completely demolished and therefore are impossible to rebuild. Their worth lies in the legitimacy that they provide for thieves. The insurers are certainly aware of what they are doing. They are expert in differentiating between rebuildable and unrebuildable vehicles. Also, police agencies have attempted to persuade some of the insurance companies to cease the practice. According to a police investigator in the Chicago area, about 80 percent of all the totally wrecked vehicles sold at insurance companies' own lots are used in illegal automobile retagging
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schemes (Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, 1979:195). Remarkably, the auto theft problem is being subsidized by the insurance industry. Auto theft investigators have been puzzled by the industry's behavior. Whatever the short-run gains, it would seem that the insurers ultimately have more to lose. The industry winds up paying out in theft claims several times more than they collect from the salvage sales that have facilitated the thefts. The insurance companies understand, however, that the salvage switch does not exhaust the ingenuity of auto thieves. There are other subterfuges, including the counterfeiting of documents and VIN plates by some highly sophisticated theft rings (National Underwriter, May 21, 1976:49). Tightening up on salvage sales would curtail many thefts, but those who would continue to steal would no longer be paying fees to the insurance carriers. As a result, the companies would lose a substantial income. Industry efforts to curtail auto theft are circumscribed by the profit motive. The industry is disinterested in a large-scale preventative approach because it generally prefers higher insurance rates to lower ones. However, any insurer welcomes the recovery of a stolen vehicle, since this reduces its costs. To assist in the recovery of the stolen vehicles, the industry sponsors its own organization, the National Automobile Theft Bureau (NATB). Supported by membership fees from over five hundred insurance companies, NATB employs a highly trained staff, many of whom are former police officials. They work closely with police departments to recover stolen vehicles and apprehend auto thieves (National Underwriter, May 18,1979:67). Just how NATB orients toward auto theft is instructive. Among its major tools is its computer system, which along with the FBI's own computer, tracks stolen vehicles (NATB,1980:7). Fed into the computers are VIN's and other pertinent information. Stolen vehicles whose VIN's have not been altered can be traced by checking these VIN's against lists submitted mainly by motor vehicle bureaus, insurance companies, and police departments. The system for various reasons works imperfectly, but nevertheless is an invaluable aid to NATB. The irony, however, is that the energies devoted to searching for illegitimate VIN's also compel many thieves to depend on salvage sales, where surveillance is minimal. NATB activities are a constant reminder that the best chances of succeeding are by engaging in a salvage switch, thereby assuring that the industry would not be excluded from a share of the profits. NATB nevertheless admonishes the insurance companies to more closely monitor their salvage sales (NATB, 1980:2). But since the practice persists, NATB investigators could be spending their time most usefully by routinely tracking down those who purchase unrebuildable, wrecked vehicles at the higher salvage prices. The problem with this approach, however, is that it would accomplish what the insurers want to avoidthe withdrawal of thieves from insurance auctions.
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The other major outlet for wrecked vehicles, salvage yards, are not required in many states to keep complete records. In any case, without a search warrant, which can be quite difficult to obtain, the police are unable to obtain information for the purpose of following up on suspected thieves. So this route is inaccessiible to NATB. Significantly, the immunity of the salvage yards is due in part to the insurance industry's neglect. In Massachusetts, legislation requiring the licensing of salvage yards has been unable to win approval as a result of the heavy lobbying by salvage yard operators. Its importance for combating auto theft is widely recognized (Governor's Task Force on Automobile Theft, 1980:661-67). The insurance companies, many of which depend upon the salvage yards to dispose of their wrecked vehicles at a lucrative price, certainly did not attempt to lobby vigorously for the bill to curtail auto theft. Had they done so, it would have had a good chance of passing. One highly dramatic strategy that elicits industry enthusiasm is NATB's sting operations (NATB Journal, Winter 1981:2). In cooperation with local police departments, a used car business is set up to lure thieves by purchasing their stolen vehicles. These sting operations, which are quite expensive, are financed with public funds. But it is really the industry, not the public, that mainly benefits. The insurance companies recover stolen vehicles as well as having already received, in many instances, the salvage price for wrecked vehicles, whose VlN's have been transplanted to the stolen cars that were sold to the sting operation. The police departments have gained too by promoting the illusion of seriously and effectively combating crime. Thieves are apprehended, but very rarely is serious punitive action taken against them. Generally speaking, property crimes directed against members of the public are treated lightly and even casually. With regard to auto theft. there is an important contextual factor. The insurance industry has not been emitting distress signals about auto theft to the police and the courts. These they reserve for those who can influence and determine insurance rates, especially the legislatures and insurance regulatory agencies. Aside from rhetoric, then, the criminal justice system does not accord an important status to auto theft. The few who are punished for auto theft are overwhelmingly drawn from the lower-class stratum, while others who are involved are generally left alone. The sting operation is one example. Those who are apprehended are the so-called disreputable. By the sting's very nature, the legitimate businesses that fence stolen merchandise are bypassed. An alternative approach would be to feign a theft ring for the purpose of entrapping businesses that knowingly and willingly purchase cars believed to be stolen. But this is not done. The issue is not only one of inequity, as important as it is. Since legitimate businesses remain untouched, thieves continue to be assured of a market for their stolen vehicles. The sting operation represents only a momentary interruption. NATB is constrained by the usual police resistance to intruding into
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the affairs of the legitimate business sector. Nor would the insurance industry condone widespread assaults against legitimate businesses which, after all, could include the insurance companies themselves. Once fencing operations are targeted, what is to stop an official investigation of the insurance industry's involvement in auto theft? Besides, there would be nothing to gain and much to lose if the auto theft problem was seriously confronted. The insurance industry, after all, is in the business of insuring against uncertainty. The greater the public uncertainty, the better for business. Like the automobile manufacturers, the nation's insurers thrive on auto theft. From our perspective, these industries are implicated in serious crimes. From their perspective, it is business as usual. In summary, we have seen how the profit motive involves the reputable business sector in the commission of crime. Property crime has become epidemic in American society not simply because a growing number of working people are being economically disenfranchised. Crime is perpetuated and actively promoted, at least in the industries discussed, by those to whom the system has bestowed both high income and a very respectable status. Moreover, their highly questionable practices are legally sanctioned and even encouraged. The occasional wrath they encounter from official circles is either cosmetic or, at best, marginal to the main thrust of their activities. The corporations not only contribute to the crime problem, they pose formidable barriers to reducing crime. Police agencies sporadically crack down on those who are defined as disreputable. But even the most dedicated and uncorruptible public servants are immobilized by the power of the corporations to fend off any attempts to undermine their business practices. We can expect, then, that auto crime will continue to pay and flourish. Clearly, then, the material roots of auto theft are to be found in the routine, lawfuL profit-making operations of the auto and insurance industries, reinforced by the collaboration of the criminal justice system. This does not suggest a conspiracy explanation, though there is clearly a conscious unity of interests and undoubtedly a degree of cooperative planning among the businesses that profit from auto theft. Rather, the widespread persistence of auto theft and the ineffectiveness of the police in controlling it are structurally determined conditions which are institutionally generated by big business in its legal practices.
NOTES 1 The data for this research have been obtained from official documents, congressional hearings, trade journals of the automobile and insurance industries, newspaper accounts, and interviews with public officials and insurance industry representatives. 2 Due to some minor limitations of the data, a precise figure could not be obtained. As a
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result, computations were made using assumptions that understate the theft rate differential between the two income groups, The actual difference is probably nearer to 10 percent higher than the figure provided in the text.
REFERENCES American Automobile Association 1979 Statement in Favor of House 1261. Bureau of Consumer Protection, Federal Trade Commission 1980 Credit Practices. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office. Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration 1968 "Rules and Regulations": 10207-10208 (July 17). 1967 "Notice of Proposed Rule Making": 20856-20868 (December 28). Governor's Task Force on Automobile Theft 1980 Auto Theft in Massachusetts-An Executive Response. Hunt, James H. 1977 Recommendations of the Hearing Officer in Relation to Discounts on Comprehensive Coverage (On file with the Division of Insurance, Commonwealth of Massachusetts) . National Automobile Theft Bureau 1981 "Over 175 Arrested in Indy Sting." NATB Journal (Winter), 2. 1980 "President's Message." Annual Report, 1-2; "Computer Operations," 7. National Commission on Consumer Finance 1972 Consumer Credit in the United States. Washington, D.C: Government Printing Office. National UndeIWriter, Property and Casualty Insurance Edition 1982 "New Record" (January), 1. 1980 "Cars Stolen Most Frequently" (July 18),1. 1979 "NATB Calls for Joint Effort on Auto Theft" (May 18), 67. 1976 "Vehicle Identification Numbering Systems" (May 21),49. Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Governmental Affairs 1979 Professional Motor Vehicle Theft and Chop Shops. United States Senate, 96th Congress, 1st Session, November 27, 28, 29,30, and December 4. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office. The Standard 1980 (May 9), 1. Statistical Abstract ofthe United States 1981 Crime and Crime Rates, by TYPe: 1971-1980, 173. 1981 Percent of Occupied Housing Units With Automobiles Available: 1970--1977, 628. 1974 Crime and Crime Rates, by TYPe: 1960--1973, 147. Subcommittee on Consumer Protection and Finance of the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, and Subcommittee on Inter·American Affairs of the Committee on Foreign Affairs 1980 Joint Hearings, Motor Vehicle Theft Prevention Act. House of Representatives, 96th Congress, 2d Session, June 2, 10, n. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. Subcommittee on Criminal Justice of the Committee on the Judiciary 1980 Hearings, Auto Theft Prevention Act. U.S. Senate, 96th Congress, 2d Session, April 14. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.
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u.s. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics 1981 Criminal Victimization in the United States, 1979 Victimization Rates: Household Crimes, by Race of Head of Household, 3. 1981 Victimization Rates on the Basis of Thefts per 1,000 Households and of Thefts per 1,000 Vehicles Owned, by Selected Household Characteristics, 38. 1981 Victimization Rates, bYlYPe of Crime and Age of Head of Household, 39. 1981 Victimization Rates, by lYPe of Crime and Annual Family Income, 39. Whittier, Tinker 1978 "Secrets of a Car Thief." Money (October), 65-68.
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9
The Production of Black Violence in Chicago Cyril D. Robinson
At the beginning of the twentieth century, when there were but 2 percent blacks in Chicago, and as late as the 1940s, when most blacks were still in the South, few people saw blacks as the major source of violent crime. Yet today, street crime and gang violence by black youth ravage many black communities. This essay will show how public and private decisions contributed to and largely determined that result. One of its major theses is that people in a position to do so have used a subordinate group, in this case, lower-class blacks, as their instrument of capital accumulation. There has been, in effect, a direct transfer of wealth from the poor and powerless to the rich and powerful. One inevitable consequence of this process is the "povertization" of a part of this subordinate group. Out of such conditions violent crime becomes an attractive occupational choice. I start my inquiry in the postslavery period between the Civil War and the first Great Migration to the North beginning in 1916. This tale, being long and complex, will move back and forth between the black experience and the sometimes global decisions that affected blacks, then back again to reconstruct the community environment that produced the violence and crime in many black communities today. Rather than try to show the impact of those decisions throughout the United States, I have concentrated on Chicago. 1 Likewise, although these decisions have adversely affected lower-class workers, small farmers, and small business people of all ethnic groups and races, I have principally restricted this essay to black males. Blacks have the longest history of any nonindigenous group in the United States,2 and because oftheir numbers in northern cities at the time of the recent structural economic transformation, the noxious results of those decisions on them act as predictors of what is happening to other subordinate groups (Hispanics, Asians) (Wilson, 1987:39; Hagedorn and Macon, 1!)88:7). Moreover, a rich historical, economic, and sociological literature has focused specifically on blacks (Jaynes and Williams, 1989). Because an important goal of this essay is to link governmental decision making to inner-city street crime, committed mostly by males, the principal focus is on them. 3
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Why blacks came north
Even though slavery had been abolished, conditions for blacks in the post-Civil War South were so oppressive that few were able to leave. Between the end of the Civil War and 1910, blacks in the South remained, economically, serfs, being dependent on white landowners and often legally tied to the land. Laws made it a crime to hire labor away from a farm for a higher wage. Those who left for this reason were subject to arrest and return by peace officers. 4 "Most ex-slaves had little information about the North [the Chicago Defender only began publishing in 1910], few resources to get there, and greater interest in the possibility of landed independence in the more familiar South" (Grossman, 1989:23; McMillen, 1989:140-50; Street 1957:21). White labor objected to working with blacks, and most employers preferred white immigrant labor to blacks, who they thought were unqualified for urban employment (Farley and Allen, 1987 :111-12). Those few leaving were frequently unattached young males who had not been slaves and did not hold any special attachment to the soil (Osofsky, 1966:22-24; Tuttle, 1970:215). Blacks came north on their own as a reaction against constant violence and injustice; increasing destruction of crops by the boll weevil; flooding and drought in sections of Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama; a decline in cotton prices and consequent lowered wages; and a "labor glut" for the limited jobs for which they were permitted to compete. "They did the dirty work of southern society, and most lived on the edge of poverty" (Marks, 1989:61; Street, 1957:381; Scott, 1969:14--15). It is generally agreed, however, that the major reason for the migrations was the search for better job prospects for themselves and educational opportunities for their children, as well as just to seek "freedom" and personal safety from the hands of whites (McMillen, 1989:264; Grossman, 1989:259; Myrdal, 1962:3-94; Tilly, 1974:155; Meier and Rudwick, 1970:214--16; Marullo, 1985:305; Nelli, 1970:55). World War I drew large numbers of blacks from southern rural areas to northern cities. Until then, low-skilled jobs had generally been filled by European immigrants who had been attracted here in the millions for the same reason that was to bring blacks, the need for cheap unskilled labor for northern mills, mines, and factories (Farley, 1968:241; Scott, 1969:169). Between 1910 and 1914, an average of over 900,000 Europeans entered yearly. From 1915 to 1920, the war cut this immigration to about 100,000 per year (Farley, 1968:253; Bloch, 1969:44; Tuttle, 1970:84). The armed forces took both unskilled and semiskilled workers, depleting northern industries, mines, and railroads of labor just when war needs increased the demand and cut off the supply of European workers. To fill this need, northern employers advertised in black newspapers, sent agents to the South offering high wages, and in the early years offered free transportation. Black-owned newspapers painted glowing pictures of northern living conditions (Farley, 1968:241; Scott, 1969:14--15; Meier and Rudwick, 1970:216; Haynes, 1924:272; Tuttle, 1970:23, 77-80; Marks, 1989: ch. 2).
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The conditions under which most agrllcultural families lived insured that they would be unable to accumulate much wealth to bring with them on their journey north (Lemann, 19~J1:17-20). A 1933 survey of 2000 tenant families in four southern states showed that average cash income for the year was just over $100. The plight of the southern black farmer is well summed up by the ditty (McMillen, UI89:132): Niggers plant the cotton niggers pick it out, white man pockets money niggers does without.
The result of all these factors was to refocus the hopes of southern blacks from seeking their wealth in land acquisition to seeking urban jobs (Grossman, 1989:19; McMillen, 1989:130-~11). Put in other terms, blacks were leaving a quasi-feudal, largely agricultural economy, for an industrial economy where their welfare depended on their ability to obtain and hold steady jobs.
The migration of the 19205-19605 While the 1920s generally meant prosperity for the industrial parts of the economy, economic depression began in the rural South in the first years of that decade. Beginning in 1920, falling cotton prices, together with destruction of crops by the boll weevil, increased the flow of blacks from farms to cities (T. Lynn Smith, 1966:159-60; Street, 1957:39). This migration declined during the depression years of the early 1930s but resumed in 1938 and 1939 in response to the defense program (T. Lynn Smith, 1966:161). Mechanization of some selected farming areas, federal acreage reduction programs, and inability to compete with whites returning to farms also contributed to the later outflow (Street, 1957:177, 182; Rose, 1971:31). Southern authorities reacted very differently to these northern migrations in the pre- and postmechanization eras. In the early period, when labor was necessary, southern states passed restraining laws and regularly arrested and jailed blacks leaving their place of work unless they had in their possession written consent from their landowner or employer. When there labor was no longer needed, southern authorities encouraged black flight, in some cases even hiring buses for the trip north (Crew, 1987:35; Robinson, 1984:59). Between 1940 and 1970, because the same number of whites left Chicago as blacks entered, Chicago's population remained almost unchanged. Chicago's black population rose from 4 percent in 1920 to 8.1 percent in 1940, 13.6 percent in 1950, 22.9 percent in 1960, 32.7 percent in 1970, and in 1980 and 1990 about 40 percent (Hirsch, 1983:3, 16-17; Kenny, 1980:56-57; U.S. Dept of Commerce, 1992). Thus, by the early 1960s, all pieces were in place for the tragic scenario
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that followed. Moreover, policymakers had all the information they needed to shift resources and reverse these obvious trends. Some even saw the gathering clouds much earlier (e.g., Grodzins, 1958:1; Myrdal, 1962:lxxi; Lemann, 1991:51-52).
Federal policies encouraging blacks to leave the Southmechanization of southern agriculture What has been called the "two-stage push" off the farm involved (1) mechanization, which substituted a capital-intensive for a labor-intensive process, thereby not only reducing the need for labor but changing the nature of the labor needed from unskilled or low-skilled to skilled; and (2) as the capital-intensive system took hold, capital-intensive crops replaced labor-intensive crops (Ford, 1973:28--30). GROSS CHANGES IN AGRICULTURE, 1910-1970 The major crop employing southern black labor was cotton. In the ten southern states where in 1935 almost all cotton was grown, about 60 percent of those engaged in cotton farming were tenants. Of the cotton families in the cotton belt, roughly 60 percent were white and 40 percent were black (Johnson, 1935:4). From the beginning, cotton culture was based on an abundant supply of low-cost labor. The social and economic institutions to which it gave birth were self-perpetuating and had a hand in delaying mechanization of cotton past the time when it might otherwise have occurred. The "availability of a routinized, poorly educated, and politically ineffectual rural labor force made labor-saving devices economically pointless" (Street, 1957:34). But when mechanization came, it came with a rush. Because of the market conditions under which the farmer operated, once machines were introduced in some parts of the South in the early 1930s, all farmers felt compelled to go along in order to lower costs (Ford, 1973:22; Rasmussen, 1976:11). Social consequences of mechanization were not unexpected. Testimony before the 1947 House Committee on Industrialization in the South concluded that the replacement of farm animals by tractors would result in the reduction of over a million farm laborers by 1965. Such displacement was said to be "necessary in the interest of efficiency and higher farm income" (Ford, 1973:24).5 No one in power sought to respond to these predictions. Subsequent government decisions not only ignored the social consequences of these changes in agricultural organization but accelerated them. HOW DID MECHANIZATION COME ABOUT? "Machine harvesting of cotton and com was introduced on a large scale in 1950 ... [resulting] in a huge decline in use of labor. For example, in the space of only three years from 1949 to 1952 the use of unskilled agricultural labor in twenty Mississippi
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delta counties fell by 72 percent, and five years later was down to only 10 percent ofthe 1949 level" (Fusfeld, 1968:60;'. Machines displaced blacks more readily than whites because blacks were more concentrated on the larger plantations, where machines were likely to be employed, and were less likely to be used as machine operators because many owners believed they were incapable of handling machinery (Myrdal, 1962:260; Ford, 1973:27). Because almost all plantations were white-owned, they "naturally" hired whites over blacks. The market forces set in motion by mechanization also worked to the disadvantage of the black and the poor "who did not possess the necessary funds, land, experience, or initiative to utilize the new methods" (Street, 1957:63; Cochrane and Ryan, 1976:15-17). The overall effect ofthe "new technology" was to reduce the number of tenant farmers or to make smaller farms less profitable and to encourage wealthier farmers to buy up smaller operations. \Vhereas in 1940 the Agricultural Census recorded 1,450,000 tenants in the South, by 1964 only 253,000 remained. These forces hit poor black farmers particularly hard. Farm ownership by blacks fell from 150,000 to 70,800 between 1935 and 1964 (Ford, 1973:26-27). THE ROLE OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT IN PROMOTING OR ENCOURAGING MECHANIZATION The federal government's encouragement of "technological
progress" has a long history: Land grant (agricultural and mechanical arts) colleges and experiment stations "eventually became the primary institutions bringing technological change to American farmers" (Rasmussen, 1976:5; Ford, 1973:35). Originally intended for the narrow purposes of testing seeds and fertilizers and disseminating technical information, these stations have tackled all sorts of practical problems of agricultural production, testing machinery and constantly monitoring quality and performance (Parker, 1972:369-417). Although the federal government neither invented the machines nor directly encouraged their invention, promotion, or sale, the government did promote mechanization in three important ways: Its experimental stations tested the performance of machines and developed improvements; it set up the system of supporting services that made mechanization feasible; and federal subsidies and credits allowed large landowners to purchase these machines (McMillen, 1989:151). But such contributions were insignificant compared to the federal government's part in hurrying along the "second agricultural revolution" (the transition from animal to tractor power) by encouraging the adoption of a "package" of farm practices including mechanization, greater use of fertilizer, conservation practices, and irrigation (Rasmussen, 1975:84; Cochrane and Ryan, 1976:17). The promotion of mechanization of agriculture, involving a private-public "cooperative" effort, illustrates the futility of trying to separate public and private contributions to this process.
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OTHER GOVERNMENT PROGRAMS ENCOURAGING MIGRATION-THEIR HUMAN CON-
The federal government has helped to build farm-to-market roads, provided market information, financed agricultural research and education, instituted power production, navigation and flood control, irrigated a fourth of all land in the West, provided short-term loans through the Federal Credit Administration, and written crop insurance through the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation. Various subsidy programs raised the price of land so that it was more difficult for a poor or young farmer to become a landowner (Lidman, 1973:903; Willhelm and Powell, 1967:243). Ford (1973:ch. 3), reviewing federal farm policies from the 1930s to the 1960s, concluded that policy was highly influenced by lobbyists for large farmers, principally the Farm Bureau. Price support programs heavily subsidized large farmers and had the concomitant effect of displacing large numbers of low-skilled laborers. Fifty years of federal programs has produced a substantial decrease in the number of farms and farmers, most of the subsidy benefits having gone to a relatively small percentage of farmers. Under these programs, black tenant farmers fell from 900,000 in 1920 to 100,000 in 1970. In 1984, only 1 percent of blacks lived on farms (Farley and Allen, 1987:114). The primary purpose of these multibillion dollar programs seems to have been to maintain farm income in the aggregate while decreasing the number of farms and farmers, thereby substantially increasing the productive capacity of farms (Schnittker, 1973:857; Lidman, 1973:912; Cochrane, 1971:3). During the same period, similar changes were occurring in southern industries. From 1950 to 1960, as a result of automated production and declining demand for coal mining, the economy lost 265,000 jobs. It has been estimated that new job creation was able to absorb only about one-quarter of agricultural and mining job losses (Ford, 1973:31-32). Although there was no "conspiracy" or concerted attempt to "drive" millions of poor blacks and whites to northern cities, the inevitable consequence of federal efforts to deal with the "crisis" of southern agriculture within the limits of a capitalist market economy made such a result predictable. Many policymakers felt that the one cure for the South's "surplus" labor force was to encourage these "inefficient" farmers to seek employment in northern cities (Street, 1957:44-55). In effect, the result of all federal programs directed at southern agriculture had been to transfer the South's problem of "surplus" population to the North, or-putting it another way-to shift "rural poverty to urban poverty" (Ford, 1973:91). SEQUENCES
BLACK RESIDENTIAL EXPERIENCE IN CHICAGO, 1910-1940 As terminus of the Illinois Central Railroad, and the place of publication of the well-known and widely circulated Chicago Defender, Chicago was a logical destination for many blacks heading north (Frazier, 1966:227, 233;
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Lemann, 1991:16,45). In 1910, blacks represented 2 percent of Chicago's population. Only about one-third lived in predominately black sections. No census tract was over 60 percent black and over halflived outside the developing Black Belt on the South Side (Spear, 1967:16-17; Weaver, 1948:31-33). But by 1910, the dynamics of black ghetto formation had been set: limited residential choice in overcrowded areas and accretion into adjacent streets of aging but better-quality housing vacated by upwardly mobile whites moving farther west, north, or south. Between 1910 and 1920, both blacks and whites were migrating to Chicago. While the white city population increased 21 percent, the black population increased by almost 150,000, or 150 percent, 90 percent of whom by 1920 were concentrated on the South Side Black Belt (Philpott, 1978:127; Abbott, 1936:119; Spear, 1967: 129-30; Frazier, 1966:234; Fusfeld and Bates, 1984:26). A combination of pressures, public and private, formed and maintained this developing ghetto. Prior to the war, incoming blacks, having few resources and being limited as to where they could find housing, sought accommodations in some of the most deteriorating areas adjacent to black areas. When housing construction was largely discontinued because of the war, the large influx of blacks overwhelmed the limited area of black residence and rapidly expanded into adjoining white areas. Most of those moving adjacent to or in white areas were middle-class blacks, themselves seeking to avoid contact with the new migrants. Such class refinements, however, were lost on the mostly working-class whites who sawall incoming blacks as threats to their neighborhoods. Blacks not only represented a social and economic threat but a political one as well. Most ethnic voters were adherents of the Democratic party, while blacks, because of the dominance of the Democratic party in the South, voted Republican (Lincoln's party). White ethnics, principally Irish and Poles, living in these neighborhoods organized a kind of "guerilla warfare" to prevent this "invasion." Between 1917 and 1919, white "athletic clubs" and "neighborhood improvement societies" engaged in threats and bombings of the homes of blacks moving into "white" areas and of black or white real estate agents who rented or sold houses to blacks (Philpott, 1978:ch. 3: Grossman, 1989:175-77). In July 1919, these individual acts of violence culminated in a race riot in which twenty three blacks and fifteen whites were killed and scores injured on each side. Although it was clear in this and earlier assaults that whites were the aggressors, neither the police nor other law enforcement authorities took measures to prevent thes.e atrocities (Frazier, 1966:201, 211,212,234; Philpott, 1978:175-79). Upper-middle-class whites in Hyde Park, further to the south, formed a neighborhood association that made arr~mgements to repurchase the property of blacks who moved in, but threatened and used violence if they
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stayed; realtors were warned not to sell or rent to blacks or to hire black janitors. In addition to violent means, property owners sought to protect themselves from black occupancy by legal measures. In 1917, the Chicago Real Estate Board designed a plan to restrict black expansion to a block at a time. It recommended the creation of "owner's societies in every white block for the purpose of mutual self defense" (Weinberg, 1977:77). In 1927, the board orchestrated a drive to cover all Chicago white communities with restrictives covenants--contractual agreements among property owners that they would not peffi1it "colored persons" to occupy, lease, or buy their properties. The campaign was so successful that "by the Spring of 1928 the Hyde Park Herald was pleased to announce that a 'fine network of contracts' extended like a marvelous delicately woven chain of armour" around all communities on the South Side threatened by black incursion (Philpott, 1978:192-93). Such a restricted housing market allowed landlords to charge higher rents and to neglect repairs. Although overcrowding was not at first a problem, higher rents (50 to 100 percent above rents paid by whites) forced many renters and owners to take in lodgers or to house incoming family members, or provided strong incentives for landlords to divide multiroom flats into kitchenettes (Philpott, 1978:198; Abbott, 1936:296; Weaver, 1948:36). Larger and poorer families, not having the resources to move and least likely to find accommodations outside the segregated area, put the greatest strain on housing facilities, which in turn were least likely to be maintained by absentee landlords (de Vise, 1967:42). Various other factors contributed to housing deterioration. White real estate agents, who would nOffi1ally filter out disreputable white tenants, did not differentiate among blacks. City authorities tolerated vice districts and even steered prostitutes to black areas in order to keep them from white areas (Abbot, 1936:119-20). As the black ghetto expanded into white neighborhoods, realtors, both black and white, often created artificial panics to induce whites to flee (Philpott, 1978:ch. 6; Frazier, 1966:25, 148-49; Drake and Cayton, 1962:62-65; Lemann, 1991:81-84). Realtors regularly "steered" black and white renters and buyers to areas "reserved" for each race (Bloom, 1987:188). During the 1920s, elite groups-real estate investors, financiers, social refoffi1ers, businessmen-attempted to solve the "Negro housing problem." Numerous city and real-estate boards and commissions were appointed, reports issued, and plans proposed. All suggested some variation of the "dual solution": that blacks and whites should continue to reside in separate areas of the city, but that blacks should be provided with better housing, to be built by private enterprise for profit. Although there were numerous plans for this construction between 1915 and 1930, no housing was ever erected, because most workers, black or white, were unable to pay sufficient rent to support the necessary capital investment (Philpott, 1978:chs. 10-11). By 1920, the scattered enclaves of the black population had almost
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disappeared (Spear, 1967:141-42). Ten elementary schools and one high school were over 50 percent black. By 1934, 90 percent of blacks lived in predominantly black areas. By 1943, the combined segregated conditions and continued immigration resulted in a finding that between 75,000 and 100,000 persons above capacity lived in the Black Belt (Weaver, 1948:63, 87).
EVOLUTION OF THE BLACK WORKING CLASS, 1910-1950 Most blacks arriving in Chicago before 1916 came from southern border states, had been farmers, and had few skills that could be used in the North (Spear, 1967:156). In 1910, over 4.5 percent of black men were engaged in four occupations: porters, seIVants, waiters, or janitors. Another substantial group, which had been resident a longer time, were seIVants to whites. Less than 1 percent were in sales and clerical positions and only about 1.5 percent held professional jobs. As European immigrants flooded the labor market, jobs such as barbering, formerly occupied in the main by blacks, fell to the incoming whites (Landry, 1987:36). It was only with the migrations of the war years that a northern industrial black proletariat developed. Many of the migrants were skilled or semiskilled workers who previously had migrated to southern towns, where they had lost in job competition with white workers. Thus, the mass of the great Migration was a mix of mostly young, literate, skilled, semiskilled, and unskilled workers and their families, many of whom came from southern cities. Nevertheless, on arrival, most blacks were limited to unskilled, low-paid labor, usuaJlly in stockyards, steel mills, or domestic service. Because as a rule whites believed blacks to be "incapable of perlorming tasks which require sustained mental application," blacks were rarely promoted. Those hired during the war were usually displaced by returning white workers (Grossman, 1989:150, 184, 206; Marks, 1989:113-15; Landry, 1987:43). By 1920, blacks had a more solid foothold in factory work, constituting approximately 4 percent of that work force, about equal to their representation in the working population (Marks, 1989:121; Spear, 1967:151). But blacks were rarely admitted to apprenticeships, and in the 1919-20 recession, they were the first to be laid off. Certain occupations were designated "Negro jobs" and represented a kind of "job ceiling": for example, Pullman porters (94 percent) and redcaps (85 percent). Only one in a hundred blacks was employed in a clerical, management, or supervisory position. Blacks had an edge solely in foundry jobs because the work was so hot and dirty (Marks, 1989:127-28; Spear, 1967:158) In the 1930s, blacks continued to be most heavily concentrated in unskilled labor categories. Such workers were the first to feel an economic crisis and suffered most. During the Great Depression, blacks were again pushed out of occupations they had previously dominated. Black
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waiters, for example, were replaced by white women. While blacks made up but 8 percent of the labor force, they represented 22 percent of the unemployed. Government was an important source of jobs. In 1932, blacks had 6.5 percent of city jobs. Three-quarters of these, however, were as janitors, laborers, or as temporary employees. Although black migration slowed to 40,000 during the 1930-40 period, those blacks that came, by competing in an already limited job market, aggravated the employment problem for those already in Chicago. Labor shortages created by World War II, however, brought thousands of blacks into the airplane-engine, electrical, and other light industries as skilled laborers, opening up some minor clerical and managerial positions, so that black employment doubled from 5 to 10 percent of the work force (Fusfeld and Bates, 1984:48).
Black-white working-class labor market competition Given that the capitalist economy is characterized by economic cycles and that even in the best of times there are never enough well-paying upwardly mobile jobs, workers have had to develop coping strategies. The two most significant have been the formation of unions and the exclusion of some groups from job competition. Those already at the bottom of the economic and ideological scale as slaves-the blackswere the obvious target (Bloch, 1969:80). Being at the bottom, their only remedy was to push up and to compete with higher levels. This had to be prevented. From the perspective of lower-income whites, the effect of pushing up was not to push others higher but to pull them down. Blacks constituted a free-floating force that could rise only by taking the jobs of others, thus representing a threat to all workers and, at the same time, offering a manipulative device by which employers could both split the working class and use blacks as surplus labor to control wages. In the South, before the Civil War, skilled blacks, working for their white masters, frequently competed with white mechanics. At the end of the war, fully four-fifths of all skilled workers in the South were blacks. Once blacks were freed, however, southern laws, licensing restrictions, and whites' refusal to work with blacks had denied them skilled employment in the South. In the North, craft unions excluded blacks from membership. By the end ofthe nineteenth century, white workers had succeeded in excluding blacks from most crafts, limiting work to domestic and manual labor, eliminating any black competition for jobs desired by whites (Walter Williams, 1982:94; McMillen, 1989:156). The continual waves of immigrants had the effect of regularly renewing energies of upwardly mobile new Americans motivated to keep blacks at the bottom of the heap (Bloch, 1969:30-42). The exclusion of blacks from union membership, together with help they often received from white patrons, made many black workers receptive to employment in plants on strike. Both corporations and unions
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were white institutions, but it was the corporations that offered the jobs. As more blacks migrated to northern cities, they became a resource employers could utilize to replace striking white workers, or on whom they could rely to stay in operation when whites went on strike. Blacks were used in breaking longshoremen's strikes both before and after the Civil War and in a series of steel strikes from the 1870s through the 1920s. "Blacks continued to be available for strikebreaking because they were discharged after a strike was settled and replaced by whites or by unionized blacks. When the next strike occurred, blacks remained marginal surplus labor available for work" (Pinderhughes, 1987:19). Similar actions occurred in the meat-packing and garment industries. Even when blacks were admitted to unions, they were often placed in segregated locals. The history of strikebreaking, together with the continued competition of blacks for "white" jobs, has maintained hostile racial relations between the groups. Because most blacks lived adjacent to neighborhoods occupied by the white working class and expanded into these areas, the double threat that blacks represented-to jobs and neighborhoods-was a powerful factor in igniting white resistance and in the continued maintenance of housing and employment segregation. Riots and other racial violence can largely be attributed to labor competition (Marks, 1989:150--51; Grossman, 1989:ch. 8). After 1935, one of the most damaging and peIVasive policies affecting black employment was the "institutionalization of seniority . . . by management, often in conjunction with unions, to meet the threat of unemployment by enhancing the security of some workers [mostly whites] while heightening the insecurity of others [minorities and women]" (Keyssar, 1989:23). It was not until the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIa) in 1937 that relations between organized labor and blacks somewhat improved. Although the leadership of the CIa in the 1950s made some attempts to organize blacks, those efforts largely failed as a result of increasing job competition and McCarthyist attacks on organized labor. Blacks' attitude toward unions continued to be shaped by their work experience. As one black worker responded to urgings to join a union, "Let's see what happens before we go into the union. We all get fired anyway. I don't see that it makes any difference" (Grossman, 1989:245; Fusfeld and Bates, 1984:13-23, 36, ch. 7; Marks, 1989:115-19). Black working-class education--compulsory ignorance in the pre-Civil War South
Both blacks and whites have understood the power of education. In 1838, free blacks unsuccesfully petitioned the Virginia legislature to allow them to erect a school because "so general has become the diffusion of knowledge that those persons who are so unfortunate as not to be in
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slight degree educated are cut off from the ordinruy means of selfadvancement and find the greatest difficulty in gaining a livelihood" (Weinberg, 1977:18). This prescient idea was well appreciated by the white dominant class. "Negro" education was seen by most southern whites as an "expensive lUxury." Whites did not believe blacks could profit from education; more important, education tended to feed dangerous political aspirations or could even "encourage discontent and rebellion"; it gave blacks the ability to compete with white labor and reduce the supply of low-wage menial (untrained) labor (Ogbu, 1978:105; McMillen, 1989:73, 75). Before the Civil War, "compulsory ignorance" laws were CUITent throughout the Deep South. Some blacks did learn to read at clandestine schools, and until 1850, the upper South and border states allowed some blacks to enroll in public schools. But faced with the impending conflict over slavery, these states reapplied the compulsory ignorance laws (Weinberg, 1977:13, 16). During the post-Civil War period, 1865-71, the Klu Klux Klan and other organized and unorganized whites attacked blacks who attempted to acquire learning, by burning school houses and books and running teachers out of town. Under the Reconstruction governments of the 1870s and 1880s, blacks were admitted to public schools. Federal troops withdrew in 1877, and by the 1890s, Reconstruction governments were gradually replaced by white Democratic administrations that withdrew the franchise. Once blacks lost all political power, the right to public education was quickly denied them (43--51).
Educational opportunity in Chicago Whereas in the South blacks were relatively powerless to effect change in school conditions, in the North that ability depended on their "political resources" (Peterson, 1985:95). In the early years, they had few allies and were buffeted by the political winds. Chicago's 1837 city charter restricted public school entry to whites. In 1849, Chicago broke with state discriminatory laws and granted school access to all children. In 1863, however, the state legislature, controlled by Democrats, required Chicago to provide for separate instruction for "negro and mulatto children." The same year, the city council, pressured by Irish fears of the increasing black presence, passed a "Black School Law" requiring black children to attend segregated schools. Black parents refused to comply with the ordinance, and in 1865 it was repealed (Hornet 1984:ch. 1; Peterson, 1985:111). For the last three decades of the nineteenth century, black and white students attended classes together. By the tum of the century, however, three factors made whites more concerned with the black presence: (1) the post-Reconstruction generation of whites was unconnected with and less interested in the antislavery movement and thus the problems of blacks; (2) white workers felt vulnerable to the use of blacks as strikebreak-
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ers; and (3) the increased numbers of blacks competed for jobs, housing, and recreational facilities (Homel, 1984:ch. 1). Although in 1916 over 90 percent of students went to racially integrated schools, by 1920 about 40 percent of black students were in segregated schools. Many of these were overcrowded and on double shift, so that many students attended part-time (Homel, 1984:27; Peterson, 1985:112). One study of1930 school attendance showed that "63.2 percent of the city's blacks lived in census tracts at least nine-tenths black, but 82.4 percent of black enrollment was in 90-100 percent black schools," tending to show that school authorities were at least partly responsible for the segregation. Black teachers were now assigned almost exclusively to black schools. Much of this discrimination resulted from pressure by white parents on administrators, many of whom were from similar ethnic backgrounds and therefore sympathetic to parents' wishes (Homel, 1984:31; Peterson, 1985:111-12). Segregated conditions had their effect on black children. By 1916, "truant colored" boys "regularly responded to juvenile court admonitions to go to school by asking 'what work can I get if I go through school?' " The goal of the school program, according to the superintendent of schools, was not education, but rather to teach them habits "remarkably similar to those required of unskilled and semiskilled workers in industry" (Grossman, 1989:258). Three means were used by the school board to carry out its segregationist policy: (1) school districts were gerrymandered to conform to changing racial boundaries; (2) black students were assigned to newly created "branch" schools in their areas when high schools became overcrowded; and (3) white students were permitted to transfer out of schools with large black populations, but black students were not allowed the same privilege (Homel, 1984:34-44; Peterson, 1985:113-14). By 1920, the principle had been established: "Most whites attended the nearest or a nearby school; blacks attended the Negro school, wherever it was located" (Weinberg, 1977:770). A study of city schools during the period 1920-40, found that teacherpupil ratio dropped least in black schools;: teachers in black schools were lower paid; new, inexperienced teachers were most often sent to black schools, and often transferred out as soon as their seniority merited it; and black schools received almost 50 percent less for supplies and maintenance than white schools. In 1940, the Black Belt was the only area in the city with overcrowded schools (Homel, 1984:58-73, 81-83; Herrick, 1971:304). Most teachers considered their black charges to be incapable of learning and acted on that belief. Therefore, expectations and demands were generally low. Black students were often taught manual skills and singing, rather than arithmetic and English. Textbooks depicted blacks as shiftless, gave almost no black history, portrayed the slavery period as one of happiness and well-being for the slaves, and Reconstruction as a time
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when blacks showed an inability at self-government. Almost no mention was made of the cultural contributions of Africa or of black leaders (Homel,1984:110-16). Black students also received a bad deal in vocational education. Because of union opposition, they were barred from the one vocational high school whose training led directly to skilled jobs; the vocational school established in the black area was underfunded, paid lower teachers' salaries, and was housed in a building designed for use as an elementary school. Because of these deficiencies, the state refused to recognize it as a trade school (121). Already in the years 1928-33 teenage pregnancies were highest in the poorest black areas; alcohol and marijuana use was widespread; vandalism of school property and of students' and teachers' personal belongings was a problem; black gangs terrorized and disrupted schools by threatening and assaulting pupils, teachers, and administrators; shakedowns of students entering orleaving school were common (98, 108). Dr. Benjamin Willis, in his tenure as superintendent of education from 1953 to 1965, adhered to a "dual solution" in which, although blacks continued to be segregated, teachers' salaries were increased, and a large building program was pursued in both black and white areas. Under pressure from black parents and organizations such as the NAACP and the Urban League, the board ordered two studies of Chicago's schools by professors at the University of Chicago. Both reports were ready in 1964. One report, prepared by Philip Hauser, confirmed what everyone knewthat Chicago schools were overwhelmingly segregated: "Of 148,000 Negro elementary students, 90 percent were in schools at least 90 percent Negro, and 10 percent in integrated or 90 percent white schools. Of 17,000 Negro students in upper grade centers, 97 percent were in Negro schools." Other findings showed that school conditions had remained unchanged or had worsened since the 1940 study (Herrick, 1971:324, 326). The second report, by Professor Robert S. Havighurst, suggested that the board could take one or two approaches to the problem of school segregation: the "four walls" philosophy (embraced by Willis), which would be "concerned only with what happens to children inside a school building"; or, alternatively, the development of "programs and standards of instruction and attendance, aimed at keeping middle income people, white and Negro, in the city and encouraging them to live in integrated local communities" (327). After considerable maneuvering, Willis finally resigned in August 1966 and was replaced by James F. Redmond. Redmond at once began busing black students to vacant places in white areas. The plan was greeted by whites with mass protest at board meetings, with marches, threatened school boycotts, lawsuits, and an attempt by area legislators to pass a law banning busing. Nevertheless, the busing continued. But it was too late. The city did not and perhaps could not follow
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Professor Havighurst's admonition to keep "middle income people, white and Negro, in the city." Between 1969 and 1987, the school population declined from 580,292 to 419,537, a fall of 28 percent (Chicago Tribune, May 17, 1988). From the 1980-81 school year, when a court desegregation decree went into effect, until 1988-89, white students in the school system decreased from 83,261 to 50,17:3, a decrease of 39.7 percent. Whites then made up no more than 12.3 percent of all students (but 41 percent of city population); blacks made up 60 percent of the school population (42 percent of city population); Hispanics 24 percent (17 percent of city population). The balance of 3 percent was made up of Asians and American Indians (Chicago Tribune, May 17,1988; Eastern and Hess, 1990:2). During May 1988, in an effort to make sense of the public school debacle, the Chicago Tribune ran a series of six articles in which the reporters concluded that pupils and teachers alike are trapped in a system inadequately administered by political appointees and career bureaucrats whose concern for comfort, sUIvival and status quo strangle the system .... 40 percent of Chicago High School students flunk at least two major courses each year; half ofthe city's 65 high schools place in the bottom one percent ofD.S. schools; barely half graduate, and the rest drop out; in some schools less than 15% of students graduate. (May 17, 1988)
In the past, public schools in Chicago functioned as a service to immigrants that was linked to the needs of patronage machines. The city's rich sent their children to private academies, and the political leadership, mostly ethnic Catholics, sent their children to parochial schools. Thus, the power structure had little personal involvement with the public schools. In 1988, only 15 percent of the fifty city alderman sent their children to public schools. House Speaker Michael Madigan, a Chicago Democrat, had not himself attended public schools. His two children attended parochial school. Therefore, the only direct interest bureaucrats or politicians had in the public schools was in seeing that blacks did not enter the white schools of their constituents (May 17, 1988).
THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE INNER CITY The inner-city economy is a direct result of the many decisions described here. Resources are constantly in movement out from the inner city. As poor blacks moved in, middle-class whites moved out. Incoming blacks have had neither the education nor the capital to replace them. Those who, after a time, are able to ascend economically move to more advantageous sectors of the city. Opportunity programs aimed at inner-city residents with an entrepreneurial bent have the effect of drawing these chosen few away from the inner city (Fusfeld and Bates, 1984:136-37).
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Capital also escapes through financial institutions that rarely invest in the inner city; few inner-city financial institutions or stores are blackowned. Absentee property owners maintain their rental income by disinvestment. Inner-city residents who own housing suffer loss in property values compared with owners of suburban homes that continually rise in price (137-39). Inadequate city investment in schools, libraries, parks, streets, and medical and other public facilities leads to deterioration, capital loss, and the disappearance of other institutions such as churches, hospitals, and related facilities and professionals. Moreover, even in the best of times, "unemployment in the urban slums falls only to the levels that are characteristic of serious recessions in the economy as a whole" (140, 144). Inner-city income generally comes from four sources: (1) well-paying jobs: blue-collar jobs, now scarce because of the deindustrialization and suburbanization of industry, white-collar jobs in government and service sectors, and a few inner-city businesses-blacks in this category move to the outer border of the inner city or to suburbs open to blacks; (2) low-income, part-time, temporary jobs in the secondary labor market, paying wages below the poverty level-although these jobs are on the increase, the number of competing workers is greater than the supply of jobs, further depressing the wage rate; (3) transfer payments: welfare, food stamps, social security, and medicaid; and (4) an informal economy, partly lawful and partly illegal, consisting of off-the-books enterprises (unlicensed cabs and other businesses) and criminal activities (narcotics, policy, prostitution, and gambling) largely servicing inner-city residents (145).6 The inner-city market economy-an antiaccumulation machine
Black immigrants to Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s, most of whom were unaccustomed to big city life, found an economic system that readily replicated the peonage system from which they had most recently escaped:7 Merchants kept workers in virtual debt bondage through sales of shoddy, overpriced furniture and appliances; through various frauds, such as bait advertising, switch sales, misrepresentation of prices, and substitution of goods; and through use of finance companies, which bought contracts from these merchants (the state permitting a legal wall that prevented the debtor from raising fraud defenses against the merchants). And then, upon failure to pay, these merchants attached the employee's pay, as a result of which the employee sometimes lost his job. Local food markets often charged 30 percent more than stores in other parts ofthe city. Inner-city residents went to such merchants because they were close, because they offered credit that could not be easily obtained at mainline stores, and because many of these merchants provided a personal touch
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that blacks were used to in the rural South and that larger stores had long abandoned. Augmenting the street merchants were the door-to-door peddlers who sold all manner of appliances, jewelry, insurance policies, clothing, and the like (Caplovitz, 1967; Kotlowitz, 1991). Evolution of the black middle and upper classes
Within this "segregated world," a black "class structure" began to emerge based "upon social distinctions such as education and conventional behavior, rather than upon occupation and income." Black middle-class history, in an essay on the antecedents of black street violence, is important for three reasons: to answer the question why some blacks made it and others did not, to show how the different life experiences of the black middle class led to different interests from the black working or lower class, and to indicate their relative wealth and economic power so as to estimate their capacity to help those less "fortunate" than themselves.8 The black "upper class" was derived principally from those blacks who were freed before the Civil War (often the offspring of white masters) and from those slaves who worked in masters' houses "as maids, butlers, cooks, nursemaids, coachmen, laundry workers, and companions" rather than in the fields. While still in slavery they were often taught to read and learned to be "bricklayers, carpenters, machine operators, mechanics, cotton-press operators, and cabinet makers," among other trades (Landry, 1987). Membership could also be won through education, by teachers, doctors, ministers, or by small business entrepreneurs. Thus, by the Civil War period, a status elite (as distinguished from a power elite), largely based on white heritage and early release from slavery, formed in both northern and southern cities (Frazier, 1957:20; Landry, 1987:24-25; Blackwell, 1985:8; Drake and Cayton, 1962:506). Such a basis for a black elite continued far beyond this period. According to Frazier (1966:319), in the 1960s the black middle class still consisted "largely of men and women of mixed ancestry," and among "leaders in practically every sphere of negro life ... the vast majority were of mixed blood." By the 1920s, the Great Migration had created a "Negro market." In cities like Chicago, a "new elite" emerged, businessmen and professionals who relied on the black community rather than on white patronage. Withdrawal of the white middle and upper classes from business dealings with blacks left openings for black entrepreneurs: real estate brokers, undertakers, doctors, lawyers, and newspaper publishers. Black enterprises also benefited from the "buy black" campaign of the 1920s. Even in black areas, however, black business was miniscule compared to white. Successes came almost exclusively in markets in which there was no white competition: undertaking, real estate, and black cosmetics. This
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new class looked to economic achievement to raise its status and was dependent on the black community rather than on white patronage. As a result, some came to have a vested interest in continued segregation (Drake and Cayton, 1962:433; Grossman, 1989:129; Marable, 1983:144; Landry, 1987:36-39; Weaver, 1948:46-48; Lemann, 1991:215). Although in 1987 gross business receipts had grown to $18.1 billion, blacks' share of U.S. gross revenues represented only 0.33 percent of the nation's total sales receipts. While black businesses were growing about 25 percent faster than white businesses and were expanding into some white markets, white-owned, better-financed firms had acquired or made subsidiaries of successful black firms; and many black firms were forced to merge to maintain their economic stability as white firms penetrated their markets (Jaynes and Williams, 1989:181-83; Marable, 1983:158-63). A good example is the soul music industry. Chicago, once the center of production and sales for the black-controlled rhythm-and-blues industry, lost its last independent producer in 1984, as larger white-controlled companies, attracted by the industry's growth in the 1960s and 1970s, created their own branches to distribute their labels, sold through chain stores, and drew away talent by better offers (Pruter, 1991 :ch. 15). Blackwell (1985:126-47) has described the black class system as being pyramidal and, in 1984, divided into an upper class (10 percent), subdivided into an old (3 percent) and newly arrived section (7 percent); a middle class (35 percent), consisting of professionals, managers, and skilled blue-collar workers; and a lower class (55 percent), divided between those marginally poor and a poverty-stricken underclass. This distribution has remained remarkably stable since the late 1960s (Drake and Cayton, 1962:522; Billingsley, 1968:ch. 5). Several factors deter the black middle and upper classes from coming to the rescue of the black underclass. Many middle- and upper-class blacks long felt divided from lower-class blacks by their different origins; socially, they had separated themselves from lower-class blacks by leaving ghetto areas as soon as they were economically able, finding more in common with middle-class white values than with those they perceived held by the black lower class; economically, they were becoming more dependent on whites. They were "dependent" on lower-class blacks only because many middle-class blacks were government employees "seIVing" the lower class. As a result, many middle-class blacks had more of an interest in the maintenance of a black underclass than in its disappearance (Frazier, 1966:236, 310; Wilson, 1987; Lemann, 1991:257, 265,288)' Moreover, many middle-class blacks held on to their status only because both husband and wife worked. Thus, they had few resources and little sympathy for lower-class left-behinds (Landry, 1987:139). These historical, economic, social, and cultural factors tended more to drive the classes apart than to draw them together.
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Why so few black inner-city businesses?
Blacks are unique in the unhappy fact that alone among all "ethnic" groups in Chicago, they do not dominate small business ventures in their neighborhoods. In 1938, white businesses received over 90 percent of all money blacks spent in black residential areas. Yet everyone knows about Little Italy, Bohemia, Greekland, "Jewtown," and Chinatown, where miniature national cultures are found, encouraging a reciprocal relation between small business people and their ethnic customers (Royko, 1971:24-25). Why not in black neighborhoods? Light (1973:12) argues that the special demands of ethnic customers (for example, lasagna noodles, kosher pickles, won ton soup) created protected markets for ethnic tradesmen who knew about the things their countrymen wanted. For instance, Chinese grocery stores feature exotic vegetables which most Americans cannot even identifY. It is, therefore, no accident that only Chinese operate Chinatown grocery stores .... Only a Polish Jew can distinguish the grades of kosher pickles most appealing to other Polish Jews. Outside competition was, in this sense, the exclusive curse of the urban blacks.
SUIveys of northern cities, including Chicago, show that blacks "have ranked persistently lower in retail business proprietorships than foreignborn minorities (Light, 1972:12). Where blacks did have a special advantage (barbers, beauticians, and funeral parlors), they have maintained their edge (Light, 1972:14; Lemann, 1991:38). "Competitive advantage," however, does not totally explain the difference between black and ethnic enterprise. For small businesses, a constant problem is adequate and cheap credit. Light (1972:ch. 2) compares the cultural mechanisms for credit that Chinese, Japanese, and West Indian blacks brought with them from their homelands, with those available to American-born blacks. In their native countries, all of these cultures had rotating credit associations, usually of about ten members, who would periodically deposit money in a common fund. Each member in tum (the organizer might be the first), would draw out the sum total of all contributions. After the next joint conltribution, another would withdraw the sum, and so forth until all members had benefited. West Africa, the origin of most American slaves, had such rotating credit associations. Those blacks who were sent to the West Indies were able to presetve and utilize this tradition because they vastly outnumbered the whites on the islands and therefi:>re were largely left to run their own affairs under loose white direction. American blacks, on the other hand, were in the minority and were subordinated to the plantation economy; thus, "the lack of slave self-maintenance and markets in the United States would tend to account for the disappearance of such customs among American blacks" (40). Lacking native cultural institutions on which to rely, blacks turned to American ones, banks and fraternal orders. Such ventures were doomed
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to failure because they lacked adequately trained and qualified personnel, largely reflecting the low educational level of most blacks and the unavailability of profitable investment opportunities for black-owned banks. Inner cities were often turned down by white banks for this very reason, but for black banks, the inner city was the sole area where they could invest and the sole reason for their existence (ch. 3). In addition, black banks had to rely on individual borrowers who, because of their impoverishment, had no security and could not profitably be pursued if they defaulted. Black organizations, such as the National Negro Business League, established in 1900, or the National Urban League, organized in 1911, consisted entirely of the black upper class. Neither the Urban League, whose mission was to provide welfare smvices for the lower class, nor the Business League, whose members had little contact outside their own class, could recruit lower-class youth into business (ch. 6). In addition to ethnic identity, ethnic groups frequently came from the same locality in the mother country and shared family ties, all of which encouraged cooperative endeavor. Blacks, not having these cultural ties, were more likely to engage in individual proprietorships, thereby decreasing the chance of success. When blacks did band together for some common economic goal, it was difficult to maintain unity against outside competition because blacks did not have the formal and informal sanctions required to maintain discipline in such groups. Most ethnic cultures had retained sanctions against members who broke the rules, and thus were able to maintain unity (Light, 1972:125-26; Drake and Cayton, 1962:723-30; Nelli, 1970:ch. 5).9 Some blacks, of course, did attain business success. But such success often involved a mulatto who had received white support, or someone who engaged in illicit enterprise (Haller, 1991). Having described the circumstances that brought blacks to Chicago and their relation to the forces of production, I now turn to the corporate dynamics that, for many blacks, would sever the employer-employee relationship.
Corporate reorganization as a determinant of global job distribution Because large manufacturing corporations formed at the end of the nineteenth and beginning ofthe twentieth centuries were having considerable trouble in controlling labor forces concentrated in central cities, these corporations began to leave the inner cities for suburban locations. Such a move also came at a time when corporations had grown to the point where the largest could separate their productive function (which often moved to the suburbs) from their administrative function, marketing, and product development (which moved to office buildings in downtown business districts with access to financial seIvices and contacts with other like firms). Inner-city areas were thereby transformed from industrial sites surrounded by working-class neighborhoods to
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downtown businesses adjacent to emptying manufacturing areas and deteriorating working-class districts (Gordon, 1978:5D-51, 54). Following World War II, the United States emerged as the banker and creditor of the world, one consequence of which was the dominant position of the dollar. This advantage allowed U.S. corporations to make massive investments in new plants and equipment overseas, producing commodities through foreign subsidiaries and shipping them back here. Such practices resulted in a steady rise in productive capacity and profits. By the 1960s, one-third of all corporate investment was in other countries. During the same postwar period, large corporations began the continuing trend of switching from manufacturing to predominantly marketing products. Such corporate reorganization accelerated, accompanied, and encouraged the building of a national and city-suburban highway system, the boom in auto production, and the mass movement of jobs from the cities to the suburbs. Improved technology worked in tandem with these organizational changes. Computerized console control permitted coordinated production to be carried out in a worldwide market; global communication systems, using satellites, freed corporations from dependence on U.S. skilled labor, shifting fragments of production to areas of the world where cheap labor was plentiful. A series of government policies aided this corporate strategy: accelerated depreciation and depletion allowances, investment tax credits, tax loopholes, military and foreign aid, favorable tariff provisions, and the creation of various government agencies whose sole purpose was to subsidize, encourage, and protect foreign investment. By the late 1960s, increased world competition placed pressure on corporations to maintain a capital flexible position enabling them to move in and out of profitable and unprofitable lines. Corporations engaged in a number of strategies: Rather than reinvest in and update their properties, they attempted to buy profitable and sell off unprofitable lines or companies; management became increasingly centralized; less profitable companies were shut down; production was shifted to parts of the country or out of the country where nonunion and low-paid workers could be found; and modem technology allowed corporations to operate hundreds of small geographically dispersed plants (Bluestone and Harrison, 1982; DuBoff, 1989:134-39). Government and market policies as a determinant in the composition of inner cities
While corporations were reorganizing for their global mission, government policymakers were responding by shifting priorities toward an infrastructure that would support the new organization of capital. By the mid-1960s, the large northern city was characterized by a poor black inner city with
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adjacent working-class neighborhoods desperately defending against blacks they perceived as invading their turf. Affiuent white suburbs ringed these cities. Key to the eventual segregation of jobs fium the inner-city population was the extensive $100 billion (90 percent federally financed) highway construction program initiated during President Eisenhower's first term in office. In the case of Chicago, the expressway network expanded fium 53 miles in 1956 to 506 miles in 1970 (de Vise, 1985:143:; de Vise, 1967:120). Its effect was to stimulate explosive suburban growth of factories, stores, and home developments fium which proliferated communicating roadways, shopping centers, office towers, and corporate headquarters (Polenberg, 1980:130; Du Boff, 1989:102-3). Access to highways, and hence to intercontinental trucking, became more important to industry than access to rail and water routes, in former times an advantage of inner-city location. Moving more labor to the suburbs made location of businesses there more "rational" and made inner-city areas even less attractive as they took on the reputation of having an unskilled and unreliable labor force in addition to their other liabilities (Katz, 1980:25, 27, 285). Alternatives that would have distributed the transportation burdens and benefits (more efficient and extensive public transport or access fium the inner city to suburban employment) were not considered (Small, 1985:214-15). Although highways accelerated the growth of suburbs, it was federal home-ownership policies that allowed the millions of white middle-class families (most of whom could not have otherwise afforded such homes) to flee from the already decaying cities. In the early New Deal thirties, home ownership became a central focus of government policy through the refinancing of home mortgages, the development of the amortized long-range federally insured home mortgage, encouragement of largescale development of single-family homes, and federal guarantees of long-term credits. The Home Owners Loan Corporation and the Federal Home Mortgage Corporation Acts of 1933 and the National Housing Act of 1934, establishing the Federal Housing Administration, were all steps in the creation of a federal policy facilitating home ownership (Castells, 1976; Anderson, 1964:chap. 6).10 This policy had its roots in the depressed condition of the home building industry. Thus, the main objective of the National Housing Act of 1934 became the use of the construction industry to energize the economy and to prevent future recessions rather than to provide better housing for all Americans (Morrow-Jones, 1980:31). This goal came into conflict with the enunciated ideal of individual home ownership as "one of the fundamental canons of the American way of life," ensconced as it was in an abiding faith that private enterprise could fulfill that dream. Because a large proportion of Americans did not have the funds to purchase houses on the private market, public housing represented a means for all Americans, regardless of their economic situation, to have a home. But public housing advocates were thwarted at every legislative
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tum by private housing lobbies arguing that it was not the role of government to build houses (Kleniewski, 1982:113). In addition, the United States Housing Act of 1937 was fatally flawed in that it required that location of public housing be approved by local authorities. As set forth in more detail below, that provision effectively precluded housing for blacks outside already segregated areas (Aaron, 1971:195). Even this program was killed in 1939 (not to be revived for a decade) by a combination of private interests, banking, real estate, and construction operators, who saw low-cost housing as unfair competition with private enterprise (Gelfand, 1975:59, 151-65). After World War II, federal guarantees of FHA and VA low-interest, long-term mortgages subsidized communities of young white middleclass families in suburban living but made few loans to urban blacks of the same income level (Fleisher, 1979:26). The Housing Act of 1952 was designed to aid in building housing for military personnel. Local zoning regulations that raised the price of building, local property taxes, federal income tax deduction of interest on mortgage payments, and the denial of a similar deduction to renters encouraged home ownership for those able to afford it (National Commission on Urban Problems, 1968:11, 86-87; Haar, 1960:99; Duskin, 1974:129; Willhelm and Powell, 1967:243). The FHA, between 1935 and 1950, warned in its underwriting manuals against the instability of integrated areas and refused loans for reasons of "incompatible racial elements" (Taylor, HI71:91; Fleisher, 1979:26; Weaver, 1948:72). Fire insurance on inner-city housing was almost impossible to buy or was available only at exorbitant rates. Military installations were built in suburban centers and in southern and western states, attracting white workers to better housing and higher paying jobs. Section 220 federal mortgage insurance provided funds for urban renewal and for financing the construction ofluxury apartments and commercial centers, ousting large numbers of poor black and working-class ethnic whites. For those blacks who were willing and able to migrate to suburbs, county and municipal officials (with independent legislative powers and homogeneous white constituencies) kept blacks out by using zoning and permit powers to discourage moderate, subsidized, or public housing. Summing up, one writer concludes that "on the whole ... federal policy has followed local practice, and on the whole, local practice has been discriminatory" (Willhelm and Powell, 1967:255-56). On a state level, suburbanization was accompanied by a shifting of state political power from central cities to suburbs and rural communities (Cox, 1982:22). Associated with these poliCies were deteriorating inner-city neighborhoods, the demise of public education, increases in crime and drug use-all of which led anyone who could to leave the inner city. Thus, slums and blight became the prime product of northern cities, resulting from a series of interlocking public and private decisions, dominated by the ethos of private profit seeking. Movement ofthe advantaged out of the inner cities to suburbs long antedated the mass migration of blacks into
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the inner cities as falling rents and increased vacancies made these areas attractive to the incoming poor. Policies such as those described encouraged mass out-migration of white middle-class families while foreclosing this possibility to the poor, black or white.
Elite response to the poor black incursion-urban renewal After World War II, an additional consequence of the loss of manufacturing plants and attendant loss of jobs and revenue was to push northern cities toward a fiscal crisis that in turn reduced the value of inner-city real estate (Cox, 1982:27). In an effort to counter these developments and protect their investments, a pro-growth coalition of corporate executives, real estate leaders, merchant interests, and labor leaders was able to elicit the help of mayors and governors to use public monies to save private investments. For the most part, these projects took the form of urban renewal, highway construction, and downtown redevelopment, which almost uniformly reduced housing available to the poor (Mollenkopf, 1977:123, 135). Just as white ethnics were frightened by incoming poor blacks, Chicago downtown business interests felt threatened by the deterioration in the 1940s of adjacent housing and neighborhoods, which decreased property values, increased costs for fire and police protection, and chased white middle-class customers to the suburbs and to suburban shopping centers (Squires 1987:154). But while white ethnics reacted to these threats with violence, the economic elite, consisting of the chief executives of Marshall Field (one of Chicago's largest department stores), the Chicago Title and Trust Company, and the city's important real estate companies, were able to devise a formula for redevelopment, motivated and controlled by private capital, but largely paid for and propelled by public power (Hirsch, 1983). For those tenants displaced, there was no relocation plan. Relocations often resulted in family breakup. Public housing was used as a main conduit, so that by 1954 half of all tenants of public housing were displaced persons, most of whom could not reenter their former neighborhoods, because rents were now 300 to 600 percent higher than 1940 rents (124-25). While almost half of the dislocated whites were relocated within the area, less than 20 percent of the blacks were. Almost all blacks displaced had been long established in the neighborhood (Fasenfest, 1984:111,185). When they moved, they frequently paid more in rent than in their previous location (de Vise, 1985 :104).n Moreover, the uprooting of lower-class blacks had an impact on surrounding neighborhoods of ethnic working-class whites, thereby increasing interracial tensions. Tenants replacing the outgoing blacks in these projects were predominantly white, single, or married without children, had college educations, were professionals, and often worked in nearby hospitals or universities that had been active in engineering the projects. Most had previously
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lived in similar high-rise, high-rent apartments and moved for convenience of location. The ultimate result has been "the creation, on the one hand, oflarge corridors of culturally and racially segregated communities of very low income Negroes on some ofthe city's least desirable land, and on the other hand, of enclaves of professional and academic elites of single persons and childless couples, albeit racially integrated, on prime urban land" (de Vise:1967:117). The Chicago Housing Authority's site selection process added to the problem by requiring site selection to be approved by the city council, whose members were almost all from white ethnic districts.12 This policy guaranteed that all black tenants would be located in black areas, and effectively shut the door to 180,000 white applicants who refused to live in all-black projects (de Vise, 1985:62).13 As de Vise (1985:306) suggests, "Chicago'S preeminence in having 10 of the nation's 16 poorest neighborhoods testifies to the past power of Chicago's government to concentrate and lock in the city's black poor." Causes of the depletion of the low-skilled iob market for young blacks
Jobs in the central city, mostly white-collar, were taken by whites driving in from suburban homes, financed by federally secured mortgages, over federally built roads. Between 1948 and 1977 Chicago lost nearly 400,000 jobs; after 1967, most of these were in the blue-collar area (Kasaroa, 1989:29,45). Between 1955 and 1963 black poverty areas, extending west and south of the central business district, suffered the greatest job loss, while northwestern Cook County, fifteen to twenty five miles away, showed the largest increase.14 Blacks suffered disproportionately as a result of plant movements, because blacks have been employed disproportionately "in industries with the largest number of layoffs due to economic cutbacks, plant closings, and the relocation offirms to cheaper labor sites and to the suburbs" (Wilson, 1987:35). Jobs increased in the central business district, but few black males were qualified for available while-collar jobs. These same companies with offices downtown have plants in the outlying suburbs. Because few blacks work in the suburbs, the Illinois Central Railroad closed stations in black areas while expanding its suburban service. Only 10 to 20 percent of blacks living in these areas own automobiles. While in 1966 there was negligible white unemployment, black unemployment in these poor communities varied from 5 to 37 percent. Between 1950 and 1966, average family incomes of these poorest communities increased from $2,494 to $4,809; but during the same period in the richest communities, the increase was from $7,390 to $22,330. Thus, "the transformation of large cities from centers of production to centers of administration bypassed much ofthe black community" (Fusfeld and Bates, 1984:90). Even the disappearance of jobs from inner cities is not an adequate explanation of black unemployment. If black youth had moved to the
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suburbs, as many did in the 1970s, studies show the unemployment rate for blacks would have been just as high (Farley and Allen, 1987:246). Blue-collar jobs in the types of heary industries where low-skilled blacks were most highly concentrated disappeared, and government jobs, a normal middle-class entry point for all ethnic groups, required skills lower-class blacks often lacked. One survey showed that almost twothirds of all government employment required professional, technical, or clerical skills (Fusfeld and Bates, 1984:39). Just as government policies encouraged mechanization in the preWorld War II South-which in tum eliminated large numbers of blacks, first as farmers and then as worke~ther government tax, social investment, and capital-formation policies increased the numbers of white-collar jobs and those qualified to enter them, while at the same time decreasing blue-collar employment. Government tax policies (investment credits, accelerated depreciation, and social security) have made it economically more sensible to invest in labor-replacing machines rather than in labor, and to replace blue-collar with white-collar employees, whose jobs most lower-class blacks are educationally unqualified to fill. Government investment in education of managers, scientists, engineers, teachers, and various technicians, as well as in research and development in all areas of business and industry, and the collection of census and other statistical information of great use in marketing are essential to corporate growth. Benefits from such expenditures accrue almost entirely to the middle class, with little or no benefit to the working class. Because three-quarters of all blacks live in inner cities, and because blacks are disproportionately employed in low-wage jobs and are usually unprotected by tenure and seniority, they are peculiarly vulnerable to instabilities in the economy. Unemployment among blacks had not been a problem before the 1929 depression. While unemployment in 1930 among blacks in the South did not rise above 3 or 4 percent, in the cities black male unemployment rose to 14.3 percent while white male unemployment rose only to 8.2 percent. This disparity in employment rates can be explained by two factors. During hard times, employers were more apt to layoff blacks than whites, and whites were willing to take lower-paying "dirty" work that they would have spurned in better times (Fusfeld and Bates, 1984:37-40, 45; Wilson, 1987:104, 121). Between 1939 and 1973, the GNP grew at an average annual rate of 2.6 percent, propelled by military expenditures during World War II and the Korean conflict. Rates of profit, however, began declining between 1966 and 1972, and from 1973 to 1986, real annual growth dipped to 1.5 percent; and during the years 1970-80, economic growth was practically stagnant at 0.7 percent annually. Recessions of 1970-71, 1974-75, 19791980, and 1980-81 contributed heavily to black unemployment and to a restricted labor market, making it more difficult for entry-level blacks to stay in or to enter the market (Bowles, Gordon, and Weisskopf, 1983:95-97,
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ch. 5; Gordon, Edwards, and Reich, 1982:207-222; James P. Smith, 1988:30; Fusfeld and Bates, 1984:153). Blacks gained between 1958 and 1974: their employment rates declined, and more blacks moved into the middle class. Yet, because white unemployment decreased substantially more than black (43 to 23 percent), blacks actually lost ground relative to whites. Black family income in 1988 was just 57 percent of white family income, a percentage that has remained fixed where it was when measured in 1900 and 1950 (Marks, 1989:135). Many of the black families that have achieved middle-class income levels depend on both spouses working to maintain that status (Glasgow, 1980:5-6). Thus, absolute improvements in blacks' economic standing left intact a large base for a developing "underclass." The Carter (1976-1980) and Reagan administrations (1980-1988) fought combined inflation and recession (stagflation) at the expense of workers, particularly black workers. The administrations' main policy tool was to reduce the growth of the money supply (Tilly, 1990:112). This move had the intended effect of raising interest rates, one consequence of which was to reduce the demand for consumer goods, causing layoffs in these industries. Curbs in government nonmilitary spending led to layoffs of thousands of government employees. Because blacks constituted about 20 percent of all federal employees in 1981 and were often the last hired, when the government began forced reductions, minorities were the first let go. Minorities represented 40 percent of those laid off. Reductions in federal funds going to states required like reductions in force at state levels (Blackwell, 1985:64--65; Lemann, 1991:201). By the 1980s, the blackwhite ratio of unemployment had grown to 2.5 to 1 from the "conventional" rate of 2 to 1. A more recent study shows that this discrepancy has mounted in 1989 to 4 to 1 (Chicago Tribune, May I, 1991, sec. I, p. 7). Difficulties in finding jobs hit young workers hardest (Hirschman, 1988:65-67).15 Why then after so many years of "progress" (from 1940 to 1980, a decline in families in poverty from 70 to 30 percent) do we still find almost one-third of black families in poverty? Two factors have continually been cited in explanation: inadequate economic growth since the late 1960s, together with recurrent recessions; and the "breakup" of the black family (Wilson, 1987; James P. Smith, 1988:161). These two causes are intimately related. Not only did the percentage of black mother-headed families increase from 1940 to 1980, but a larger percentage of women were becoming pregnant at an earlier age, women who had never been married and came from impoverished families. They started offpoor, had a limited capacity to earn because of low skills, needed to care for their children, had no spouse to add to the income, and often lived in low-income neighborhoods. Many women who divorce or separate from their husbands drop into poverty because they are so close to the poverty line already that the loss of the spouse's pay moves them below the line
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(Smith, 1988:161-65; McLanahan and Garfinkel, 1989:100; Sullivan, Warren, and Westbrook, 1989:ch. 8). Rolison (1986:43) argues that the social and economic origins of the underclass lie in the formation of the "underclass family." While the normative middle-class family places the father in the labor force and the mother in the home, or in today's society, both the mother and father in the labor force, the underclass family places only the mother in the labor force. "Therefore, it can be seen that the underclass family is the family form in which children are present and the mother must at some point sell her labor-power given that the father [who is unemployed] cannot. Given a patriarchal society marked by gender inequality, this insures the subordination of the underclass (read now in terms offamily)" (43). From 1950 through 1980 the rise in female-headed black families followed the growth of unemployed black males (44):
Unemployed Males
1950
1960
1970
1980
27.6%
30.7%
34.4%
41.1%
17.6%
21.7%
30.5%
41.7%
(16+)
Single-Female-Headed Families
During this same period, unskilled jobs that did open up in the central business districts-secretarial, data processing, office clerk-were defined as women's work, thus excluding "black men from good-paying unskilled male jobs because of race and low-paying unskilled female jobs because of gender" (210-11). Thus, in capitalist America, the black lower-class family, far from being "society's basic mode of economic organization [as it was] in the pre-industrial land" (Bodnar, 1985:38), was positively dysfunctional. Another useful indicator of the stability of the poverty population is the percentage of the population at or below the poverty line from 1964 to 1986. Between 1964 and 1969, numbers in poverty had been reduced about one-third, from 36 million in 1964, to just over 24 million in 1969, or from 19 to 12.1 percent. Nevertheless, in 1976, 25 million people, or 11.8 percent, were still in poverty; between 1979 and 1986, the poverty level climbed above 13 percent, higher than it was in 1969 at the start of the war on poverty (Harris and Wilkens, 1988:36-38). These figures are another indicator of the sensitivity of large parts of the population to macro changes in the economy. When jobs were plentiful in the 1960s, the poverty population declined radically. But even the "war" on poverty beginning in 1969 and continuing in subsequent years was unable to maintain the decline. The series of recessions in the late 1970s and early 1980s and the Reagan administration's withdrawal of many benefits pushed the poverty population in 1983 to 152 percent (two-thirds of whom were white).
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Black joblessness is most concentrated among those sixteen to nineteen years old. The "rule" has been that "black youth have always experienced higher unemployment if they competed in the same labor market with white youths" (Hirschman, 1988:69). Indeed, since the late 1960s, young black men have shown a decreasing participation in the civilian labor force. From 1969 to 1983, for black males eighteen to nineteen years old, labor force participation rates declined from 62.3 percent to 49.1 percent, while for white males it increased from 59.6 percent to 65.5 percent; that is, whereas in 1969 black male labor force participation was almost three percentage points higher than white, by 1983, it had fallen to more than 15 percentage points below (Fusfeld and Bates, 1984:113). In Chicago, this discrepancy between black and white youth employment didn't happen just by change: There was a sense that blacks were not really in on the intricate system of deals by which Chicago operated. When a white baby was born ... certain things were guaranteed. The minute the priest sprinkled the water on his head at his baptism, it was as ifthree powerful interlocking institutions had lined up on his side: The Roman Catholic Church, the Cook County Democratic Central Committee, and the AFL-CIO Building Trades Council. He was in. He had a future. (Was it an accident that an unusually high proportion of the blacks who were truly wired into the machine were converts to Catholicism?) In grammar school, the priests would check the kid out and decide what track to put him on. Ifhe was smart and ambitious, it would be Loyola or DePaul law school, the state's attorney's office, and then a partnership at one of the big law firms on LaSalle Street. Ifhe wasn't so smart and ambitious, there was Washburn Technical Institute (which the unions controlled), a plumber's or electrician's license (the unions controlled the city licensing agencies, too), and a relatively undemanding billet with a municipal department like Streets and Sanitation or Public Works (again, hiring controlled by the unions in conjunction with the Central Committee). The kid might even achieve the Chicago Dream-a job with the city and a job with the county, running concurrently-or, failing that, he could at least supplement his salary with a little moonlighting on (union-controlled) private contracting jobs. Neither route, the one to the state's attorney's office or the one to Streets and San, was open to a black kid. (Lemann, 1991:93-94)
If some black young men were not or could not participate in the "legitimate" labor force, what were they doing?
THE UNDERWORLD, THE UNDERGROUND ECONOMY, THE UNDERCLASS, AND BLACK VIOLENCE During the first few years of the twentieth century, blacks coming to Chicago with few resources found residence in areas where rents were low and where there were employment opportunities. For many, this was
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Production of Black Violence
an area adjacent to the downtown business area, which housed the city's red-light district and continued to be the home of vice even after the red-light status was ended in 1912. The area consisted of "high-class colored residential neighborhoods, as well as 'black and tan' cabarets, white and colored vice resorts, and the worst type of slum," and "dilapidated houses carrying signs of rooms for rent at fifteen and twenty cents a bed, junk shops, markets with stale meat, and crowded Negro quarters with filthy bedding half-visible through sooty and broken windowpanes" (Thrasher, 1963:14; Frazier, 1966:278). But vice to some meant jobs for others as porters and maids in houses of ill fame, as entertainers, madams, pimps, prostitutes, panderers, and policy runners for gamblers. As the area became a center for jazz, blacks as well as whites furnished customers for these enterprises, the only spot in Chicago where blacks and whites could mix (Haller, 1991:725-26). Policy, a type of lottery involving a drawing of numbers, was particularly attractive to the black poor because as little as a few pennies could be wagered. In order to reduce their risks, policy banks were formed, covering perhaps one hundred policy stations, which, in tum, employed runners, who carried betting slips between the stations and the banks. In addition, there were clerks, cashiers, accountants, lawyers, police, and politicians on the payroll. With the increasing numbers of blacks arriving, and their concentration in the vice areas, white and, later, black politicians organized them into voting blocks that dominated two South Side wards. Blacks were excluded from bootlegging and bookmaking but were able to gain entrance to policy, although whites initially controlled most banks. Reciprocal relations evolved between black gamblers and politicians, in which the black vote was traded for political protection from police interference with illegal enterprise or for police raids on competing businesses. Police often allowed whites to operate vice more openly in black than in white areas. At the same time they harassed black prostitutes, driving them into the hands of pimps or white politicians (Haller, 1991:734; Peterson, 1952:143; Ianni, 1974:112-17). By the end of the nineteenth century, a few blacks became important gambling entrepreneurs, investing their profits in legitimate enterprises such as real estate or cabarets, where bootleg liquor was served, prostitutes plied their trade, and marijuana and cocaine could be used or sold. In the 1920s, contemporaries already considered narcotics addiction a "serious problem." Blacks dominated inner-city numbers playing and narcotics, but, as in the rest of society, black illegal activity was limited to black areas (Pinderhughes, 1987:148). A few black owners of policy games had amassed fortunes from which they built political bases. Entrepreneurial gains were pumped back into inner-city legitimate business, religious and other philanthropic causes. Such men, aside from wielding considerable political influence, provided what was perhaps the largest and best employment opportunities in
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inner-city areas, employing an estimated 6,000 persons in policy operations alone. Although few blacks were able to accumulate enough money to invest in legitimate enterprises as had other ethnic groups, these men, by their illegal activities, made illegal enterprise an integral part of the community economy (Cartney, 1970:28; Schaffer, 1972:4; Gosnell, 1967:118-35; Haller, 1991:728-31). This world, however, was changing, to the detriment of black illegal enterprise. By the end of the 1920s, the diffusion of radios and talking pictures, the popularity of dance bands, and the building on the South Side of large white-owned ballrooms sounded the death knell for the more intimate cabaret black culture. Accelerating this decline was the burgeoning criminal underworld that scared away white patrons (Haller, 1991:732). For most blacks the Great Depression was a disaster. Black children, no longer receiving pocket money from their parents, took to purse snatching and petty thievery. Commercialized prostitution gave way to streetwalkers. Scattered among the "church folks" were the "denizens of the underworld ... the pimps and prostitutes, the thieves and pickpockets, dope addicts and reefer smokers, the professional gamblers, cut-throats, and murderers." Criminals, however, tended to be "lone wolves." Most crimes were either crimes of passion or petty misdemeanors (Drake and Cayton, 1962:600, 611; Frazier, 1966:277). For the policy kings the depression was a time of growth. To unemployed working-class blacks, policy represented not only a source of employment but a change of fortune. Reportedly, in 1941, blacks were spending $7 million yearly on policy (Virgil Peterson, 1952:195). A small industry developed in predicting winners: dream books, spiritualists, and numerologists. To the gambling-entertainment-political link, the 1930s added the emerging field of black sports, partially supported by gambling money. Policy kings, long recognized as "race leaders," improved their social position during the depression by being among the few blacks having the capital to establish legitimate businesses and thereby having the ability to continue as patrons of charity. Considerable community influence was acquired by their ability to withhold as well as to give. Known as the "Upper Shadies," they were powerful enough so that other community leaders were hesitant to criticize their leisure activities: association with "sporting" women, extravagant and expensive clothing, extensive traveling, and wild parties. Policy kings invested in nightclubs and ballrooms, attended horse races, associated with theatrical and sports celebrities. At the same time, in an attempt to replace the old black upper class, they sent their children to the best eastern prep schools (Haller,1991:729; Drake and Cayton, 1962:ch. 17). The decade of the 1940s was dominated by the economic good times energized by World War II. Those blacks who came north after the war often exchanged $10-a-week farm jobs for $200-a-week city jobs in labor-staIVed war industries or government. Increased supplies of cash in
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Production of Black Violence
hands that were unused to such sums, and where there were limited opportunities for them to put the money to better use, provided a boom for saloons and dance and pool halls. Between 1945 and 1950, policy operations took in over $150 million (Pinderhughes, 1987:147). Gambling continued its climb into respectability, attracted middle-class interest, and thereby lost its dependence on violence as a means of norm enforcement. Chicago was in the secure tenure of Mayor Kelly's Democratic machine. Accommodations were easy to work out: hands off illicit business activities, such as policy, in exchange for votes. Police continued to underpolice black areas. A high police profile, particularly when it threatened black business interests (gambling, unlicensed or after-hours taverns, fencing and drug operations, houses of prostitution or streetwalkers) would result in charges of race prejudice from black politicians. Because ofthe numbers and concentration of black voters, their support, controlled by black politicians, was crucial to the machine's success. Meanwhile, the underground economy flowered: policy, prostitution, narcotics, and outlets for juvenile theft (pawnshops and fencing operations). Dope, which earlier had been pretty much limited to the jazz subculture, was merchandised throughout the inner city by whitecontrolled rings. Cocaine was available from the west coast of Central America. Teenage pushers sold reefers to other school children who stole to pay for them. Robberies, purse snatchings, thefts, muggings, and beatings of white "johns" drove away the remaining white trade. With the end of Prohibition, Italian and Jewish bootleggers took over leadership of black operations, with the exception of policy. Black gamblers still ran the inner-city gambling apparatus, but "a substantial portion" of the profits poured into the "pockets of the Capone syndicate" (Peterson, 1952:29193; Lait and Mortimer, 1950:45, 151-56). Because recent research has shown that delinquency (theft, burglary, and robbery) and gang violence have different etiologies and forms (Spergel, 1984), I discuss the two separately. Evolution of black gangs as drug sales organizations
Until the 1960s, except at the street level, blacks had been shut out of bootlegging and drug sales, principally by Italian-controlled groups. In the mid-1960s, blacks engaging in illegal enterprise saw their chance to take over the drug operation. A number of factors coalesced to make this possible: (1) Italians and allied groups who had now moved into the middle class were unwilling to use sufficient force to maintain their domination, while lower-class blacks were both willing and able to use violence; (2) blacks had the organization to merchandise drugs either through the use of their policy network or through organized street gangs; (3) youth employment was sufficiently bad in the late 1960s and thereafter, that the nature of gang composition changed-once the work
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option for maturing out of gangs disappeared, stable families became problematic, and the gang became the substitute family and the smvival technique for many youth; and (4) in the late 1960s and 1970s the drug market expanded into the middle class. Various other factors played a part in the transformation of some gangs into drug sales organizations. The politicization of crime, accompanied by intensive law enforcement efforts against gangs, had the unintended effect of encouraging intra- and intergang conflict and of enhancing gang organization. Large numbers of young men were concentrated in poorly maintained public housing; and in families where there was no male presence, mothers were on welfare, and their own prospects were dismal. Numbers of Hispanics, some with criminal connections, immigrated from drug-producing centers in Cuba, Mexico, Central and South America; and access of blacks to Far Eastern drug markets, as a result of their Vietnam War experience, freed them from dependence on Mafia sources (Abadinsky, 1990:255-60; Suttles, 1968:122; Hagedown and Macon, 1988; Ianni, 1974; Wilson, 1987:36-39; M. Sullivan, 1989:109-113; Spergel, 1990:174; Reuter, 1983:chap. 3, 1985:chap. 7). In the 1920s, the black South Side was bordered on the north by Italians, on the south by Irish, and on the west and south by Poles and Germans. Although there were more black gangs than white gangs per capita, white gangs were usually better organized, often as ethnic-based "athletic clubs"; that is, they had political sponsorship, which might later lead to political jobs for members. Such groups were active in fomenting mobs against blacks in the 1919 race riots. Black gangs, therefore, may have first formed both to protect themselves and their communities from these "clubs" and to imitate white gangs (Royko, 1971:30--32; Thrasher, 1963:42-43; Perkins, 1987). Usually, however, gang fights were over territory more than race and could involve the use of firearms. "Gangs are most numerous in the poorer sections and especially in the so-called 'crime spots' where gambling, robbery, and murder are prevalent." Gangs evolved from neighborhood play groups. Members, once they reached marriageable age, usually left the gang, and when most members were that age, the group would disappear, to be replaced by younger boys forming another group. By 1920, however, there was the rare "criminal gang," composed of older boys, "purely commercialized groups" that engaged in crime for profit. One of the gangs specialized "in dopepeddling" (Thrasher, 1963:14, 121, 130, 140,. 289). During the 1940s, gangs began organizing in housing projects. Violence consisted principally of intergang fights, in which gangs settled their differences with zip guns, knives, baseball bats, and brass knuckles. Criminal acts consisted of muggings, holdups, assaults, and burglaries, but, on the whole, during the 1950s and 1960s, property crime was the most prevalent form of delinquency. "Serious violence" was uncommon (Curry and Spergel, 1988:382; Spergel, 1990:188). With the increase in black and decrease of white enrollment, however, schools began to deteriorate.
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Production of Black Violence
School dropout rates reached 40 percent in some schools. Gang recruitment often followed school dropout, which in tum led to petty crime and involvement in the juvenile court system (Perkins, 1987:33-34). Various attempts were made to domesticate these gangs by such organizations as the YMCA, the Chicago Boys Club, Chicago Youth Centers, and Hull House. Social and law enforcement agencies were often at odds in their treatment of gang members. As a result, neither gained their trust. City business and political interests did little to provide gang members with alternatives to criminal activity (Perkins, 1987:31-32). During the late 1960s a number of abortive efforts were made by various interests to tum newly formed powerful gangs to their political advantage. In 1968, leaders of the Black P. Stone Nation were invited by President Nixon to the White House. Funds from the federal government and private foundations were used for a number of short-lived training and small business ventures that failed because they lacked sufficient ongoing funding and professional guidance to assure successful management and were hampered by internal struggles for power among gang members (Kotlowitz, 1991:37). But perhaps most of all, they were defeated by harassment from City Hall forces led by Mayor Daley, who feared a competitive political force not under his control. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the city launched a war against gangs. A series of prosecutions on weapons, racketeering, and murder charges resulted in the incarceration of many gang leaders, who claimed that they were railroaded on trumped-up charges and that black organizations, which had earlier worked with them, had now abandoned them (Perkins, 1987:21-23, 37; Olivero and Schremmer-Phillip, 1989; Fry, 1973; Dawley, 1973; Royko, 1971:206). Incarceration of gang leaders had mUltiple effects: new gang coalitions formed; gang violence increased in the prisons; and as gang members were released, gangs reformed in the streets (Perkins, 1987:38-39; Spergel, 1989:246). Disorganization within and competition between gangs resulted in fights for leadership and for control of drug territories. According to one study, the most serious period of gang violence was between 1967 and 1971, followed by a lull (on the streets, not in the prisons) between 1972 and 1976, and then a heightened degree of violence, reaching a high of eighty-four gang-related homicides in 1981 (Spergel, 1984:204; Olivero and Schremmer-Phillip, 1989:15). Black gamblers had maintained their dominance in policy operations until the early 1950s, when Italian and Jewish mobsters "with superior manpower and organization muscled in" (Ianni, 1974:117, 317). Blacks continued to run street operations as well as intermediate ranks within the inner city, but for the most part, outside operations were controlled by Italian syndicates with the political contacts to provide police protection. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, the character of black gangs began to change from territorially oriented younger members to commercially oriented older (nineteen plus) members (316-17).
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With the decline of the large profits earlier obtained by black policy kings, drugs became the logical and perhaps the only road left to poor blacks if they wished to follow the Irish, Jews, and Italians who used bootlegging as a means of social mobiliW. Increasing law enforcement efforts, public condemnation, and stiff penalties drove other groups out of the field. Enormous drug profits provided ample funds for political graft. Selling cocaine as well as heroin on the street enormously expanded the market and therefore the profitabiliW of drug operations (Ianni, 1974:318-23; Haller, 1989). Through the late 1960s into the mid-1970s, congruent with gang involvement in drug trafficking, both the seriousness and the violent nature of crime increased: There were numerous instances of gangs extorting businessmen; threats, beatings, widespread use of guns; shooting of young men who resisted attempts at gang recruitment; coercion of witnesses to prevent them from testifYing against gang members; and retaliation against neighborhood residents who dared defy gang rule (Olivero and Schremmer-Phillip, 1989:21-23; Perkins, 1987:80; Cuny and Spergel, 1988:383; Spergel, 1990:201, 214). In 1975, territorial disputes over narcotic sales resumed as imprisoned gang leaders began to be released. Large percentages of prisoners were black, from the same economic class, often from the same neighborhoods, and thus I could easily and active~y organize and recruit while in prison. In 1978, one leader, Jeff Fort, of the Black P. Stone Nation formed the El Rukns. Soon after his release, he met with representatives of the Italian syndicate having vice interests in El Rukn territoI)'. Reputedly, the Italian group ordered Fort to keep hands off. After burning down the mob restaurant where the warnings were given, Fort, in tum, ordered the syndicate out of El Rukn territoI)'. The reorientation of some Chicago gangs from territorial defense to economic gain through drug sales was reflected in the 1978 reorganization of the Chicago Police Department: The Gang Crimes Unit and the Narcotics Unit were merged (Olivero and Schremmer-Phillip, 1989:38, 60, 62; Abadinsky, 1990:257; Kotlowitz, 1991:38). By 1981, the El Rukns were investing their drug profits in real estate and other legitimate businesses and were employing pharmacists, doctOl'S, accountants, and la""Yers. Satellite clubs or alliances were formed in other parts of the countl)' (Olivero and Schremmer-Phillip, 1989:67-99; Klein and Maxson, 1989:217; Lemann, 1991:244--52).16 (For a similar evolution of black gangs into drugs and violence in Harlem, New York, and the accompanying violence, see Smith and Chapelle, 1991). Reportedly, by the mid-1980s gangs were so strong that they were able to keep crack out of Chicago until 1988, while it was ravaging other cities. The incentive to prevent its distribution was that it could be easily produced and sold by small entrepreneurs and thus, if allowed to enter the market, might have challenged the monopoly of the established gangs (Kotlowitz, 1991:38).
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Production of Black Violence
As to why anyone would engage in such a dangerous and short-lived occupation as selling drugs, a "young adult already launched on a career in organized crime" answered (Ianni, 1989:212), "If the people I saw driving Lincolns and Cadillacs in my neighborhood had been doctors or lawyers, that's probably what I would have wanted to be, but they weren't; they were drug dealers and pimps who were making it."
The path of black violent crime Historians, writing about the late nineteenth century, have concluded that after 1870 the socializing effects of industrialization-public schooling, bureaucratic and industrial employment-brought about a significant downturn in all varieties of crime, from drunkenness to murder. In Philadelphia, between 1900 and 1930, young Italian male immigrants had high rates of criminal involvement, much of it violent. But such violence declined, as it did in other northern cities, as "they went to school, got married, and settled into the orderly pattern of home ownership [and] neighborhood stability," thereby focusing the immigrant's attentions "on family and future." Blacks, on the other hand, have been "denied the experience of regimentation, the need to adjust to the psychological and emotional demands exacted by urban-industrial discipline" (Lane, 1989:71; Lane, 1986:3, 13-16, 37-44). National crime rates appear to bear out this thesis. Crime rates for all groups, including blacks, fell through the 1940s and 1950s, years of full employment. Moreover, the predominant type of murder during these years was between persons known to each other, that is, assault rather than robbery homicide (Zahn, 1989:224). But beginning in the mid-1960s, at a time when black youth once again were excluded from industrial advancement, crime, particularly violent crime, began to skyrocket to rates comparable to the preindustrial 1840s and 1850s (Lane, 1989:73-74; Zahn, 1989:224). Additional support is given to this hypothesis by subsequent Chicago crime statistics. The homicide rate in 1965 was about the same as in 1926 and 1927, during the Prohibition era, and remained relatively stable during the interim, even though the black population in Chicago rose from 7 to 28 percent ofthe total. But between 1965 and 1974, although the black population increased only 22 percent, its homicide rate doubled, and robberies by blacks increased 55 percent (Block, 1977:39). Thus, the higher homicide rate cannot be explained by the increase in the young male population. Additionally troubling findings are that those youths between fifteen and twenty-one who got into trouble acted in concert with other youth, began to commit more serious and violent offenses (more than 50 percent were robberies) as they got older, and increasingly used guns during robberies. In 1977, three-quarters of all homicides during robberies resulted from gun use (Skogan, 1989:239; Block and
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Block, 1980:11, 32; Block, 1977:29,43), and during the period 1965 to 1981, blacks committed 76 percent of all Chicago robbery homicides (Block, 1985b:vi) As one Chicago researcher commented, "Some black youths have taken up robbery as an economically viable profession" (Richard Block, 1977:51, 53). Because Chicago is the most racially segregated city in the country, and because most offenders, particularly younger offenders, normally commit crimes in their own vicinity, both offenders and their victims are usually black. In Chicago, 95 percent of the victims of black assault homicide are black. In the case of robbery homicide, however, black victims have the dubious advantage of being poor targets because they usually have little to steal, so that in 1980, only 24 percent of the victims of black robbers were other blacks (Block, HI85a:69, 27). In 1985, across the United States "84 percent ofthe violent crimes perpetrated against blacks were committed by black offenders .... The leading cause of death among black males between ages 15 and 24 is murder by other blacks" (Flowers, 1988:83, 85). The problem of black crime has been exacerbated by the tempting political target of black male predators roaming the streets in search of white middle-class victims. From Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon's law and order campaign to George Bush's Willie Horton escapade, politicians have found its attractions hard to resist. As a result, law enforcement policy and resources have targeted the black male violent offender with dramatic results. A recent study by the National Council on Crime and Delinquency shows that 29 percent of Cook County black males between the ages of 20 and 29 were in jail at least once last year, as against 4 percent for whites (Chicago Tribune, Sept. 23, 1990, p. 1). Nationally, almost one in four (23 percent) black men in their twenties is in the custody or control of the criminal justice system, either in prison, jail, on probation, or on parole on any given day. In 1989, half of all men in state prisons (138,706) were black, and about one third of all men in federal prisons (7,358) were black (Mauer, 1990:3, 8; Curtis, 1989:148). In Illinois in 1987, of 19,071 males in prison, 11,422 were black. Perhaps 60 percent of these men were imprisoned for some crime of violence such as robbery, murder, rape, or aggravated assault. Because the vast number of blacks in Illinois live in Chicago, we can presume that all but a small number of these blacks in prison had been Chicago residents (U.S. Dept. of Justice, 1987; Dykstra, 1981:18). Although this statistical review tells us about the seriousness and extent of involvement of black youth in crime and the effects of their crimes on other blacks, it tells us nothing about how young people get into crime. The history I have set forth detailing the inner-city economy, the limited choice that black youth have to pursue legitimate employment, and the history of illicit enterprise in the Chicago inner city brings us to the point where it is appropriate to answer that question.
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Production of Black Violence
Getting into crime Thrasher (1963:258, 263-66) suggests that in the 1920s delinquency typically began with truancy, often accompanied by the truant leaving home, living by picking up rags, bottles, and barrels to sell, then stealing milk, groceries, and bicycles, often selling the articles to junk dealers or fences, who then might direct children to steal items more easily disposed of. The ready accessibility to saloons and gambling, the unavailability of positive moral incentives, and the reinforcement of this behavior by the boy's peer group insured its continuity. Mercer Sullivan (1989:ch. 5) brings this analysis up to date in a study comparing youth in three Brooklyn, New York, communities, one white, one Puerto Rican, and one black. The book focuses on "the process by which inner-city youths choose between employment and crime as alternative sources of income" (108). The white neighborhood consisted largely of Catholic ethnic descendants of Italian and Polish immigrants, with income levels "markedly higher" than the two other neighborhoods but lower than most white areas in the city. The residents of the predominantly black area were from first- and second-generation children of southern immigrants. And the Puerto Rican neighborhood was composed predominantly of first- and second-generation families. Levels of AFDC and of families below the poverty line were 10 percent in the white area and about 50 percent in the minority areas. The black neighborhood consisted of "a massive concentration of low-income housing projects amid acres of burned-out rubble relieved only by a few shopping streets, a small section of private houses, and a very few factories. Fire [set by arsonists, presumably for insurance money] continued to ravage what was left ofthe retail section" (148). Sullivan and his coworkers found a complex but rational system of choices that led some youth to choose crime. Factors that encouraged such a choice arose from a combination of limited family resources (no father in the household, or a father without access to labor market networks for sons to follow, and parents with little income to share with their children) and the expectation that youths spend their mid-teens in school despite the inability of the schools to fulfill their function as preparatory institutions for future work because a segmented labor market excluded black youth with these qualifications. ''youth joblessness ... makes economic crime more attractive, while adult un- and underemployment contribute to a weakened social control environment" (226). Regardless of the neighborhood the youths came from, all youths, as they grew older, went through a series of steps tending to increase or decrease their involvement in crime: 1. In their early to middle teens, youths from the same area hung together in temporary assoclations (cliques), engaging in fighting for
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turf and reputation with other cliques from surrounding areas. During these street fights, theft did take place (taking radios, bicycles, or clothing), but the aim was fun, excitement, or to establish a personal "rep." Boys, at this stage, stole for the property's use value, not its sales value; if it was sold, little would be received because the boy had no idea of its market value. Fighting did, however, prepare the youth for more serious criminality because the taking of property revised his view of property rights-they were no longer fixed but were something over which he could exercise control. From fighting he learned techniques that could be applied to violent crime and how weapons could be acquired and used. 2. By mid-teens, boys had more experience in crime; they were stronger. Few had been caught, and if caught, not severely punished. They had a greater need for income (for clothing, entertainment, marijuana, girls); they learned more about the value of stolen items and about the networks for converting them to cash; they were better able to weigh the risks and benefits between types of crime, as well as between crime and legitimate employment. The motivation for crime now became economic, a means of support rather than an occasional excursion to vary the day-to-day boredom of just hanging out. Generally, street 1lighting preceded involvement in economic crime, and as a youth took on crime as his main source of income, he dropped out of street fighting. 3. Once youths had determined on a career of crime, the ecology of the area determined the type of crime in which they might engage. Because the black housing projects in which black youth lived provided limited opportunities (apartment burglaries, muggings in elevators or staiIwells), they eventually had to commit robberies and purse snatchings outside their neighborhoods where, with repeated exposures, their chance of apprehension was heightened. Most youths by their late teens decided "the risks outweighed the benefits" and discarded violent crime as their principal occupation (163). 4. Several of those who were disillusioned with the risks of street crime were attracted to drug sales. At the time of these obseIVations (the early 1980s), there were "smoke shops" and "reefer stores" where marijuana was sold. Heroin and cocaine were sold on the streets. It was easy to obtain drug consignments until the youth had enough capital to stake himself. A competent seller could earn between $500 and $1,000 a week. Sullivan found that work was a crucial variable in the incidence and seriousness of crime committed by these youth: (1) "crime preceded work," usually occurring between ages ten and thirteen; (2) "occasional crime for economic gain overlapped with early employment"-that is, employment had the effect of reducing the frequency or predatory nature
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Production of Black Violence
of the crimes committed; (3) crime involvement was reduced as the boys aged and found steady work; (4) a few of the group, in their late teens, entered a type of crime that would provide "a steady income in lieu of wages from legitimate employment" (207). The white neighborhood, the only one with many adults in blue-collar jobs, provided a network into legitimate employment unavailable to the black and Puerto Rican youths. Where legitimate employment was available, most youths opted for such employment over a criminal career. Even those who pursued crime tended to commit less risky and predatol}' crime than youth in the other two neighborhoods. Crime, particularly violent street crime, which has a noxious influence on any community, hits black communities particularly hard. Because blacks are so segregated and are so visible in other communities, the general absence of easy, lucrative targets such as factories and stores, as well as their lack of access to employee theft, "forces" young blacks into available crime opportunities such as robberies and drug sales. In the Puerto Rican neighborhood, by contrast, nearby factories provided easy access to young burglers. For auto thieves, there were markets in both legitimate auto repair shops that dealt on the side and with illegitimate chop-shops. Stolen goods were sold at "bargain basement" prices to community residents. For community residents such crime represented a kind of wealth redistribution, and the perpetrators were therefore "more or less tolerated at the local level according to the extent to which they distribute scarce resources into a neighborhood" (244). On the other hand, blacks who commit crimes in their own neighborhoods receive no such tolerance. But reqardless of their choice---crime or no crime-the futures for these youth are dim: some will "accept the low-wage, unstable jobs to which they did not have access during the period of their involvement in serious theft, ... some will die, others will spend much of their lives in prisons or mental hospitals. Few will graduate to lucrative criminal careers, and few will continue the patterns of street crime of their youth" (250). Even at $500 to $1,000 a week a drug seller's future was dismal;I7 "I'm a good businessman .... I know how to buy and sell. But I've been ripped off, cut, and arrested. Now, I'm on probation and I won't get off so easy next time. But how am I gonna get a job now? ... I can't go up to somebody and say, "Listen, I know how to buy and sell, ... I've been buying and selling drugs for years." And I sure don't want to be no messenger, not after the money I'm used to" (175).
An economic and political end product-The Henry Horner Housing Project Kotlowitz (1991) tells the stol}' of two black preteen-age boys, Terrence and Lafeyette Rivers, during the period 1986 to 1989 in the Henl}' Horner Housing Project on Chicago'S near West Side. Of the 66,000 people in 1980
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living in the immediate area, 88 percent were black and 46 percent had incomes below the poverty line. In the stunmer of 1987,6,000 lived in the project, 4,000 of whom were children. Eight-five percent of the households were headed by women (65). The neighborhood had no banks, theatres, movie houses, skating rinks, or bowling alkys, all having moved away with the white and black middle classes in the 1960s and 1970s. Welfare checks were cashed at currency exchanges at a cost of $8 a check. Once a month women took cabs out of the neighborhood to buy all their groceries (140). Both in management and design, the project matched the deterioration of the neighborhood. Beginning in 1965, a series of damning reports alleged that the Chicago Housing Authority was run by incompetents and political hacks. One report concluded that the CRA "is operating in a state of profound confusion and disarray. No one seems to be minding the store [or) seems to genuinely care" (260). LaJoe Rivers, the mother of the two children who are the subject of this book, moved to the project with her parents because they were about to be evicted from their apartment to make way for the building of the Illinois Institute of Technology (21). Some years later, when LaJoe obtained her own apartment, the shoddy design and construction were already taking their toll. Apartments had remained unpainted, and repairs had virtually ended in the 1970s when the CRA ran out of money; her apartment was roach-ridden; closets had been constructed without doors, making orderliness almost impossible; sheet-metal cabinets were rusted through; during the winter, tenants had to open windows because the heating ran out of control; bathrooms had been designed without windows, and because the fans atop the building that were supposed to provide ventilation had been stolen, they were darl< and dank; scalding water ran day and night from the broken tub faucet (there was no shower); one toilet emitted a fetid odor from an unknown source, until April 1989, when an inspection ordered by a new CRA director found the basement crowded with forgotten and now rusted refrigerators and stoves, together with dead animals, the cause of the stench (24, 27-28, 241). LaJoe met her husband, Paul, when she was thirteen and he seventeen. Paul is the father of all her eight children, the first of whom LaJoe had at the age of fourteen. When LaJoe found out that Paul, who began to shoot drugs at twenty-two, had fathered two children by another woman, their relationship soured; he now spent little time at the house, but did his best to father the children (24). Ever-present violence, gangs, and drugs dominated project life. In 1975, someone strangled LaJoe's older sister in her bathtub. More recently, two teenagers robbed LaJoe, cutting her right middle and ring fingers with a butcher knife, severing the neIVes, so that she has been unable to do many ordinary household chores. The friend with LaJoe was stabbed seven times. A local candy store was firebombed for unknown reasons; a fourteen-yearold friend of her son Lafeyette died in the crash of a stolen car when it went out of control as the police gave chase (54,98,186,209).
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Production of Black Violence
Horner was divided between two gangs) the Conservative Vice Lords and the Disciples. The Vice Lords occupied two of the high rises. One apartment was outfitted with a television) a sofa) and lounge chairs. Empty apartments were used to store guns) drugs) and money. In one week police confiscated twenty-two guns and 330 grams of cocaine. The gang worked out of two cars stationed in front of their high rises. Sentries were posted to watch for cops. Entrance hall lights were knocked out to make any police search of that building more difficult. "Soldiers" sold cocaine and heroin and returned a percentage of the proceeds. The estimated take of the gang was $50)000 to $100)000 a week. Gang shootings became a part of the growing-up experience. Gangs shot from one high rise to another; a gang member was shot on the street in front of LaJoe's building and died on the stairway (still stained with his blood); an eight-year-old boy and thirteen-year-old girl were wounded by stray bullets; young men were seen waving guns and automatic weapons in the street; several times a year LaJoe and her children were pinned down in her apartment or in the street by exchanges of gunfire; a youngster was given a gun to shoot a gang member found in another gang's territory; a fifteen-year-old friend of Lafeyette who got into an argument with a gang member was shot dead (17-18) 32) 41--42). At the time of these observations) Jimmie Lee) thirty-eight) headed one faction of the Vice Lords) was the undisputed ruler of the project) and determined who could sell drugs in his territory. Lee arrived in a safari of three cars) the two bracketing him being his bodyguards. He wore a bulletproof vest and used a cellular telephone to communicate with his network. His arrival was greeted by a mob of worshipping teenagers. Lee also acted as arbitrator in family disputes) occasionally bought food for poor families) gave children dollar bills or bought them new shoes) and did not allow his gang to use thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds in gang fights. In 1987) he was convicted of possession of a controlled substance) with intent to deliver) and sentenced to thirty years in prison) but others were waiting in line to take over (33-36) 41) 138). One of LaJoe's main concerns was to keep her sons out of gangs. She forbade them to wear caps (the bill turned one way signaled a Disciple) the other way a Vice Lord) or ear rings (another gang insignia). But for a young boy the sale of drugs was enticing. Although Paul, Terrence's father) warned one drug dealer who had befriended his son to stay away from him) twelve-year-old Terrence was soon back. He sold under the L) two blocks from the project, where it was convenient to stash his drugs and money in the supporting pillars. The dealer set up Terrence in his own apartment and entrusted him with as much as $10)000 in the belief that no one would suspect a boy that young of carrying such sums. Evenings he and the dealer would play at target practice with a .45 revolver. Because he missed his family) Terrence eventually moved back home. But by the time he was eighteen he had been arrested forty-six times for crimes ranging from disorderly conduct to purse snatching) and
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finally, for his involvement in a tavern hold-up, he received an eight-year term. LaJoe's next oldest son, Lafeyette, was arrested with four other boys for breaking into and stealing items from a car. Because he had no record, Lafeyette was given a year's probation and one hundred hours of community seIVice at a boys club (265,2991).18
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS Blacks in the United States make the perfect subject for the study of unequal accumulation of capital. As I have demonstrated, the function of blacks in the American social formation was to become part of a process of wealth accumulation for others. As slaves, they were accumulation machines for cotton plantation owners. That relation substantially continued until they became part of the northern industrial proletariat. There, through the 1960s, they represented a reseIVe army of unemployed: a group of mostly low-skilled laborers who did the dirtiest, hardest, and lowest-paying jobs, often substituting as strikebreakers, laid-off during recession and slow production periods, to be rehired as needed by employers (Marks, 1989:134-35). When those jobs disappeared, so did their place in the labor market. On a macro basis the creation of an underclass can be understood as the end product of a massive redistribution of wealth. As one study concluded (Tilly, 1990:104), the "economic restructUling [described above] has primarily [widened] the gap between high- and low-paid workers" (emphasis in original). A 1983 sUIVey of wealth distribution in the United States found that it was "remarkably uneven" and that such maldistribution has been increasing in the past twenty years, the wealth moving upward from the poor to the rich (Joint Economic Committee, 1986:23, 36).19 The multiple roadblocks in the way of black accumulation act also as collection points for a transfer of wealth from poor blacks into richer hands.20 When this process is multiplied in all the ways I have tried to show in this essay, it is apparent that lower-income blacks, being at the base ofthe market structure, have the least ability themselves to accumulate capital. Life for them is the equivalent of an Atari war game. If one missile doesn't get you, another will. Like the children's game "king ofthe hill," those on top stay on top by pushing down those who try to scramble up to the top themselves. Not only do those on top push down, but all those along the path up have an interest in keeping those below them always below them. Just as space on top is limited, so is space along the path up the hill. By using the capitalist process of accumulation as the point of inquiry, I have shown that all resources, whether found in government policy, corporate enterprise, market forces inside and outside the inner city, or in their own racial group at a higher level on the hill, have some interest in keeping a certain number of young black males at the bottom or, more to the point, have no interest in them at all. One should not be surprised
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therefore if those at the very bottom create their own hill and turn all of these forces on their heads. Through the gang, powerlessness becomes power, daily boredom is replaced by melodrama; through drug sales, wealth is instantly created, accompanied by the possibility of acquiring a future of material goods and status. In a word, people denied all means of legal accumulation have created their own ladder of opportunity, temporary and destructive though it may be. Although the accommodation arrived at by some blacks-violent crime in black communities-is understandable, it creates havoc and great pain and suffering, mostly for other blacks, and thus, ironically, substantially decreases their ability to accumulate educational and occupational riches. The reality for inner-city blacks is that white capitalist America no longer needs to exploit them. Left high and dry on the capitalist shore, these same young men, infused with capitalist values of power and materialism, have turned to the only other victims available in their segregated world, other blacks. If one were to sit down with a class of graduate students in criminology and were to assign them a problem-to set forth all the criminogenic conditions necessary to create the community violence described in this essay-it would take considerable study, time, and thought before a brilliant team of students could provide as perfect a set of public and private decisions as would be needed to bring about this result. Yet such a result was produced, not with much, but with little thought; not because powerful people necessarily wanted to harm blacks, not even because of racism. It all happened perfectly naturally according to the law of politics whereby power seeks its own level, and the law of the economics of capitalism, that of the "invisible hand," whereby one, by seeking one's own profit, benefits all.
Notes 1 Similar conditions will be found in other northern cities, although the details will vary in accordance with each city's political and economic structure. See, for example Boston (Sheehan, 1984); New York (Jonnes, 1986; Schnick, 1982); Cleveland (Kusmer, 1976); Philadelphia (Kleniewski, 1981; Ley, 1974; Lane, 1986); Milwaukee (Hagedorn and Macon, 1988); North Manhattan (Katznelson, 1981); and Los Angeles (Glasgow, 1980). 2 It should not be concluded, however, that poverty is an exclusively black problem. Although the 1990 census shows that minorities make up about 25 percent of the U.S. population (12.1 percent black, 9.0 percent Hispanic, 2.9 percent Asian, and less than 1 percent Native American), even in 1980 minorities composed 42 percent of those in poverty, meaning that most persons in poverty are white (U .S. Dept. of Commerce, 1992, tables 16, 717). A large proportion of those in poverty are members of female-headed households (Sandefur and Tienda, 1988:2-3). 3 The vast number of such crimes are committed by males. Why this should be so has been investigated by Hagan (1989), Jack Katz (1988), and Spergel (1986:110): "Gang violence involves males almost exclusively." With reference to black women, see Marable (1983).
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4 During the period 1890-1910, described by McMillen (1989:141--491 as the most repressive years of the postwar era, both "tenant stealing" by other landowners and voluntary migration were considered deadly threats to the South's labor supply. This threat was combated with a variety of devices, from physical restraint to countless means of maintaining tenants in debt, and a criminal justice system supporting these practices (Bloom, 1987:26--271. 5 Ford (1973:241 asks, "Higher farm incomes for whom? What was to be the fate of the 1,183,000 displaced farm workers and their dependents? Were the impending changes to take place in the interest of efficiency or in the order of special interest? What, in fact, happened? The two full-time equivalent series for agriculture (family workers and hired farm workers) indicate a job loss of 2,291,000 for Southern agriculture between 1950 and 1969." 6 To survive, a family may employ several aspects of this economy: one "articulate" daughter helps her mother to obtain her welfare entitlement; another daughter who is doing well in school is expected to continue, eventually entering the regular job market; and a son good at hustling deals in drugs (Schwendinger and Schwendinger, 1985:321. Only one study (Schaffer, 19731 analyzes in- and outflows of inner-city income. In 1969, the author compared two Brooklyn, New York, neighborhoods-Bedford-Stuyvesant, a predominately black low-income area, and Borough Park, a middle-class white area about forty blocks distant-and concluded that "the flows of income through the Bedford-Stuyvesant community ... [make it] appear to be rather like a sieve, with a relatively small stream of income flowing through it [and] with little remaining." 7 All their lives, southern rural blacks had been defrauded of their earnings by landowners. They were forced to borrow at unlawfully high interest rates, to buy supplies at company stores at inflated prices, and were subjected to falsified accounts of money owed. Powerlessness to seek legal remedies assured they would be constantly abused. The effect of such practices on the ability of blacks to accumulate capital is obvious (McMillen, 1989:132--41; Lemann, 1991:18-19, 55--571. 8 What was said about European immigrants before them could also be said about migrating blacks: "In reality two immigrant Americas existed. One consisted largely of workers with menial jobs. The others, a smaller component, held essentially positions which pursued personal gain and leadership. Immigrants did not enter a common mass but adapted two separate but related worlds which might be termed broadly working class and middle class" !Bodnar, 1985:2081. 9 The difference in the way blacks and ethnic groups accumulated capital for small business may be limited by economic as well as cultural imperatives. Suttles (1968:122, 2241 describes the personal labor in lieu of cash that went into the purchase of a building. An immigrant group would engage in a business on the first floor of a building and pack other floors with family and friends to pay for the building's purchase. Blacks, on the other hand, were doing well if they could live in a project, where such business ventures were impossible. See Kotlowitz (19911 and note 20. 10 Blacks received only about 5 percent of the HOLC refinanced loans. Various FHA
policies, particularly the recruitment of personnel from hostile banking institutions and their lack of resources, prevented blacks from profiting from the program (Weaver, 1948:711. 11 The reason dislocatees paid more for rent was that they were looking for a rental units
of the same kind as had just been demolished. Thus, there were fewer such units available to meet a greater demand. Conversely, those units built for middle-class renters added to an already adequate supply, so that rents for such units were reduced. The net effect was that the lower-income renter subsidized the middle- or upperincome renter or buyer (Hirsch, 1983:62-631.
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1.2 Of 33 projects approved during the 1950s to mid-1960s, only one was in an area with
less than 85 percent blacks. Between 1948 and 1953, the CHA built 9,903 housing units, of which 9,141 were located in black areas, 615 in mixed areas, and 147 in a white area. Between 1954 and 1967, the CHA built 10,193 of 10,256 family units in black areas, 33 in a mixed area, and 30 in a white area (Hirsch, 1983:243). 13 Feeble federal inteIVention, white opposition, and city intransigence combined to
successfully stifle litigation to force integration in public housing projects or to place blacks in white areas. During the 1970s and 1980s, fewer than 200 public housing units were built in Chicago despite orders by two federal judges (Hirsch, 1983:265-68: de Vise, 1985:290-91). 14 "Between 1957 and 1963 the number of jobs near the Negro Ghetto declined by almost
93,000 while the number of jobs in outlying and suburban areas increased by 72,000" (Baron and Hymer, 1972:304). In manufacturing, the suburbs provided only 37 percent of the jobs in 1948, but by 1963 they accounted for more than half (Taylor, 1971:59). Retailing employment located in the central cities fell from almost 75 percent in 1948 to just over half the total employment by the mid-1960s. Whereas in 1954 Chicago still contained 10,000 "manufacturing establishments," employing nearly 500,000 bluecollar workers, by 1982 this number had been cut to less than 162,000. Thus, although low-skilled blacks in the 1950s had about the same employment rate as whites, by the 1980s two out of three blacks residing in ghetto areas were jobless, while six out of ten white adults were employed, about the same rate as during the 1950s (Wacquant and Wilson, 1989:13). 15 After 1940, as whites left unskilled labor for other occupations, blacks increasingly occupied the places vacated. For example, in Chicago, the percentage of all males fourteen and older employed as operative and nonagricultural laborers declined from 30.8 percent, in 1940 to 29.7 percent in 1950. For black males, for the same years, the percentage went in the opposite direction, from 40.2 percent to 52.0 percent. This same trend continued through at least 1980, when 37.2 percent of all black males were in such unskilled occupations, as compared to only 21.6 percent of white males (Rolison, 1986:144). A recent study of the history of unemployment over a hundred-year period concluded that "in 1982, as in 1882, unemployment was a class phenomenon, a malady afflicting blue-collar workers while sparing nearly all members of the middle class. In 1982, for example, the annual unemployment rate for managers and professionals was 3.3 percent, while the figure for 'operators, fabricators, and laborers' was 16.7 percent" (Keyssar, 1989:19). Thus, to the extent that a high percentage of blacks remain in the laboring class, they will be disproportionately unemployed. 16 Spergel (1984:204, 206) found that during the period studied, 1967-81, in Chicago there
were 12,000 homicides, of which 5.5 percent, or 634, were attributed by the police to gangs. "Of the fifty-five identified violent gangs, thirty-three were Hispanic, fifteen were black, and seven were white. Chicago's population is approximately 40 percent white, 40 percent black, and 14 percent Hispanic." More recently the police estimate one hundred to two hundred gangs operate in Chicago (Select Committee, 1986:46). 17 A July 1990 study of open-air and crackchouse markets in Washington, D.C., shows the
centrality of narcotics sales to black urban life. Narcotics has offered middle-class employment opportunities, netting $24,000 a year, to daily sellers (Reuter, MacCoun, and Murphy, 1990). A Rand Corporation research group studied all those charged with crimes, 1985-87. They found that 66 percent of the "District population-and 80 percent ofthe group most likely to be involved in crimes, males aged 20-24-are black," that "in recent years, each succeeding age group entering adulthood has shown increasing involvement in dealing. As many as one out of six black males born in 1967
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were charged with drug distribution between ages 18 and 20 .... Extrapolating from current, age-specific arrest rates, the ratio is likeJly to be closer to one in three before the age group reaches 30. Few of those charged ... had completed high schoo!. ... Those who sold on a daily basis (three out of eight) have net earnings of $2000 per month at the median and $3600 per month on average .... Feeding a personal habit seemed to be a prime motive for involvement." Two-thirds of those arrested had legitimate jobs and devoted more time to such work than dealing. Even though risks in such salles involved a 22 percent chance of imprisonment, a 7 percent chance of severe injury, and a 1.4 percent chance of death, and even though sellers knew of these risks, sales continued. Twenty-four thousand residents sold in street drug markets, about half of whom were regular dealers, at a total market value of $350 million. 18 This summary of Kotlowitz's work (1991) is a very pale replica of his detailed
description of the impact of these conditions on family life, how they work on the young male's view of the world, and finally how violence becomes a logical defense against all the violence in his environment. See also Lemann (19911, who follows a number of black families from the South to their'lives in Chicago. 19 The survey divided the population into four categories: the "super rich" (the top 0.5
percent of households I, the "very rich" (the next 0.5 percent of households I, the "rich" Ihouseholds between the 99th and 90th percentilel, and "everybody else." Super rich households In = 420,000, excluding wealth attributed to personal residences I owned more than 26.9 percent of privately held family wealth; and the top ten percent controlled approximately 68 percent of the nation's wealth (Phillips, 1990:111. While those on top got richer, those in the middle or at the bottom got poorer. In other words, there was a direct transfer of wealth from lower to upper, not new creation of wealth. While the average net worth of the top 0.5 percent of families rose 6.7 percent in the 1980s, the bottom 90 percent fell 8.8 percent. The greatest loss was by white men 25 to 34 without college educations. For them the poverty level nearly doubled to 17 percent. During the period real hourly wages fell 5 percent. Among jobs created, 77 percent were in retail and service occupations paying the lowest wages (Mishel and Frankel, 19901. By the end of 1990, it was projected that the top 1 percent of the population 12.5 million Americans) would have almost as much income after taxes as the bottom 40 percent (Dollars and Sense, October 1990, 51. For such maldistribution of wealth as an early manifestation of capitalist development, evident by 1845, see DuBoff (1989:25, 43, 87,1791. 20 One important government policy affecting wealth transfer is federal tax policy. While the corporate income tax has fallen from 34 percent offederal tax receipts in 1950 to but 7 percent in 1983, during the same years the payroll tax has risen from 12 percent to 38 percent, a tax that primarily burdens the working poor. Taking into consideration changes in "progressive" taxes (personal and corporate income, estate, and gift taxes) and regressive taxes (excise, customs, and payrolll, progressive taxes as percentages of the total federal tax receipts have declined from 70.5 percent in 1950 to 55.5 percent in 1983. During this same period, the poor also paid higher state and local sales and payroll taxes (Blank and Blinder, 1986:197-203). Reduction in capital gains taxes also benefited the rich, as households in the top 1. percent of the population more than doubled their income from that source (Dollars and Sense, October 1990, 5; Mishel and Frankel, 1990). For the political consequences of this shift in income, see Phillips, 1990. Although the U.S. and state governments provide substantial gross sums to the poor in transfer payments (food stamps, welfare, AFDC), the United States in 1981 spent a lesser percentage on income distribution (14.91 than any Western industrialized nation (Germany, 26.5; France, 23.8, Italy, 22.7; United Kingdom, 18.91 (Burtless, 1986:46).
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Weaver, Robert C. 1948. The Negro Ghetto. New York: Harcourt Brace. Weinberg, Meyer. 1977. A Chance to Learn: The History of Race and Education in the United States. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press. Willhelm, Sidney M., and Edwin H. Powell. 1967. "Who Needs the Negro." In Jeffrey K. Hadden, Louis H. Masotti, and Calvin J. Larson, eds., Metropolis in Crisis, pp. 211-18. Itasca, Ill.: Peacock Publishers. Williams, Walter E. 1982. The State Against Blacks. New York: McGraw-Hill. Wilson, William J. 1987. The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Zahn, Margaret A. 1989. "Homicide in the Twentieth Century: Trends, 'TYPes, and Causes." In Ted Robert GUIT, ed., Violence in America, vol. I, The History of Crime, pp. 216-34. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications.
EDITOR'S NOTES 1 Robinson argues that ghetto neighborhoods are impoverished because capital flows out of these neighborhoods. However, neighborhoods do not produce capital. Capital can flow out only if it has first flowed in. The same is true in more affluent neighborhoods. If ghetto residents are poor, it is because their incomes are low and they cannot save much. 2 Evan Stark, in his essay in Part 4, "Gangs and Progress: The Contribution of Delinquency to Progressive Reform," argues that the institutions of social control established by Progressive Era reformers to acculturate the children of immigrants-the school, the social work agency, the reformatory-played an important role in creating a working class that could transcend ethnic and national differences to organize the factories they entered as workers in the 1930s. Robinson's analysis indicates that today these institutions are no longer producing these "positive" effects. Schools turn out graduates who are barely literate; the reformatory fails to reform; and the factories that used to provide entry-level jobs to workers with little skills have in many instances relocated outside the United States, where labor costs are low and repressive governments stand in the way of unionizing efforts. Possibly the armed forces are now the only institutions that take in and socialize large numbers of young black urban males. In doing so, they remove them from the community and train them in the use of weapons. Only to a limited extent can they provide skills that will be useful in careers outside the military. The flight of manufacturing jobs has weakened U.S. labor unions and made the achievement of working-class unity across racial and ethnic lines more difficult. 3 Robinson's analysis leads one to wonder whether more recent immigrants to the United States from Asia, Africa, and Latin America will encounter the same kind of obstacles that blacks met when they came to the Northern citJies. Is it possible that some immigrant groups will bring with them cultural resources or capital that can help them succeed? One also wonders whether the outcome Robinson describes for blacks was truly inevitable. Suppose the consequences of throwing large numbers of blacks off the land in the South had been anticipated. Could some way have been found to prevent their dispossession, or to help them enter the capitalist economy? What would the obstacles have been? Could blacks themselves have shaped their future more successfully? By doing what? 4 Many of the processes that Robinson describes for Chicago were also taking place in other American cities. Blair Badcock, Urifairly Structured Cities (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984) discusses these processes within the framework of alternative traditions of Marxist theory.
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Delinquency and the Age Structure of Society David F. Greenberg Adapted by permission from David F. Greenberg. "Delinquency and the Age Structure of Society." Contemporary Crises: Crime. Law and Social Policy 1 IApril 1977): 189-223.
An extraordinary amount of crime in American society is the accomplishment of young people. In recent years, more than half of those arrested for the seven FBI index offenses have been age 18 or under. Per capita arrest rates for vandalism and property crimes not involving confrontation with a person (burglary, grand larceny, auto theft) peak at age 15 to 16, fall to half their peak values in two to four years, and continue to decline rapidly. Arrest rates for narcotics violations and offenses involving confrontation with a victim (homicide, forcible rape, aggravated assault, robbery) peak a few years later, at 19 to 21, and also decline with age, but less rapidly. Field and self-reporting studies of delinquency confirm that delinquents commonly abandon crime in late adolescence.1 This pattern is a fairly recent development. The peak ages for involvement in crime seem to have been higher in nineteenth-century America than they are today. Other industrialized capitalist nations, such as England, seem to have undergone a similar shift in the age distribution of involvement in crime. By cqntrast, comparatively few crimes are committed by young people in the less industrialized nations of the modem world.2 The increasingly disproportionate involvement of juveniles in major crime categories is not readily explained by current sociological theories of delinquency, but it can be readily understood as a consequence of the historically changing position of juveniles in industrial societies. This changing position has its origin, at least in Europe and the United States, in the longterm tendencies of a capitalist economic system. I am grateful to Ava Baron. Eliot Freidson. Daniel Glaser. Irwin Goffman. Drew Humphries. Caroline Persell. Edwin Schur. and James Q. Wilson for helpful discussions and suggestions.
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DELINQUENCY THEORY AND THE AGE DISTRIBUTION OF CRlME Since neither the very young nor the very old have the prowess and agility required for some types of crime, we might expect crime rates to rise and then fall with age. But the sharp decline in involvement in late adolescence cannot be explained in these terms alone. If age is relevant to criminality, the link should lie primarily in its social significance. Yet contemporary sociological theories of delinquency shed little light on the relationship between crime and age. If, for example, loweit' class male gang delinquency is simply a manifestation of a lower class subculture, as Miller (1958) has maintained, it would be mysterious why 21-yealt'-0Ids act in conformity with the norms of their subculture so much less often than their siblings just a few years younger-unless the norms themselves were age-specific. While agespecific expectations may contribute to desistance from some forms of delinquent play, such as vandalism and throwing snowballs at cars, as Clark and Haurek (1966) suggest, there is no social class in which felony theft and violence receive general approval for persons of any age. Moreover, adult residents of high crime areas often live in fear of being attacked by teenagers, suggesting that if delinquency is subcultural, community does not form the basis of the subculture. The difficulty of accounting for "maturational reform" within the framework of the motivational theories of Cloward and Ohlin (1960) and Cohen (1955) has already been noted by Matza (1964:24-27). In both theories, male delinquents cope with the problems arising from lower class status by entering into and internalizing the norms of a subculture which repudiates conventional rules of conduct and requires participation in crime. As with other subcultural theories, it is not at all clear why most subculture carriers abandon activities that are so highly prized within the subculture with such haste. This desistance is especially perplexing in anomie or opportunity theories (Merton, 1957; Cloward and Ohlin, 1960) because the problem assumed to cause delinquency, namely the anticipation of failure in achieving socially inculcated success goals through legitimate means, does not disappear at the end of adolescence. At the onset of adulthood, few lower and working class youths are close to conventionally defined "success," and their realization that opportunities for upward mobility are drastically limited can only be more acute. Students can perhaps entertain fantasies about their future prospects, but graduates or dropouts must come to terms with their chances. Cloward and Ohlin do note that many delinquents desist, but explain this in ad hoc terms unrelated to the main body of their theory. Writing of neighborhoods where violence is common . they assert: As adolescents near adulthood. excellence in the manipulation of violence no
longer brings status. Quite the contrary, it generally evokes extremely negative sanctions. What was defined as permissible or tolerable behavior during adolescence tends to be sharply proscribed in adulthood. New expectations
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are imposed, expectations of "growing up," of taking on adult responsibilities in the economic, familial, and community spheres. The effectiveness with which these definitions are imposed is attested by the tendency among fighting gangs to decide that conflict is, in the final analysis, simply "kid stuff." ... In other words, powerlul community expectations emerge which have the consequence of closing off access to previously useful means of overcoming status deprivation ICloward and Ohlin, 1960:185). In view of Cloward and Ohlin's characterization of neighborhoods where gang violence is prevalent as so disorganized that no informal social controls limiting violence can be exercised (1960:174-75), one can only wonder whose age-specific expectations are being described. Cloward and Ohlin do not say. This explanation, for which Cloward and Ohlin produce no supporting evidence, is inconsistent with their own larger theory of delinquent subcultures. In addition, it seems inconsistent with the slowness of the decline in the violence offense categories. In a departure from the emphasis placed on social class membership in most motivational theories of delinquency, Bloch and Niederhoffer (1958) interpret such forms of delinquency as adolescent drinking, sexual experimentation, and "wild automobile rides" as responses to the age status problems of adolescence. Denied the prerogatives of adulthood, but encouraged to aspire to adulthood and told to "act like adults," teenagers find in these activities a symbolic substitute which presumably is abandoned as soon as the genuine article is available. As an explanation for joy-riding and some status offenses, this explanation has manifest plausibility. For other categories it is more problematic, since it assumes that delinquents interpret activities engaged in largely by adolescents as evidence of adult stature. When Bloch and Niederhoffer turn to more serious teenage crime, their explanations are vague and difficult to interpret, but in any event seem to depend less on the structural position of the juvenile. In Delinquency and Drift, Matza (1964) provides an alternative approach to the explanation of desistance. His assumption that many delinquents fully embrace neither delinquent nor conventional norms and values, but instead allow themselves to be easily influenced without deep commitment, makes desistance possible when the delinquent discovers that his companions are no more committed to delinquency than he is. This discovery is facilitated by a reduction in masculinity anxiety that accompanies the attainment of adulthood. There are valuable insights in this account, but unresolved questions as well. Insofar as the discovery of a shared misunderstanding depends on chance events, as Matza suggests (1964:54-58), systematic differences in desistance remain unexplained. Why does desistance from violence offenses occur later and more slowly than for theft offenses? Why are some juveniles so much more extensively involved in delinquency than others? Matza's remarkable presentation of the subjective elements in delinquency must be supplemented by an analysis of the objective, structural elements in causation, if such questions are to be answered.
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That is the approach I will take. I will present an analysis of the position of juveniles in American society and elaborate the implications of that position for juvenile involvement in crime. The explanation of high levels of juvenile involvement in crime will have two major components. The first, a theory of motivation, locates sources of motivation toward criminal involvement in the structural position of juveniles in American society. The second, derived from control theory, suggests that the willingness to act on the basis of criminal motivation is distributed unequally among age groups because the cost of being apprehended are different for persons of different ages. Although some of the theoretical ideas (e.g. control theory) on which I will be drawing have already appeared in the delinquency literature, each by itself is inadequate as a full theory of delinquency. When put together with some new ideas, however, a very plausible account of age and other systematic sources of variation in delinquent involvement emerges.
ANOMIE AND THE JUVENILE LABOR MARKET Robert Merton's discussion of anomie has provided a framework for a large volume of research on the etiology of crime. Although Merton observed that a disjunction between socially inculcated goals and legitimate means for attaining them would produce a strain toward deviance, whatever the goal (Merton, 1957:166), specific application of the perspective to delinquency has been restricted to an assessment of the contribution to delinquency causation of the one cultural goal Merton considered in depth, namely occupational success. Cloward and Ohlin for example, attribute lower class male delinquency to the anticipation of failure in achieving occupational goals as adults. These youths' involvement in theft is interpreted as a strategy for gaining admission to professional theft and organized crime circles, that is, a way of obtaining the tutelage and organizational affiliations necessary for the successful pursuit of career crime, rather than for immediate financial return. Crime is thus seen as a means toward the attainment ofJuture goals rather than present goals. The assumption that delinquency is instrumentally related to the attainment of adult goals is plausible only for limited categories of delinquency, however; e.g. students who cheat on exams in the face of keen competition for admission to college or graduate school, and youths who save what they earn as pimps or drug merchants to capitalize investment in conventional business enterprises. For other forms of delinquency this assumption is less tenable. Delinquents would have to be stupid indeed to suppose that shoplifting, joy-riding, burglary, robbery or drug use could bring the prestige or pecuniary rewards associated with high status lawful occupation. Nor is there evidence that most delinquents seek careers in professional theft or organized crime. In the face of Cohen's characterization of delinquents as short-run hedonists (1955:25), and the difficulty parents and
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teachers encounter in attempting to engage delinquent youths in activities which could improve chances of occupational success (like school homework), the future orientation assumed in opportunity theory is especially farfetched. The potential explanatory power of anomie theory, is, however, not exhausted by Cloward and Ohlin's formulation, because delinquency can be a response to a discrepancy between aspirations and expectations for the attainment of goals other than occupational ones. Most people have a multiplicity of goals, and only some of them are occupational. As the salience of different life goals can vary with stages of the life-cycle, our understanding of delinquency may be advanced more by examining those goals given a high priority by adolescents than by considering the importance attached to different goals in American culture generally. The transition from childhood to adolescence is marked by a heightened sensitivity to the expectations of peers and a reduced concern with fulfilling parental expectations (BIos, 1941; Bowerman and Kinch, 1959; Tuma and Livsen, 1960; Conger, 1973:286-92). Popularity with peers becomes highly valued, and exclusion from the most popular cliques leads to acute psychological distress. Adolescent peer groups and orientation to the expectations of peers are found in many societies (Eisenstadt, 1956; Bloch and Neiderhoffer, 1958); but the natural tendency of those who share common experiences and problems to prefer one another's company is accentuated in American society by the importance that parents and school attach to popularity and to developing social skills assumed to be necessary for later occupational success (Mussen et aI., 1969). In addition, the exclusion of young people from adult work and leisure activity forces adolescents into virtually exclusive association with one another, cutting them offfrom alternative sources of validation for the self (as well as reducing the degree of adult supervision). A long-run trend toward increased age segregation created by changing patterns of work and education has increased the vulnerability of teenagers to the expectations and evaluations of their peers (Panel on Youth, 1974). This dependence on peers for approval is not itself criminogenic. In many tribal societies, age-homogeneous bands of youths are functionally integrated into the economic and social life of the tribe and are not considered deviant (Mead, 1939; Eisenstadt, 1956:56-92). In America, too, many teenage clubs and cliques are not delinquent. Participation in teenage social life, however, requires resources. In addition to personal assets and skills (having an attractive appearance and "good personality," being a skilled conversationalist, being able to memorize song lyrics and learn dance steps, and in some circles, being able to fight), money is needed for buying clothes, cosmetics, cigarettes, alcoholic beverages, narcotics, phonograph records, transistor radios, gasoline for cars and motorcycles, tickets to films and concerts, meals in restaurants, and for gambling. The progressive detachment of teenage social life from that of the family and the emergence of advertising directed toward a teenage market (this being a creation of post-
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war affluence and the "baby boom ") have increased the importance of these goods to teenagers and hence have inflated the costs of their social activities. When parents are unable or unwilling to subsidize their children's social life at the level required by local convention, when children want to prevent their parents from learning of their expenditures, or when they are reluctant to incur the obligations created by taking money from their parents, alternative sources of funds must be sought. Full or part-time employment once constituted such an alternative, but the long-run, persistent decline in teenage employment and labor force participation has progressively eliminated this alternative. During the period from 1870 to 1920, many states passed laws restricting child labor and establishing compulsory education. Therefore, despite a quadrupling of the "gainfully employed" population from 1870 to 1930, the number of gainfully employed workers in the 10- to 15year-old age bracket declined. The Great Depression resulted in a further contraction of the teenage labor force and :increased the school-leaving age (Panel on Youth, 1974:36-38). In 1940 the U.S. government finally stopped counting all persons over the age of 10 as part of the labor force (Tomson and Fiedler, 1975)! In recent years, teenage labor market deterioration has been experienced mainly by black teenagers. From 1950 to 1973, black teenage labor force participation declined from 67.8% to 34.7%, while white teenage labor force participation remained stable at about 63%. The current recession has increased teenage unemployment in the Hi- to 19-year-old age bracket to about 20%, with the rate for black teenagers being twice as high. This process has left teenagers less and less capable of financing an increasingly costly social life whose importance is enhanced as the age segregation of society grows. Adolescent theft then occurs as a response to the disjunction between the desire to participate in social activities with peers and the absence of legitimate sources of funds needed to finance this participation. Qualitative evidence supporting this explanation of adolescent theft is found in those delinquency studies that describe the social life of delinquent groups. Sherif and Sherif noted in their study of adolescent groups that theft was often instrumentally related to the group's leisure-time social activities: In several groups ... stealing was not the incidental activity that it was in others. It was regarded as an acceptable and necessaIY means of getting needed possessions, or, more usually, cash. Members of the aforementioned groups frequently engaged in theft when they were broke, usually selling articles other than clothing, and often using the money for group entertainment and treats. (1964:174)
Similarly, Werthman (1967) reports that among San Francisco delinquents, shoplifting ... was viewed as a more instrumental activity, as was the practice of stealing coin changers from temporarily evacuated buses parked in a nearby
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public depot. In the case of shoplifting, most of the boys wanted and wore the various items of clothing they stole: and when buses were robbed, either the money was divided among the boys, or it was used to buy supplies for a party being given by the club. Studies of urban delinquent gangs or individuals in England (Fyvel, 1962; Parker, 1974), Israel and Sweden (Toby, 1967), Taiwan (Lin, 1959), Holland (Bauer, 1964), and Argentina (DeFleur, 1970) present the same uniform picture: unemployed or employed-but-poorly-paid male youths steal to support their leisure-time, group-centered social activities. Only to a very limited extent are the proceeds of theft used for biological smvival (e.g., food). Where parents subsidize their children adequately, the incentive to steal is obviously reduced. Because the cost of social life can increase with class position, a strong correlation between social class membership and involvement in theft is not necessarily predicted. Insofar as self-reporting studies suggest that the correlation between participation in nonviolent forms of property acquisition and parental socioeconomic status is not very high, this may be a strong point for my theory. By contrast, the theories of Cohen, Miller, and Cloward and Ohlin all clash with the self-reporting studies. In view of recent suggestions that increases in female crime and delinquency are linked with changing gender roles (of which the women's liberation movement is taken either as a cause or a manifestion), it is of interest to note that the explanation of adolescent theft presented here is applicable to boys and girls, and in particular, allows for female delinquency in support of traditional gender roles related to peer involvement in crime. The recent increases in female crime have occurred largely in those forms of theft where female involvement has traditionally been high, such as larceny (Simon, 1975), and are thus more plausibly attributed to the same deteriorating economic position that males confront then to changes in gender role. As teenagers get older, their vulnerability to the expectations of peers is reduced by institutional involvements that provide alternative sources of self-esteem; moreover, opportunities for acquiring money legitimately expand. Both processes reduce the motivation to engage in acquisitive forms of delinquent behavior. Consequently, involvement in theft should fall off rapidly with age, and it does. DELINQUENCY AND THE SCHOOL To explain juvenile theft in terms of structural obstacles to legitimate sources of money at a time when peer-oriented leisure activities require it is implicitly to assume that money and goods are stolen because they are useful. Acts of vandalism, thefts in which stolen objects are abandoned or destroyed, and interpersonal violence not necessary to accomplish a theft
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cannot be explained in this way. These are the activities that led Albert Cohen to maintain that much delinquency is "malicious" and "nonutilitarian" (1955:25) and to argue that the content of the delinquent subculture arose in the lower class male's reaction to failure in schools run according to middle class standards. Although Cohen can be criticized for not indicating the criteria used for assessing rationality-indeed, for failure to find out from delinquents themselves what they perceived the goals of their destructive acts to be-and though details of Cohen's theory (to be noted below) appear to be inaccurate, his observation that delinquency may be a response to school problems need not be abandoned. Indeed, the literature proposing a connection between one or another aspect of school and delinquency is voluminous (see for example, Polk and Schafer, 1972). I believe that two features of the school experience, its denial of student autonomy, and its subjection of some students to the embarrasment of pUlblic degradation, are especially important in causing "non-utilitarian" delinquency. In all spheres of life outside the school, and particularly within the family, children more or less steadily acquire larger measures of personal autonomy as they mature. Over time, the "democratization" of the family has reduced the age at which given levels of autonomy are acquired. The gradual extension of freedom that normally takes place in the family (not without struggle!) is not accompanied by parallel deregulation at school. Authoritarian styles of teaching, and rules concerning such matters as smoking, hair styles, manner of dress, going to the bathroom, and attendance, come into conflict with expectations students derive from the relaxation of controls in the family.3 The delegitimation of hierarchical authority structures brought about by the radical movements of the 1960s has sharpened student awareness of this contradiction. The symbolic significance attached to autonomy exacerbates the inherently onerous burden of school restrictions. Parents and other adults invest age-specific rights and expectations with moral significance by disapproving "childish" behavior and by using privileges to reward behavior they label "mature." Because of this association, the deprivation of autonomy is experienced as "being treated like a baby," that is, as a member of a disvalued age-status. All students are exposed to these restrictions, and to some degree, all probably resent them. For students who are at least moderately successful at their schoolwork, who excel at sports, participate in extracurricular school activities, or are members of popular cliques, this resentment is likely to be more than compensated for by rewards associated with school attendance. These students tend to conform to school regulations most of the time, rarely collide with school officials, and are unlikely to feel overtly hostile to school or teachers. Students who are unpopUlar, and whose academic record, whether from inability or disinterest, is poor, receive no comparable compensation. For them, school can only be a frustrating experience: it brings no current gratification and no promise of future payoff. Why then
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should they put up with these restrictions? These students often get into trouble, and feel intense hostility to the school. Social class differences must of course be taken into account. Preadolescent and early adolescent middle and upper class children are supervised more closely than their working class counterparts, and thus come to expect and accept adult authority, while working class youths, who enter an unsupervised street life among peers at an early age, have more autonomy to protect, and guard their prerogatives jealously (Psathas, 1957; Kobrin, 1962; Werthman, 1967: Rainwater, 1970:211-34; Ladner, 1971:61-63). To the extent that they see in the school's denial of their autonomy, preparation for a future in occupations that also deny autonomy, and see in their parents' lives the psychic costs of that denial, they may be more prone to rebel than middle class students, who can generally anticipate entering jobs that allow more discretion and autonomy. Middle class youths also have more to gain by accepting adult authority than their working class counterparts. Comparatively affluent parents can control their children better because they have more resources they can withhold and are in a better position to secure advantages for their children. Children who believe that their future chances depend on school success are likely to conform even if they resent the school's attempt to regulate their lives. On the other hand, where returns on school success are reduced by class or racial discrimination (or the belief that these will be obstacles, even if the belief is counter to fact), the school loses this source of social control. For similar reasons, it loses control over upper class children, since their inherited class position frees them from the necessity of doing well in school to guarantee their future economic status. Only a few decades ago, few working class youths-or school failures with middle class family backgrounds-would have been exposed to a contradiction between their expectations of autonomy and the school's attempts to control them, because a high proportion of students, especially working class students, left school at an early age. However, compUlsory school attendance, low wages and high unemployment rates for teenagers, along with increased educational requirements for entry-level jobs, have greatly reduced dropout rates. Thus in 1920, 16.8% ofthe 17-year-old population were high school graduates; and in 1956, 62.3% (Toby, 1967). In consequence, a greater proportion of students, especially those who benefit least from school, is exposed to this contradiction.4 Common psychological responses to the irritation of the school's denial of autonomy range from affective disengagement ("tuning out" the teacher) to smouldering resentment, and at the behavioral level responses range from truancy to self-assertion through the flouting of rules. Such activities as getting drunk, using drugs, joy-riding, truanting, and adopting eccentric styles of dress, apart from any intrinsic gratification these activities may provide, can be seen as forms of what Gouldner has called "conflictual validation of the self" (1970:221- 22). By helping students establish independence from authority (school, parents, etc.), these activities contribute to
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self-regard. Their attraction lies in their being forbidden. As a status system, the school makes further contributions to the causation of delinquency. Almost by definition, status systems embody invidious distinctions. Where standards of evaluation are shared, and position is believed to reflect personal merit, occupants of lower statuses are likely to suffer blows to their self-esteem (Cohen, 1955:112-13; Sennett and Cobb, 1972), The problem is somewhat alleviated by a strong tendency to restrict intimate association to persons of similar status. If one's associates are at roughly the same level as oneself, they provide the standards for self-evaluation (Hyman, 1968). In addition, "democratic" norms of modesty discourage the flaunting of success and boasting of personal merit, thereby insulating the less successful from an implied attribution of their failures to their own deficiencies. These niceties are not, however, universal in applicability. In our society, certification as a full-fledged social member is provided those whose commitment to the value of work and family is documented by spouse, home, car and job (for women, children have traditionally substituted for job). Institutional affiliations are thus taken as a mark of virtue, or positive stigma. Those who meet these social criteria are accorded standards of respect in face-to-face interaction not similarly accorded members of unworthy or suspect categories (e.g., prison and psychiatric hospital inmates, skid row bums, the mentally retarded). In particular, these fullfledged members of society are permitted to sustain self-presentations as dignified, worthy persons, regardless of what may be thought or said of them in private. Students, especially failing students, and those with lower class or minority origins, are accorded no comparable degree of respect. As they lack the appropriate institutional affiliations, their moral commitment to the dominant institutions of society is suspect. In this sense, they are social strangers; we don't quite know what we can expect from them. They are, moreover, relatively powerless. In consequence, they are exposed to evaluations from which adults are ordinarily shielded. School personnel continuously communicate their evaluations of students through grades, honor rolls, track positions, privileges, and praise for academic achievement and proper deportment. On occasion, the negative evaluation of students conveyed by the school's ranking systems is supplemented by explicit criticism and denunciation on the part of teachers who act as if the academic performance of failing students could be elevated by telling them they are stupid, or lazy, or both. Only the most extreme failures in the adult world are subjected to degradation ceremonies of this kind. Cohen (1955) has argued that working class youths faced with this situation protect their self-esteem by rejecting conventional norms and values. Seeking out one another for mutual SUpp0I1, they create a delinquent subculture of opposition to middle class norms in which they can achieve status. This subculture is seen as supporting the non-utilitarian acts of destructiveness that alleviate frustration. There is little difficulty in finding evi-
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dence of adolescent destructiveness, but the choice of target may be more rational (or less non-utilitarian) than Cohen allows. If the school is a major source of the juvenile's frustration, then the large and growing volume of school vandalism and assaults on teachers may, in the perpetrator's own frame of reference, not be irrational at all, even though it may be targeted on those who themselves are not necessarily to blame for what the school does. Other targets may be chosen because of their symbolic value, such as members of a despised racial group or class stratum, or adults, who represent repressive authority. Even random violence, though comparatively rare, can be a way of experiencing the potency and autonomy that institutions-the school among them-fail to provide (Silberman, 1978). Self-reporting studies of delinquency indicate the association between class and most forms of delinquency to be weaker than Cohen supposed. School failure, though class-linked, is not the monopoly of any class, and the self-esteem problems of middle class youths who fail are not necessarily any less than those of working class schoolmates; indeed since parental expectation for academic achievement may be higher in middle class families, and since school failure may auger downward mobility, their problems could conceivably be worse. If delinquency restores self-esteem lost through school failure, it may selVe this function for students of all class backgrounds. The impact of school degradation ceremonies is not limited to their effect on students' self-esteem. When a student is humiliated by a teacher the student's attempt to present a favorable self to schoolmates is undercut. Even students whose prior psychological disengagement from the value system of the school leaves their self-esteem untouched by a teacher's disparagement may react with anger at being embarrassed before peers. It is the situation of being in the company of others whose approval is needed for self-esteem that makes it difficult for teenagers to ignore humiliation that older individuals, with alternative sources of self-esteem, could readily ignore. Visible displays of independence from, or rejections of, authority can be understood as attempts to re-establish moral character in the face of affronts. This can be accomplished by direct attacks on teachers or school, or through daring illegal performances elsewhere. These responses mayor may not reflect anger at treatment perceived to be unjust, mayor may not defend the student against threats to self-esteem, mayor may not reflect a repudiation of conventional conduct norms. What is crucial is that these activities demonstrate retaliation for injury and the rejection of official values to an audience of peers whose own resentment of constituted authority causes it to be appreciative of rebels whom it would not necessarily dare to imitate. Secret delinquency and acts that entailed no risk would not selVe this function. Field research on the interaction between teachers and delinquent students (Werthman, 1967), and the responses of delinquent youths to challenges to their honor (Short and Strodtbeck, 1965; Horowitz and Schwartz,
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1974), support this dramaturgical interpretation of delinquency. Most gang violence seems not to erupt spontaneously out of anger, but is chosen and manipulated for its ability to impress others. Non-utilitarian forms of theft, property destruction and violence may well be understood as quite utilitarian if their purpose is the establishment or preseIvation of the claim to be a certain sort of person, rather than the acquisition of property. Goffman (1974) has called attention to the common features of other, mainly non-criminal activities in which participants establish moral character through risk-taking. Such activities as dueling, bull fighting, sky diving, mountain climbing, big game hunting, and gambling for high stakes are undertaken for the opportunity they provide to calVe out a valued social identity by exhibiting courage, daring, pluck and composure. These qualities are those the industrial system (factory and school) tend to disvalue or ignore: the concept of seeking out risks and "showing off" is antithetical to the traditional ethos of capitalism, where the emphasis has been placed on minimizing risk, using time productively, and suppressing the self to demonstrate moral character. Consequently, those who seek prestige through risk-taking traditionally come from classes not subject to the discipline and self-denial of industriall production, e.g. the European nobility, bohemian populations, and the unemployed poor. More recently, as production has come to require less sacrifice and selfdenial from large sectors of the work force, and to require the steady expansion of stimulated consumption for its growth, the more affluent sectors of the labor force are increasingly encouraged to seek an escape from the routine of daily life through mild forms of risk-taking (e.g., gambling and skiing) as well as through the leisure use of drugs and sex. The similarity between the subculture of delinquency and that of the leisurely affluent, noted by Matza and Sykes (1961), makes sense in view of the position of the delinquent vis it vis the school. Like the factory, the school frequently requires monotonous and meaningless work. Regimentation is the rule. Expressions of originality and spontaneity are not only discouraged, but may be punished. Sociability among students is prohibited by the discipline of the classroom. Students who reap no present rewards from their schoolwork or who anticipate only the most limited occupational returns as a compensation for their adherence to the onerousness of school discipline are free to cultivate the self-expressive traits which the school fails to reward, because they will lose nothing that is important to them by doing so. As Downes (1966) points out, they may come to regard adults who work as defeated and lifeless because of their subordination to a routine that necessitates self-suppression, and hence try to avoid work because of the cost in self-alienation. Traditionally this has been especially true of students with lower class backgrounds; however, when the political and economic institutions of sectors of society lose their legitimacy, students of other classes may find the prospect of entering conventional careers in those sectors so repugnant that they lose the motivation to achieve in school, and also cultivate life-
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styles based on self-expression or politically motivated risk-taking. The bright hippies and radicals from white middle class backgrounds in the late 1960s are a case in point. The similarity between delinquent and non-criminal recreational risktaking warns us that the pursuit of status through risk-taking does not necessarily arise from problems in self-esteem. Once a status system rewarding delinquent activity exists, students may act with reference to it in order to increase prestige in the group, not only to prevent prestige from falling. Thus teachers may be provoked (Werthman, 1967), gang rivals taunted, and daring thefts and assaults perpetrated, even in the absence of humiliation. When students drop out or graduate from high school, they enter a world that, while sometimes inhospitable, does not restrict their autonomy and assault their dignity in the same way the school does. The need to engage in crime to establish a sense of an autonomous self and to preserve moral character through risk-taking is thus reduced. In addition, the sympathetic audience of other students of the same age is taken away. Thus schoolleaving eliminates major sources of motivation toward delinquency. Indeed, American studies indicate that the self-esteem of dropouts rises after they leave school (Bachman et al., 1972) and that dropping out produces an immediate decline in delinquency involvement (Mukherjee, 1971; Elliot and Voss, 1974). In England, when the school-leaving age was raised by one year, the peak age for delInquency rose simultaneously by one year (McClean and Wood, 1969). These findings are especially ironic, in that nineteenth-century reformers touted the extension of public schooling as a way of reducing delinquency; and present-day delinquency prevention programs have involved campaigns to keep delinquents in school.5
MASCULINE STATUS ANXIETY AND DELINQUENCY
Many observers have remarked on the disproportionate involvement of males in delinquency, and the exaggerated masculine posturing that characterizes their involvement, particularly where violence offenses are concerned. This behavior pattern has been explained as a "masculine protest" against maternal domination and identification, especially in the female-based households of the lower class (Parsons, 1947; Cohen, 1955:162-69; Miller, 1958). In such households, the argument goes, boys will tend to identify with the mother, and hence will experience uncertainty and anxiety in later years in connection with their identification as a male. To allay this anxiety, they reject the" good" values of the mother and engage in "masculine" forms of delinquency. Application of the theory to delinquency in the United States has not been entirely successful. Male delinquency does appear to be associated with what has been interpreted as anxiety over masculinity, but it is independent of whether the household in which the child is raised lacks an adult male (Monahan, 1957; Tennyson, 1967; Rosen, 1969). This finding
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points to the need for a revision in the argument. Hannerz (1969) has pointed out that children raised in homes without fathers may still have alternative male role models. Indeed, children raised in a community where adult male unemployment rates are high may spend more of their time in the company of adult males who could seIVe as role models than their middle class peers. Males who are not in doubt about their identity as males may nevertheless feel anxiety in connection with anticipated or actual inability to fulfill traditional sex role expectations concerning work and support of family. This masculine status anxiety can be generated by a father who is present but ineffectual, and by living in a neighborhood where, for social-structural reasons, many men are unemployed-regardless of whether one's own father is present in the household. Men who experience such anxiety because they are prevented from fulfilling conventional male role expectations may attempt to alleviate their anxiety by exaggerating those traditionally male traits that can be expressed. Attempts to dominate women (including rape) and patterns of interpersonal violence can be seen in these terms. In other words, crime can be a response to masculine status anxiety no less than to anxiety over male identity; it can provide a sense of potency that :is expected and desired but not achieved in other spheres of life. In this interpretation, a compulsive concern with toughness and masculinity arises not from a hermetically sealed lower-class subculture "with an integrity of its own" nor from the psychodynamics of a female-headed household (Miller, 1958), but as a response to a contradiction between structural economic-political constraints on male status attainment and the cultural expectations for men that permeate American society. The role of the subculture Miller describes is to make available the behavioral adaptations that previous generations have developed in response to this contradiction. If I am correct in assuming that delinquents in the last years of elementary school and early years of high school are not excessively preoccupied with their occupational prospects, but become more concerned with their futures toward the end of high school, then masculine anxiety during these early years must stem from other sources. One plausible source lies in the contradiction between the school's expectations of docility and submission to authority, and more widely communicated social expectations of masculinity. While the school represses both boys and girls, the message that girls get is consistent with society's message; the message boys receive is contradictory. This difference would help to explain sex differences in delinquency in early adolescence. Most of the male behavior that can be explained plaUSibly in this way-smoking, sexual conquests, joy-riding, vandalism, fighting-is fairly trivial, and either becomes legal in mid to late adolescence or abates rapidly. Anxiety over inability to fulfill traditional male occupational roles would be expected to show up late in adolescence. One would expect masculine status anxiety to appear with greatest in-
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tensity and to decline most slowly in those segments of the population in which adult male unemployment is exceptionally high. This conforms to the general pattern of arrests for violent offenses such as homicide, forcible rape and assaults-offenses often unconnected with the pursuit of material gain, and hence most plausibly interpreted as a response to masculine status anxiety. Rates of arrest for these offenses peak in the immediate post -high school age brackets (several years later than for the property offenses) and the decline is slower than for property offenses. Moreover, blacks are overrepresented in violence offense arrests to a much greater degree than in arrests for property offenses.
COSTS OF DELINQUENCY
So far, some possible sources of age-linked variation in motivation to participate in criminal activity have been identified, but this is only half the story, for one may wish to engage in some form of behavior but nevertheless decide not to do so because its potential costs are deemed unacceptably high. Costs can be a consequence of delinquency, and must be taken into account. Control theorists have begun to do so (Briar and Piliavin, 1965; Hirschi, 1969; Piliavin et al. 1969). In early adolescence the potential costs of all but the most serious forms of delinquency are relatively slight. Parents and teachers are generally willing to write off a certain amount of misbehavior as "childish mischief," while enormous caseloads have forced juvenile courts in large cities to adopt a policy that comes very close to what Schur (1973) has called "radical nonintelVention." Given the slight risk of apprehension for any single delinquent act, the prevalence of motivations to violate the law, and the low cost of lesser violations, we should expect minor infractions to be common among juveniles, and the self-reporting studies generally suggest that they are. As teenagers get older, the potential costs of apprehension increase: victims may be more prone to file a complaint, and police to make an arrest. Juvenile court judges are more likely to take a serious view of an older offender, especially one with a prior record. Older offenders risk prosecution in criminal court, where penalties tend to be harsher, and where an official record will have more serious consequences for later job opportunities. Delinquents are acutely sensitive to these considerations. According to several youthful offenders testi(ying before the New York State Select Committee at a hearing on assault and robbery against the elderly, "If you're 15 and under you won't go to jail .... That's why when we do a "Rush and Crib"-which means you rush the victim and push him or her into their apartment, you let the youngest member do any beatings. See, we know if they arrest him, he'll be back on the street in no time" (Williams, 1976). Thus the leniency of the juvenile court contributes to high levels of juvenile crime.
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Just as the costs of crime are escalating, new opportunities in the form of jobs, marriage, or enlistment in the armed forces create stakes in conformity and, as Matza points out (1964:55), may also relieve problems of masculine status anxiety. Toward the end of high school, when student concern about the future increases, the anticipation of new opportunities is manifested in desistance from delinquency and avoidance of those who do not similarly desist. Consistent with this interpretation is the fact that in both England and the United States, the peak year for delinquent involvement is the year before school-leaving. Those whose opportunities for lucrative employment are limited by obstacles associated with racial and/or class membership, however, will have far less reason to desist from illegal activity than those whose careers are not similarly blocked. The jobs available to young members of the lower strata of the working class tend to be limited, tedious, and low paying. Marriage may appear less appealing to young men whose limited prospects promise inability to fulfill traditional male expectations as breadwinner. Even an army career may be precluded by an arrest record, low intelligence test scores, physical disability, or illiteracy. Thus the legitimate opportunity structure, even if relatively useless for understanding entrance into delinquency, may still be helpful in understanding patterns of desistance. The same may be said of the illegal opportunity structure. Those few delinquents who are recruited into organized crime or professional theft face larger rewards and less risk of serious penalty than those not so recruited, and their personal relationships with partners may be more satisfying. They should be less likely to desist from crime, but their offense patterns can be expected to change. This reasoning suggests that the association between criminal involvement on the one hand and race and class on the other should be stronger for adults than for juveniles. If this is so, arrest rates in a given offense category should decline more rapidly for whites and youths with middle class backgrounds than for blacks and youths with working class and lower class backgrounds, and they do (Wolfgang et al., 1972).
DELINQUENCY AND THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE JUVENILE Among the structural sources of adolescent crime identified here, the exclusion of juveniles from the world of adult work plays a crucial role. It is this exclusion that simultaneously exaggerates teenagers' dependence on peers for approval and eliminates the possibility of their obtaining funds to support their intensive, leisure-time social activities. The disrespectful treatment students receive in school depends on their low social status, which in turn reflects their lack of employment and income. In late adolescence and early adulthood, their fear that this lack of employment will persist into adulthood evokes anxiety over achievement of traditional male gender role
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expectations, especially among males in the lower levels of the working class, thus contributing to a high level of violence. Institutionalized leniency to juvenile offenders, which reduces the potential costs of delinquency, stems from the belief that teenagers are not as responsible for their actions as adults. The conception of juveniles as impulsive and irresponsible gained currency around the turn of the century, when organized labor and Progressive reformers campaigned for child labor laws to save jobs for adults, a goal given high priority after the Depression of 1893. This conception was, in a sense, self-fulfilling. Freed from ties to conventional institutions, teenagers have become more impulsive and irresponsible. The exclusion of teenagers from serious work is not characteristic of all societies. Peasant and tribal societies could not afford to keep their young idle as long as we do. In such societies, juvenile crime rates were low. Under feudalism, too, children participated in farming and handicraft production as part of the family unit beginning at a very early age. In depriving masses of serfs and tenant farmers of access to the means of production (land), European capitalism in its early stages of development generated a great deal of crime, but in a manner that cut across age boundaries. Little of the literature on crime in Elizabethan and Tudor England singles out juveniles as a special category. The industrial revolution in the first half of the nineteenth century similarly brought with it a great deal of misery, but its effect on crime was not restricted to juveniles. Children of the working class in that period held jobs at an early age and in some sectors of the economy were given preference. Only middle and upper class children were exempt from the need to work, and they were supervised much more closely than they are nowadays. As far as can be judged, juvenile crime in that period was a much smaller fraction of the total than at present, and was more confined to the lower classes than it is now. In modern capitalist societies, children of all classes share, for a limited period, a common relationship to the means of production (namely exclusion) which is distinct from that of most adults, and they respond to their common structural position in fairly similar ways. Although there are class differences in the extent and nature of delinquency, especially violent delinquency, they are less pronounced than for adults, for whom occupational differentiation is much sharper. The deteriorating position of juveniles in the labor market in recent years has been ascribed to a variety of causes, among them the inclusion of juveniles under minimum wage laws; changes in the structure of the economy (less farm employment); teenage preference for part-time work (to permit longer periods of education), which makes teenage labor less attractive to employers; and the explosion in the teenage labor supply, created by the baby boom, at a time when women were entering the labor market in substantial numbers (Kalacheck, 1973). \Nhatever contribution these circumstances may have made to shifting teenage employment patterns in the
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short run, the exclusion of juveniles from the labor market has been going on for more than a century, and may more plausibly be explained in terms of the failure of the oligopoly-capitalist economy to generate sufficient demand for labor than to these recent developments (Carson, 1972; Bowers, 1975).6
In both the United States and England, the prolongation of education has historically been associated with the contraction of the labor market, casting doubt on the view that more education is something that the general population has wanted for its own sake. Had this been true, the schoolleaving age would have jumped upward in periods of prosperity, when a larger proportion of the population could afford more education, not during depressions. Moreover, the functionalist argument that increased education is necessary as technology becomes more complex would apply at best to a small minority of students, and rests on the dubious assumption that fulltime schooling is pedagogically superior to alternative modes of organizing the education of adolescents. The present social organization of education, which I have argued contributes to delinquency, has also been plausibly attributed to the functional requirement of a capitalist economy for a docile, disciplined and stratified labor force, as well as to the need to keep juveniles out of the labor market. Thus the high and increasing level of juvenile crime we are seeing in present-day United States and in other Western countries originates in the structural position of juveniles in an advanced capitalist economy. Delinquency is not, however, a problem of capitalism alone. Although there are many differences between crime patterns in the United States and the Soviet Union, the limited information available indicates that delinquency in the Soviet Union is often associated with leisure-time consumption activities on the part of youths who are academic failures, and who either are not working or studying, or are working at or preparing for unrewarding jobs (Connor, 1970; Polk, 1972). This suggests that some of the processes described here may be at work in the Soviet Union. Since Soviet society is based on hierarchical domination and requires a docile, disciplined and stratified labor force, this parallel is not surprising. Yet it must not be forgotten that the parallel is only partial. The Soviet economy, for example, does not generate unemployment the way the capitalist economies of the West do. Insofar as can be learned from Soviet sources, juvenile delinquency has declined in recent decades, whereas it has increased rapidly in most of the capitalist nations.
DISCUSSION
For decades, criminologists have proposed such reforms as eliminating poverty and racial discrimination to solve the crime problem (see, Silberman, 1978, for the latest of this genre). None of them seriously addresses how the serious obstacles to achieving this task are to be overcome within
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the framework of a capitalist society. To suppose that the writing of an article or a book calling for an end to poverty and racism will actually contribute to ending poverty and racism is to betray a whimsical bit of utopianism. Marxist theorists tend to see these problems as largely produced by a class society, and insoluble within it. Efforts to tackle these problems may certainly be worthwhile, but not because they can be expected to achieve full success. My analysis of delinquency suggests that most proposed "solutions" to the delinquency problem would have limited impact. Thoroughly integrating teenagers into the labor force, on at least a part-time basis, would go far toward reducing delinquency. But the jobs for adolescents are not there; and the drastic restructuring of education that would be required is hardly to be expected in the foreseeable future. If young people had a good understanding of the structural sources of their frustration and oppression, their response might well be different. Instead of individualistic and predatory adaptations, we might see collective, politicized, and non-predatory challenges to their exclusion. It seems unlikely that such a radical transformation in consciousness would develop spontaneously, but in the context of a mass socialist movement, it could well occur.
Notes 1 Arrest rates broken down by age can be found in any recent edition of the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports. 2 See, for example, Christiansen 11960), Toby 11967), DeFleur 11970), and Christie 11978). 3 These expectations are derived from young peoples' knowledge of family arrangements in
our society generally, not from their own family circumstances alone. When controls in their own family are not relaxed, this can provide an additional source of conflict. 4 The emphasis given to school problems as a cause of delinquency in the criminological Iiterature of the 1950s and 1960s was probably due at least in part to there being more delinquents in school then than in earlier decades. 5 Although this evidence confirms that the school does contribute to delinquency, it is hardly necessary. In Argentina, patterns of delinquency are fairly similar to those in the U.S., even though the school-leaving age for working class children is 10, and delinquents report favorable attitudes toward school IDe Fleur, 19701. In the United States, unsatisfactory school experiences simply add to the economic motivations created by the exclusion of juveniles from the labor market. 6 The theory of supply and demand in economics demonstrates that with a given demand for a product, profits will be maximized at a lower level of production if the producing firm is a monopoly than if it is faced with competition. Thus the demand for labor has declined relative to the volume of production as American business has become more concentrated in a small number of giant corporations. The replacement of workers by machinery further reduces employment. Monopolization speeds up this process because large firms can more easily afford large investments in machinery. Large corporations can also relocate in other parts of the country or overseas to reduce costs of production, generating unemployment where disinvestment occurs. Since the labor market is not fully competitive, wages do not fall to a level that would permit full employment; such factors as minimum wage laws, labor
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unions, welfare for the unemployed, and illegal income all help to maintain wages above the competitive level.
References Bachman, J. G., S. Green and I. Wirtanen 119721. Droppi'ng Out: Problem or Symptom. Ann Arbor: Institute for Social Research. Bauer, E. J. 119641. "The Trend of Juvenile Offenses in the Netherlands and the United States." Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology and Police Science 55:359-69. Bloch, H.A., and A. Niederhoffer (1958). The Gang. New York: Philosophical Society. BIos, P. 119411. The Adolescent Personality: A Study ofj'ndividual Behavior. New York: Appleton. Bowerman, C. E., and J. W. Kinch 119591. "Changes in Family and Peer Orientation of Children between the Fourth and Tenth Grades." Social Forces 37:206. Bowers, N. (1975). "Youth and the Crisis of Monopoly Capitalism." In Radical Perspectives on the Economic Crisis in Monopoly Capitalism. New York: UniDn £If Radical PDlitical Economics. Briar, S., and I. Piliavin 119651. "Delinquency SituatiDnal Inducements, and CDmmitment tD CDnfDrmity." Social Problems 13:35-45. CarsDn, R. B. (1972). "Youthful Labor Surplus in DisaccumulatiDnist Capitalism." Socialist Revo-
lution 9:15-44. Christiansen, K. 119601. "IndustrializatiDn and UrbanizatiDn in RelatiDn tD Crime and Juvenile Delinquency." International Review of Criminal Policy 16:3. Christie, N. 11978). "YDuth as a Crime-Generating PhenomenDn." In Bany Krisberg and James Austin leds.), The Children of Ishmael. PaID AltD, Calif.: Mayfield. Clark, J. P., and E. W. Haurek 11966). "Age and Sex RDles £If AdDlescents and Their InvDlvement in MiscDnduct: A Reappraisal." SDciolDgy and Social Research 50:495-503. ClDward, R., and L. Ohlin 119601. Delinquency and Opportunity. New YOlk Fnle Press. CDhen, A. (1955). Delinquent Boys. New YDrk: Free Press. CDnger, J. J. (1973). "A WDrld They Never Knew: The Family and SDcial Change." Daedalus 100:1105-38. CDnnDr, W. 11970). Deviance in SDviet SDciety. New York: Columbia University Press. DeFleur, L. 119701. Delinquency in Argentina. Pullman: WashingtDn State University Press. DDwnes, D. M. (1966). The Delinquent SDlution: A Study in Subcultural Theory. New York: Free Press. Eisenstadt, S. N. 119561. FrDm Generation tD Generation: Age Groups and Social Structures. New York: Free Press. Elliot, D. S., and H. L. VDSS (1974). Delinquency and Dropout. Lexington: D.C. Heath. Fyvel, T. R. (1962). Troublemakers. New York: Schocken Books. Goffman, E. (1974). "Where the Action Is." In Interaction Ritual. Garden City: AnchDr BDDks. GDuldner, A. 11970). The Coming Crisis in Western Sociology. New YDrk: Basic Books. Hannerz, U. (1969).Soulside: Inquiries intD Ghetto Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Hirschi, T. (1969). The Causes of Delinquency. Berkeley: University of California Press. Horowitz, R., and G. Schwartz 119741. "Honor, Normative Ambiguity and Gang Violence." Ameri-
can Sociological Review 39:238-51. Hyman, H. H. (1968). "The Psychology £If Status." In H. H. Hyman and E. Singer leds.l, Readings in Reference Group Theory and Research. New York: Free Press.
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Kalacheck, E. 11973). "The Changing Economic Status of the Young." Journal of Youth and Adolescence 2:125-32. Kobrin, S. 119621. 'The Impact of Cultural Factors in Selected Problems of Adolescent Development in the Middle and Lower Class." American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 33:387-90. Ladner, J. 11971). Tomorrow's Tomorrow: The Black Woman. Garden City: Doubleday. Lin, T. 119591. "Two Types of Delinquent Youth in Chinese Society." In Martin K. Opler led.l, Culture and Mental Health. New York: Macmillan. McClean, J. D., and J. C. Wood 119691. Criminal Justice and the Treatment ofQffenders. London: Sweet and Maxwell. Matza, D. 119641. Delinquency and Dr(ft. New York: Wiley. - - - and G. Sykes 119611. "Juvenile Delinquency and Subterranean Values." American Sociological Review 26:712-19. Mead, M. 119391. From the South Seas: Part III. Se}( and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies. New York: Morrow. Merton, R. K. 119571. Social Theory and Social Structure, rev. ed. New York: Free Press. Miller, W. B. 119581. "Lower Class Subculture as a Generating Milieu of Gang Delinquency." Journal of Social Issues 14:5-19. Monahan, T. P. 119571. "Family Status and the Delinquent Child: A Reappraisal and Some New Findings." Social Forces 35:251-58. Mukherjee, S. K. 11971I.A Typological Study of School Status and Delinquency. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms. Mussen, P. H., J. J. Conger and J. Kagan 119691. Child Development and Personality. New York: Harper and Row. Panel on Youth of the President's Science Advisory Committee 119741. Youth: Transition to Adulthood. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Parker, H. H. 119741. View from the Boys. North Pomfret, VI.: David and Charles. Parsons, T. 119471. "Certain Primary Sources and Patterns of Aggression in the Social Structure of the Western World." Psychiatry 10:167-81. Piliavin, I. M., A. C. Vadum and J. A. Hardyck 119691. "Delinquency, Personal Costs and Parental Treatment: A Test of a Reward-Cost Model of Juvenile Criminality." Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology and Police Science 60:165-72. Polk, K. 119721. "Social Class and the Bureaucratic Response to Youthful Deviance." Paper presented to the American Sociological Association. Polk, K., and W. E. Schafer (1972).Schools and Delinquency. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. Psathas, G. (19571. "Ethnicity, Social Class, and Adolescent Independence from Parental Control." American Sociological Review 22:415-23. Rainwater, L. 119701. Behind Ghetto Walls. Chicago: Aldine. Rosen, L. (19691. "Matriarchy and Lower Class Negro Male Delinquency." Social Problems 17:175-89.
Schur, E. M. (19731. Radical Non-Intervention: Rethinking the Delinquency Problem. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. Sennett, R., and J. Cobb (19721. The Hidden Injuries of Class. New York:
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Sherif, M., and C. W. Sherif (1964). Reference Groups: E](ploration into Conformity and Deviation of Adolescents. New York: Harper and Row. Short, J. F., and F. L. Strodtbeck (1965). Group Process and Gang Delinquency. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Silberman, C. (1978). Criminal Violence, Criminal Justice. New York: Random House.
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Simon, R. J. 119751. Women and Crime. Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books. Tennyson, R. A. 11967). "Family Structure and Delinquent Behavior." In M. W. Klein led,), Juvenile Gangs in ContelCt. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. Toby, J. 119671. "Affluence and Adolescent Crime." In Task Force Report: Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime, pp. 132-44. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office. Tomson, B., and E. R. Fiedler 119751. "Gangs: A Response to the Urban World," Part II. In D. S. Cartwright, Barbara Tomson, and Herschey Schwartz leds.), Gang Delinquency. Monterey, Calif.: Brooks/Cole. Tuma, E., and N. Livson 119601. "Family Socioeconomic Status and Altitudes toward Authority."
Child Development 31. Werthman, C. 119671. "The Function of Social Definilions in the Development of Delinquent Careers," pp. 155-70. In Task Force Report: Juvenile Delinquency. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office. Williams, L. 119761. "Three Youths Call Mugging the Elderly Profitable and Safe." New York Times, December 8, p. B2. Wolfgang, M. E., R. M. Figlio and T. Sellin 119721. Delinquency in a Birth Cohort. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Editor's Notes 1 Since this essay was published, Travis Hirschi and Michael Gottfredson have taken exception to its claim that the relationship between age and crime has undergone historical change ("Age and the Explanation of Crime," American Journal ofSociology 89 [1983]: 552-841. The relationship is, they contend, historically and cross-culturally invariant. A careful examination of the evidence, however, shows that there has been appreciable historical change, and that there are cross-naltional differences (David F. Greenberg, "Age, Crime and Social Explanation," American Journal ofSociology 91 [1985]: 1-21; Darrell J. Steffensmeier, Emilie Andersen Allan, Miles D. Harer, and Cathy Streufel, "Age and the Distribution of Crime," American Journal ofSociology 94 [1989]: 803-31. In an unpublished master's thesis done at National Taiwan University, Annie Lee found that official crosssectional rates of Taiwanese women's involvement in crime did not decline until after age 65. This pattern is radically different from that found in contemporary North American and European societies. 2 Partial confirmation that employment variables are important for understanding youthful crime comes from Emilie A. Allan and Darrell J. Steffensmeier, "Youth Underemployment and Property Crime: Differential Effects of Job Availability and Job Quality on Juvenile and Young Adult Arrest Rates," American Sociological Review 54 (1989): 107-23, who found that youthful property crime rates, as measured by arrests, are higher where unemployment, underemployment, and low wages are more prevalent. Randy L. LaGrange and Helene Raskin White, "Age Differences in Delinquency: A Test of Theory," Criminology 23:19--45, examine age-specific contributions of control theory to the explanation of juvenile delinquency. 3 The present essay has been criticized in Piers Beirne and James Messerschmidt, Criminology (San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991), p. 572, for paying too little attention to race and class differences in delinquency. The criticism is probably valid, though we still have very little sure knowledge of what the relationship between these background variables and delinquency actually is (Charles Tittle and Robert F. Meier, "Specnying the SES/Delinquency Relationship," Criminology 28 [1990]: 271-991. Several theories of delinquency that draw on Marxism and other strands of criminologi-
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cal thought attach greater importance to social class than I did (Mark Colvin and John Pauly, "A Critique of Criminology: Toward an Integrated Structural-Marxist Theory of Delinquency Production," American Journal ofSociology 89 [1983]: 513-51; John Hagan, A. R. Gillis, and John Simpson, "The Class Structure of Gender and Delinquency: Toward a Power-Control Theory of Common Delinquent Behavior," American Journal ofSociology 90 [1985]: 1151-78; Hagan, Simpson, and Gillis, "ClarifYing and Extending PowerControl Theory," American Journal ofSociology 95 [1990]: 1024-37; Hagan, Simpson, and Gillis, "Class in the Household: A Power-Control Theory of Gender and Delinquency," American Journal ofSociology 92 [1987]: 788-816). Some elements of these theories have received empirical confirmation, while others have not (Gary F. Jensen and Kevin Thompson, "What's Class Got to Do With It? A Further Examination of Power-Control Theory," American Journal of Sociology 95 [1990]: 1009-23; Robert Larzelere and Gerald R. Patterson, "Parental Management; Mediator of the Effect of Socioeconomic Status on Early Delinquency," Criminology 28 [1990]: 301-23; Steven F. Messner and Marvin D. Krohn, "Class, Compliance Structures, and Delinquency: Assessing Integrated Structuralist Marxist Theory," American Journal ofSociology 96 [1990]: 300-3481.
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Rape, Sexual Inequality, and Levels of Violence Julia Schwendinger and Herman Schwendinger Adapted by permission from Julia and Herman Schwendinger, "Rape, Sexual Inequality and Levels of Violence," Crime and Social Justice 16 (19811; 3-32.
I. SEXUAL INEQUALITY AND MODE OF PRODUCTION Bring a group of knowledgeable anthropologists into one room for a serious discussion of violence against women, and the interchange begins with the realization that sexual inequality is entirely rooted in historical conditions (Caulfield, 1978). In light of the historical variations in sexual equality, the so-called "perpetual" battle between the sexes becomes a myth without substance. Women were not (as Brownmiller[1975] says) subjugated by men in the dawn of time. Anthropologist Eleanor Leacock describes numerous archaic societies in which the status of women was autonomous or equal to men. Her work on the Montagnais-Labradore tribes uses the chronicles vvritten by a seventeenth-century Jesuit priest, Father Paul Le Jeune, to show how the French colonials imposed sexual inequality and patriarchal family relationships on a society that had never known such relationships before (Leacock, 1975; Leacock and Goodman,1976). On the other hand, the use of rape as a mode of controlling women, in addition to other violent measures, has been reported by anthropological studies. In some societies, for example, rape is institutionalized to keep a woman in her place after other measures fail to restrict her sexual activities. In Mundugamor, says Margaret Mead (1963:219): "A woman of equal violence [to the excessively violent men] who continuously tries to attach new lovers and is insatiable in her demands, may in the end be handed over to another community to be communally raped." The Iatmul headhunters also call in their age mates to rape their wives into submission (Mead, 1969:76). Anthropologist Gayle Rubin (1975:163) generalizes: "In the Amazon valley of the New Guinea highlands, women are frequently kept in their place by gang rape when the ordinaIY mechanisms of masculine intimidation prove insufficient; 'We tame our women with the banana,' said one Mundurucu man."
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We notice, however, that this form of rape exists in societies that are violent in other respects. Among the Mundugamor, according to Mead, the punishment for a man who exceeds the norms of violence is death; he may be killed treacherously during an intertribal battle or a member of his tribe may kill him directly (Mead, 1963:219). The Mundurucu and Iatmul provide further evidence that institutionalized rape is usually embedded historically in supremacist, warlike cultures (Mead, 1969:77, 115, 117; Bateson, 1958:59-72, 138-41). Consequently it is possible that the adoption of rape is partly determined by the general level of violence in these societies. The economies of such male supremacist tribes figure importantly, though not universally, in creating the level of violence. Often the tribes are distinguished by patrilineal estates or individual male property ownership. While, allegedly, tribes like the headhunting Mundurucu were extremely violent traditionally (Murphy, 1960), in other tribes, violence may be a function of their production for exchange which, in some cases, includes production for capitalist markets. Furthermore, while some of these tribes may not be internally divided by social classes or characterized by private property ownership, their relations with neighboring groups may be antagonistic. They engage in raids and militaIY campaigns, and at times, their violence is directed toward capturing wealth, tribute, natural resources, or children, or toward the abduction of slaves, especially women. In this context, wars are, at least in part, economic policy. Further, some societies with sexual inequality are based on "lineage systems" which concentrate economic resources and surplus goods in the hands of male elders. Even though they are not yet class societies, exploitative developments move them in this direction !Dupre and Rey, 1980; Meillasoux, 1980J. The appreciation of the effects of socioeconomic relations on sexual inequality directs our attention to a comparative study by Karen Sacks 11975), an anthropologist. Sacks contends that sexual inequality varies greatly depending upon socioeconomic relations. (We will describe her study in the first section of this chapter.) Her thesis will be extended to suggest that within the context of modes of production and their articulation, both property relations and a woman's participation in social production affect her status in differing degrees.1 Furthermore, we will hypothesize that the general level of violence in the societies studied is also associated with their modes of production and degree of sexual inequality, although this association is not necessarily invariant. 2 In the second part of this article, we will test our hypothesis by examining evidence of violence in the same four African societies studied by Sacks. We will be particularly interested in demonstrating that exploitative modes of production culminating in precapitalist class societies produce sexual inequality along with the production or intensification of violence in general,3 Finally, the third and concluding part of our discussion will
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deal with the social mechanisms, operating in societies dominated by commodity relationships, that make violence against women appear to be derived spontaneously from the nature of men. The four tribes: modes of production and iilutonomy
As indicated, sexual inequality varies depending upon the dominant mode of production within a society. Sacks prepared a fascinating account of changes in sexual relations ranging from enviable equality to the subjugation of women in four African societies. She selected the four from anthropological writings on East and South Africa, ensuring that the sexual, economic and political data were adequate and comparable. The societies ranged from the highly egalitarian Mbuti of Zaire to the inegalitarian class society of the Baganda in Uganda. She included the Lovedu and Mpondo of South Africa because their egalitarianism falls between the others. Sacks analyzed each of these societies, modifying but keeping in mind Engels's theory of sexual inequality and class relations. (Engels [1975J attributed the emergence of sexual inequality to the rise of social classes and their institutions, the family, private property, and the state.) The Mbuti are a simple forest people who, like prehistoric societies, survive chiefly by hunting and gathering the necessities of life. They live communally in family households, but both sexes collect and process necessities for direct use by the entire band. Thus they have an "economy of use," according to Sacks (1975:221). The Mbuti sexual relations are completely egalitarian. There are no sexist standards, and the Mbuti marriage, for instance, does not restrict a woman's authority over her work, her children, or her socializing. Woman's labor is "public labor": it is not confined to the immediate family household but contributes to the entire band's survival. The Lovedu, on the other hand, illustrate a contradictory set of relations. Because of their patrilineal organization, women are discriminated against in domestic life, especially in relation to property ownership and transfer of family resources. Also, women are subject to some restrictions based on their reproductive capacity, on menstruation, pregnancy, and adultery. However, women are not wards of men and even within the household they enjoy some degree of independence. The relations outside the home scene deny extensive patrilineal discrimination. Lovedu women are powerful in tribal political life. They hold political office, officiate at certain religious rituals, and participate in political decisions and settlement of disputes. And, like the Mbuti, both sexes among the Lovedu give and receive food, an activity that is the material basis for exercising political power. Lovedu women have personal autonomy outside of domestic life. One measure of their freedom and independence is that women and men regularly participate in most of the same social activities. Women exercise
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independent choice with regard to marital and extramarital sex and divorce. Regarding extramarital affairs, the Lovedu, like the Mbuti, have a single, not a double standard. Significantly, unlike the Mbuti, the Lovedu society is organized around patrilineal family estates and male ownership of property. On the other hand, like the Mbuti, the Lovedu have an economy of use. Furthermore, the existing sexual and social restrictions on women's activities are weakly enforced or limited. Despite their patrilineal restrictions, the Lovedu, Sacks concludes, are predominantly egalitarian (Sacks, 1975:222-23). The Mpondo is a male supremacist society with deep antagonisms. For example, Mpondo men view their own extramarital affairs as right and proper; yet, they define the women's affairs as immoral. The women have an adult status outside the home although their domestic status is that of a ward. Thus, with regard to domestic authority and inheritance of the marital estate, the Mpondo men actively discriminate against women in domestic life. But it should be noted that this discrimination is limited. It does not extend to divorce, socializing by women, or a woman's right to represent herself in legal proceedings. Notably, the Mpondo women work in a use economy. Their labor is social because they produce for persons outside their immediate family group. The men, on the other hand, while working in the agricultural-use economy, also raise cattle, make war, and raid other communities for livestock. Most of their warlike activity is based on conflicts over cattle and grazing land. Like the Lovedu, patrilineal estates are characteristic of the Mpondo, but, unlike the Lovedu, Mpondo men are partly engaged in an early form of production for commodity exchange centered around cattle, according to Sacks. Now, let us turn to the fourth tribe. Compared with the Mpondo, commodity relations among the Baganda are far more developed. Organized as a patrilineal class society where both men and women are exploited, the Baganda subsist on hoe agriculture, but they primarily produce for exchange (Roscoe, 1965). Economic individualism is also very important because a man's economic interests are less subordinated to family obligations than they are in the other tribes. Sexism among the Baganda prevails everywhere. The Baganda woman's status is strictly that of wife and ward. Women are unequivocally subordinated to husbands in marital and extramarital relations. A man can kill his wife for adultery, but she has little recourse if the situation is reversed. Nor can women represent themselves in legal proceedings. A male guardian brings a woman's case to court; moreover, since he is held responsible for her conduct, he receives compensation for wrongs done to her. With the Baganda, moreover, "women's work" is individual production for household use. Women do not engage in social labor that extends
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outside the immediate household. Also, women are excluded from a major portion of social activities given by patrons or state officials. When Roscoe's observations were made, the Baganda tribe was organized as a kingdom where the king's wives, sisters, and daughters had privileges, such as economic power and freedom from work, which distinguished them from peasant women; but even they were subordinated to the men of their station. Peasant women, of course, were exposed to class as well as sexual oppression, and they had no access to political positions which were available to their husbands. At the opposite end of the scale from the Mbuti, the Baganda have individual male ownership of private property, domestication of women's labor, an economy based on production for exchange, social class relations, and sexual discrimination in every sphere oflife.
Social labor, private property, and mode Ilf production With this capsule portrait of the four tribes, we can return to Sacks's analysis. Her study seeks the causes of sexual inequality in the different types of socioeconomic formations. Her work is extremely valuable because it clearly demonstrates that sexual discrimination cannot be understood simply as a monolithic and universal phenomenon. Sexual discrimination may be nonexistent, it may be restricted to certain spheres of life, or it may extensively permeate every aspect of a society. Analyzing this variation, Sacks focuses sharply on discrete socioeconomic conditions. In this research, she finds that sexual discrimination is correlated with commodity exchange. The Baganda's economy is based chiefly on commodity e((change, and as a result, women are sharply restricted everywhere in life. The Mpondo men engage mostly in commodity relations and to a lesser extent in production for use. While they actively discriminate in domestic affairs, there is less discrimination outside the home. The Mbuti and Lovedu, however, whose economic lives focus for the most part on production for use, are predominantly egalitarian. Sacks emphasizes another discrete relation. Participation in production for use for a social unit larger than the immediate members of the family seems especially significant to women's autonomy. The Mbuti and Lovedu women engage in this extended form of social production and they have an independent adult status. This production among Mpondo women also supports some degree of independence outside the domestic sphere. Among the Baganda, however, women's labor is totally restricted to the private household, and their status reflects this. They do not have autonomy but are only wards ofthe men. On the other hand, private property is less important to Sacks's intertribal analysis. Although she agrees with Engels that, in general,
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women in nonclass societies stand in a more equal relation to men, she stresses the exclusion of women from social production beyond the immediate family as being more important than private property for determining their independence. She says, "It follows that a society would have to exclude women from public labor or in some way denigrate women's performance of such labor in order to deny them social adulthood for any length of time (Sacks, 1975:229). Here for the first time, on the issue of private property, we diverge somewhat from Sacks's explanation. We feel that a mode of production cannot be completely defined by such concepts as "production for use" or "exchange," because these concepts refer to commodity circulation and consumption relations and do not directly denote the social aspects of production relations. The question of how goods are produced must also be addressed. For instance, in later English feudalism, an "independent mode of production was expanded among small farmers and artisans, and it involved both production for household use and petty commodity exchange. This mode was supported by private property relations because small farmers and artisans owned their own farms, tools, and workshops. Nevertheless, since its social production relations were organized primarily around the cooperative labor of household members, this mode of production was not necessarily exploitative. Furthermore, more than one mode of production may exist in a socioeconomic formation, and one of them is often dominant. In addition to the independent mode, the dominant "feudal mode of production in Western Europe entailed the extraction of the agricultural surplus (in the form of labor or rent) directly from peasant producers by landlords. Moreover, that extraction did not occur through commodity exchange but rather as a result of the authority-political, ideological, and legal-which the ruling class was able to exercise over its subject class. Political authority was backed by a military caste, ideological authority emphasized the serfs oath of fealty, and legal authority was founded in the private ownership of land. We suggest that private property relations, under certain circumstances, may actually outweigh women's role in social production. However, first we note that the concept of private property cannot stand alone in our analysis, because the effects of property relations on women depend on the mode of production. A comparison of property relations within the four tribes will make this clear. For instance, the Mpondo and Bagandas, but not the Mbuti and Lovedu, have private property relations linked to exploitative modes of production. They exploit others through raiding and warring or by their class relations. Even though the Mpondo may not now be internally divided by social classes, their raiding and warring over cattle are extensions of economic life that represent one of the earliest forms of exploitation. 4 Along with class exploitation, this II
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forcible appropriation of property, and thereby the exploitation of others, influences the difference in degree of sexual equality between the former and the latter tribes. By comparison, where the mode of production is nonexploitative, private property relations may be limited and may have little effect on women's status. Lovedu production, for example, is not exploitative. The Lovedu breed cattle, but uses of this property are not what one might expect. Cattle are not raised for trade but for such family use as doW!)'. Moreover, women as well as men own the cattle that bind the family groups into a network of reciprocal relations through marriage. E. 1. Krige and 1. D. Krige (1943), the anthropological husband-and-wife team who spent more than a decade studying the Lovedu, note, "Cattle are individually owned by both men and women, but the kind of ownership, except in the case of some 15 percent, is entirely different from what we understand by the word. For the vast majority of cattle are linked to the chain of munywalo (bride-price) exchanges and as such the individual's rights over them are subject to many restrictions. The primary value to the Natives of cattle is not economic, but social."5 It is not surprising, therefore, that the Lovedu property relations are not strictly governed by patrilineal norms and that certain aspects of these property relations as well as the dominant mode of production support women's authority in most spheres oflife.6 Let us speculate for a moment, however, on the interrelations that might increase the small degree of sexual inequality among the Lovedu. First, inequality might be extended if two new factors were to evolve in the patrilineal estates. These factors are (1) a mode of production based mainly on the exploitation of individual Lovedu or neighboring people, and (2) the kind of private property relations that safeguard this mode of production. (As evidence that inequality might increase, we note that among the Mpondo males, where the economy was partly based on these relations, the amount of sexual discrimination was greater.) Second, if these economic changes were to occur, the emergence of a state based on exploitative class relations would then also be possible; moreover, it would be controlled by the wealthier estates as the Baganda situation implies. Under such conditions, male supremacy would become generalized to the remaining spheres of Lovedu liife? Furthermore, such speculation is not unrelated to evolving socioeconomic realities. Originally, the traditional Lovedu sexual division of labor was not uneven. The Kriges say, "Both men and women hoed, weeded and reaped. Only men cleared the forest but against this only women cultivated certain crops, such as groundnuts. The old pattern is still more or less maintained at least in principle." But, and more to the point, the Kriges observed in the early 1940s that economic life among the Lovedu was beginning to change. The men were becoming engaged in plough
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agriculture for cash crops and in work as laborers in nearby settlements, while the women were maintaining the agrarian production for use based on hoe agriculture. The Kriges (1943:37-38) point to results of these departures from tradition: "Crops specially planted by women tend to fall behind in the race. Women do most of the hoeing today, and their labour, valuable as it is on the steep slopes and among the stones, cannot keep pace with the plough. Moreover, men make the modem gardens by the sides of streams [where fuITOWS can be irrigated and the plough can cut more easily], and the mong beans, groundnuts, and native potatoes which the women planted disappear before the advance of European vegetables. This is as yet not a great change, because there are very few of these gardens, and it is far beyond present resources to construct irrigation furrows." The pace of economic change among the Lovedu, therefore, depend upon numerous factors-the availability of forces of production, of animals, implements, and wage labor, and the development of markets for the new European crops. Yet, if these changes should increase, the division oflaborbetween the sexes may grow more uneven (with women performing a greater share of the traditional labor), especially with the decline of other male work activities, such as hunting, because of South African government restrictions. In addition, the women are still subject to monotonous labor, but the younger men are beginning to feel that hoeing is women's work and that the men pull their weight if they go out periodically to earn wages, plough the field, and build the huts. Finally, an important change is that some of the Lovedu have converted to Christianity and have migrated to the towns. The Kriges (1943:58) say, "The Christians are notable ... because ... they have eagerly accepted whatever differentiates them from their heathen brothers. They are competitive, money conscious; they exploit their brothers." The Christians are squarely integrated into the South African-capitalistmode of production. In short, numerous factors are changing because of the articulation between a capitalist mode of production and the precapitalist mode that tradition characterized Lovedu society. The Lovedu mode appears to have been somewhat preserved, yet it is undergoing very gradual decay in the face of South African economic developments. 8 Eventually the traditional mode of production among the Lovedu may disappear entirely. Consequently, one can conclude from the direction of these developments that the effects of property relations cannot be evaluated without reference to the differences and changes in precapitalist modes of production and how they are articulated with capitalist relations. Now, another part of Sacks's analysis may be modified. We would point out that these differences in modes of production must also be consid-
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ered in evaluating women's participation in labor for people beyond the immediate family (i.e., sociallaborl. In a "use economy," which is based on primitive communism, as in the case of the Mbuti, there is a direct relation between women's social labor and their autonomy. However, under other modes of production, social labor hardly affects their status. For instance, in slave modes of production, enslaved women labor in the fields alongside men, but this labor does not make them independent. They remain the slave owner's property, and their participation in social production is itself a condition of their servitude. Consequently, if property relations refer to who owns the means of production, the products of labor, labor power, or even who owns the laborer, then private property relations enter into the determination of women's status despite their participation in productive activities extending beyond the family. Furthermore, in pre capitalist and capitalist societies, property relations need not affect women's status negatively. In fact, where individual women are able to own the means of production, in addition to the products of their labor, their status is usually increased. For example, wherever precapitalist forms of commodity production prevail, women's independence is heightened by their ability to own and sell as well as produce cash crops, by their owning, selling, and processing foodstuffs, and by their merchandising other commodities that they have not produced at allY Also, under capitalism, Ithe independence that workingclass women achieve from employment may stem more from their status as private owners of labor power (a commodity salable for cash) and the earnings from the exchange of this power, than from their participation in commodity production per se.lO When we compare some of the characteristics of the two variables, ownership of commodities and participation in production, we can see why one contributes more to status than the other. The sale of commodities results in money income, a readily observable value contributing to autonomy, while the underlying values of social production activities are hidden from view due to the complicated and indirect social relations on which they are based. These indirect relations are experienced by people only as relations between people on the one hand and salable things on the other.!1 Since status appears to be based merely on commodity ownership and money, a worker's contribution to production cannot usually be observed in terms other than money earnings. Therefore, the fact of participation in social production alone does not have the same social psychological effect that property relations have. In other words, depending upon the mode of production or its articulation with other modes, both property relations and a woman's participation in social production affect her status in society, in differing degrees. They may support either sexual equality or inequality depend-
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ing upon the concrete modes of production within which they operate. Usually it is the mode of production that informs us about who owns or controls women's ability to labor. It determines both the products of their labor and the means of production that are used to create these products. And it is the mode of production that informs us of how independence is dynamically related to the nature of property relations as well as woman's participation in social production outside of her immediate family.
II. LEVELS OF VIOLENCE AND SOCIAL FORMATIONS In Part I we suggested a positive correspondence between sexual inequality and violence in certain socioeconomic formations. 12 We were also interested in determining whether expoitative modes of production, culminating in precapitalist class societies, have produced or intensified violence while increasing sexual inequality. Before our hypotheses are tested, however, let us first discuss some theoretical issues. These issues emerge because the theories stimulated by Engels's work do not invariably unlock the secrets of sexual inequality. Also, we shall see that attempts to deal with these issues relate to rape and other forms of violence. The problems with the evolutionary theories are evident. Since they are highly general explanations of sexual inequality, such theories are conceived abstractly and independently of countervailing influences. They can only shed light on general social changes and are not meant to cover every historical instance. Consequently, although these theories seem to deal well with global changes, contradictory instances still remain. Further, even the critics of anthropologists like Leacock, recognize that egalitarian societies deteriorated much more rapidly than inegalitarian societies under the destructive impact of colonialism (Godelier, 1981:8-9). After contact with the world economic systems created by class societies, few social systems with a high degree of sexual equality remain. Since male domination is the rule today, tribal societies that contradict evolutionary theories are easy to find, while positive examples are, by now, relatively rare. Thus, there are inegalitarian tribes and bands that seem to have none of the characteristics that Engels felt were necessary to the original development of sexual inequality. For instance, the Mundurucu, who lived in the savannas of the Amazon basin, engaged in horticulture and hunting during the contact period. They had no private property in the means of production and no social classes or state apparatus. The Mundurucu relations of production were organized communally, and
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food was distributed to each according to need. Finally, Mundurucu women participated in production beyond their immediate households; yet, contemporary anthropology implies that they were still dominated by men. Reports about the traditional culture of the Mundurucu men suggest that they were male supremacists despite the apparent absence of virtually every economic relations important to evolutionary interpretations of sexual inequality. Maurice Godelier (1981) has made such contradictions the basis for discounting the importance of Leacock's obseIVations of societies where women have autonomy. He states (Godelier,1981:10) that "men have so far dominated power in the last analysis," and their dominant position is due to several causes. First, men were more mobile in hunting and gathering societies than women, and this difference encouraged men to become hunters. The sexual division of labor led men to adopt a "differential value system" which set "a higher value on men's activity insofar as it involved greater risks of losing one's life and greater glory in taking life." Cooking, by comparison, was not valued so highly since "both sexes can perform" it (12). Second, men assumed a dominating position in order to force women to "reproduce the life that maintains the group," that is, by bearing and raising children who become productive social beings. They also required dominance to force women to marry into and live with another group (patrilocality), thereby establishing reciprocal relations among families (12-14). There are other parts of Godelier's theory that might be mentioned; for example, the ban on incest allegedly exists because it aids survival (by compelling families to establish reciprocal relations), and the ideology of male supremacy is based partly on ego defense mechanisms. Men compensate for their inability to bear children by elevating their roles as hunters and warriors and by denigrating the roles of women. In sum, Godelier's functionalist theory regards male domination as a means for optimizing the chances for social survival when natural resources are scarce.13 Sexual inequality, therefore, arises to preseIVe the lives and well-being of humankind. A "society" is thus able to "survive" because men dominate women with regard to childbearing (the creation of "living labor") and with regard to the establishment of supportive joint-family relations. Presumably, women are unable or indisposed to engage wholeheartedly in the reproduction of producers and kinship relations without male domination. Besides having to force women to reproduce and raise children, male violence against women appears, in this context, because women resist being controlled. Violence also arises, according to Godelier, when solidary kinship relations disintegrate. Out of this social disorganization there emerges "raiding, rape, war and expropriation" (Godelier, 1981:15).
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Even though Godelier considers himself a Marxist, in our opinion his theory is composed of a melange of Durkheimian and Freudian ideas which, besides having factual shortcomings, are susceptible to the same kinds of criticism that plague other structural-functional theories.1 4 First, this criticism refers to "equifunctional alternatives" that are egalitarian and that would have enabled a given "society" to survive equally well. Second, the alternatives posed by such questions undermine the facile structural-functional assumptions that certain relations, such as prostitution, monogamy, male supremacy, social classes, or the state, are necessary for the survival of society. Inquiring into equifunctional alternatives, one would ask whether Mundurucu women really needed to be dominated by men to reproduce tribal existence. Why couldn't the women easily achieve the same results by ensuring cooperation among their own sex? After all, most women are just as intelligent, capable, and interested as most men in conceiving of the need for establishing mutual aid among families and ensuring the survival of their tribe, their children, and their kin. Second, why should any violence, male or female, be pitted against women to achieve this purpose? Intratribal violence is exceptional among tribes like the Mbuti or Lovedu. Couldn't female persuasion, ridicule, shame, and even banishment perform the same social control function? After such questions are asked, Godelier's theory seems extremely unconvincing and hopelessly androcentric. Furthermore, Godelier, for all practical purposes, virtually ignores the extent to which the world economic system, introduced by early mercantile and capitalist developments, transformed tribal societies. True, he mentions that colonialism affected egalitarian societies adversely, but this awareness plays no role in his theory. Certainly, with regard to the Mundurucu, one should inquire whether it was perhaps the European penetration of the Amazon valley that produced inequality rather than any general necessity to control the fertility of women. What were the effects of the colonial penetration of the Amazon valley? As indicated, conventional accounts of the Mundurucu suggest that they have always been warlike; yet this impression seems to have originated mainly from their furious attacks, in 1770, against Portuguese settlements along the shores of the Amazon. Robert Murphy (1960:29) writes that this period also witnessed an epic attack by the Mundurucu into the State of Maranhao, an amazing five hundred miles away. These attacks would suggest that some extraordinmy events had provoked the Mundurucu either by offending their sense of justice or their need for survival; but unfortunately, curiosity about these possibilities is nowhere expressed by Murphy. (Such possible events will be suggested shortly.! We are informed, however, that a short twenty-five years later, in 1795, the governor of Para, using superior weapons, directed a successful military counter-
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expedition against the Mundurucu, thus establishing colonial supremacy by force; and this was followed by contact with Jesuit missionaries. As they migrated closer to "civilized settlements" for trade, the Mundurucu continued, for a time, to engage in warfare with other tribes. Other decisive turning points in the relations with the Portuguese took place when the Mundurucu were enlisted by the colonizers to help quell other Indian tribes. Recognizing the militmy superiority of the Europeans, the Mundurucu joined them and became mercenaries throughout the nineteenth century. Their military activities waned, however, as the area was pacified and as the Amazon valley became progressively assimilated into a more developed, capitalist, colonial economy. By 1852, as this assimilation proceeded, the Mundurucu in the lower Tapajos River region lost their cohesiveness and became fragmented. From the last half of the nineteenth century into the twentieth cenhlry, through trade in farinha and through the penetration of capitalist rubber-gathering enterprises, the upper river Mundurucu were also assimilated. Rubber companies, expanding rapidly, as early as 1860 in the lower parts of the Tapajos River, eventually overran all resistance to their domination of the regional economy. (There is even a case of the dismissal of a Jesuit priest whose mission was shut down, because he urged the Indians to monopolize their rubber production in order to avoid exploitation by Brazilian business interests [Murphy, 1960:41].) By the twentieth century the Mundurucu in the upper river region had become integrated into plantation networks headed by patrones who were part of the economic system established by Brazilian descendants of the Portuguese ruling class. During this entire period, the Mundurucu went through momentous changes. They were fragmented and decimated by war and European diseases. Their traditional kinship relations disintegrated and changed from patrilocal to matrilocal living arrangements to facilitate farinha production, which was centered in the hands of women, when farinha became an important commodity for trade with Jesuit missions and other colonial settlements. According to Yolanda Murphy, women's status was somewhat improved by these developments, but this improvement may have ended with the rise of nuclear family relations brought about by the rise of rubber plantations. Such developments reinforce the argument that sexual relations are strongly affected by economic and political changes. This argument is buttressed by scrutinizing the precious little bit of information that exists about the Indian tribes in the Amazon basin before the Mundurucu attacked the Portuguese settlements. In this context, Leacock touches on the early contacts with Europeans in an observation about a group of Yanoama, who lived on the borders of the basin. This observation may be extremely significant because the description ofthe Yanoama bears certain similaritiies to the Mundurucu.
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Leacock (1981:198) points out that these particular Indians are characterized in Marvin Harris's (1975) widely read anthropology textbook as having a culture that is entirely dominated by incessant quarreling) raiding) dueling, beating) and killing. According to Harris, this culture is "regarded as among the world's fiercest and most male-centered cultures." Yanoama men, Harris says) are as tyrannical with their women as Oriental monarchs with their slaves. To explain this male domination, Harris employs the usual liberal-functionalist scheme for explaining war and interpersonal violence, namely, neo-Malthusian propositions· about population density and the struggle over scarce natural resources. But Leacock (1981:98-99) challenges Harris's explanation. She points out that "in a study of another Yanoama group ... one reads that these people may have first gained their reputation for fierceness when they fought off a Spanish exploring party in 1758. In that period, Spanish and Portuguese adventurers were ranging throughout the Amazon area searching for slaves. The author of the account worked with a relatively peaceful highland group, and he suggested that the exaggerated fierceness of the lowland Yanoama is not typical) but may have been developed for self-protection. In the village he studied, elder women, like elder men, are highly respected. When collective decisions are made, mature women 'often speak up) loudly, to express their views.' Younger men, like younger women, 'have little influence' " (our emphasis). Now, it is quite possible that the Mundurucu gained their reputation as fierce warriors after attacking Portuguese settlements, but it may also be that their attack was a response to prior contact with European slavers. On the other hand) slaveIY does not have to be the only basis for conflict: there are numerous accounts of European contacts with North American Indian tribes that justifY their attacks against white settlers. Evelywhere, from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, tribal societies waged fierce struggles against slavery and colonialism. Also, the number of Indians in the Amazon basin does not at all suggest that population density was a critical factor for the development of warfare or sexual inequality. Only 1,500,000 lived in the vast Amazon basin and this figure dropped drastically to 75,000 after the conquest and assimilationist periods ended. True) the Mundurucu were among the most ferocious headhunters in the Amazon valley, and they were noted for attacking neighboring tribes) killing the adults and incorporating the children into their own families. But their warlike culture may be due primarily to Portuguese influence, and the Mundurucu may have captured children because of the drastic diminution of their own population resulting from disease and warfare. It may have had nothing whatsoever to do with high population density and scarce resources. On the other hand, the effects of such changes alone cannot tell us anything about their relation to male domination unless the effects of war,
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Jesuit mIssIOnaries, and other colonial-induced factors on the social organization of male activities encouraged sexual inequality. That the Jesuits steadfastly encouraged male domination is a certainty. Also, considering that men are its primary participants, wrufare in this context may have led to the male control of organized violence, the glorification of male warriors, and dominance relations headed by men. If the earliest engagements of wrufare against the colonial settlements did not encourage male domination, then the later ones at the behest of the Brazilian authorities and under the influence of the church may have. Certainly, if the tribal mode of production is not itself conducive to violence, then this violence has to emerge from external sources. And if the mode of production is not conducive to sexual inequality, then there would have to be mechanisms based on internal and external relations that engender inequality. In the preface to her new book of collected articles, Leacock (1981:4-5) comments on how egalitarian social relations are undermined. She notes that in societies which are otherwise egalitarian, "indications of male dominance tum out to be due to either (1) the effects of colonization and/or involvement in market relations . . . ; (2) the concomitant of developing inequality in a society, commonly referred to in anthropological writings as 'ranking,' when trade is encouraging specialization oflabor and production for exchange is accompanying production for use ... ; or (31 problems arising from interpretations of data in terms of western concepts or assumptions." Furthermore, it is possible to posit that in relation to sexual inequality, modes of production that establish such rankings, and wrufare that encourages the male monopoly of organized violence, though independent, have additive effects and that these effects converge in class societies. We entertained such a possibility when we hypothesized that the general level of violence--including violence against women-would correlate with socioeconomic formations that have greater sexual inequality. Data to test this hypothesis for the four African societies were obtained from the Human Relations Area Files, which index primary anthropological research on more than eight hundred precapitalist formations. 15 By classi1)ing economic, kinship, ecological and other relations, the files isolate information for comparative research. In light of such information, were our predictions substantiated or were they unfounded? First, however, it should be noted that violence in all four of these societies can be demonstrated in several ways. For example, it can be expressed by the state itself whenever legal codes are enforced by corporal punishment instead of persuasion. Furthermore, military activities and the treatment of prisoners or slaves are further indicators of violence. Finally, we learn much about the level of violence of a society from its childrearing practices and from other interpersonal relations. By carefully scrutinizing observations in the area files that are indexed by
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topics pertaining to war, social sanctions, childrearing, sexual relations, and so forth, we were able to evaluate the variations in violence between the societies for similar kinds of relationships.
Mbuti Examination of the Mbuti along these lines suggests that their violence is minimal compared with the violence in the other three tribes. The Mbuti have no police force, court, army, or permanent council that dispenses violence. On the other hand, they make reprisal raids against plantations of villagers who have treated a Mbuti tribe member violently. Intertribal conflicts over territorial claims may evoke threats of war, but they are usually settled peaceably, since the Mbuti are not a warlike people. Authority among the Mbuti is dispersed throughout the society because each area of band activity has its own leader. Furthermore, the Mbuti discourage individuals from aggressively assuming authority; when leadership is assumed, its exercise is restricted to persuasion alone. Colin Turnbull (1965:181), an anthropologist who studied the Mbuti in their forest environment, says, "Such adults as have respect in any particular field at any particular moment do not even have any authority; they can merely claim to be heard." What happens when a member offends another person? If there is a dispute regarding food, sex, territory, or anything else, it is usually settled quickly and quite painlessly. Retributive sanctions against an offending member are infrequent and even then sanctions are expressed by ridicule or criticism rather than a show of violence. Turnbull finds no evidence of blood payment of any kind for serious offenses. For even the most serious offenses such as incest, his field observations indicate the use of ostracism and ridicule rather than torture, imprisonment, or execution. Interpersonal violence is restricted to fighting between two or three people at most. Disputes over reciprocal duties and personal jealousies occasionally lead to fights; consequently, the daily routine of life is punctuated at times by squabbles and beatings involving a couple of youngsters, an unmarried couple, or a husband and wife. These conflicts, however, do not last long and may be reconciled by giftgiving or compensation. Moreover, intervention by other tribal members usually prevents these conflicts from becoming magnified. In addition, Turnbull could find no incidence of rape, even among the youth. He reports much sexual activity when youth are on the trail together and he mentions the fact that it sometimes degenerates into lusty orgies. However, Turnbull (1965:121) says, "A boy may rip off a girl's outer bark cloth, if he can catch her, but he may never have intercourse with her without her permission. I know of no case of rape, though boys often talk about their intentions of forcing reluctant maidens to their will."16
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Turnbull describes the sources of common disputes and the quick and equal method of arbitration. He writes: "A number of disputes arising over food indicate trivial domestic disagreements, and seldom reach major proportions. A wife is late in cooking her husband's food, or cooks it badly; he spills some precious oil or fails to catch any game on the hunt. Such disagreements are confined almost entirely to the younger married couples, and they usually settle them by beating each other. If the beating gets too severe then the older women intervene, slapping both boys and girls soundly" (Turnbull, 1965:201). Marital disputes not forced on the attention of the band are ignored, but they may evoke ridicule and complaints if they become noisy and keep people awake. Turnbull writes, "Certainly a fight going on between husband and wife inside the hut is followed with zest by all the youths and some of the younger married couples. These may even stand around watching the hut shake, ready to catch whoever comes flying out first and prevent further damage." Sometimes such a squabble is followed by the couple making up loudly so everyone will hear, and then they will walk hand in hand about the camp in ostentatious amity. Turnbull (1965:206-7) says, "This is considered a good thing." The Mbuti child is treated with much attention and affection, and a woman, if she is childless, is considered unfortunate. A birth, according to Turnbull, is looked upon as a happy event. He says, "After a few days, when the child is brought freely into the open, the hunters and elders will fondle it and compliment the parents. The father is as proud as the mother, and just as likely to carry the child around to show it off" (Turnbull,1965:129). Socialization of the child is shared by the entire band. Infants crawl everywhere, are fondled by anyone, are soundly slapped and brought back to the mother's hut if they get in the way or crawl into the fire. If they are too noisy in the children's play area, they are criticized. The parents are responsible for the child only until it is three or four years old, and then it is cared for and educated by its age peers, the band's youths, and the oldest of the elders. Children learn the ways of the band and forest through playing games with each other and with the youths. In these activities, the controls applied to them are mainly ridicule and ostracism. Turnbull (1965:125) describes a typical learning situation and the form of discipline used. He says, "Another important initiative game is the hunt, in which a youth or an elder pretends to be an antelope ... any child who fails to react properly is laughed out ofthe game." When little boys and girls play house, they hunt, fish, and gather, and thus contribute in a small way to the food economy of the band. Important behavior and personality patterns develop and carry over into the future. In highlighting the value ofthese children's activities, Turnbull
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(1965:125) says, "They also learn not only to rely on their fellow age mates for help in food-gathering activities, but to share with them. The sharing is largely left to the girl's decision." Lovedu
The traditional Lovedu mode of production is organized around communal production for use within the family estate and the reciprocal exchange of these use-values with kinship groups. This mode is being threatened by a growing money economy and the absorption, chiefly of the men, into agrarian commodity production. Nevertheless, the traditional mode of production was still dominant in the tribal communities when E. Jensen Krige and J. D. Krige (1943) wrote The Realm of a Rain Queen. Unlike the Mpondo, who raise cattle for cash and who speak of money as cattle, the Lovedu raise cattle but use them to integrate joint family relations. We have seen that cattle are used for dowry and thereby operate as a most significant means for establishing reciprocal links between kinship groups. On the other hand, both Lovedu and Mpondo are encompassed within the capitalist economy maintained by the South African government. They operate within the framework of a racist state apparatus which ruthlessly represses activities that threaten the safety of the white population. The white government also thwarts any and all developments that threaten such prerequisites for capital accumulation as labor, land, orderly commerce, and political conformity. Consequently, although native courts and customs deal with violations of tribal rules, a South African criminal justice system is imposed on the tribesP This system appears to restrict itself to violations of South African laws, including laws containing intertribal warfare and protecting the government and the white population. Imprisonment and execution are used as sanctions by the South African government. Engaging in sedentary agriculture, the Lovedu have developed a much more complicated mode of production and social structure than the Mbuti. However, the Lovedu are nonaggressive, even though they have experienced centuries of war with invading tribes and Europeans who finally pressed them into a mountainous region in South Africa. Although it is not a class society, authority relations among the Lovedu are partly consolidated in a royal family and district heads. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century the royal family has been headed by a queen. The Kriges (1943:285) report, "Nowhere else are so many women heads of districts or in so many important political positions." Women generally have high status in Lovedu society. The Kriges (1943:198) obseJve, "Women are the strongest pillars of the social structure and without their support there can be no guarantee that the
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adjustments in the superstructure will be lasting or effective; and in a society that relies on compromise and not on coercion, this role becomes even more important." It is notable, too, that the men who sit in judgment in the khoro rely completely on voluntary compliance. The enforcement of their decisions is left to the disputing parties because the court cannot enforce its edicts violently. Therefore, the proceedings are aimed at compromise and conciliation (Krige and Krige, 1943:200-201). Clearly then, the principal mechanism of conflict resolution is compensation rather than violence. Gifts and compensatory fines reduce the strains in social life. For instance, in one case noted by the Kriges, a father intervened in a squabble between his son and his son's wife, and the son in anger stabbed the father. The incident was reconciled when the son provided his father with a goat and begged pardon (202). Other examples suggest a remarkable consistency in their nonviolent solutions for settling offenses. If an adulterer is discovered, he asks pardon by giving a goat or cattle as a gift to the offended husband. Even homicide is reconciled through compensation, although sometimes restitution is also made by converting the criminal into a kinsman. When this mechanism is invoked, the slayer m.akes restitution by assuming some of the obligations of the person he killed. Accounts of childrearing patterns indicate that discipline is achieved primarily through encouragement by parents and pressure from age mates. Punishment of children is infrequent, though threats are common (104). Parents are affectionate and gentle with their children (102-25). Since the Lovedu are not a warlike people, the foreign policy of the queen is appeasement rather than war, and this also affects childrearing. The Kriges observe, "There is no need to direct [initiation rites] towards hardening the youth or instilling manly courage, and military discipline and regimentation are of little or no importance." Because of these nonaggressive relations, the Europeans feel that Lovedu are cowardly and deceitful-lacking the manly qualities of the Shangana-Tonga, a neighboring society that is more commercially oriented and whose people have aggressive dispositions that make them favorable candidates for native South African police forces (284--85). Mpondo
On the other hand, for the Mpondo, commodity production centered around the individual ownership of cattle and wage labor in Europeanowned mines and plantations either was dominant or was rapidly becoming dominant when this tribe was studied by anthropologist Monica Hunter, author of Reaction to Conquest. Hunter's observations of the Mpondo indicate that they are more
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violent than the Mbuti and the Lovedu. The Mpondo engage in cattle raiding and armed conflicts with neighboring tribes even though these acts are suppressed by the South African government. Responding perhaps to the greater interpersonal violence, South African magistrates seem to be more active among the Mpondo than the Lovedu. Hunter reports that some warfare is caused by external attacks, but cattle raiding by the Mpondo themselves is probably the most frequent of all occasions for war (Hunter, 1961:412). Although the Mpondo economy is based on hoe agriculture and cattle exchange, Hunter reports that now more and more people in Mpondoland are using money for exchange and have adopted ploughs in their fields. Customary authority in Mpondo society is centered around male political leaders. Each headman, or chief, with the men under him, forms a court of the first instance. From this court a person can appeal to the court of the headman's immediate superior and thence to the court of the paramount chief. The sanctions administered for wrongs are usually fines, but in some cases an offender is punished by death (413). The suppression of raiding has had limited success, and it seems to have had almost no effect on traditional standards of masculine conduct. For example, young boys exhibit warrior traits at early ages. Hunter observes, "Small boys begin to carry sticks at about five years, and from that age are constantly fighting one another with sticks." She reports herd boys fighting each other in tournaments, and they continue into adolescence, fighting over grazing land and girls (410). Hunter (1961:410--11) says, "The boys of one ridge, of one subdistrict, fight those of another. Sometimes they dare not enter each other's territory .... Subdistricts fight over grazing, and over girls. Gatherings in the hut of a girl being initiated, weddings, and festivals are usual occasions for a fight. Fights at festivals between subdistrict and subdistrict often become serious. Older men join in, and sticks are exchanged for spears. Women give the war cry, and word goes out, ilizwe lifile [The country is at war!]. One such fight began at a beer drink which I attended at Ntontela .... As always the division was on territorial lines, each man fighting with his neighbors. Three men died of wounds received in that fight." Hunter adds that such local disputes sometimes envelop whole tribes. The headmen, according to Hunter (1961:427), report people involved in these violent encounters to the South African magistrates, who impose fines and imprisonment. Despite these sanctions, "fights between young men of different districts, in which sticks and occasionally spears or guns are used and individuals killed, are not unusual." Mpondo fathers are devoted to their children, carrying them about in their arms, fondling them, playing with them, and teaching them to dance. As children grow older, however, they are taught respect and
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obedience, which are particularly due their fathers because of the patriarchal traditions. These traditions also encourage the use of violence toward women. Hunter (1961:30) reports, for instance, that one man beat his brother's wife because she had beaten one of the children who was quarreling and not the others. She ran home, but a brother-in-law complained, "In the old days you beat another man's wife even more than your own, but now women say they will not be beaten except by their own husbands." Most of the quarrels between husband and wife tum on the double standards in sexual morality, according to Hunter (1961:42). Men can have as many wives as they can afford, but a wife is forbidden to have relations with any except her own husband. In actual practice very many of the married women have lovers even though their husbands make every effort to catch and prosecute the adulterer. Sometimes the jealousies between husbands and wives over adultery lead to beatings of the wife. The Mpondo are obviously more violent than the Lovedu or Mbuti, but for a quantum leap in violence beyond the others, we must examine the Baganda. 8aganda
The Baganda's dominant mode of production is based on the extraction of an agricultural surplus (in the form of labor, rent, or tribute through taxation) directly from peasant producers by landlords and political officials. The Baganda had their own judicial system at the time they were studied by Rev. John Roscoe (1965), an anthropologist and missionary who spent twenty-five years in Africa. I8 The Baganda belong to a class society where the juridical system headed by the king's court enforces the law and administers punishment. When fines are used as punishment, the state typically takes a lion's share and gives the rest as compensation to the injured party. In addition to fines, the king's court administers justice through imprisonment in stocks, agonizing torture, and execution. Roscoe (1965:259) notes, "The King often brought a spurious charge against a chief who was becoming rich, and fined him heavily, or sent him to prison, intimating to him that he must pay a handsome sum if he wished to be freed; failing that, he would be cast into the stocks, where he would be so much ill used, that he would be glad to pay any fine to escape the torture and the danger of being put to death." In the "lower courts," petty theft and disobedience on the part of a child are offen punished by burning the child's hand or cutting off his ear. "The punishment of children was usually far in excess of the fault; and little mercy was shown when the child was a slave or an orphan. Adults often have their hands cut off for theft," says Roscoe (1965:267).
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Adultery is punished severely. Roscoe (1965:261) writes, "Though death was usually the punishment inflicted for adultery, an offender's life would sometimes be spared, and he be [sic] fined two women, if he were able to pay them; the culprit was, however, maimed; he lost a limb, or had an eye gouged out, and showed by his maimed condition that he had been guilty of a crime. A slave taken in adultery with one of his master's wives was invariably put to death."19 Corporal punishment can also be inflicted by any man on his wives or slaves, but this is a private affair. Punishment might consist of cutting off a person's lips, ears or one hand, or gouging out an eye. Moreover, a husband is also allowed to torture his wife until she confesses if he suspects her of committing adultery. Roscoe (1965:263) indicates the following procedure for the torture: "The woman was stripped and made to lie down; her legs and arms were stretched out and tied to the posts of the house; she was flogged, and then left in this position for the whole night, or until she made confession. The husband would not be punished by law, even if he killed his wife under such circumstances; her relations might have the case tried, but if it was proved that she was in the wrong, no one would condemn the husband. If the husband was proved to have unjustly tortured or killed his wife, her relations would be satisfied with fining him." Women's roles among the Baganda are defined in terms of serving their husbands and supplying them with children. This is apparent in the differential socialization of boys and girls. Boys are allowed time for fun, while girls are put to work that is unremitting. Roscoe (1965:77) says, "Boys had a free and happy life while the time of herding lasted; they met together daily, and while the animals browsed, they had ample time for all kinds of games." He notes further, "Girls seldom played games; they were kept busy for the whole day, and were taught to make mats and baskets to occupy their leisure time; they also drew water and brought in fire-wood. From the time that a girl arrived at puberty, she was called Mulongo, a term used of a cow when it was old enough to have calves" (80-81). Girls learned their female roles early. Roscoe (1965:79) obseIVes, 'Girls were taught to cook and to cultivate as soon as they could hoe." The mother had charge of the child temporarily in its earliest years, but it would soon go to one of the father's relatives. Warm and caressing relations occurred only minimally. Roscoe (1965:61) says, "The language contains no word for tender affection such as love ... children as they grew up had some regard for their parents; the father was at least feared and respected, while there was something approaching love shown towards the mother .... She might hug it, and pat it, while it was small, when it was cross or had been hurt." In previous centuries, the ruling classes ofthe Baganda engaged in war and raids to capture people for the slave trade. In the first half of this
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century, the Baganda still attacked neighboring tribes and were known for their merciless treatment of conquered people. The acquisitions from war may have numbered hundreds of women and seIVants and more than a thousand cattle. Male prisoners taken in battle were speared or clubbed to death, while the women were enslaved and some of them awarded for valor to military personnel. If the army won a battle, the defeated enemy was made to suffer greatly, their wives, seIVants, cattle, goats, sheep, ivory, and anything else valuable they possessed being seized. All the men except the male children were put to death. It is not necessary to continue describing the Baganda to further confirm our hypothesis about the general relations among violence, sexual inequality, and socioeconomic formations. We grant that variations in violence are produced by historical conjunctures that affect the evolution of a mode of production or the class struggles and political institutions that secure a mode. 20 Nevertheless, the variation in violence that we have seen here and elsewhere on the face of the globe is not produced by the inherent nature of man. Clearly, this variation is socially determined and different modes of production are basic to this determination. Finally, the exploitative modes of production which have culminated in the formation of class societies have either produced or intensified sexual inequality and violence.
III. MECHANISMS AND FETISHISM OF VIOLENCE Rape, in its different forms, tumbles from the annals of class society. The conquering hordes of Genghis Khan raped and plundered populations from far and near during innumerable forays. European feudal mercenaries, when fighting in neighboring principalities, raped and looted towns and villages. Homecoming bands of sixteenth-century British soldiers, embittered by denial of pay and defeat abroad, raped and pillaged at will after they landed on English soil. The Force Publique of the Congo, a native colonial army, adopted the ethos of their imperial Belgian masters; they too raped and plundered Congolese people. Today, in the Philippines, thugs and bandits are hired by Christian settlers who covet the lands of neighboring tribes. These hirelings are employed to rape and terrorize the Philippine tribal communities.21 Furthermore, tribal societies in the New World, conquered by European colonizers, met force with force, adopting the new violent tactics of the conquerers along with their more sophisticated weapons. For example, early accounts of the Iroquois and other American seaboard tribes indicate that rape was not used in warfare before the Europeans arrived. To force the Indians from their land, the Europeans burned villages to the ground, scalped the men in punitive raids, raped the Indian women, and
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in some cases massacred entire tribes. In retaliation, rape and other tactics were used by the Indians who sought to match the Europeans' ruthlessness and ferocity. The connection between rape and socioeconomic relations is also apparent in societies based on slavery, where the reproduction of class relations is impossible without class-directed violence mediated by state power. In American slave states, black women were treated as objects with commercial value. Unprotected from slave owners and overseers, these women were raped with impunity. Gerda Lerner, author of Black Women in White America (1972:172), notes that from the slave period onward, the rape of black women by white rapists cannot be explained as the isolated acts of criminals. Whites were not punished at all, while blacks charged with raping white women faced a death penalty or a lynch mob. Furthermore, rape, in this context, expressed the relations between social classes as well as individual men and women. Angela Davis, the black philosopher and activist, writes, "Although the immediate victim of rape was the black woman-and it was she who endured the pain and anguish-rape served not only to further her oppression, but also as a means ofterrorizing the entire black community. It placed brutal emphasis on the fact that black slaves were indeed the property of the white master." Rapes by whites emphasized the special forms of racial oppression that support exploitative modes of production. Consequently, in an endless spiral of cruelty and violent counterreactions, numerous forms of violence, including rape, were conferred on the people of the world. Rape itself became associated with violent practices organized around broader aims: the subjugation of women, the exploitation oftribes, classes, and other social groups. Violence became the focus of a never-ending struggle by individuals, classes, and nations for power and property. Internal mechanisms of interpersonal violence
There were societies that exhibited both a high degree of violence and male domination before contact with European nations. However, for those that did not already have these characteristics, the internal social changes resulting from European contact contributed to violence within the societies themselves. Some of these changes are illustrated in an article by Leacock and Goodman (1976) referring to the seventeenthcentury chronicles of Paul Le Jeune, a Jesuit missionary. After wintering with Montagnais families, Le Jeune wrote, "They are very much attached to each other, and agree admirably. You do not see any disputes, quarrels, enmities, or reproaches among them" (82). But Le Jeune's admiration was outweighed by his mission to "improve" the level
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of native morality. He and his countrymen systematically instigated the changes that eventually destroyed this interpersonal amity. Le Jeune's chronicles show that French missionaries and troops pressured or cultivated social changes that were religious, familial, and political. For example, when some of the Montagnais converted to Christianity, they adopted the patriarchal family, and accepted a "system of permanent chiefs" that enforced religious and colonial mandates, violently when necessary. Economic changes were also imposed: the French encouraged fur trading with European class societies. As the Indians warred with each other over the gains from fur trapping, the Montagnais took delight in torturing their Iroquois prisoners. Furthermore, before the arrival of the French, the Montagnais abhorred corporal punishment. Three incidents will show how their outlook changed. At first, when the French introduced corporal punishment, it was rejected even when it was administered to a French boy who had wronged one of the Montagnais. In the chronicles, Le Jeune tells this story: "One of [the Montagnais] was looking very attentively at a little French boy who was beating a drum; and, going near to see him better, the little boy struck him a blow with one of his drumsticks and made his head bleed badly." Immediately all the tribal onlookers took offense and loudly demanded compensation. They cried, "Behold, one of thy people has wounded one of ours; thou knowest our custom well; give us presents [compensation] for this wound.' '22 Le Jeune, noting that "there is no government among the Savages," recorded the native mode of settling accounts. He said, "If one kills or wounds another, he is ... released from all punishment by making a few presents to the friends of the deceased or the wounded one." The French viewed the incident with the boy as an opportunity to teach the Montagnais an object lesson. The interpreter turned to the Indians and said, " 'Thou knowest our custom; when any of our number does wrong, we punish him. This child has wounded one of your people; he shall be whipped at once in thy presence.' As the Savages saw we were really in earnest ... they began to pray for his pardon, alleging he was only a child, that he had no mind, that he did not know what he was doing; but as our people were nevertheless going to punish him, one of the Savages stripped himself entirely, threw his blankets over the child and cried out to him who was going to do the whipping: 'Strike me if thou wilt but thou shalt not strike him.' And thus the little one escaped" (Leacock and Goodman, 1976:90). Later, however, the Montagnais's views of punishment changed as they were converting to Christianity. In one account, Le Jeune tells how a young Indian woman, who had separated from her husband, was chased,
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forcibly captured, and then threatened with imprisonment in a dungeon if she did not return to her husband's domicile. Imprisonment and other harsh measures were recommended by the Indian Christian converts who had learned that it was the custom in France to "proceed in that manner" with recalcitrant wives. But men also became objects of corporal punishment, sometimes self-inflicted. Once again, religious zeal was involved. In one such account, the punishment expressed the personal guilt, sexual obsession, and self-flagellation cultivated by Christianity. One can imagine the moralistic sentiments imposed by the French for this to happen. Le Jeune wrote, "A young savage, recently married, felt tempted to leave his wife, and the thought caused him deep sorrow. The Devil pictures to him the delight of changing a wife whom one hates for another whom one loves .... He remembers the word that he has plighted to God and to his wife; he wishes to be faithful, but nevertheless, he feels himself inclined toward infidelity. He goes to his Director.... The mere idea of changing his wife seems to him so great a crime that he entreats to be sent to prison and to be put into a dungeon or to be publicly flogged. Seeing his request refused, he slips into a room near the Chapel and, with a rope that he finds, he beats himself so hard allover the body that the noise reaches the ears of the Father, who runs in and forbids so severe a penance" (84). Spontaneous mechanisms of violence
While the Montagnais violence against women did not take hold until colonial domination occurred, this violence emerged within the great colonial powers such as France, England, and others under somewhat different circumstances. Violence against women has its own basis in each socioeconomic formation. In feudalism, the status of women as chattel justified the violence against women in family relations. However, in early capitalism, this chattel status was more complex than it might seem. It became intertwined with the personal dependencies based on class control of rents and income stemming from early capitalist, agrarian commodity relations rather than serfdom. For instance, H. Perkin (1969:37), author of The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780-1880, writes; "In the small communities, the villages and tiny towns, of the old society ... the source of income itself, with the rest of the 'life chances' of the individual, was controlled by a paternal landlord, employer or patron .... In a world of personal dependency any breach of the 'great law of subordination,' between master and servant, squire and villager, husband and wife, father and child, was a sort of petty treason, to be ruthlessly suppressed.... Literally so in the case of women
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who murdered, or were accessory to the murder of their husbands, who were burned at the stake for their 'petty treason.' "23 Elsewhere, we have indicated that the dependency relations imposed on women have been grounded historically in the socioeconomic changes that have restricted most women to the continuous production of use-values in the home, and men to production for commodity exchange (Schwendinger and Schwendinger, 1980:11-13). Because of these restrictions and dominant moral standards in capitalist societies, the dependency of women has been equated ideologically with inferior abilities and capacities. Such ideological equations also enter into the determination of the status relations that legitimate sexual inequality. Similar changes continue to occur today in developing nations. A study by Susan Draper (1975) dealing with the impact of modem African labor markets on village family relations illustrates these changes. Although they are taking place under more benign circumstances, the effects of capitalism on sexual relations and patriarchal violence, in this study, parallel the changes that occurred in Western societies. Draper's study is also significant because it contrasts aboriginal band sexual equality and relatively nonviolent family relations, on the one hand, with village inequality and greater family violence, on the other. Draper's field experiences focus on the !Kung Bushmen aboriginal bands that forage on the edges of the great Kalahari desert. However, she also details the changing patterns of life among those band members who have migrated into village settlements. In the villages the egalitarianism of the band is disappearing, yet this change does not appear to be imposed by any force from the outside. Importantly, from the standpoint of everyday life, it seems to arise spontaneously from the personal inclinations and the changing roles and relations of people inside the village itself. Draper's (1975:87-93) observations begin with the familiar correspondence between primitive communism and sexual equality. She notes that among the people living in bands, in the economic sphere, which is based on hunting and gathering, !Kung women have personal autonomy. Also, there is no rigid sex-typing for most adult activities, including domestic chores and raising children in their communal society. Finally, the !Kung nomads are gentle and they actively minimize any sign of harmful competition among males and violence between the sexes. The aboriginal bands are unquestionably characterized by sexual equality. All of this is changing, however, as the !Kung are relocating in villages where the economy is partly organized around commodity production. This commodity activity involves the private ownership of livestock on land surrounding a village and the exploitation of male wage labor in nearby Bantu or European settlements (100-03). In the villages themselves the authority of males is gradually increasing and the status of women is declining.
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Why are these changes taking place? Partly it is because the desire for higher living standards encourages the men to leave the village, frequently for several days at a time, to work for Bantu employers. When they return, their authority is heightened by their control over goat and cattle raising and their mastery of the Bantu language and customs. These work experiences and the knowledge of Bantu also encourage male participation in political relations that are largely based on contacts with the other settlements. Village women themselves have become enmeshed in household economies whose material inventory is much richer than that of the nomadic bands. In the village, food preparation becomes more complicated. Furthermore Draper (1975:101) says, "Women do the greatest part of the cooking, and they also do most of the [food] drying and storing." Household possessions also require more energy to maintain. The women, therefore, spend more time and work harder at domestic tasks. In addition, village relations are being affected by severe economic and political constraints that operate behind the scenes. The village economy is organized around independent peasant households; and it is essentially based on a precapitalist mode of production in the process of being shaped by its articulation with a capitalist mode of production (Wolpe, 1980). Yet-unlike the Montagnais under seventeenth-century colonial rule-there is no military or religious institution blatantly imposing these changes in the village itself. Instead, in everyday life, the allocation of men to commodity production and women to household labor, outside of the economic constraints, appears to be based on spontaneous choices exercised freely by individuals. Along with their competition for status and material wealth, the men are becoming more aggressive and contemptuous of women. In the nomadic bands, a woman finding herself with an uncongenial husband quickly leaves his company and spends a year or two in casual flirtations before marrying again. In the village, however, couples are held together in fitful marriages by economic pressures. At the same time, public censure is addressed to the wife; and slander by boastful husbands in public settings deflects social criticism of marital conflicts away from the men (97). Simultaneously, the organization of space and privacy in the villages isolates marital conflicts. Village men spend more of their time in economic activities away from the village or on its periphery, while women are more restricted to the household economy centered around the residence. Moreover, in the bush, choice of residence is such that over time married couples live about equally-often simultaneously-with the kin of both the husband and wife. Consequently, a bush woman who is involved in a marital dispute usually has several of her kin to support her interests nearby. Village wives, however, live only with their husbands
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and they are more readily denied such support because the family is considered a private sphere. "In the bush," Draper (1975:107-108) says, "people can see each other and determine, on a variety of grounds, whether it is appropriate or timely to initiate social interaction. In the ... villages one heard such exchanges as 'So-and-so, are you at home?' and 'Shall I enter [your space)?' " These apparently spontaneous developments are also creating new patterns of violence among the men. After experiencing the gentleness of the nomadic bands and the joyful camaraderie shared by both sexes, Draper (1975:109) was chilled when she heard a !Kung woman say, " ... if a [village) man is angry with his wife he could put her in their house, bolt the door and beat her. No one could get in to separate them. They could only hear her screams." The same !Kung woman observed that this violence would not occur among the people in her nomadic band. First of all, the nomads would not even have their own houses with bolted doors and fences or customs that mark off an inviolate private space for domestic violence. Second, the band members move quickly to curb such aggression. If couples argue, people do not hesitate to intervene if either spouse loses self-control. "When we !Kung fight, other people get in-between," the woman said. The !Kung as well as the Mbuti actively intervene to control interpersonal violence so that it does not get out of hand. Sexual fetishism of violence
Though the capitalist mode of production did not invent male supremacy, it provides its own foundations for this supremacy. Draper's observations provide further evidence of the degree to which sexual inequality is promoted by the articulation between the capitalist mode of production and precapitalist types of production. Moreover, while capitalism has not invented violence, it gives birth to conditions that reproduce violence anew.. Capitalist conditions produce the personality developments that link masculinity with violence and femininity with nonviolence. For instance, the allocation of women to social production for use within the family is consequential for character formation. Under these conditions women undergo early childhood experiences that greatly restrict their engagement in violence and in many other antisocial forms of conduct. They act far less violently than men, whose character structures are more closely aligned with the exploitative requirements of the capitalist mode of production and the instrumental norms of its competitive market. Furthermore, men retain a monopoly over weapons and training for war. With respect to crimes based on personal victimization, such as robbery, assault, burglary, and rape, female criminality can hardly be compared to criminality among men.
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The synchronization between masculinity and violence, and femininity and nonviolence is cultivated ideologically. Everywhere in the United States, for instance, the mass media display the archetypal images of men whose innate violence is presumably acted out in myriad situations. These media portrayals also leave a lasting impression: male aggression, rather than socioeconomic relations, appears to be the fundamental source of violence in gereral. Furthermore, in everyday life this synchronization appears to be firmly rooted in biological differences. Two sets of conditions create this appearance. First, the relation between violence and gender is perceived firsthand within one's family relations, while the sociohistorical determinations of this relation are not experienced directly. That is, the face-toface relations are readily observable, but the historical relations are understandable only by theoretical reflection; they simply cannot be understood on the basis of daily life. Second, the weight of our cultural traditions favors biological explanations of social relations. This is true especially whenever sexual, racial, or other biological traits seem obviously correlated with social relations that are seen day after day-women and kitchens, blacks and menial jobs. Thus, the personal appearances of things are influenced by preexisting interpretations of reality and, under these conditions, it is not surprising that the relations between violence and gender seems to validate natural facts of life established from birth by genetic differences between men and women. Such relations underlie what we call the sexual fetishism of violence. Fetishism is a false and illusory notion about social or natural relations. People harbor the illusion that a type of person or thing such as a guru, idol, money, or natural object has secret properties it really does not have. At the earliest level of religious evolution, the fetish is an object of worship. Fetishism is therefore defined as the deification of various things or objects (fetishes) to which mysterious supernatural forces are then attributed. Vast powers of destruction were attributed to male idols, for instance, and female figures were associated with fertility and the force of life. Modem-day fetishes have similar qualities, although they do not necessarily involve religious symbols. In the case of the sexual fetishism of violence, the powers for determining war, crimes of violence, dictatorships, and colonial oppression are attributed to the nature of man, often in contrast to the nature of woman. Thus, from a theoretical point of view, human relations are fetishized when social facts are collapsed or converted into natural ones. Fetishism is involved when complex social relations are explained on the basis of natural or supernatural laws "governing" the power of people or things. When people take for granted that nature has made men predators
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toward women or, for that matter, made them predators toward all other living things, violence is itself fetishized sexually. Here, the category of gender substitutes for the real social determinations of violence in general, as well as sexual violence in particular. Finally, since people have fetishized violence sexually for thousands of years, their sexual stereotypes operate as archetypal reference points for self-identity. Today, many men actively represent themselves and are emotionally conditioned by these symbolic relations. Regulating their behavior stereotypically, they believe in ready-made axioms and other "essential truths" about sexual relations. They feel an obligation to act benevolently toward women who submit willingly to their "innate desire" for mastery, but they easily find justifications for violence when women are "ungrateful." They believe too, that when women submit willingly, it denotes a natural passivity, although, on occasion, women can be dangerous. And despite the logical contradictions, they are equally convinced that whenever women do become their enemies, the Machiavellian tendencies lurking deep in their feminine hearts are revealed. Such stereotypic notions characterize the fetishism of violence. But, again, since many forms of violence are fetishized sexually, the words "man," "masculinity," and "machismo" in everyday life stand for more than male domination of women. In the grammar of motives, these words seIVe as master symbols of male violence in general. In all sorts of circumstances, these words associate masculinity with violent power and domination: thus, they glorilY violent sports, glamorize war, and idealize ruthless businessmen. Violence is even separated ideologically from its myriad ends and conditions; and, in this context, it appears to validate masculine ideals, all by itself. This sexual fetishism helps us understand why some men also define sexual violence against men as an affirmation of "manhood." Alan J. Davis (1968:15-16), who studied homosexual rape in Philadelphia jails and prisons, for instance, says, "A primary goal of the sexual aggressor, it is clear, is the conquest and degradation of his victim. We repeatedly found that aggressors used such language as 'Fight or fuck,' 'We're going to take your manhood,' 'You'll have to give up sorne face,' and 'We're gonna make a girl out of you.' Some ofthe assaults were reminiscent of the custom in some ancient societies of castrating or buggering a defeated enemy." Davis (1968:16) suggests that these sexual assaults are not primarily caused by sexual deprivation. He concludes, "They are expressions of anger and aggression prompted by the same basic frustrations ... [which] can be summarized as an inability to achieve masculine identification through avenues other than sex." Denied other avenues for expressing their "manhood," male prisoners displace their frustration in rape. Davis's obseIVations, in our opinion, are valid, yet his psychoanalytic, causal explanation is not. Whatever its form, rape is mediated by socially
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acquired attitudes; and even though it can be catalyzed around personal frustration, it is vitally important to recognize that it occurs regardless of whether or not men are experiencing any deprivation at all. The validation of personal "manhood" through violence is conditioned by the social experiences underlying sexual inequality and by the sexual fetishism of violence. Its expression is not necessarily restricted to frustrating conditions and defense mechanisms. Furthermore, as we shall see, the degree to which this fetishism is actually used to justifY rape is strongly influenced by definable sets of class conditions.
IV. CLASS AND RAPE
In Part III, we have indicated that most men learn to fetishize violence sexually; however, this does not mean that they will engage in rape regardless of the circumstances. The fact is that most men do not rape, and this majority includes men from all classes, most of whom are imbued with patriarchal bourgeois attitudes. On the other side of this coin, let us be clear, there are men from all classes who do rape. Neither are we saying that the dominant ideologies in societies like the United States place no limits on violence. Even though they contain double standards and they are applied hypocritically, bourgeois ideologies do incorporate moral criteria when they evaluate violence. In bourgeois morality, the violent instincts associated with masculinity are regarded with ambivalence so that any sharp deviations from moral ideals are considered evil and unnatural peIVersions, presumably offending the laws of nature and God. Still, we also know that bourgeois sexual ideals are qualified by chauvinistic conceptions that hold certain kinds of women in contempt or that objectifY women instrumentally as mere things. Under certain circumstances these sexist conceptions are converted into "stereotypes of probable victims" (Schwendinger, 1963; Borges and Weis, 1973). In war, where male behavior is especially conditioned by high levels of violence, these stereotypes are buttressed by racial and national chauvinisms which generate enormous increases in sexual victimization by soldiers. Within the United States, the level of interpersonal violence among members of the relative surplus labor force and lump en proletariat is an important consideration. Their level of violence conditions instrumental relations between the sexes, especially among men whose main sources of income stem from secondruy labor markets or irregular economic activities. With persistent unemployment, some of these men go through a series of dependent relationships, relying for income and resources on family, other relatives, and friends. Some finally tum to thievery and hustling in illegal markets where the exploitation of sexuality has no bounds.
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Within these populations, women sometimes provide more stable sources of economic assets than men because of their own earnings, their access to welfare payments, or their role in extended family relations where they govern the redistribution of whatever resources are available among sisters, brothers, in-laws, and children. Under these conditions, the importance of manipulating and controlling women, by violence if necessary, is elevated among those men who accept capitalism's premises yet develop extremely cynical and parasitic adaptations to their class situation. A ramified instrumental ideology emerges among men who make these adaptations. The ideological importance of male chauvinism and its fetishism of violence to self-esteem also expands enormously under these material conditions, and it resonates with the cultural portrayal of the "Superstuds" and "Superflies" who rely on violence for more reasons than their economic and political disinheritance. This chauvinism and its fetishism resonate because the control of women, no matter how precarious it is, is one of the many substitutes that these men use for uncontrollable labor-market conditions. When we examine life in communities with these populations, we also find a greater proportion of peer groups that subscribe to violent macho ideals. Group sexual attacks by two or more males expand the incidence of rape by as much as 24 percent, according to a victimization study of twenty-six cities.24 Such expansion can largely be attributed to the long-term effects of adverse socioeconomic conditions and the effects of male supremacy on family, school, and community life. These violent peer groups develop prior to labor market engagement and are secondary products of class conditions; consequently, they are relatively impervious to short-term economic fluctuations. 25
NATURAL LAWS VERSUS SOCIAL LAWS
We have emphasized socioeconomic conditions because the theoretical significance of these conditions has generally been ignored, especially by bourgeois feminists who perceive the so-called community of men rather than social relations as the cause of violence against women. In this context, it is well to recall that the struggle for women's rights at the turn of the 1970s made rape a symbol for all the social harms generated by sexual inequality. Consequently, for many women, the response to this crime went beyond the harms done to rape victims alone. The response became infused with a moral outrage so intense that it flared up against every form of violence inflicted by men upon women. While this kind of outrage is very important, it cannot substitute for an adequate social theory. Without a realistic understanding of society, outrage invites utopianism and eventually disillusionment. Furthermore,
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without an emphasis on the socioeconomic factors contributing to violence, this outrage is easily captured by demogogic appeals for repressive crime control. It is readily absorbed by "law-and-order" movements that locate the fundamental causes of crime within individuals rather than in the social conditions under which individual criminals thrive. A prime example of a law-and-order rhetoric is Susan Brownmiller's (1975) Against Our Will, the most popular American work on rape today. The innumerable accounts of rape in this work shocked its readers and triggered their moral outrage. Yet these accounts also stimulated the belief that rape is due to the bestial nature of men. All men, according to Brownmiller, are innately brutish-killing, raping, or dominating others to satisfY their desire for power and property. Such a notion, as we indicate elsewhere (J. Schwendinger and H. Schwendinger, 1976), properly belongs to a "natural-law conception of man," because it attributes rape to natural tendencies, inherent in every man. 26 Natural-law conceptions have been proclaimed for a long time and they are frequently called upon to justifY highly repressive criminal justice policies. (Since men are beasts at heart, the repression of their antisocial actions is logically the fundamental answer to crime control.) Consequently, rapists can be controlled, Brownmiller (1975:379, 389-90) says, by putting more women into positions of power-equal numbers of women and men in the police and military forces; by redefining rape as assault, so that rapists can be convicted more frequently; and by repressing prostitution and pornography without qualification. Aside from the serious legal and social issues posed by the implementation of such policies with regard to pornography and prostitution, for instance, these policies by themselves cannot by any stretch of the imagination significantly reduce the incidence of rape. Thus, whether or not moral outrage catalyzes people around progressive crime-fighting policies depends upon how the causes of crime are interpreted. Is rape really a crime that erupts from the sordid nature of men in general? Or does it express complex causal patterns due to the nature of society rather than man? The answers to these questions are extremely important. If social relations are the fundamental causes, then the repression of individual rapists will never provide a long-term solution to the eradication of rape. For every imprisoned rapist there will be others created by society to take his place in the population at large. That rape is due to social causes rather than natural laws is suggested by victimization studies of rape and attempted rape. These studies are valuable because they are based on interviews of women and therefore measure the incidence of rape independently of the policeP If natural laws accounted for rape, we would expect rape to be a norm for male behavior; furthermore, since the population of men in our society is so
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high, rape should occur as frequently as other violent or property crimes, including robbery, assault, burglary, and larceny. Brownmiller's book itself sets up such expectations: it unfolds an apparently endless list of rapes that were reportedly committed with great frequency throughout the history of humankind. Fortunately, however, victimization studies go against such gloomy predictions. While no amount of this vile crime is justifiable, and while our incidence surpasses that of all other highly industrialized countries, rape is actually among the least frequent of all the serious index crimes. (Only homicide is less frequent.) Moreover, the relatively small magnitude of rape incidence does not depend on how the statistics are derived. According to police estimates, forcible rape comprises less than 1 percent of the crime index total and accounts for only 6 percent ofthe volume of violent crimes. Victimization studies have similar findings. The national survey Criminal Victimization in the United States, 1978, for example, showed that rape comprised less than 1 percent of the personal and household crimes found by the study and only 2.9 percent of the volume of violent crimes. Obviously, given these very low relative frequencies, it is extremely unlikely that this crime is due to universal characteristics of men or that it reflects the laws of nature. The relative infrequency of rape is not the only datum that contradicts natural-law theories. Just like other "common" violent crimes, rape is not committed equally in all parts of the population. It is committed primarily by older adolescents and young adults. In addition, the social class of both rapists and their victims is skewed toward one end of the income scale. Figure 1 contains information from four victimization surveys of American cities. Two surveys of the same eight cities conducted three years apart found that victims from low-income groups had the highest rape rates. The larger victimization studies demonstrate that the relation between family income and victimization is neither accidental nor due to unreliable responses in other studies.28 Figure 1. also illustrates findings from a 1973 survey ofthirteen large cities, and it shows a similar tendency found by a 1974-75 survey of twenty-six large cities. Finally, the most recent studies, based on nationwide samples in 1977 and 1978, discovered the same relation between rape victims and family income, and their findings are shown in Figure 2. (The national survey data has lower rates because in its average it includes rural, small urban, and suburban areas that have markedly fewer rapes.) Survey after survey has found that the overwhelming majority of women who experienced rape or attempted rape have had annual family incomes ofless than $10,000.29 This conclusion was based on a variety of 1973-78 victimization studies, but our opinion about low socioeconomic status and much higher rates of victimization have not changed since that time. Victimiza-
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-$3,000 $7,500 $15,000 $25,000+ Family Income of Victim
1974-7526 Cities 1974-75 e Cities 1973 13 Cities 1971-72 e Cities
Figure 1 Rape and Family Income of Vict:im: Four Surveys of Large Cit:ies Sources: The rates in Figures 1 to 3 are based on numbers of attempted and completed rapes per 100,000 females twelve years of age and older. The SUIVeys of cities included Atlanta, Baltimore, Cleveland, Dallas, Denver, Newarl<:, Portland, and St. Louis. See Criminal Victimization SUN1¥' in Eight American Cities, U.S. Department of Justice, LEM, NCJ Information and Statistics Service, November 1976. The survey of thirteen cities included Boston, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Houston, Miami, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, New Orleans, Oakland, Pittsburgh, San Diego, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. See Criminal Victimization Surveys in Thirteen American Cities, U.S. Department of Justice, LEM, NCJ Information and Statistics Service, November 1975. In addition to most of the cities listed above, the survey of twenty-six cities included Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, New Ymx, and Los Angeles. See M. Joan McDermott, Rape Victimization in twenty-six American Cities, U.S. Department of Justice, LEM, NCJ Information and Statistics Service, 1979.
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Figure 2 Rape and Family Income IIf Victim: Two Nationwide Surveys Sources: Criminal Victimiz.1tion in the United States, 1977, U.S. Department of Justice. LEAA. NCJ Information and Statistics SeIVice, December 1979; and Criminal Victimization in the United States, 1978, U.S. Department of Justice, LEAA, NCJ Information and Statistics SeIVice. December 1980.
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tion studies after this period also show that rape victims primarily come from lower-income families. However, an income of $10,000 per family is no longer adequate in evaluating this relation because inflation must now be taken into consideration. From 1977 to 1982, for instance, the poverty threshold for a family offour increased almost 40 percent. As indicated, this systematic trend is not the only one indicating the importance of social class relations for the study of rape. Rapists usually (but not always) pick victims with economic backgrounds that are similar to their own (Amir, 1971:70, 91-92). When this choice is compared with the disproportionate number of poorer victims, the implications are equally significant. Furthermore, it is likely that the socioeconomic status of most rapists is fairly similar to the status of most apprehended offenders in all the other violent index crime categories. In other words, the poor are highly overrepresented. This likelihood becomes stronger when we consider the rapes that are accompanied by theft. In the victimization study of twenty-six cities, victims who were subject to completed rape reported that the attacker stole money or other items of value or tried unsuccessfully to steal something.30 Only 20 percent of the completed rapes of victims in the lowest income category were accompanied by theft, presumably because these victims possessed little of value. However, in a report that analyzes this data for the twenty-six -city study, as many as 40 percent of the rapes of women with incomes of $10,000 and more were accompanied by theft (McDermott, 1979:28-29). Since robbers are not likely to be wealthy, even women in higher income categories were raped by men from poorer segments of society. The personal resources and social conditions that enable women to foil rapists are also structured by class relations, There are more "attempted rapes" than completed ones. Yet, the twenty-six-city victimization study shows that while 65 percent of the attacks on women in the lowest income categOIY were not completed, as many as 92 percent ofthe rapes of women in the highest income category were not completed. As a result, when the completed rapes found by that sUIVey are isolated, they show the effect of class relations to an even greater degree. That effect is shown in Figure 3. The findings of victimization studies, therefore, provide support for causal interpretations of rape that link it, along with other index crimes, to social class conditions. These findings do not support theories that rely for their explanations on biological factors-the universal characteristics of men. If these universal theories were true, we would expect rape to be much more prevalent than it is in higher income groups. Obviously, then, although men, and not women, are rapists, victimization studies suggest that rape cannot be reduced to gender relations alone. As indicated, those studies emphasize the importance of the same social-
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$10,000 $25,000 $25,000+ $7,500 $15,000 Family Income of Victim
Figure 3 Complel:ed Rapes and Family Income: 1974-75 Survey of Twel1lt:y-Six Cil:ies
class relations that affect other violent index crimes such as assault and robbery. They provide evidence that the prevention of rape within the United States is significantly tied to the "prevention of most common crimes." In our book, Rape and Inequality, we take note of these relations and point out that the bourgeois feminist adoption of natural-law theories has distracted people from realizing that rape is strongly influenced by familiar social-class conditions. (Such conditions generate higher incidences of direct interpersonal violence among marginal members of the labor force as well as among men whose livelihoods are based primarily
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on illegal activities such as pimping and robbery.) While making this point, we grant that rape is also committed by bourgeois males and that it erupts in wartime among sexist men from all classes, especially when those men are infused with racial and national chauvinisms. At the same time, however, we insist that the fallacy of attributing rape to the universal characteristics of men has distracted attention from critical empirical findings, and it has justified crime-fighting strategies that are objectively no different from those advocated by the so-called Moral Majority. The main point is that within the United States the incidence of rape is strongly influenced by class relations, and even though some of the mechanisms that encourage men from different classes are not known, the incidence of this crime can be reduced enormously by affecting the conditions oflife in poorer working-class communities.
CONCLUSION
We have said that moral outrage against the victimization of women is easily channeled into law-and-order policies because the social sources of violence against women cannot be observed directly. (These sources are represented phenomenologically by the spontaneous actions of individuals and not by the causal socioeconomic relations.) Law-andorder strategies are appealing partly because the behavior of violent men appears to reflect a spontaneous expression of personal motives which, therefore, merely call for individual repression. On one level of reality, these appearances are valid: the acts ofthese men are indeed willful and they are morally responsible for their crimes. On another level of reality, however, the spontaneous appearance of violence against women is not a valid guide to political action. Certainly the increasing levels of repression which target this spontaneous appearance cannot prevent and, indeed, have not prevented further violence. Consequently, people who are outraged by this violence have to come to terms with its social foundations, even though these foundations can only be grasped theoretically. On this theoretical level, then, it is clear that nothing really significant can be done about combating rape in the United States without considering the causes of violence in general and violent crime in particular. It is equally clear that the prevention of rape today means fighting back to reverse long-term government policies that create new generations of violent men by making living conditions worse for poor people-especially for racially oppressed poor people. 31 The political legacies of the Reagan and Bush administrations pose an even greater threat because they escalate violence against women enormously by bringing about other wars. Viewed in this way, the fight against rape must make common
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cause with the growing resistance to right-wing developments rather than with reinforcing them. The political times and the theoretical understanding of violence call for a broadening of the strategies for the control and prevention of violence against women. Women's groups pioneered in defending the rights of victims in the justice system and community, and they encouraged self-defense strategies as well as increased convictions of rapists. Nevertheless, even though these measures still have merit, they largely represent individualistic solutions to criime control. Certainly strategies that go beyond these solutions are needed more than ever before. Also, while it is fruitless to debate whether most middle-class movements will ever transcend their class perspective toward violence, it is appropriate to ask whether the "moral panics" about rape, recently being directed by certain segments of the women's movement at pornographers, for example, are different from the conservative trends that are determining justice policies in other areas of crime. In this regard, we fully agree that pornographic enterprises should be punished for exploiting violent sexuality and for demeaning and preying on women and children; but, there are political approaches to the problem of pornography that make no distinction between violent sexuality and other forms of erotica, or between the rights of pornographers and the rights of political dissenters. Brownmiller's work is only one example. It has a markedly anti-civil libertarian stance, and it makes no distinction between the absolutist interpretation of the First Amendment (which was adopted in recent decades when the Supreme Court originally permitted these pornographers to operate) and the interpretations that protect political dissent (which were originally advanced by the radicals who framed the Bill of Rights). Such an approach to crime control is hardly distinguishable from the law-and-order trends that have swept the country during the last decade. The advocates of these law-and-order trends have swindled the American people by promising them crime prevention that they have never delivered. They have also made matters worse by encouraging the repression of political dissent. Further, they have directed attention away from serious consideration of crime-fighting policies aimed at improving the conditions of life that especially oppress poor families-black, Hispanic, and white. Consequently, it is not inappropriate to question whether the moral panics that are raised by people like Brownmiller will do more to prevent rape than the militant working-class movements that are struggling politically against the present mobilization for a new war and against the steady deterioration offamily, work, and communal life. It is time to recognize that rape is distributed in our social structure in predictable ways and that rape as well as other violent crime is due to the effects of structural conditions on people's lives. It is also time to integrate
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this recognition into our most significant standards for evaluating whether feminist or nonfeminist movements are really doing something to prevent violence against women. Surely the feminist movement has raised the consciousness ofleft organizations regarding the oppression of women, and surely it is not too late for feminist and nonfeminist organizations to unite with working-class movements in a struggle against sexual inequality and the conditions of exploitation that breed violent crime against the most vulnerable segments of our population.
Nates 1 The phrase "social production," or "social labor," in this context refers to a woman's participation in work (done singly or in a group) for use or appropriation by people who are outside of her immediate household. 2 The level of violence can be affected independently of socioeconomic characteristics by repeated aggression against a society from external sources. 3 However, under certain conditions, as we shall see, the intensification of violence between male warriors can be due to other factors, and itself can effect sexual inequality. 4 According to Monica Hunter (1961:135, 379-86), cattle raiding afforded an opportunity for enterprising men to get rich quickly. Mpondo men also acquired wealth by serving a chief, or wealthy man, and receiving in return the loan or gift of cattle. Wages could be acquired through work in gold mines and on sugar plantations owned by European corporations or settlers. Further, it is important to note that though Sacks classifies only the Baganda as a class society, we are not sure about the absence of class relations among the Mpondo. Hunter indicates that prior to annexation by the Union of South Africa, the Mpondo chiefs had more cattle, land, and grain than other members of the society, and they were wealthier than others. Her description of traditional economic life suggests a stratification system based on wealth and political power which is partly sustained by the labor of commoners. Such relations may be confined; nevertheless, they do appear to represent incipient class developments. 5 The Kriges (1943:42) in this case are equating the word "economic" with the value of the cattle in a competitive market, while the word "social" refers to the value of cattle for integrating joint family groups into a network of reciprocal relations. Both cases, however, actually involve socioeconomic relations, but of different types. 6 For instance, "a well marked characteristic of Lovedu society, one that clearly distinguishes it from the strictly patrilineal Zulu, Xhosa, and Pondo, is the importance of the mother's side of the family," say the Kriges (1943:77). 7 The logic of this argument is derived from Engels. 8 Meillasoux (1980:198) provides insights into the articulated relations that conserve pre capitalist formations and lead to their gradual rather than rapid decay. For an excellent collection of articles on articulation relations, see Harold Wolpe (1980). 9 Material conditions such as these provide the material basis for women's organizations that maintain or extend the status of women. In "Down to Gentility: Women in Tanzania," the anthropologist James Brain suggests that during the precolonial period, the favorable position of the Igbo women in Nigeria was based on their economic success and trading and on their tightly organized women's groups. In addition, Brain
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describes how a "money economy" and Victorian bourgeois ethics contributed to the deterioration of women's status in a Tanzanian resettlement program. This discussion does not deal with the issue of the long-term effects due to participation in social production under capitalism. This participation provides a material base for the economic and political organization of women, or men and women, which affects women's position in society. In the opening chapters of Capital, vol. I, Karl Marx indicates that because of commodity fetishism, these relations appear to be different from what they are in essence. Rather than changes within or among similar socioeconomic formations, our concern here is with the variation between different formations. The form of Godelier's theory, in our opinion, is identical to structural functionalism. For descriptions and criticisms of structural-functional justifications of inequality (which use optimization functions of inegalitarian ism for "society"), see Schwendinger and Schwendinger (1974). For factual objections, see Leacock's criticism of the notion that women did not engage in hunting. Leacock (1981:141) says, "The association of hunting, war, and masculine assertiveness is not found among hunter-gatherers except, in a limited way, in Australia. Instead, it characterizes horticultur·al societies in certain areas, notably Melanesia and the Amazon lowlands." (The Mundurucu, who belong to the latter group, will be taken up in Part II.) Leacock (1981:142) also criticizes the idea that these male activities were, in the past, more prestigious than the creation of new human beings. Finally, the old "activepassive" sexual distinction is implicated by Godelier's assumptions; and Leacock also refutes this distinction. For the use of this antiquated distinction by early sociologists, see our discussion entitled, "W. I. Thomas: Women Are Stationary-Men Are Mobile: 'Look! Jane, See Dick Run! Look! Dick, See Jane Hide!' " (Schwendinger and Schwendingel', 1974:315). The files generally contain qualitative material, but since they are usually based on works resulting from lengthy obselVation, they are not simple random impressions. Unfortunately, other anthropological sources on the four tribes provide no information specifically on rape. However, this lack of information does not negate the importance of Turnbull's obselVation of no Mbuti rapes or of our general hypothesis about sexual inequality, violence, and modes of production. SInce Uganda has a central government (or at least a semblance of one after Idi Amin's dictatorship), statistics on rape may be available. For instance, Turnbull's field study was published in 1965, and in that year, there were 1,063 convictions in Uganda for rape, murder, and armed robbery (see Allison Herrick et aI., Area Handbook for Uganda, 385.) The number of convictions, however, is not very useful because they are grouped with other violent crimes and apply to the country as a whole. Also, the actual amount of crimes is obviously much higher than the number of convictions; and, moreover, these figures are very conselVative since, as Herrick et al. note (382), police in remote rural areas do not use formal courts; nor do they report crimes to the central government. On the other hand, some comparison may ultimately be possible regarding levels of violence, since rape, murder, and armed robbery are far less frequent among the Mbuti. Violations of tribal rules, disputed claims, and injuries are judged by male judges who sit in the khoro, which is a kind of native court, although it does not enforce legal statutes or dispense corporal punishment. A parallel system of authority over family disputes and the allocation of compensation for various wrongs is centered around
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older women, especially "the cattle-linked sisters," who also present the dowry for their daughters. Furthermore, the Kriges point out that the older sister is "the legal 'builder' of most houses in the country, [it is] she who 'cuts' cases arising within the house and regulates the inheritance of goods and of widows." The role of the older sister is fully recognized in khoro proceedings. In fact, in complicated cases the male judges often postpone their decision again and again until she appears, and they rely upon her to suggest a solution and to guarantee its being put into effect. 18 Roscoe's account appears to be filled with moral and European bias associated with
anthropologists who are also missionaries; however, even if we discount his accounts of the frequency of violence, there remain enormous differences between the other tribes and the Baganda. 19 On the other hand, the husband's own life may be at stake if the adulterer is powerful.
"If a peasant found that his chief was making love to his wife, he would pack up his goods and leave the district by night lest he should be put to death on her account; should his wife refuse to go with him, he would leave her behind," according to Roscoe (1965:263--64).
20 Such variations include, for example, differences in violence and inequality within the capitalist mode of production during stages involving the primitive accumulation of capital and monopoly capital, or historical conjunctures involving bourgeois democracy and fascism. Other refinements would consider whether a mode of production is based on visible forms of exploitation, such as slavery, feudalism, or tributory modes, or on forms that are not immediately apprehensible, such as capitalist commodity relations. 21 This reference to the Philippine Tiboli tribe is found in John Nance (1975).
22 For a fuller discussion of compensation, in relation to laws and custom about rape, see Schwendinger and Schwendinger (1982). 23 However, one cannot overestimate the degree to which violence against women and women's status changed with advanced forms of capitalism. Although personal dependencies still flourish where power is tightly consolidated in the hands of single individuals, for example, in civil bureaucracies or corporations, the growth of industrial capital and working-class organizations has substantially undermined these relations outside the family. Furthermore, as capitalism continued to develop, the feudal doctrine of coverture and the legal right of husbands to administer corporal punishment in the United States have also fallen by the waySide. Today, while corporal punishment remains a serious problem in its use, only customary supremacist practices (not laws) justify corporal punishment for maintaining the wife's obedience to patriarchal authority (Schwendinger and Schwendinger, 1982). 24 There are data indicating that these multiple rapes are frequently committed by adolescents and young adults. McDermott (1979:13) reports that such rapes involve a disproportionate number of younger victims and rapists. Almost 50 percent of the victims of multiple rapes were between twelve and nineteen years old and 43 percent of the total rapes and attempted rapes committed by multiple offenders included rapists perceived to be under twenty-one years old. 25 Again, our interest here is in emphasizing the main socioeconomic trends. We are certainly aware flum our own delinquency research that gang rapes are sometimes committed by adolescents and young adults flum "middle-class" families. 26 Allegedly, rape is created by "laws of nature" which are fundamentally independent of human will. For a discussion of natural-law conceptions, see Schwendinger and Schwendinger (1974:7-14).
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27 The surveys may undercount rapes involving personal acquaintances, because victims
are reluctant to report such rapes to interviewers as well as to the police. However, estimates from the San Jose study indicate that this undercount involves only a small proportion of the rapes that are counted by the surveys (McDermott, 1979:3-4). When we also consider that any undercount is distributed among the various income groups, then the likelihood of finding actual distributions that are not skewed socioeconomically is small. 28 Because of its low frequency, there are reliability problems with rape victimization data.
However, for the pUIposes at hand, these problems are less relevant because the same socioeconomic trend is found repeatedly by victimization surveys. 29 Since many women do not work, or work pal'1:-time, total family income is a better
indicator of the income of rape victims than their personal income. 30 The rate of theft for the attempted rapes was only 9 percent, but M. Joan McDermott's
(1979:25) analytic report suggests that this low rate occurs because "it is easier for the offender to steal something when the rape is completed and the victim is less capable of offering resistance. The reasons rape attacks are not completed-reasons such as effective resistance, fighting or flight-may also be the reasons for the smaller proportion of thefts in attempted rape." 31 Systematic unemployment, chronic overcrowding, and violent life histories set the
stage for increases in rape that are found especially in racially oppressed communities. A nationwide victimization survey comparing 1977 with 1978 found an increase in stranger rape rates for black females, age n-velve and over, of 122.9 percent. The comparative increase for white females was 9.1 percent (Criminal Victimization in the U.S.: 1973-78 Trends, 1980).
References Amir, Menachem 1971 Patterns in Forcible Rape. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bateson, Gregory 1958 Naven (2d ed'). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Brain, James L. 1978 "Down to Gentility: Women in Tanzania." Sex Roles 4, 5. Brownmiller, Susan 1975 Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape. New York: Simon and Schuster. Caulfield, Mina Davis 1978 "Equality, Sex, and Mode of Production." New York: Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. Davis, Alan J. 1968 Sexual Assaults in the Philadelphia Prison System and Sheriff's Vans." Transaction (December 8). Davis, Angela 1975 "JoAnn Little--The Dialectics of Rape." In Save JoAnn Little. Oakland, California: Women's Press Collective. (No page numbers or publication date in this movement pamphlet. Because it was used to raise funds for JoAnn Little's defense, it was probably published in Spring 1975.)
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Drapel', Patricia 1975 "!Kung Women: Contrasts in Sexual Egalitarianism in Foraging and Sedentary Contexts." In Rayna R. Reiter led.l, Toward an Anthropology of Women. New York: Monthly Review Press. Dupre, Georges, and PimTe-Phillippe Rey 1980 "Retlections on the Pertinence of a Theory of the HistOIY of Exchange." In Harold Wolpe led.l, The Articulation of Modes of Production. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Engels, Frederick 1975 The Family, Private Property, and the State. New York: International Publishers. Godelier, Maurice 1981 "The Ol'igin of Male Domination." New Left Review 217 IMay-Junel. Harris, Marvin 1975 Culture, People, Nature. New York: Crowell. Hunter, Monica 1961 Reaction to Conquest 12d ed.!. London: Oxford University Press lorig. 19361. Krige, E. Jensen, and J. D. Krige 1943 The Realm of a Rain Queen. London: Oxford University Press. Leacock, Eleanor Burke 1981 Myths of Male Dominance. New York: Monthly Review Press. 1975 "Introduction." In Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. New York: Intemational Publishers. Leacock, Eleanor Burke, and Jacqueline Goodman 1976 "Montagnais Marriage and the Jesuits in the Seventeenth CentUlY: Incidents From the Relations of Paul Le Jeune." The Western Canadian Journal of Anthl'opology6. Lerner. Gerda 1973 Black Women in White America. New York: Random House. Mal'x, Karl 1959 Capital. Vol. 1. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. McDermott, M. Joan 1979 Rape Victimization in twenty-six American Cities. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. Mead, Margaret 1969 Male and Female: A Study of the Sexes in a Changing World. New York: Dell Publishing Co. 1963 Sex and Temperament. New York: Dell Publishing Co. Meillasoux, Claude 1980 "From Reproduction to Production: A Marxist Approach to Economic Anthropology." In Harold Wolpe led.i, The AI1icuiation of Modes of Production. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. MUlphy, Robert F. 1960 Headhunter's Heritage. Berkeley: University of California Press. Nance, John 1975 The Gentle Tasaday. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Perkin, H. 1969 The Origins of Modem English Society, 1780-1880. London: Methuen.
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Roscoe, John 1965 The Baganda (2d ed.). London: Frank Cass and Co. (mig. 1911). Rubin, Gayle 1975 "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex." In Rayna R. Reiter (ed.), Toward an Anthropology of Women. New York: Monthly Review Press. Sacks, Karen 1975 "Engels Revisited: Women, the Organization of Production, and Private Property." In Rayna R. Reiter (ed.), Toward an Anthropology of Women. New York: Monthly Review Press. Schwendinger, Julia, and Herman Schwendinger 1983 Rape and Inequality. Beverly Hills: Sage. 1982 "Rape Law and Private Property." Crime and Delinquency. 1980 "Rape Victims and the False Sense of Guilt." Crime and Social Justice 13 (Summer). 1976 "A Review of the Rape Literature." Crime and Social Justice 6 (Fall-Winter). Schwendinger, Herman, and Julia Schwendinger 1976 "Delinquency and the Collective Varieties of Youth." Crime and Social Justice 7 (Spring-Summer), chapters 1-3. 1974 The Sociologists of the Chair: A Radical Analysis of the Formative Years of North American Sociology (1883-1922). New York: Basic Books. 1967 "Delinquent Stereotypes of Probable Victims." In Malcolm W. Klein (ed.), Juvenile Gangs in Context. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. Turnbull, Colin 1965 Wayward Servants. Garden City. N.Y.: Natural History Press. Weis, Kurt, and Sandra Weis 1973 "Victimology and Justification of Rape." In Israel Drapkin and Emilio Viano (eds.), Victimology:A New Focus, vol. V. Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath. Wolpe, Harold 1980 "Introduction." In Harold Wolpe (ed.), The Articulation of Modes of Production. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Editor'S Notes 1 In a critique of the Schwendingers' use of anthropological data, James Messerschmidt, Capitalism, Patriarchy, and Crime (Totowa, NJ.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1986), 15-24, points to studies of band and tribal societies in which women are subordinated and their labor exploited, even though exchange relations are insignificant and distinct classes other than those defined by gender do not exist. Messerschmidt makes this point by showing that among the nomadic !Kung San, an African people whom the Schwendingers discuss, men have somewhat higher status and prestige than women, and their activities are more highly valued, even though their bands are generally egalitarian in their gender relations. However, Edwin M. Wilmsen's recent study, Land Filled with Flies: A Political Economy of the Kalahari (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989) shows that the !Kung San cannot be regarded as a pristine survival of an egalitarian band of hunter-gatherers. Not too long ago they were pastoralists as well as hunters. They participated in extensive long-distance trade, and were dominated by
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neighboring peoples. The small degree of male superiority they exhibit may have been due to these factors. If so, they are not an exception to the Schwendingers' analysis. 2 In arguing that rapists are drawn disproportionately fium the lower socioeconomic strata, the Schwendingers cite official rape statistics based on arrests. Arrest statistics have long been criticized for possible biases about the social background of criminals. In the case of rape, these biases could be large. The Schwendingers note, however, that indirect substantiation comes fium victimization surveys, which show that rape victimization occurs disproportionately to low-income women. Drawing on Menachem Amir's finding that Philadelphia rapists tended to rape women of their own social class, the Schwendingers argue that conclusions about the social backgrounds of rapists derived fium arrest statistics may be valid. Amir's study, however, was restricted to officially identified rapists and thus may be biased in the same way as arrest statistics. Although the Schwendingers do not say much about race, victimization surveys regarding the race of assailants provide some evidence regarding the extent of bias. These surveys suggest that the ratio of white to black rapists in 1990 was approximately 1.45 to 1. (Precision is impossible here because published figures do not tell us enough about episodes involving multiple rapists of mixed racial background.) In arrest statistics, the corresponding ratio was 1.275 to 1 (Timothy J. Flanagan and Kathleen Maguire, eds., Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics, 1991 [Washington, D.C.: u.s. Department of Justice, 1992], 303, 306, 444). Thus, arrest statistics may slightly exaggerate the percentage of rapes committed by blacks. However, when one takes into account that whites greatly outnumber blacks in the u.s. population, it is apparent fium either set of figures that rapists are disproportionately black. Because there is a correlation between being black and having low income in contemporary American society, it would not be possible for this to be true and for socioeconomic status to be unrelated to rape. This conclusion must be qualified in one respect. It is possible that victimization surveys are themselves biased. Respondents may not regard sexual assault by a spouse or acquaintance as rape, and so may fail to tell interviewers that they have been raped. Episodes in which employers and supervisors coerce employees to give them sexual favors, or in which medical practitioners molest patients, are even less likely to be mentioned when an interviewer asks about a sexual attack. Nor will they appear in arrest statistics. Thus arrest statistics and victimization surveys could both seriously underestimate the extent of rape (or of coercive sex that is not technically rape) committed by middle- and upper-class men. Only recently have researchers begun to study these forms of coercive sex. However, Diana Russell's study of marital rape found little evidence that it was related to a husband's class position (Rape in Marriage [New York: Macmillan, 1982], 128-29). Although education is an impeifect indicator of class position, it is noteworthy that in her sample, 22 percent of husband-rapists had some college education, 20 percent were college graduates, and 14 percent had post-graduate education. Russell's study, it should be noted, was based on a single survey of women in one city (San Francisco), and details of the procedures Russell used have been questioned. Clearly, further research is desirable. Even if it should turn out that Russell's conclusions regarding marital rape withstand critical scrutiny, they do not impeach the Schwendingers' conclusions regarding extramarital rape. An exchange between James Messerschmidt and the Schwendingers on these issues appeared in Social Justice 15, no. 1 (Spring 1988): 123-60. At the heart of their debate is the question of the degree to which sexual subordination and superordination can be explained in Marxist terms as the consequences of exploitative socioeconomic relations, instead of having a dynamic of their own, as many feminists argue.
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The Gendering of Crime in Marxist Theory David F. Greenberg
MARXISM AND THE GENDERING OF CRIME Imagine, in your mind's eye, a criminal. Chances are high that the person you've imagined is male. When criminologists think of criminals, they too usually think of males, and for reasons that are not just imaginary. So far as we know, in all countries throughout the world, crimes of interpersonal violence and theft are committed very disproportionately by males (Mannheim, 1967:697; Sutherland and Cressey, 1978: 130-36).1 With women seriously underrepresented in the annals of crime, criminology until recently gave only occasional and limited attention to female criminality. Even less attention was given to the role culturally defined conceptions of masculinity might play in crimes committed by males. Sparked by the rise of the women's liberation movement and by the belief that women's law violations had gradually been increasing, criminologists of the 1970s and 1980s-many of them feminists-have been been paying more attention to female crime. The study of the etiological significance of masculinity stereotypes is just beginning (Adler, 1975; Simon, 1975; Smart, 1976; Adler and Simon, 1979; A. Harris, 197~r; Datesman and Scarpitti, 1980; Leonard, 1982; Carlen, 1985; Heidensohn, 1B85; Brown, 1B86; Chesney-Lind, 1B86; Currie, 1B86; Smith and Paternoster, 1987; Daly and Chesney-Lind, 1B88; Naffine, 1988; Steffensmeier and Allan, lB91). Though many suggestions have been offered, we still do not have a good understanding of why men assault and steal more than women, or why the ratio of female to male involvement changes with time. To date, Marxist criminologists have done little to address these questions. They have simply stood aside while others have analyzed the gendering of crime. I am grateful to Annette Sroka for invaluable research assistance, to Whitney Bagnall for help in using the Columbia Law Library's collection of Old Bailey sessions. Freda Adler, Ava Baron, Harold Benenson, Peter Linebaugh, James Messerschmidt, Antony Simpson, Ross Matsueda, and Carol Smart offered helpful comments and suggestions. My greatest debt, however, is to Malcolm Feeley, from whom I learned of the relevance of the Old Bailey sessions to my problem, and for sharing his thoughts and work with me prior to publication.
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Since Marxists have long slighted gender issues of all kinds, their neglect of the gendering of crime is not so surprising. That feminist criminologists have neglected Marx as a possible theoretical resource is also not surprising. Pioneering feminist scholars had to legitimate their focus on gender by arguing that gender relations are autonomous from other dimensions of social life, hence not explained by or reducible to them.2 The persistence of discrimination against women in the aftermath of revolutions led by Marxists who had made the equality of men and women one of their goals (Stacey, 1983; Croll, 1984) lent plausibility to the feminist claim of autonomy. Some radical feminists went so far as to propose a new reductionism. To them, class was not the key that unlocked the secrets of society, as Marxists claimed; instead, it was gender that illuminated class relations and the state: "The profoundly radical analysis beginning to emerge from revolutionary feminism [is] that capitalism, imperialism, and racism are symptoms of male supremacy-sexism" (Morgan, 1970:xxiv; see also Redstockings, 1970). That perspective looks to displacing Marxism, not to achieving a synthesis with it. As appealing as feminists' bold monocausal ambition may have seemed twenty years ago, it is now widely regarded as being just as inadequate as all the other monocausal theories of history. Too much is left out. The realization that this is so stimulated some feminist thinkers to grapple with the theoretical problems of incorporating gender into Marxist theory, but thus far, most of these efforts have been programmatic or at a very abstract level, or in a context largely restricted to contemporary American or English society.3 Many of these efforts focused on such questions as whether housework produced surplus value and, if so, who appropriated it. Ultimately these efforts reached a dead end, having failed to explain anything. Their criminological relevance remains obscure. The present essay seeks to explore what resources Marxism might offer for understanding the gendering of crime. At first glance, the answer is not obvious. Gender is not a category in Marxist theory. Thus, Marxism alone would seem to have nothing to say about the gendering of crime. If Marxism is to be helpful, it will have to be supplemented by a theory of gender. Because the gendering of crime is still largely terre inconnu, it makes sense to undertake such an exploration without prejudice to the outcome of the inquiry. The goal is not to demonstrate that Marxism holds the answers but to find out whether it has any. The possibility of a negative answer must be left open. The exploration proceeds by developing theoretical models in which changes in gender relations are understood as the consequence of developments in capitalism. I will interpret that task as placing the burden of explanation on class relations. Marxist concern with this part of the causal model dates back to Engel's (1972) claim that the subordina-
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tion of women occurred as a result of the rise of private property. The models will be restricted to those aspects of gender that appear to be helpful in understanding criminal behavior. Many other aspects of gender also merit exploration, but they cannot be taken up here. The second part of the model states only that gender relations have consequences for involvement in crime. For the time being, I leave open the ways these consequences are produced. Right from the start, it seems sensible to acknowledge the insight from feminist social science that gender relations (like just about everything else) are not completely determined by class relations. As a purely hypothetical example, if assaultive behavior is influenced by serum testosterone levels, which are in tum influenced by diet, then class position could affect involvement in crimes of violence through its influence on what people eat.4 That would be true even if class did not fully determine diet and if hormone levels were influenced by other factors as well. Nor do we expect gender relations to be the only influence on criminal behavior. It would, then, be unrealistic to expect Marxism to explain everything about the gendering of crime. The most sophisticated theories imaginable will fail to do so. I will be satisfied ifl can explain something. The effects of gender on crime
The existing criminological literature leaves us with many possibilities for theorizing the effects of gender on crime. For example, women have fewer opportunities to commit some kinds of crime. Their exclusion from military combat and from high government office deprives them of the opportunity to commit war crimes. Few women are high corporate executives; consequently few commit crimes that can be committed only by top executives, such as antitrust violations. When women do commit white-collar crime, it is largely petty, reflecting the restricted criminal opportunities oflower-Ievel employees (Daly, 1989). Women have fewer opportunities to learn techniques that are useful for some criminal activities. Where military service is performed primarily by males, women are less likely to learn how to use weapons. Fathers often teach sons, but not daughters, how to fight. Girls are socialized differently from boys in ways that might be expected to affect involvement in crime. In recent times (without being too precise about dates), girls have by and large been encouraged not to be overly assertive, but rather to be gentle, docile, self-effacing, cautious, cooperative, and nurturing; males, to be rugged, self-assertive, achievement-oriented, and competitive, often to the point of aggressiveness. 5 Boys are expected to fight as a normal part of growing up; girls are not. In studies of the ways American parents interact with children of kindergarten age, one of the strongest findings to emerge was that boys were permitted to act much more aggressively than girls (Sears, Maccoby, and
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Levin, 1957).6 Much more than girls, boys are encouraged, and given opportunities, to develop muscle strength through vigorous sports. Expectations of earning income for themselves are communicated to boys; until recently, the expectation in most social strata of American society has been that after they marry, women will be supported by their husbands. According to one influential theory, failure to meet this expectation may lead unsuccessful males to try to fulfill male gender role expectations illegally (Merton, 1938). On average, girls are more closely supervised than boys, and are afforded less freedom-reducing their opportunities for participation in delinquency without their parents' knowledge (Hagan, Simpson, and Gillis, 1979, 1987, 1988; Morash, 1986; Simmons and Blyth, 1987). This is less true for women than for girls, but juvenile delinquency is an important entry route to adult crime. A girl who has been kept from delinquency through close supervision when she is a teenager has, by the time she has become an adult, probably become enmeshed in and committed to a "straight" life-style that is not easily combined with many kinds of criminal activity. Even if she wanted to commit crime, she would lack the skills and personal contacts required for many kinds of crime. Psychoanalytically oriented sociologists have pointed to the different consequences for boys and girls of being raised primarily by mothers or mother-surrogates. Both boys and girls, it is argued, form their first identification with their mothers. With very few exceptions, boys break this identification at a very young age and identity themselves as male. The process of differentiation from the mother may entail a repudiation of everything the mother stands for, including the moral standards she tries to uphold. In this way, masculinity can come to stand for "badness." Girls do not need to break with a primary identification with their mothers and are less likely to strive to be "bad." Consequently they do not need to differentiate themselves from others as sharply (Parsons, 1947:162-69; Cohen, 1955; Chodorow, 1978). Gilligan (1982) has profiled differences in the styles of moral reasoning supposedly employed by boys and girls in dealing with moral dilemmas. Girls, she claims, are more likely than boys to seek solutions to personal problems that accommodate the interests of all the affected parties; boys are more likely to reason in absolute terms and opt for solutions with winners and losers. This is the sort of difference one would expect to find if girls' ego boundaries were indeed less sharply defined than those of boys. Sykes and Matza (1957) have argued that delinquents often victimize others, even though they have internalized moral standards that would seem to preclude such behavior. They do so by mentally constructing justifications and excuses that "neutralize" the prohibition, such as blaming or denying the moral worthiness of the victim. No one has specifically compared the neutralization techniques of boy and girl delinquents, but Gilligan's analysis suggests that there should be differences. Girls' greater tendency to identifY empathetically with others and
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to take their interests into account should make it harder for them to blame prospective victims. This sex-linked capacity to empathize would inhibit thefts and interpersonal violence? The inevitable frustrations an infant experiences in interaction with its mother, Dinnerstein (1976) argues, lead to infantile rage directed toward its mother. In girls, this rage is moderated by the girl's identification with the mother; in boys it is not. In later years, this rage may lead to rape or assaults against women who are identified with the mother. No great ingenuity is required to devise explanations of this kind; their conformity with commonsense understandings of gender gives some of them a manifest plausibility. It would be amazing if some of them were not true. Needless to say, much research to test them systematically remains to be done. For present purposes, explanations of this sort will be taken as valid in the aggregate, in the sense that at least some of them explain at least part of the sex differences in crime rates. Although the empirical evidence I examine may suggest something about the validity of these different explanations, it is far beyond the scope of:this essay to distinguish among them empirically. Explaining gender
My next task is to account for these gender differences. Why are soldiers male? Why is child care performed mainlly by females? Why do parents supervise girls more than boys? It is tempting to obseIve that humans evolved from primate species in which gender distinctions already existed. This observation pushes the explanation of gender differentiation back into the prehuman stages of evolution. If men differ from women in more ways than the obvious, it can only have been a result of natural selection. The skeletons of early hominids show men to have been taller and larger than women (Leibowitz, 1986). Perhaps other gender differences are equally a part of our primate legacy, built into our genes. Sociobiologists have found this line of reasoning appealing. Thus, Steven Goldberg contends, "men and women differ in their hormonal systems .... every society demonstrates patriarchy, male dominance and male attainment. The thesis put forth here is that the hormonal renders the social inevitable" (1973:93; see also Morris, 1967, and Wilson, 1975:551). Yet, in some primate groups, including chimpanzees, who are genetically very close to humans, neither gender differentiation nor male domination is pronounced (Gough, 1971). In some human societies, too, gender differentiation is weak, and male domination weak or absent. Though it is possible that the genetic legacy we have inherited from our primate ancestors plays a role in human patterns of gender differentiation, it is clearly far from being the only factor. The whole story must include social phenomena that do not arise directly from genetically
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transmitted sex differences. The present essay explores Marxist ways of conceptualizing the social aspects of gender. On the face of it, there is nothing in Marxism, a theory of class society, that would offer an explanation of why males and females should have different opportunities, or be exposed to different levels or kinds of parental control, or should be socialized differently. As I already observed, Marxism is gender-neutral. Not a single one of its fundamental categories-class, state, capital, surplus value, and so forth-has anything to do with sex or gender (Kuhn and Wolpe, 1978; Eisenstein, 1979; Hartmann, 1979). How to introduce gender into Marxism or to achieve a unified theoretical treatment of gender and class is not entirely clear. Faced with this difficulty, some investigators have decided not to make the attempt. "Dual systems" theorists, for example, characterize modern Western society as having two independent systems of subordinationcapitalism and patriarchy, offering no explanation for the existence of patriarchy (Mitchell, 1971; Hartmann, 1979).8 By default, it appears as a transhistorical system of domination that lies outside of and remains unaffected by historical transformation or, at least, by the transformation of class relations. 9 Such independence is not very plausible. To seek a Marxist explanation for gender is implicitly to take the position that gender does not operate totally independent of class relations. Our model, however, seems to be saying something more. By placing class relations causally (and therefore temporally) prior to gender relations, it seems to imply that gender did not exist until it was created by class relations. This can hardly be true. People living in classless societies are already gendered. The same is true of people who live in class societies. There are no class relations ofungendered people. For this reason, we must be careful in the way we interpret the model. At least hypothetically, we can imagine that in any given social formation, class relations among gendered people change for reasons that have nothing to do with gender, such as class conflict in which gender issues are irrelevant. The assumption is that the consciousness and actions of capitalists and workers will be the same whether the capitalist or the worker is male or female. That is how Marxists have generally understood social change. This sort of analysis, however, is incapable of explaining why men and women of the same class do not always have the same consciousness and behave differently. Early Marxist writings on gender issues finessed this issue. Engels (1972), for example, argued that the subordination of women occurred when social evolution reached the point of creating surpluses. Men, wanting to pass surpluses on to their progeny, wrested power away from mothers, who, in earlier matrilineal kinship systems, had the power to bequeath their property to their offspring. Although this reasoning still has its defenders (Reed, 1978; Sayers, Evans, and Redclift, 1987) it is obviously deficient insofar as it assumes much of what needs to be explained. Why should it matter to fathers that
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their wealth goes to their own children instead of their mother's brothers' children? Why should men have been able to subordinate women? Clearly, a more coherent account is needed.10 We also need one that can address changes that have taken place since the primordial "worldwide defeat of women." Engels has little to say about changes in gender relations in historical time. Vogel (1983) has proposed one strategy for introducing gender into Marxism. It is inspired by Engels's (1972:71) obseJvation that a society's persistence entails both the production of material goods and the reproduction from day to day, year to year, and generation to generation of its population. This observation, which could have been made as easily by a functionalist as by a Marxist, focuses attention on both biological and social processes of reproduction. There must be births and provisions for ensuring the survival of children. There must also be arrangements for channeling individuals into the roles needed to keep the social system functioning, and for ensuring that role occupants are able to perlorm their roles adequately and are motivated to do so. A number of contemporary scholars have attempted to clarifY the historical processes by which gender differences in human society emerged and led to a gender hierarchy in which women are subordinated. The precise processes at work have been the subject of considerable debate. Vogel suggests that such attempts should focus on women's unique capacity to conceive and bear chilldren. This capacity implicates women in the social reproduction system differently from men. Although this is not the only way a gender difference can be introduced into social theory, it is one I adopt here. It has the convenience of breaking the gender symmetry of social theory by introducing a biological distinction between the sexes from outside the social realm. Yet it severely limits the role of biology. The many gender differences found in modern societies are by no means direct consequences of pregnancy and lactation. Therefore, social processes must play an important role. But, if the model is correct, these social processes should be traceable to pregnancy and lactation, even if the causal connections are complex and indirect. Arguably, under conditions of early human life, pregnancy and lactation had implications for the kinds of food-gathering activities men and women could pursue. Pregnant and nursing women would have been unable to participate in hunting as effectively as men. Had they hunted, their reduced agility would have placed them at higher risk of death from predators and jeopardized their reproductive capacity. If they were carrying small children, the children would also have been at risk. On the other hand, small children left at home by hunting mothers would have been in danger of being orphaned. Moreover, women on long treks would have been unable to nurse them. Where hunting entailed unanticipated chases of wild game, child care would have been difficult to arrange on short notice (Quinn, 1977; Leibowitz, 1986). Bands in which women hunted would have been less likely to survive. l l
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David F. Greenberg
Because the density of early hominid populations was probably very low, warfare between bands was most likely infrequent or nonexistent. For that reason I have developed the argument with reference to hunting. However, it is possible that warfare did occur under special circumstances, such as famineP For present purposes this is irrelevant; similar arguments could as easily be made in reference to warfare. What is important is the development of some differentiation in task performance or division of labor based on sex, as an adaptation to biological differences in males and females connected with reproduction, in the conditions under which early hominids lived. In itself, differentiation need not imply subordination. The form human sex differention took, however, could have led to subordination. Men's primary responsibility for hunting could have given them the physical capacity-and perhaps the mental emotional outlook-needed to dominate women. One might speculate that women would have preferred husbands who were taller and stronger, and perhaps more aggressive, as those qualities would make them better at hunting and fighting. 13 Sexual selection would then have produced domineering husbands and fathers. Yet if that did happen, it did not necessarily produce male supremacy. Having the physical capacity to dominate women is not the same as doing so. Many anthropological studies of band societies have found that men do not usually dominate women. Typically, gender stereotypes and constraints are flexible and are not accompanied by the subordination of women (Kaberry, 1939:142-43,277;Leacock,1972;Sacks, 1974,1976,1979; Sanday, 1981; Bell, 1983:23; Lerner, 1986). In some regions of the world, however, subsequent developments enabled men to capitalize on the earlier differentiation ofthe sexes in such a way as to dominate women. Much effort has been devoted to identifYing the points in history at which this shift occurred. Marxist analyses have posited the rise of exploitative classes as the critical point, but their adequacy has been contested (Messerschmidt, 1986:20). Anthropological research has focused on such factors as warfare, herding, residence rules, and the domestication of large animals, with its attendant problems of theft (see, for example, Burstyn, 1983a, 1983b; Coontz and Henderson, 1986b). As interesting as they are, these efforts will not be reviewed here. Once a given gender division of labor is established, it tends to perpetuate itself. Those who benefit from it will use resources at their disposal-force, material rewards, ideological manipulation-to perpetuate that division. 14 Legitimating ideologies that define the existing arrangement as natural and desirable will be created and communicated to the next generation. Children tend to model their own behavior on the example of adults they see around them. To encourage their children to follow established patterns, parents will apply positive and negative reinforcements to shape their behavior. Once a given division is established, there are costs in abandoning it: habits have to be broken,
Gendering of Crime
413
unfamiliar skills acquired, and new arrangements established. The benefits of change, on the other hand, may be remote or hypothetical. But of course, conditions can and do change. Climactic shifts can alter the conditions of social reproduction, forcing new adaptations (e.g., the disappearance of big game in the Stone Age). A technological innovation may affect men differently from women. New access to external markets made possible by conquest can bring financial benefits to those who make the products that can be sold in those markets. In some instances these benefits have gone to men, in others to women (Boserup, 1970; Moore, 1988). Changes in resources going to men and to women will tend to shift the balance of power in the group. In the long run, gender relations will change in response to these exogenous changes in resources and power. However, in the short run, the conserving processes described in the previous paragraph may retard the impact of these changes. Indeed, those who perceive their situation as deteriorating because of these changes may resist them. These intended and unintended conserving processes are a major source of the partial independence of gender from the social or ecological conditions to which gender differences were an initial adaptation. Still, this independence can be only partial. Any set of gender relations is dependent on resources and possibilities made available by the entire complex of social relations. Under these circumstances, neither gender nor anything else can be totally autonomous. Thus far I have been speaking as if all men and all women of a given social formation were implicated by any particular gender system in more or less the same way. Yet once social cleavages or divisions of other sorts are present in a society (e.g., those of class or occupation), change can affect women (or men) of different categories in different ways. Relations between men and women will, in general, differ depending on whether they are aristocrats, seris, slaves, capitalists, or workers. Moreover, changes in the gender system-however they arise----can have implications for the class system. In stateless groups structured on the basis of cOIporate kinship, gifts of daughters as wives, and surpluses extracted from them, are used to build patron-client relations that form the basis of "big man" political systems. A specific type of gender relation thus appears to have been critical in the development of early stratification systems (Chevillard and Leconte, 1986; Coontz and Henderson, 1986b). In Africa, relations between men and women were of great importance in state formation (Goody, 1976; Meillasoux, 1981). Some of the surplus that helped to finance early industrialization in England may have been produced by the labor of housewives and appropriated by their husbands (Middleton, 1983). This dependence of state and class on gender has largely gone unstudied within Marxist social science, which has implicitly taken them to be unimportant; for that reason they are omitted from the model. Even if the long-term influences of gender on class should prove to be large, in any given short time frame, their omission may be innocuous.
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David F. Greenberg
CRIME IN EIGHTEENTH- AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND To explore the implications of this crude causal model, it is necessary to examine the gendering of crime over an extended period. Enough time must elapse for major changes in the social relations of production to occur and for these changes to influence socialization practices, learning patterns, kinds and degrees of control, and opportunities to commit crimes of different kinds. I shall examine these changes in England between the early eighteenth and the early twentieth centuries. Crime statistics of a sort are available for this period and have recently been exploited by Feeley and Little (1991), and the development of capitalism and the transformation of gender relations have both been much studied. A "standard model," appearing in synthetic histories addressed to a wide audience of nonspecialists, has women in early modern England participating actively in a wide range of productive and distributive activities. This participation was cut back as industrialization removed production to the factory, leaving women isolated in the home.1 5 My model of gender and crime suggests that as women's roles were restricted to housework and child care, they were less likely to violate the law. Socialized to care for others, they would not have been disposed to steal or assault. Lacking the personality traits of assertiveness and competitiveness, they would have been inhibited in confronting victims. Being out in public less than men, women would have had fewer opportunities to steal small objects from carts and coaches, or laundry from clothes lines, to shoplift or pickpocket, to take pewter pots from public houses, or to pilfer tools, raw materials, or finished products from their employers. These were common forms of theft in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century London. In principle, this is only halfthe story. Reconstructions of women are at the same time reconstructions of men. The historical process by which women were removed from the pool of criminals was not a necessary one for the production of high levels of male involvement in crime; as far as we can tell, there was a great deal of it in the eighteenth century. But newer definitions of masculinity may have prevented male rates from dropping along with those of women. A full account of historical trends in the gendering of crime must deal with both aspects of the gendering process; here, however, I can tell only half the story. The pioneering study of trends in the gendering of crime recently carried out by Feeley and Little (1991), using the trial records of the Old Bailey court in London, examines trial records for every twentieth year between 1715 and 1895 (as well as the years 1687 and 1912). They discovered that female involvement in crime (as measured by their representation in the court records) peaked around 1735 at approximately 42 percent, with a secondary peak in 1795, at about 32 percent. Thereafter female participation fell steadily, relative to male participation,
Gendering of Crime
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reaching about 9 percent in 1912. For both sexes, the offenses charged oVeIwhelmingly involved theft. That London was not unique in seeing this type of change is demonstrated by a recent study of crime rates in Toronto, where women's participation also underwent a long-term decline between 1859 and 1955. Apart from year-to-year fluctuations, the percentage of property crime arrestees who were female declined from about 31 percent around 1865 to about 12 percent in the mid-twentieth century. Female involvement in crimes of violence also declined substantially for several decades but then rose somewhat in the twentieth century (Boritch and Hagan, 1990). Women's involvement in diverse forms of crime was also exceptionally high in eighteenth-century Amsterdam and Leiden (Kloeck, 1990). The common lore about female crime is that there has always been little of it. Thus Barbara Hanawalt, who studied crime in medieval England, concluded "The role of women in crime has remained remarkably consistent from the fourteenth century to the present. In the fourteenth century, with some minor county to county variations, the suspect was female in 10 percent of the cases .... In Elizabethan Essex, 250 years later, women still comprised only 10 percent of the cases" (1979:115). This constancy, she notes, could be explained by the stability of women's roles since medieval times, or by biological causes.16 Yet the analyses of Feeley and Little, and of Boritch and Hagan, showing substantial changes in levels of female criminality over long periods of time, point to substantial historical change. These changes clearly call for a social, not a biological, explanation. I follow the lead of Feeley and Little by examining the Old Bailey trial transcripts. With only a few exceptions, the Old Bailey had exclusive jurisdiction over felony cases during this period. Peers accused of crime were tried by the House of Lords, and commoners could remove their cases to the Court of King's Bench. But few peers were put on trial, and few criminal defendants could afford the high costs of bringing a case to the Court of King's Bench. I examined every tenth year from 1730 to 1910, instead of every twentieth year, in the hope of being able to identify the beginnings and ends of trends with greater precision than was possible with Feeley and Little's sampling procedureP In addition, I wanted to examine patterns for individual offenses classified less broadly than in their work, and to examine relations between defendants and accusers. Many of the defendants in this period were employed by the victims of their thefts, raising the possibility that changes in female labor-force participation might account for changes in their involvement in crime. Table 1 shows the percentage of defend.mts who were female in each of the years I sampled. Because the volume containing transcripts for 1870 was missing from the Columbia University Law Library-the only library in the New Yorl< area holding the Old Bailey proceedings-I substituted the closest period included in the collection, November 1872 to April 1973.
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Table 1 Sex Composition of Old Bailey Defendants, 1730-1910
Year
Percent Female
Total Number of DefendRnts
1730 1740 1750 1760 1770 1780 1790 1800 1810 1820 1830 1840 1850 1860
34.0 41.7 n.a. n.a. 26.0 33.4 24.9 21.3 19.0 24.4 22.0 22.1 17.7 25.9 11.7 13.2 15.1 4.3 7.4
745 465 n.a. n.a. 682 674 587 1012 126 299 2676 402 367 158 264 212 146 163 955
1872/3
1880 1890 1900 1910
The years 1750 and 1760 were also missing. Unfortunately, the volumes for neighboring years were also missing, making a similar substitution impossible. For some years, the Columbia University Law Library collection of Old Bailey sessions was incomplete. For that reason, the figures I cite for 1810 and 1820 are based on court records for just part of those years. As Feeley and Little found, the percentage of defendants who were female was high in 1730 and 1740. For both sexes, this involvement was primarily in theft; the number of cases involving interpersonal violence is quite small. Moreover, male and female criminals sometimes worked together in small teams to commit burglaries or robberies. Despite this broad similarity, there were some qualitative differences between male and female patterns of involvement. In 1730, for example, 18.7 percent of the males on trial were charged with robbery, compared with 3.2 percent of the females. Similarly, 10.2 percent of the males were charged with burglary, compared with 3.2 percent of the females; 10.2 percent of the males were being tried for shoplifting, compared with 5 percent of the female defendants. Females, on the other hand, were overrepresented in other kinds of theft. Some women, for example, were prostitutes accused of stealing from their male clients; no men were charged with stealing under comparable circumstances. The offenses of pickpocketing, fraud, larceny, counterfeiting and uttering false currency, and receiving stolen goods accounted for 84.1 percent of the female defendants, 59.8 percent ofthe male defendants.
Gendering of Crime
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These figures suggest that when women stole, they tended to avoid crimes that involved real or potential confrontation with a victim, or the destruction of property. In 1730, only one female defendant was on trial for homicide; twelve of the male defendants were. That lone female was charged with killing her small child; all but one of the victims of the male defendants were adults. I have no data for the next thirty years, but Feeley and Little's figures show that in 1755, female involvement had declined only moderately, to about 30 percent. After 1780, rates fluctuated in the range of 20 to 25 percent, then dropped again between 1860 and 1872. At the end of the nineteenth century, female involvement fell further, to less than 10 percent. Trends for individual crimes are more difficult to identify with confidence, because percentages for each year are based on small numbers of cases. Year-to-year fluctuations due to chance can be high under these circumstances. Thus, in 1840, 60 percent ofthe robbery defendants were female, a higher percentage than in any other year of my data. But there were only 5 robbery cases in that year. Little confidence can be placed on the figure of 60 percent when it is based on just 3 female robbers. More significant, for the years 1860 to 1910, only 2.6 percent of the robbery defendants were female (1 female defendant compared to 37 male defendants). This compares with 13 percent (of 96 defendants) between 1730 and 1810.A similar downward trend is visible for burglaries. Between 1730 and 1810, 10.8 percent of the 434 burglary defendants were female; between 1860 and 1900, just 1.6 percent 01'65 defendants. Robbery and burglary both entail the use or threat of force, but the downward trend is equally visible for thefts not involving force. An examination of trends for other forms of theft is plagued by ambiguities in classifying many thefts on the basis of the limited information provided by the transcripts and by small numbers of cases. I handle this difficulty by aggregating shoplifting, pickpocketing, fraud, embezzlement, larcenies, counterfeiting and uttering false currency, receiving stolen goods, and smuggling. I then find that levels of female involvement in miscellaneous thefts declined more or less steadily from 1730 to 1900 (see Table 2). These figures must be interpreted with a good deal of caution, as they are not fully representative of all the crime that occurred in London. Business and governmental crime hardly appear. My figures are not for crimes that occurred, or for crimes reported to the police; indeed, with the exception of the Thames River Police, there was no salaried full-time police force in England before 1829. My figures are for prosecutions, which were brought by victims. Then, as now, there must have been many cases that did not come to the courts, because victims thought it pointless to prosecute, did not know the perpetrators, knew them and did not want to prosecute, had been paid by the perpetrator not to prosecute, or because the constables had not been able to apprehend the perpetrators.
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Table 2 Sex Composition of Old Bailey Defendants Charged with Stealing. 1730-1910·
Year
Percent Female
Total Number ofDefendants
1730 1740 1750 1760 1770 1780 1790 1800 1810 1820 1830 1840 1850 1860
34.9 42.8 n.a. n.a. 26.2 40.6 21.5 22.0 21.8 15.5 29.7 23.4 17.1 23.8 9.4 13.3 12.8 2.3
602 439 n.a. n.a. 682 547 653 982 119 264 495 393 322 101 201 150 94 129
1872/3
1880 1890 1900
'See text for offense categories included.
Feeley and Little note that even trends cannot be taken at face value, because offenses involving minor thefts were downgraded from felonies to misdemeanors during the nineteenth century and were then tried in lesser courts. It was in these offenses that women's involvement was especially high. Nevertheless, their examination of trends within offense categories established that at least for the eighteenth century, the decline in female involvement was not entirely artifactual. Zedner (1991a) notes that English judicial statistics for the period 1857-92 show declines in the ratio of women to men for the lesser offenses. It thus seems unlikely that legal reclassification could fully explain the nineteenth-century trends. The possibility that contemporary changes in rates of female involvement in crime reflect changes in "chivalry" has been proposed and debated. According to this view, recent rises in female participation in crime seen in arrest records reflect only the greater willingness of victims, police, and prosecutors to arrest, charge, and prosecute them. (Curran, 1983; Krohn, Curry, and Nelson-Kilger, 1983; Rans, 1978; Steffensmeier, 1980). In a period in which feminist demands for gender equality have received much public attention, perhaps victims, police, and prosecutors will prosecute female criminals more readily. Whether or not an earlier double standard favoring female defendants has been disappearing in recent decades, it is possible that rising standards of chivalry in earlier centuries reduced the willingness of victims to prosecute female defendants. Several students of eighteenth-
Gendering of Crime
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century English crime have found that juries and judges were more lenient to women (Beattie, 1977; King, 1983; McLynn, 1989:128). Certainly one encounters many cases in the transcripts in which judges and juries failed to act according to standards we would call chivalrous. In 1777, Mary Jones "was destitute and her children struving. She took a piece of raw linen off a shop clDunter but put it back when the shopkeeper saw her. For this alone, she was hanged" (McLynn, 1989:125). Among the death sentences in my sample, I find the cases of women shoplifting a linen cloth (1780, p. 675), pickpocketing (December 6,1780, p. 15), shoplifting (1790, p. 596), and stealing laundry from an employer (1800, p. 447). \'\!here the defendant was young, as in the case of the sixteen-year-old sentenced to hang for stealing money from her employer's home (1820, p. 14), juries commonly recommended men)'. In the case of the thirty-fouryear-old Mary Beckworth, who was convicted of shoplifting £5 worth of calico with her fourteen-year-old daughter, both were sentenced to death, with a recommendation of meny for the daughter on account of her age (1800, p. 473). But none of the juries recommended meny on account of sex. Nor did troops hesitate to fire on female rioters (Bohrstedt, 1988). Perhaps the Victorian age brought greater leniency to women. If this leniency extended to the willingness of victims to prosecute female criminals, they would be underrepresented in the court records in the latter part ofthe time span understudy. Ifso, my analysis, which assumes that the gender ratio really changed, would be seriously threatened. However, eighteenth-century writings about crime suggest that the ratio of women to men was higher then than later. Thus, Joseph Massie, writing in 1758, wrote that it would be necessary to guard charity homes for women to prevent "street robbers etc." from coming to the homes to recruit female accomplices (Beattie, 197'5). This would not have been thought necessary a century later. One obseIVer estimated in 1859 that at least one-third of all English criminals were female (Zedner, 1991b:38). Victorian-age discussion of crime focused on female criminality to a far greater degree than has been true in the vvVentieth century. Moreover, indirect evidence suggests that in the nineteenth century, the trend was not in the direction of more leniency toward female defendants. Over the period 1857-90, the discharge rate (dismissal rate) for women apprehended for indictable offenses dropped from 38.1 percent to 17.9 percent. The dismissal rate for men dropped almost exactly as much. The decline was probably brought about by better police work, and did not favor either sex (Zedner, 1991b:316). Moreover, with the exception of a few feminist writers, middle-class commentators on crime had little sympathy for female criminals, whom they tended to see as more depraved than their male counterparts. Women, they thought, tended innately toward morality and respectability. Those who turned to crime had fallen farther than had their male counterparts, and thus were more depraved and less susceptible to redemption (Zedner, 1991b :40-46).
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A further complication is that the percentages of defendants who were female are not per capita rates; they have not been adjusted to take into account possible differences in the numbers of males and females in the London population. The earliest British census was held in 1801, leaving no figures at all for the eighteenth century. With immigrants from the countryside streaming into London, I cannot assume that the sex ratio for adolescents and adults would have equaled 1.18 That a substantial fraction of the defendants were female in the eighteenth century has implications for the notion that gender differences in crime stem from differences in styles of moral reasoning. Either differences in styles of moral reasoning have little relation to criminality, or the differences were not very sharp in the eighteenth century. Perhaps children were raised differently 250 years ago, or perhaps the theory itself is flawed. It seems implausible that people's moral reasoning should fail to affect their involvement in crime. However, women's domestic responsibilities as wives and mothers sometimes led them to steal in order to feed their children, as in the shoplifting cases cited above. Women sometimes led eighteenth-century food riots; according to one contemporary account, they were "foremost in violence and ferocity" (Thompson, 1963:65; Thompson 1971; but see Bohrstedt, 1988). In the early nineteenth century, they gave militant support to strikes, sometimes stoning police and scabs (Taylor, 1979). In these circumstances, caring for others (spouses, children, members of their class and community) did not preclude crime. Of course, many women's crimes did not stem from altruism. If one wishes to reconcile these illegalities with the work of Gilligan and Chodorow, one might note that in the "standard model" of gender and capitalist development, much production took place in and around the home before the Industrial Revolution. Even though women generally had primary responsibility for small children, men were usually present and to some extent involved in child care merely by their presence. Gender differences in the permeability of ego boundaries, and in styles of moral reasoning, should have been smaller then because child rearing was not so exclusively the task of women (Davidson, 1982:185-88; Bohrstedt, 1988). On the other hand, one may question how important gender differences in child rearing are for styles of moral reasoning. Empirical research casts doubt on Gilligan's claim that there are major sex differences in moral reasoning. Because children have less extrafamilial experience than adults, parents' child-rearing practices should have the greatest impact on their children while they are young. Yet, when boys and girls below the age of eighteen are compared, very few differences in moral reasoning style are found. Some differences are found among adults, but mostly when the female subjects are housewives. Once controls for educational attainment and job status are introduced, these differences tend to disappear (Kohlberg, Levine, and Hewer, 1983:127-30; Walker, 1984).1 9
Gendering Df Crime
421
It seems likely, then, that where gender differences in styles of moral reasoning are found for adults, they reflect later influences, including socialization connected with different kinds of occupational careers.20 An orientation toward formal rules is most appropriate in large-scale bureaucratic organizations; an informal, flexible ethic based on individualized "caring" is most appropriate in the familyP These considerations redirect our attention to the kinds of work English women of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did, and the work settings in which they found themselves.
WOMEN IN THE ENGLISH LABOR FORCE Under English common law, women's legal rights were severely restricted. Although an unmarried or widowed woman enjoyed the same rights as a man to operate a business, enter into a contract, and sue, when she married she lost all these rights under the common law doctrine of coverture (Lewis, 1984:119-21; Earle, 1989:158).22 Women were excluded from the civil service, law, medicine, and the clergy; most guilds excluded women except for widows of male members. Cultural stereotypes defining women as "weaker vessels," "the softer sex," and "the gentle sex" must have made these exclusions seem justifiable (Fraser, 1984:1-4; M. Roberts, 1985) Though many occupations were effectively closed to women, the English economy was too inefficient to permit half its potential labor force to remain idle. The political economist Sir William Petty observed in his 1690 Political Arithmetic that "all women and girls over seven years of age are to labour except among the upper tenth" (quoted in Richards, 1974). The range oftheir activities was wide. On the farms, women engaged in heary labor in the fields, and to a limited extent in animal husbandry. Women of the early eighteenth century baked and brewed. They worked as milliners, seamstresses, mantua makers, and stay makers (Hill, 1989:89, 94). As wives of artisans and craftsmen, they helped supervise journeymen and apprentices and sold finished goods from shops that were part of or attached to their homes. Women operated public houses, inns, and lodging houses, sometimes with their husbands. They peddled, took in laundry, and worked as prostitutes. Many of their occupations involved the production and sale of clothing, food, and drink, and drew on skills that were also utilized in the household (Charles, 1985). Yet women also worked in occupations that later became male dominated: there were female blacksmiths, butchers, plumbers, carpenters, tailors, bricklayers, and coopers (Davidoff and Hall, 1987:312-13; Hill, 1989:259).23 As guilds in corporate towns such as York and Norwich lost control over entry to the crafts in the period 1690-1770, it became easier for women to become makers of women's garments (Rendall, 1990:28). Even
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David F. Greenberg
at wages that were usually less than men's, their contributions to the family income were sufficiently important that one man of the 1750s remarked, "None but a fool will take a wife whose bread must be earned solely by his labour and who will contribute nothing towards it herself' (quoted in Chapman and Chambers, 1970:10, and Richards, 1974). Can women's relatively high rate of involvement in crime be explained, at least in part, by their relatively extensive experience in what later came to be defined as men's jobs? So some nineteenth century writers suggested. Thus, an 1850 newspaper article on the Black Country, a region of England that included Wolverhampton, attributed its exceptionally high female crime rate 24 to women who worked "at rude and unsexing labour at the pit mouth, partly assuming the habiliments and altogether adopting the coarseness of the men" (quoted in Philips, 1977:34). One could, of course, object to this reasoning by pointing out that working under the close supervision of an employer does not instill independence and assertiveness. Surely employers tried to inculcate subservience and obedience to authority in their servants and employees. However, in many of these occupations, women were not working under close and continual direction, but exercised a reasonable degree of autonomy and judgment. Besides, employers who tried to inculcate subservience did not necessarily succeed. Then, as now, employees sometimes resisted their employers-by demanding higher wages and shorter hours, and, at times, by stealing from their employers. Descriptions of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century work life do not suggest that laborers of either sex were timid or compliant.25 They rather suggest a vigorous independence. Much of this militancy came from craftsmen and artisans, whose work generally required a large degree of autonomy and independence of judgment. Still, even where workers worked under closer supervision, the experience of working collectively may have bolstered self-confidence, facilitating criminal activity.26 In the absence of motivation, there is little reason to think that assertiveness alone would lead anyone to crime. Working women certainly had reason to be motivated to violate the law, because most were poorly paid (Collett, 1889; Cadbury, Matheson, and Shann, 1906; Alexander, 1983; Morris, 1986; Fishman, 1988; Rose, 1988). In many sectors of the economy, employment was irregular for both sexes. The contrast between servants' poverty and their employers' relative affluence must have tempted many to stealP In some instances, employees may have wanted to retaliate against employers who treated them abusively. Where it is possible to draw inferences from the trial transcripts about the socialclass backgrounds of female defendants, they are mostly from the laboring classes, like the male defendants. Even when the stringent penalties meted out by the courts were taken into account, it would have been rational for many of the poor to steal. If high levels of female involvement in crime are predictable in light of
Gendering of Crime
423
women's economic standing and socialiization in the early eighteenth century, can their declining involvement be traced to reduced labor force participation? That is what the "standard model" would suggest. A rigorous statistical test of this possibility cannot be carried out, however, because there are no occupational or labor-force statistics for the eighteenth century, and those for the nineteenth century are considered to be of such poor quality as to be virtually unusable (Hall, 1979; Higgs, 1986:29-41). Experts are not even in complete agreement as to the overall trends. Though some historians think the Industrial Revolution expanded job opportunities for women (Pinchbeck, 1930; Hartwell, 1971:343), others think it reduced them (Tilly and Scott, 1978; Richards, 1974). Hunt (1981:17) thinks that in the aggregate it made little difference. Trends within particular sectors of the economy can be tracked, and they are variable, suggesting that the "standard model" needs to be elaborated (Freifeld, 1986; E. Roberts, 1988). In textile manufacturing, for example, machinery was initially introduced in the context of the putting-out system, in which male and female family members cooperated in producing cloth at home, using raw materials provided by a capitalist entrepreneur. In London, women began displacing men from the tailoring trade, working at very low wages at home or in small workshops (Rendall 1990:29). When power looms were introduced into the factories in the 1830s and 1840s, they were operated primarily by women and children, who were attractive to employers because they could be paid less than men and might be less militant (Hutchins, 1915:5(';; Pinchbeck, 1930:187-88; Neff, 1966:30-31). But the number of such jobs was limited. In some instances, women lacked the craft skills needed to operate the machines, and for certain time periods, the physical strength. Later the Factory Acts limiting the employment of children made it difficult for mothers to work (Atkinson, 1914; Smelser, 1959:184-92; Lazonick, 1976; Medick, 1979; Hall, 1982a, 1982b; Freifeld, 1986; Bradley, 1989:45).28 In other sectors of the economy, the exclusion or downgrading of women to the least-skilled, worst-paid jobs preceded the factory system or the introduction of new machinery (Snell, 1985; Middleton, 1985). On the farms, the introduction of machinery displaced some female workers, but the reasons for this are not altogether clear. In some instances, great strength may have been required to operate heavy machinery. But since women traditionally performed heavy labor, this explanation is doubtful,29 (Clark, 1919). More likely, women had been performing the leastskilled, highly routinized tasks. It was these tasks that new machines were being designed to perform (Bradley, 1989:80-87). With the expansion of the scale of production in nonagricultural sectors of the economy during the eighteenth century, some artisan and craft production was being relocated from the home to separate locations preceding the Industrial Revolution, simply because homes were not
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large enough. Before the separation, wives could learn a trade informally while helping their husbands; afteIwards, this was no longer possible (Alexander, 1970; Hall, 1982a). Beginning in the late eighteenth century, male workers protested the hiring of women, alleging unfair competition: employers were hiring women instead of men because they could pay them less (Taylor, 1979; Walby, 1986; Lown, 1990). This pressure, which was not always successful, was framed in terms of an ideology that originated higher in the social structure and earlier in English history. John Browne, secretary to the Grand Lodge of Operative Tailors, wrote in a union publication in 1834, "Have not women been unfairly driven from their proper sphere in the social scale, unfeelingly tom from the maternal duties of a parent, and unjustly encouraged to compete with men in ruining the money value of labour?" (Taylor, 1979). The notion that women should be subordinate to men has a long history in Christian thought, dating back to the Pauline injunction that women should submit to their husbands (Colossians 3:18; Ephesians 5:22; 1 Peter 3:1). Upper-class Puritans gave this ancient teaching a particular twist, one that placed great emphasis on the family. As their opposition to the Church of England made it impossible for them to rely on the established church as a social control institution, they turned--especially after the Restoration in 1660--to the male-headed family based on a shmp gender division of labor as a remedy for threatening social upheaval. In the hands of the evangelical reformers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Puritan doctrine developed into an ideology of separate spheres, in which work was considered a distinct--and distinctly male-sphere of life. The ideal upper-class woman was no longer active in her husband's business or a partner with him in the management of his farm; her place was at home, ruled by her husband, caring for him and for their children, and upholding high standards of virtue and morality in the face of the market economy's tendency to undermine them (Hall, 1980; Davidoff and Hall, 1987:149, 155). The Puritan poet John Milton had Adam express this new thinking about the family when he told Eve: ... for nothing lovelier can be found In Woman, than to study household good And good works in her Husband to promote. (Paradise Lost, 9:232-34)
It is reflected in the comment of a member of Parliament in 1649 that "it
was not for women to Petition, they might stay at home and wash the dishes" (quoted in Fraser, 1984:4). At first, only wealthy men could afford to relinquish their wives' incomes or contributions to household production and maintenance. It thus became a badge of male achievement to be able to keep a wife idle. In 1726, Daniel Defoe, in The Complete English Tradesmen, remarked
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sarcastically that "the tradesman is foolishly vain of making his wife a gentlewoman, and forsooth he will have her sit above in the parlour, receive visits, drink Tea, and entertain her neighbors" (355; quoted in George, 1988:9). Once a few shopkeepers barred their wives from working in their shops, others went along so as "not to have their trades or shops thought less masculine or less considerable than others" (348; quoted in George, 1988:4-5). Conduct books telling "the new domestic woman" how to behave circulated widely among the nascent middle class (Armstrong, 1987), to great effect. According to Defoe, "Ladies ... scorn to be seen in the compting house, much less behind the counter, despise the knowledge of their husband's business, and act as if they were ashamed of being tradesmen's wives, and never intended to be tradesmen's widows" (348; quoted in George, 1988:4-5). For practical reasons, this innovation spread downward through the class structure only slowly. Most eighteenth-century shops were still parts of houses, and women continued to playa large role in running them (Hall, 1980). By mid-nineteenth century, however, the cult of domesticity was well established, at least as an ideal. According to a woman's diary for 1853, a respectable woman of the middle classes, must not work for profit ... the conventional barrier that pronounces it ungenteel to be behind a counter, or serving the public in any mercantile capacity is greatly extended. The same in household economy .... [L)adies, dismissed from the dairy, the confectionary, the story room, the still room, the poultry yard, the kitchen garden and the orchard, have hardly yet found themselves a sphere equally useful in the pursuits of trade and art to which to apply their too abundant leisure. (Quoted in Pinchbeck, 1930:315-16, and Hall, 1980)
Even in the middle classes, the ideology of separate spheres was imperlectly realized. Some feminists protested their exclusion from male occupations; many women had to work because they could not marry or did not want to do so. There being more women than men, some women could not be supported by a husband. Their occupational choices were restricted by their limited education and skills and by discrimination on the part of employers (Collett, 1902). When women ofthe middle class did work, it was mostly in occupations that least threatened gender stereotypes-as governesses or shopkeepers or managers of lodging houses. But the women of the middle class hardly ever appear in the Old Bailey records except as prosecutors or witnesses. Neither the ideology nor the reality of domestic life reduced their involvement in crime substantially, because it was very low right from the start. Notwithstanding some legal restrictions, women of the laboring classes continued to work in many occupations, often at very low wages and under wretched working conditions. One study of women in London in 1888 found them in two hundred trades (Alexander, 1983; Fishman, 1988:115). Henry Mayhew's (1862) ethnographic study of life among the
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London poor confirms what the figures in my tables show: many women participated in a range of criminal activities, even if at a lower level than they had a century earlier. When male workers like John Browne complained that women were undercutting their wages, they invoked the discourse of separate spheres: a woman's place was at home, not in the factory (Taylor, 1979:268-75). This exclusionary principle had been brought to the working class by middle-class reformers. The evangelical reformers of the eighteenth century had been preoccupied with the reconstitution of gender relations in the more affluent classes. In the nineteenth, they targeted the working class. One reason for working-class crime and radicalism, they thought, was that working mothers were failing to fulfill their domestic responsibilities. Husbands were going to public houses to eat their meals because wives were not at home to cook. Daughters were not learning domestic skills because their mothers were not home to teach them. As part of a broad offensive directed at working-class culture, they established Sunday schools and day schools, preached sermons, and wrote moral tales espousing middle-class values and norms, among them, the ideology of female domesticity (Hewitt, 1958; Hall, 1979, 1980; Purvis, 1989:45). In the lower classes, the contradiction between what was ideal and what was practical was even larger than in the middle classes. Deaths, desertions, and a man's unemployment could force wives and daughters to take jobs. Thus, in Lancashire during the 1790s, if a man enlisted in the military, his wife might take up weaving; by 1808, "possibly half of all weavers were women and children" (Benenson, 1991a). Single women could not afford to remain idle, and were not expected to do so. Indeed, as far as one can tell from the census data, the percentage of women who were employed hardly changed between 1851 and 1901. Gender stereotypes had a larger impact on the kinds of jobs women held (Jordan, 1989). Women could, for example, work without violating gender role stereotypes by working as domestic servants in the homes of those who were more fortunate. If a middle- or upper-class woman was to live a life of leisure, she needed servants to perform domestic chores. 3D Rising incomes for the middle classes enabled them to expand the number of household servants they employed. Most of these positions were filled by women (Banks and Banks, 1969:58; Higgs, 1986; Kent, 1989; Purvis, 1989:64-65). In 1881, 36 percent of all employed women were domestic servants (Lewis, 1984:149, Purvis, 1989:30J, far more than in any other single occupation. Increased employment opportunities for women as household servants may have reduced their need to steal, while the long hours and close supervision to which servants living in their masters' homes were subjected kept them away from criminal subcultures (e.g., the local pub, where many criminal enterprises were organized), exposed them to noncriminal influences, and reduced their opportunities to steaPl
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In one respect, however, those opportunities were enhanced. It was very easy for a servant to steal from her master or mistress, and judging from the court records, quite a few did. In 1730, for example, 18.7 percent ofthe female larceny defendants were employees of the victim (as were 12 percent of the male larceny defendants).32 These figures undoubtedly understate the percentages, because the circumstances of a number of the thefts suggest that the defendant had been a domestic servant (or perhaps a lodger), even though the transcript does not say so. These are cases in which the defendant is accused of stealing a single silver teaspoon or a few miscellaneous articles of clothing. On balance, it is unclear that increased employment in domestic service reduced women's representation in the court records, though it very likely did so. The personal ties that often develop between employers and domestic servants must have inhibited prosecution in many instances. Working-class women usually began their work careers at an early age, before marriage. Once they married or had children, they often left their jobs or worked out of their homes (Collett, 1889).33 The success of working-class trade unions in winning "a family wage" enabled many working-class women to quit their jobs when they married or had a child. Some women were probably eager to do so; their poorly paid, monotonous jobs offered few rewards; and some were no doubt persuaded by middle-class propaganda that their place was in the home (Humphries, 1977a, 1977b; Lewis, 1984:50).34 Indeed, women in the labor movement gave high priority to women's domestic and familial responsibilities (Humphries, 1977a; Taylor, 1979; Benenson, 1984; Ross, 1984; Lown, 1990:77; but see Benenson, 1991b). In other instances women were fired by employers who thought it improper for married women to work. Their husbands, no doubt, welcomed the higher level of domestic labor their unemployed wives could now supply (especially as working hours fell, giving them more time at home), felt assured by their wives' dependence on them, and took pride in being able to support a wife and family. Thus, according to Collett (1889, "no respectable man would willingly let the mother of his children go out to a factory, nor would the lOs a week she could thus earn make up for the loss incurred by her absence if he brought home even so little as 18s" (see also Jones, 1974; Vincent, 1981; Rose, 1988). The low wages paid to working-class women have generally been attributed to male employers' beliefs-not very well-founded-that female laborers did not need to be paid as well as men because they were merely supplementing a husband's earnings (Rose, 1986). That contention, however, implies that individual employers can set wages as they wish. In a competitive labor market, however, employers do not have that power. Of course, labor markets are not perfectly competitive. Where one or a few plants dominated a town's economy, employers may have been able to fix wages, confident that many workers would not leave. Employers themselves sometimes said that women were not as pro-
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ductive as men. In some instances that may have been true, though there is no way to verify the claim. In an age of machine production, however, productivity can depend on the design of the machinery as well as the skill ofthe workers using it (Beechey, 1982; Lewis, 1984:170-71). If women were less skilled-as was often the case---it was because male workers and employers denied them the opportunities to acquire skills (Freifeld, 1986). The failure of the male-dominated trade unions to demand equal opportunities for women on the job, or to insist on equal pay, clearly worked to the detriment of women as well. With women kept out of many jobs by gender stereotyping and restricted to those requiring limited skill, employers faced "an almost unlimited supply of women ... who were an elastic labor force" for unskilled jobs (Rose, 1986; Lown, 1985; Jordan, 1989; Purvis, 1989:45). It was this that kept wages down in unskilled jobs. This combination of low pay, unattractive work conditions, hiring discrimination, and ideological pressures to stay at home, drove many married women from the labor market. Between the middle and end of the nineteenth century, the number of married women holding jobs dropped, probably by more than 50 percent (Hewitt, 1958:19; Lewis, 1984:149). Once women left, they were unlikely to return unless forced to do so by widowhood or a husband's unemployment.
CONCLUDING REMARKS This account has placed the complex history of the gendering of paid labor in the context of the development of capitalism. Although concepts familiar to Marxist theory-ideology, class conflict, profit-maximizing capitalists who prefer docile to militant employees, and workers whose consciousness of common class interests does not extend as far as the Marxist might hope---are evident in that account, they are not organized into a formal theory. Though the rise of capitalism is one of the most central issues that Marxist theory has addressed, fundamental questions regarding this process, such as the source of the capital that made primitive accumulation possible and the class background of the early capitalists, remain controversial (Williams, 1944; Dobb, 1946; Wallerstein, 1974; Hilton, 1978; Brenner, 1976, 1982; Middleton, 1983, 1985). This is not the place to explore those issues in depth. For present purposes, I assume that a satisfactory Marxist account can be elaborated, without delivering one. What is important for my purposes is that as industrial capitalism evolved, it transformed gender relations in complex ways. While middle-class women were being restricted from remunerative labor, many working-class women were being pulled out of the household into shops and factories. In the long run, they too were
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pushed and pulled back into the home by a complex combination of factors-employers who paid women low wages, male-dominated unions that failed to defend the interests of women workers, deprivation of opportunities for appealing jobs, deskilling, pressures from husbands who wanted their wives to do housework, propaganda that gave women primary responsibility for raising small children, the absence of childcare facilities at work, the lack of equal-opportunity legislation. The detailed histories currently available to us are not fully adequate to assess the relative weight or importance of these factors; I have certainly not tried to do so. I have rather tried to depict a context within which English gender relations and ideologies were transformed, indicating some of the causal forces at work without pinning the narrative down to a sharply defined model. The developments responsible for this transformation are not inherent in capitalism as a mode of production. A capitalist society that does not rely on women to do housework and care for small children is not an impossibility. However, the transformation as it occurred can only be understood in the context of a particular capitalist society with a particular initial sexual division of labor, technology, and ideology differentiating men's and women's tasks and capabilities. At times alternative understandings of gender were promulgated, for example, by the Owenite movement of the nineteenth century and by some feminists; however, their limited appeal suggests that even if details of this history were contingent, the main trends could hardly have taken place in any other way. These trends created women who would have had to surmount high barriers to commit serious crimes of theft or violence. Women who were not employed were unlikely to be out at night or at a public house or on the streets. Their conventional routines reduced their opportunities to commit crime and to enlist potential partners. With wages rising for working-class men, marriage kept many women from the extreme poverty that drove women of earlier decades to steal. Rising incomes for men of the working and middle classes also made it possible for a larger number of women to support themselves through prostitution, avoiding the necessity of stealing. Even when working-class women's needs became pressing, the newer notions of femininity may have inhibited theft. Although there is no way to disentangle the separate effects of each of these processes, together the ideological effect of missionizing work, the raising of working-class living standards, and the confinement of many working-class women to their fathers' or their husband's homes, or to the homes where they worked as domestics, dramatically reduced their involvement in crime. Only in the twentieth century, as women gradually returned to the paid labor force, were women to begin to return to the ranks of crime.
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NOTES 1 In the United States in 1988, 82.2 percent of those arrested were male (U.S. Department ofJustice, 1989 :185). For the so-called crimes of violence the figure was 88.6 percent, for property crimes, 76.0 percent . .2 When Marxists did discuss gender, it was often in crudely reductionist terms. Marx's letter to P. V. Annenkov of December 28, 1846, is typical: "Assume particular stages of development of production, commerce and consumption and you will have a corresponding social constitution, a corresponding organization of the family, of orders and classes, in a word, a corresponding civil society" (quoted in Nicholson, 1986:194). 3 For a fuller discussion of these efforts, see O'Laughlin, (1977), Barett and McIntosh (1979), Hartman (1979), Barrett (1980), Harris and Young (1981), Coward 11983:270-77), Vogel (1983), and Delphy (1984). 4 As it happens, some studies have found a positive correlation between levels of serum testosterone and involvement in crime (e.g., Dabbs and Morris, 1990), but other studies have not (Fausto-Sterling, 1985:126-28). 5 Some of these sex differences appear in many cultures. In a cross-cultural study of sex differences in socialization, 82 percent of the thirty-three cultures in the sample placed greater stress on nurturance in the socialization of girls (Barry, Bacon, and Child, 1957). 6 This is not true in all societies. On the Melanesian island of New Britain, girls "are encouraged to behave aggressively toward males" and do so (Goodale, 1980:135). 7 David Franks's (1985) study of rape is consistent with this analysis. So are survey results showing sex differences in support of war. A New York Times/CBS News telephone survey of 1044 Americans, conducted in the second week of December 1990, found 37 percent of the women and 53 percent of the men saying that military actions should be initiated against Iraq if it did not withdraw from Kuwait by the date of the United Nations deadline (Oreskes, 1990). A British survey conducted in 1991 is also consistent with this gender difference. It found that 11 percent of men and 3 percent of women would commit murder to become millionaires if they could be confident of not being caught (New York Newsday, July 1, 1991, 3). 8 By contrast, MaI'X offered, in Das Kapital, a lengthy account of the the origins of capitalism and tried to explain its historical evolution. Because Messerschmidt's (1986) analysis of crime issues draws on feminist as well as Marxist theory, and insists that capitalism and patriarchy are two independent systems of subordination, it is tempting to take his work as an example of dual systems theory. However, Messerschmidt sees these two systems as interacting so extensively that in practice they are far from fully independent. 9 The very vocabulary dual systems theorists (and many other feminist writers) use suggests this. In Weberian sociology, patriarchy means "rule by the father." It designates forms of society in which a patriarch literally rules an extended household, with powers over its members that are close to absolute. Weber had in mind the Biblical Patriarchs, the heads of Albanian zagorras, and the Roman pater familia, not the modem male "head of household," whose powers over wives and minor children have been seriously eroded by the expansion of legal rights for women and children. Understood in this way, patriarchy is only one form male domination has taken. Modem discrimination against women is predominantly not a manifestation of patriarchy but a bureaucratic form of male domination. The term "patriarchy" has been convenient for those who wish to see gender relations in transhistorical terms precisely because it tends to blur distinctions between different forms of male supremacy. There has been a lively feminist debate over the pros and cons of the term "patriarchy" and its conceptualization le.g., Edholm, Harris, and Young, 1977: Beechey, 1979; Barrett, 1980:10-19; Coward, 1983:268-77; Walby, 1990).
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10 Though undertheorized, some parts of Engels's proposal may be valid empirically.
When the conditions underlying matrilineality among the Nayars of India changed (disappearance of the demand for mercenary soldiers), fathers wanted to give their property to their own children instead of their sisters', and the traditional kinship system collapsed (Fuller, 1976; Quale, 1988:260-61). 11 The loss of a fertile or potentially fertile female is more damaging to the reproductive potential of a band than the loss of a male. This is so because pregnancy in humans limits women's reproductive capacity, but not men's. If a man dies, other men can impregnate surviving women. If a woman dies, other women will not be able to replace her to the same degree. This argument is not seriously damaged by the existence of some bands in which women participate effectively in hunting (Dahlberg, 1981; Estroko-Griffin and Griffin, 1985), These bands hunt game of moderate size (wild pigs, deer), not large game, and appear to live in milieux where danger from large predators does not exist. In most cultures, women stay close to home. Men travel farther and take on riskier pursuits (Parker and Parker, 1979). 12 Warfare plays a central role in the kinship theories developed by Ember and Ember
(1971) and Divale and Harris (1976), but their arguments and evidence have been criticized by Dow (1983) and Coontz and Henderson (1986a). 13 Since many human males are not aggressive, this argument is questionable. It is just as likely that women would have preferred their husbands to be cooperative and conciliatory. There has also been speculation that early marriage systems favored male domination. If early marriages were exogamous to the band-an arrangement that might have come about to avoid the deleterious genetic consequences of inbreeding, or to create alliances-under certain conditions it would have been favorable to exchange females rather than males. Where warfare occurred, a son who was sent to another band as a husband might return with them and use his fighting skills against his natal band (Lerner, 1986:47-48). In hunting, there may be advantages in keeping together boys who were raised together (Quale, 1988). Such an arrangement facilitates bonding among adult males and makes it difficult for in-marrying females to find allies. But this is speculative, because we know nothing about the marriage arrangements that prevailed as the human species evolved, or even whether there was an institution resembling marriage. 14 Where the gender division of labor is one of domination and exploitation, those who
benefit will be members of the dominant gender. Where the division is more equitable, both sexes may perceive themselves as benefiting from it. 15 The seminal works are Schreiner (1911:50-51), Clark (1919), and Pinchbeck (1930). Zaretsky (1976), Hamilton (1978), and Hartmann (1976) draw on these and more recent sources. 16 Hanawalt's data may have been atypical of medieval England; Bennett (1987:38-39)
found that about a third of the criminal defendants in her study of Brigstock before the Black Plague (1348) were female. Curtis (1980) found 15.4 percent of the defendants in quarter sessions during the years 1610-19 to be female; the percentage rose to 30.4 percent for the years 1680-84. In Middlesex, 23 percent of the quarter sessions defendants for the years 1613-17 were female. 17 The published version of Feeley and Little's paper contains data for every fifth year; however, their preliminary analysis, presented to the Law and Society Association in 1990, contained data only for every twentieth year. 18
Every indication is that there were more women than men (Wrigley, 1967; Glass, 1968). According to one estimate, the ratio of women to men in the eighteenth century was as high as 1.3 to 1, and the census of 1881 found one million more women than men (Branca, 1975; Hall, 1979).
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19 Additional criticisms of Gilligan's work can be found in Brighton (1983), Nails (1983),
Greeno and Maccoby (1986), Benhabib (1987), Colby and Damon (1983), and Epstein (1988:7&-94) . 20 This possibility was, in fact, suggested by Kohlberg and Kramer (1969). Supporting evidence comes from Ember's (1973) study of children in a Kenyan community. In families where the absence of daughters led parents to assign stereotypically girls' tasks to their sons, the boys were less aggressive than in other families where they did not. The difference was greatest when boys' work took place inside the home rather than out-of-doors. 21 This is not to say that a concern for caring is out of place in the policies of the state or
large organizations. However, for practical reasons, when policies are to be implemented on a large scale, they must be implemented bureaucratically, on the basis of formal rules. 22 In special circumstances, this restriction could be circumvented, allowing a woman to engage in business as afeme sole merchant, independent of her husband. 23 This occupational pattern had persisted since medieval times (Bennett, 1987:5-7, 116).
A fifteenth-century source indicates that women could be "Brewers, Bakers, Carders and Spinners, and Workers as well of Wool, as of Linen Cloth, and of Silk, Brawdester, and Breakers of Wool, and all others that do use and work all handy works" (Dale, 1928:27; quoted in Lown, 1990:9). On the manor, flexibility in the gender division of labor prevailed: "Manorial bailiffs sometimes hired women to do work usually assigned to men (even plowing), and men were similarly employed for traditionally female jobs (e.g., dairying, gleaning). Although many tasks were loosely associated with either men or women, few were actually proscribed for one sex" (Bennett, 1987:11&-19; see also Bradley, 1989:77-78). More extensive treatment of medieval Englishwomen's tasks and occupations can be found in Abrams (1916), Dale (1932), Thrupp (1948), Power (1975), Middleton (1979, 1981a, 1981b, 1983), and Kowaleski (1986). 24 Between 1835 and 1860, 25.7 percent of the defendants in the criminal court were female (Philips, 1977:148). 25 Large numbers of women workers participated in the Owenite union movement of the
1830s. Certain "female" trades, such as lace making and glove making, had a reputation in the 1830s for militancy, even violence (Taylor, 1979). 26 Female participation in riots in the period 1790 to 1810 was facilitated by their
employment in manufacturing jobs (Bohrstedt, 1988). 27 Belief that theft by domestic seIVants was extremely common and difficult to prevent
led to its exemption in 1706 from the ancient rule that those who were literate could not be executed (Beattie, 1975). 28 High production costs blocked the introduction of factory production in London
through the nineteenth century. The developments discussed here took place largely outside of London; if they had any effect on crime patterns in the metropolis, it would probably have been through immigration from the countryside. The limited scope of factory production also limited its impact; only in textiles did factories largely replace production at home or in small workshops (Hill, 1989:11). According to Rule (1986 :8), as late as 1851, "the majority of those employed in manufacturing ... still did not work in factories." In the short run, the Industrial Revolution expanded domestic production more than it did factory production. 29
On average, men are capable of attaining greater physical strength than women, but the extent to which potential strength is actually attained depends strongly on exercise and training. In some societies, such as rural Uganda and Albania, women have traditionally performed heary labor, while men have not (Perlea, 1990; Binder, 1991).
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30 Recruitment of domestic servants may have been a secondary goal for the middle-class women who, unable to hold remunerative employment, turned in vast numbers to philanthropy (Prohaska, 1980). 31 Servants in the 1880s were normally not allowed out of the house in the evening unless they had advance permission, and that was given only for a specified purpose (Purvis, 1989:30). Employers tried to prevent servants fium associating with "disreputable" people. Servants had to go along with these conditions to keep their jobs and to obtain references when they left. 32 Terminological ambiguities make it difficult to distinguish household servants from business employees. The latter were usually called servants, as well. 33 Thus, in the 1851 census, 42 percent of employed women between the ages of twenty and forty were unmarried (Richards, 1974). In some sectors of the economy, employers were reluctant to hire young women, because they tended to quit when they married (Fishman, 1988:70). Dependent on their husbands for sustenance, they could do little when their husbands beat them (London, 1903:135; quoted in Fishman, 1988). 34 Other women protested their exclusion; they liked the income from their jobs, and did not want to be cooped up inside the house all day (Benenson, 1991b).
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Part 3 Criminal Law and Criminal
Part 3
INSTRUMENTAL AND STRUCTURAL THEORIES OF STATE AND LAW
Until the 1960s, criminologists restricted their research to an extremely limited set of questions. They Justice asked what the causes of crime were, and how it could be prevented or controlled. The laws that defined what was criminal, and the enforcement practices that defined who was to be labeled as a criminal and punished or rehabilitated were not studied. Although criminologists were aware that different societies had different definitions of crime, they made no systematic attempt to study these differences. That law enforcement was not always evenhanded and that it was sometimes corrupt was well-known to criminologists. But they did not place these topics on their research agenda. Only with the advent of labeling theory in the 1960s did law and its enforcement become important subjects for criminological research. Radical criminologists have devoted particular attention to the criminal law and the administration of criminal justice. Early radical criminology literature took pains to refute the common portrayal of law and criminal justice as something socially neutral, standing above classes and interest groups, and providing protection for all members of society! This conception of law was utterly incompatible with the ways law and law enforcement were used in the 1960s to harass people who had adopted unconventional lives, or merely dress, and to repress civil rights workers and antiwar demonstrators. In opposition to this "consensus" perspective on law, radical criminologists substituted a "conflict" perspective, already implicit in some of the labeling theory literature. Here society was depicted as a collection of diverse groups in conflict with one another about a variety of issues. The more powerful groups used the law and the criminal justice system to advance their own values and interests over those of the less powerful groups (see, for example, Chambliss, 1976). As the Marxist influence was assimilated into radical criminology, some radical Criminologists, such as Richard Quinney, began to write of the ruling class (in a capitalist society this would be the capitalist class) as a preeminent interest group, one that used the law to stifle dissent and to create or reinforce inequalities of wealth and power. These writers pointed out that ruling class power could be seen in the substantive content of the criminal law, which favored the rich and failed to protect the poor and the working class. This lack of protection permitted capitalists to exploit workers, endanger their health and safety, and poison the environment, all with legal immunity.2 The law could also be seen to
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favor the rich procedurally. In its administration, the law could be seen as biased against racial minorities, the poor, and political and cultural deviants. Police discretion in making arrests; prosecutors' discretion in refusing to prosecute, dropping or reducing charges, or going ahead with prosecution; judges' discretion in setting sentences; and parole boards' discretion in releasing prisoners from custody, all operated to the advantage of the wealthy. And the right to an attorney benefited those who could afford superior legal representation more than it benefited others. Significantly, Marxian criminologists (and others) began to see these inequities not as an unfortunate product of prejudice on the part of isolated individuals, but rather as a reflection of the inequalities in power that follow from inequalities in wealth. The majority of people, according to this literature, are passive and powerless victims of law, dece:ived as to their true interests by the ruling class (and its agents, including criminologists) into supporting law enforcement (Michalowski and Bohlander, 1976l. This view of law is characterized as "instrumentalism," because it views law as an instrument or a tool that the ruling class uses on behalf of its interests. I should stress that not all radical criminologists accepted or accept this extreme view oflaw, however. Thus, Chambliss (1974: 38), assessing a great deal of evidence regarding the creation of law, concludes: "The ruling class model falls short ... to the extent that it posits a monolithic ruling class which sits in jurisprudence over a passive mass of people and passes laws reflecting only the interests of those who rule. On the other hand, the importance of the ruling class in determining the shape of the criminal law cannot be gainsaid." In his own work, Chambliss has given great attention to the organizational factors that shape law enforcement (Chambliss and Seidman, 1971). Although many individual laws and many particular acts or patterns of enforcement seem consistent with the instrumental theory of law, the theory has theoretical and empirical weaknesses. As Chambliss pointed out, it seems to exaggerate the unity of the capitalist class and its ability to act cohesively. If capitalists are as unconstrained as the instrumental theory suggests, why do they sometimes fail to achieve their goals?3 Have the "common people" really no influence on public policy? Why does th~ ruling class choose to rule through law rather than naked and arbitrary terror? Having made this choice, might it not have some consequences for the manner in which the class rules? If law always embodies the will of the ruling class, why do members ofthat class sometimes violate the law? Here the existence of corporate and governmental crime becomes mysterious. Some of these questions have been raised by researchers who have empirically tested radical criminologists' propositions concerning law. For example, Chiricos and Waldo (1975) found that lower-class defendants sentenced to prison in several southern states did not receive longer sentences than defendants from other classes. Hopkins (1979) found that, in Australia,
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business lobbying in connection with antitrust legislation "was relatively unsuccessful" when it "ran counter to electoral pressures." But some of these questions have also been raised by Marxists influenced by the French structuralists' interpretation of Marx, particularly by Louis Althusser and Nicos Poulantzas. Although these theorists see law as an essential component of capitalist social formation, they do not see it as a simple reflection of the interests of any class. In this perspective, although the existence of law is rooted in class relations, especially class conflict, its content is not necessarily controlled by a single class (Balbus, 1977; McCormick, Jr., 1979; Chambliss, 1979). Marx and Engels assert something like this in The German Ideology, which they wrote in 1845-46: The material life of individuals. which by no means depends merely on their "will." their mode of production and form of intercourse. which mutually determine each other-this is the real basis of the state .... These actual relations [Le. the social relations of the mode of production, etc.] are in no way created by the state powerj on the contrary they are the power creating it. The individuals who rule in these conditions-leaving aside the fact that their power must assume the form of the state-have to give their will. which is determined by these definite conditions. a universal expression as the will of the state. as law. an expression whose content is always determined by the relations of this class. as the civil and criminal law demonstrates in the clearest possible way. Just as the weight of their bodies does not depend on their idealistic will or on their arbitrary decision. so also the fact that they enforce their own will in the form of law. and at the same time make it independent of the personal arbitrariness of each individual among them. does not depend on their idealistic will. (1976:329)
Thus it is not the will ofthose that rule, but the relations of those that rule that determine the law. Both the relationships within the ruling class and those that involve other classes have consequences for the form and content ofthe law. That a class rules through law and not in some other way is itself a consequence of these relations. This passage implies, and structuralists have expliCitly argued, that the role law plays in reproducing capitalist social relations precludes its expressing solely the interests of a single individual or class. If law is to be legitimated to the masses, it cannot appear to be nothing more than an instrument of their oppression; it must appear to be fair. And to appear fair, it must sometimes be fair. Thus Beirne (1979) has suggested the possibility that if class discrimination in sentencing were too blatant, the consequence might be social unrest. The upshot of this line of reasoning is that there are structural constraints on law and its enforcement that operate outside the will of any single class or individual. Although the structuralist position has the merit of avoiding some obvious weaknesses in the instrumentalist position, structuralists have themselves given little attention to the historical process by which the formal
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properties of bourgeois law, to which they pay much attention, arose. This neglect leaves structuralism in the unsatisfactory position of pointing to what seem like formal correspondences between bourgeois law and capitalist social relations (Balbus, 1977) whose existence is never explained (Young, 1979). The structuralists have yet to reconcile their argument that formal legal equality reflects bourgeois social relations with the gross violations offormal equality that are to be found in some capitalist legal systems. 4 Ifinstrumentalists have exaggerated discrimination as a feature of law enforcement, structuralists may well err on the opposite side by minimizing it. Some of the readings in Part 3 reflect a largely instrumental conception of law, while others either show a structuralist orientation or draw on both perspectives. The student who wishes to assess these different perspectives on law and the state as they bear on empirical research will find pertinent material here. The first reading, on crime control by Humphries and Greenbert, provides a general overview of developments in criminal law and criminal justice from the beginning stages of the industrial revolution to the early twentieth century in England and the United States. Since so much Marxist work has been done on law, I felt tht an overview of this kind would be more useful than a selection of a couple of papers on particular aspects of the law. The chapter will also provide background for the chapters on criminal justice that follow it. Histories of criminal law and criminal justice of course abound. The Humphries and Greenberg paper emphasizes not the myriad details in so many histories, but the way that Marxian theory helps us to understand the main lines of historical development. It stresses four principles. First, the partial autonomy of the state is highlighted. A number of recent Marxian works on the state have stressed that the state is not controlled by a single class and that it acts with partial independence from the economy. Though constrained by class forces, its policies are not entirely determined by them (Wolfe, 1974; Gold, La and Wright, 1975; Esping-Anderson, Friedland and Wright, 1976; Block, 1977; Wright, 1978:181-225). Second, in the political arena one sees not only classes, but fractions of classes and alliances of classes and class fractions. Criminal legislation and law enforcement are viewed as products of shifting alliances. The superior financial resources of capitalists naturally give them an advantage over other classes in conflicts over legislation and enforcement, but this advantage is not always decisive. Third, ideologies are important in understanding changes in both law and enforcement. They grow out of the experience of class relations, though once created they may persist despite changes in class relations. Fourth, changes in class alliances as well as in ideologies are the consequences of unplanned, or even unanticipated structural changes. Changes
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in the relations of production have an especially important effect on such alliances.
EARLY NINETEENTH·CENTURY PENAL REFORM Both England and the United States adopted major reforms in criminal law in the early nineteenth century. In both countries, capital punishment was drastically curtailed; and imprisonment in penitentiaries, which were administered along very different lines from the eighteenth-century jail, became a major sanction. Standard accounts of these developments attribute them to the initiatives of enlightened and humanitarian reformers who triumphed over cruelty, cupidity, and indifference. Their reforms are made to seem obvious, so advantageous that we wonder why they never occurred to anyone else earlier. But this is hagiography, not sociology. Some Marxists have denied that the reformers' motives were humanitarian (Platt, 1969; Barak, 198OJ.And in many cases they are right to do so. Some reforms advocated as humanitarian can be explained more plausibly as the expression of reformers' self-interest. But even if one concedes that reform can originate in humanitarian sentiments, one must wonder why a given group of reformers were humanitarian, why their humanitarianism was expressed in one way rather than another, and why some proposals for humanitarian reform were adopted and others not. These questions call for a structural analysis. As Michael Rustigan points out in his chapter on criminal law reform in England, Jeremy Bentham has been credited with many reforms in the administration of justice. Yet, Rustigan insists, Bentham's genuine influence on these reforms was limited. He argues that reform was due primarily to pressure from businessmen who sought to protect their property. Law reform thus originated in the mobilization of class interest, not in an enlightened individual. Humanitarianism does find a place in Rustigan's analysis, but one wonders, nevertheless, how far reform would have gone had it not coincided so conveniently with the reforms that were needed to protect bourgeois property. On the basis of Rustigan's evidence, one suspects that much less would have been done. Parliament's favorable response to businessmen's demands for law reform is not without theoretical interest. Since these reforms were instituted before the Parliamentary reforms of 1832 that gave industrial interests greater formal political power, the response cannot be attributed to fears of being defeated at the polls. Perhaps the gentry in Parliament also had an interest in the reforms, or perhaps they thought it important to the country that property rights be defended more effectively. Paul Takagi's interpretation ofthe origins of the Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia (Chapter 3) bears more than passing resemblance to Rustigan's analysis of criminal law reform in England. Before the American War of In-
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dependence, American jails, like English jails, were run along lines that later seemed intolerably lax. Prisoners of all ages, races, and sexes congregated freely. Debtors and the accused being held before trial were all confined in the same facility, and prisoners could buy liquor and other privileges from their jailors. After the war, American jails were reorganized along lines of much stricter discipline. Prisoners were confined in cells and the sale of liquor was stopped. Similar developments occurred in Europe, partly influenced by American innovations. Most discussions of these reforms attribute them to the humanitarian, though possibly misguided, impulses of 1the Quakers. Since Quakers had been among the leading advocates of just such a system in both England and the American colonies, and since Philadelphia had a large Quaker population, this attribution is perhaps understandable. Yet in his reexamination, Paul Takagi shows that while Quakers were involved in reorganizing the jail, their role has been greatly exaggerated. More important, he argues that the motives behind the reform were not those of humanitarianism as it is usually understood. Instead, they had to do with the centralization of state power in the face of growing popular unrest and increasing social inequality in the aftermath of independence. Broadly speaking, Takagi's analysis is consistent with the newer revisionist interpretations of penal history in Europe and the United States (Foucault, 1977; Melossi and Pavarini, 1980). HISTORY OF THE POLICE
Sociological research on the police has developed over the last fifteen years in large measure along lines shaped by the political concerns of the 1960s. Racial conflict in Northern cities in the sixties often crystallized around police issues. And so sociologists pursued questions like: How violent are the police? How extensively do they discriminate against blacks and Hispanics? Why are they sometimes so abusive to citizens? Why do they hold such conservative political views? At their best, these studies enriched our understanding of what transpires in face-to-face encounters involving police, the effect of police work on the attitudes and opinions of police officers, and the socialization of new officers into the occupational practices and subculture of the force. Concentrating on routine patrol activity and the enforcement of vice and narcotics prohibitions, this genre of research ignored the more explicitly political dimensions of policing, such as the "Red squads" responsible for policing "subversives" and the repression of blacks and civil rights activists by police departments in the South. The organizational forms through which policing is carried out were not subjected to sociological analysis, nor were the social consequences of policing for different groups given serious consideration. While sociologists were riding around in squad cars, historians began to publish histories of individual police departments, and in some cases, to
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analyze broader changes in the organization of policing. Much of this work focused on the establishment of police departments in the Jacksonian era, and on attempts to remove the police from partisan politics, reduce corruption, and "professionalize" the force during the Progressive Era. Although these histories are a valuable resource for the sociologist, they have two essential weaknesses. The absence of an explicit theoretical framework to guide the selection of materials sometimes drowns the reader in a sea of detail whose importance is not always clear; and the complex role that the police played in class conflict is sometimes treated with a superficiality that frustrates the sociologist.5 Sidney Harring's paper examines the police in the American industrial revolution (Chapter 4). He analyzes the reorganization of police forces in the large cities of the Northeast in the context of the bitter industrial strife of the late nineteenth century. His analysis takes note of the many ways the police were used as a weapon in the class struggle, ranging from the suppression of strikes to the repression of tramps and the supervision of working-class morality (for example by enforcing vice laws and arresting drunks). At the same time, Harring delineates the obstacles that businessmen and politicians encountered when they tried to deploy the police against the working class. Although he disagrees fundamentally with the idea that the working class "captured" control of the police (Walker, 1980), he emphasizes that the bourgeois control of the force was often precarious. How much of Harring's analysis remains valid today? Clearly there have been some changes. Tramping doesn't exist today in the way it did in the late nineteenth century, although police repression of vagrants has been a recent feature of some American cities (Foote, 1956). The police no longer play such a large role in breaking up strikes; since the New Deal, labor relations have become more peaceful in our large cities, though not always in the South or Southwest. Some fractions of the working class have even become strong supporters of the police. Others, notably urban blacks, have vigorously opposed repressive police tactics. To complicate matters further, the police themselves have become politically militant in unprecedented ways (Ray, 1977). Steven Spitzer's paper (Chapter 5) takes a somewhat longer range view of the police, focusing on the way large-scale economic and political change has constrained and shaped the structure of policing organizations. This analysis is largely structural: it says little about which individuals or groups were responsible for bringing about the changes described. One may infer from the omission that this is not regarded as a critical issue. Certain changes may have been necessary whether anyone in particular wanted them, although on the other hand, Humphries and Greenberg argue (Chapter 1) that the necessity of a given measure does not guarantee that the measure will be taken. Here, perhaps, more work would be useful. Both of these readings on the police help to put in historical context the contention of structural Marxists that the state is best able to serve the
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needs of capital when it is not under the direct control of individual capitalists. Both of them document the process by which the state policing function became more autonomous from dominant classes. And both authors argue that enforcement became more legitimate after it was removed from the direct control of business classes and was administered bureaucratically. This argument raises some interesting questions about legitimacy. If police practices were themselves prejudicial to working-class interests, one wonders why workers would regard them as more legitimate because they were administered impersonally? On the other hand, it may be that reformers wanted to legitimate enforcement to some other group, such as the urban middle classes. Marxists have made much of the need to legitimate one thing or another. The notion that rule through coercion alone is difficult and unstable is implicit in this interest. If people can be persuaded that rulers have a legitimate claim to rule, much less coercion should be necessary.6 But who is persuaded, and to what extent? This subject has received little exploration. Another issue, implied by both Harring and Spitzer, but not raised explicitly by either of them, has to do with the precise nature of the relationship between policing and capitalism. Every industrial society I know of, whether capitalist or not, has established a bureaucratic police force. In what sense, then, can industrial capitalism be viewed as the source of the transformation in policing that both authors document? One argument is that industrialization and urbanization were the critical considerations, and that it was unimportant that it was capitalism that led to these developments in the West. Had they occurred under socialist auspices, the outcome would have been the same. Even this skeptical position would concede that the functions of the police and its styles of operation might be very different in socialist industrial societies than in capitalist societies. In a socialist society, we would expect the police to defend working-class interests, not repress them in the ways Harring documents for nineteenthcentury America. A different position might hold that in a socialist society, state functions can to a large extent be taken over by the population itself. For instance, communities might do much of their own patrolling, intervening in family quarrels, directing traffic, picking up drunks from the street, and so on. Both Cuba and China have taken some steps in this direction.
PRISON LABOR IN THE NINETEENTH CEnlTURY Over the years, a number of histories of the American prison have appeared, detailing innovations of architecture such as solitary cellular confinement, methods of discipline, and penal philosoph\es, as well as some of the social context for these innovations (W. D. Lewis, 1965; O. Lewis, 1967; Barnes, 1968; Rothman, 1971; McKelvey, 1977). Little attention is paid in these treatments to the various forms that prison labor has taken. Rosalind Petchesky
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(Chapter 6) analyzes the complex and changing role that prison labor played in the class struggle in the nineteenth century. In part, prison labor was an intervention in the class struggle on behalf of capitalists. By providing employers with labor at lower wages than prevailed on the open market, it enabled them to keep wages down-or so workers believe, and in some cases they were probably correct. The reference to prison labor in Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme (see Part 1) indicateds that prison labor was used in the same way in nineteenthcentury Europe. Yet as prisoners became workers, class struggle appeared within the prison itself. And since employers who did not have the use of prison labor were competitively disadvantaged, they, like workers, opposed the use of prisoners to manufacture goods for sale on the market. Thus, class conflict inside and outside the prison transformed the character of prison labor, changed the functions of the prison as an institution, and changed its methods of discipline. The lesson is one that several of the contributors to this volume have drawn: the history of prisons, like the history of other responses to crime, cannot be understood in terms of reform from the top down alone. Innovation was forced on administrators by both workers and prisoners? Whereas Petchesky's analysis focuses mainly on prisons in the industrial Northeast, Shelden's focuses on the South, taking the work of Rusche and Kirchheimer (1939) as its point of departure. Rusche and Kirchheimer demonstrated the importance of labor control as an influential, though often hidden function of criminal punishment. As a society's economic system changed, they argued, the methods of punishment used to control labor changed also. Rusche and Kirchheimer drew on this idea to interpret the history of penal sanctions in Europe. In Chapter 7, Shelden confirms their general thesis by documenting the effect that the abolition of slavery in the United States had on the type of criminal punishment imposed on southern blacks. Since slave owners could not subject their slaves to imprisonment without losing the value of their investment, they preferred to punish their slaves' infractions with corporal punishment. With a free market in labor, the value of an individual laborer is less a consideration. If one laborer is sent to prison, another can be hired in his place. Thus, when capitalism is fully established as a mode of production, we tend to see imprisonment substituted for corporal punishment. That is exactly what happened with regard to blacks in the aftermath of the Civil War. The contract labor and convict leasing systems are both forms of organizing prisoner labor that are specific to a capitalist economic system. An issue worth considering is the use of prison labor in socialist societies. Since private business enterprises are not part of a socialist system, we would not expect to see contract labor or convict leasing in a socialist society. Yet prisons and prisoner labor might well be found in socialist societies. The question arises, then, how prisoner labor might be organized in an industrial socialist society.
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THE PROSECUTION OF CRIME Marxist work on the prosecution of crime has pursued several lines ofinvestigation. One line, followed by Timothy Carter and Donald Clelland (1979) has concerned the criteria used in judicial decision making. In recent years researchers have tried to find out what influence the attributes of defendants, victims, judges, and the characteristics of the case itself (such as strength of evidence) have on sentencing. How much impact does the nature of the offense and the length of the defendant's prior record have on the length of sentence relative to the def,endant's age, race, sex, or social class? Conflict theorists had argued that lower-class defendants would be treated more harshly than middle- or upper-class defendants, and black defendants more harshly than white. As Beirne (1979) has observed, this is not a prediction that follows unambiguously from Marxist theory, but many criminologists, some radical and many not, have held that these patterns prevailed. Empirical testing of these propositions has produced conflicting findings. Some studies have found evidence of racial or class differences in sentencing, and others have not. Those that have not have been interpreted in some quarters as a refutation of radical criminology.8 In any event, Carter and Clelland note that the definition of class position employed in these studies, i.e., socioeconomic status, does not derive from Marxian theory. They found that when juveniles were assigned to classes defined in Marxian terms, predictions derived from Marxian th.eory about class bias in juvenile court dispositions were confirmed. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, sentencing practices were widely and sharply criticized for being discriminatory and arbitrary. Individual prosecutors and judges generally have wide discretion in deciding whether to prosecute someone, what the charges should be, how much bail should be demanded, and what sentence should be imposed on those convicted. Since prosecutors or judges may think different criteria are relevant to these decisions, wide disparities in outcome can result. This concern with arbitrariness and dis.crimination has led to proposals for restricting the discretionary powers of prosecutors and judges. Some of these proposals were conceived in connection with broader efforts to build a socialist movement. In this respect, they were unsuccessful. But in another respect they succeeded: sentencing reform legislation has boon adopted in a number of states. Greenberg and Humphries outline the original proposals for sentencing reform in Chapter 8 and describe the way they were transformed in the process of being implemented. This article explains the transformation in terms of political and economic developments in the 1970s. It ends by suggesting that in their present form, the new sentencing arrangements are likely to be unstable, since they are creating problems for administrators that will lead to pressure ti[)r further change. It should be noted that advocates of sentencing reform took an approach
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to the building of a socialist movement that Marxists would not necessarily approve. In essence, the approach consisted of dramatizing the discrepancy between the bourgeois ideal of equal treatment under law, and the reality of grossly unequal treatment, to make the argument that only under socialism can the ideal be fulfilled. However, Dean Clarke has drawn on Marx to argue that conceptions of justice are meaningful only with respect to specific ways of organizing social relations. Even when wedded to a radical posture toward capitalism, he contends, the conception of justice embodied in the "justice mode!," described by Greenberg and Humphries is still "liberal"i.e., capitalist. In his view, implementation of the model in a capitalist soci~ ety is impossible, and in a post-revolutionary socialist society unnecessary (Clarke, 1978:55). A communist society like China achieves [social control] by overt political socialization and community pressure. Such a society needs to make no pretence that the legal, political and economic spheres are independent of one another. Indeed, it is inconceivable, from the point of view of communist theory, that they could be. Reified formal-legality in the Western sense is seen as inferior, and only necessary in imperfect societies.
Consequently, struggles over violations of the principles of bourgeois justice are diversionary. Clarke notwithstanding, the People's Republic of China has not relied exclusively on socialization and community pressure to control deviance. Imprisonment, forced labor, and executions have been employed on a vast scale there (Buo-Wang, 1976). It is in response to wrongful imprisonment and executions that the People's Republic of China began in 1979 to institute new fOnTIS of due process in criminal cases. Similar abuses in other socialist countries have made some Marxists suspicious of throwing out "bourgeois" justice altogether. Thus the British Marxist historian E. P. Thompson (1975) insists that law must be preserved in a socialist society to protect individuals from the state. It is useful to consider these debates not only in light of Greenberg and Humphries' treatment of sentencing refonTI movements here, but also in connection with comments in Part V about the relationship between praxis and Marxist criminology, and in the Introduction, about socialism. In a brilliant and suggestive paper, Wolf Heydebrand (1979) has drawn on the work of the Marxian economist James O'Connor (1973) to analyze organizational developments in the administration of justice. O'Connor argued that in its present stage, capitalism generates increasingly higher social costs-environmental pollution, unemployment compensation, medical costs connected with job-related injuries, and so forth. The political power of large corporations enables them to pass these costs on to the government. Yet the state's revenues cannot be expanded indefinitely to meet these costs without damaging the private sector of the economy or provok~ ing a taxpayer's revolt. Consequently the state faces a fiscal crisis: it is caught between the need to spend more money and the inability to raise it.
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Heydebrand sees the courts facing just such a crisis now, and innovators are responding to the crisis by seeking more efficient ways of carrying on the court's business, including better use of judicial manpower. A number of developments in the criminal courts are consistent with this analysis. Although crime rates and arrest rates have risen rapidly over the last two decades,9 the judiciary has been relatively unsuccessful in increasing its resources. Sentencing legislation that restricts the judges' flexibility in coping with the flood tide of cases exacerbates this shortage of resources. At the same time, public demands to "do something" about crime create pressures for effectiveness. The decentralization of American criminal justice administration (most court systems are part of country governments I means that courts must deal with these pressures individually. The federal Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAAI, which provides subsidies for administrative innovations, can be seen as an attempt to increase substantive rationality in dealing with crime. In its early years, LEM helped local police forces acquire heary weaponry for use in riots. More recently it has been concerned primarily with routine crime. For example, community corrections projects, such as programs that divert arrestees from the courts. have been substantially subsidized by LEM. LEAA has also provided fUlnds for the Institute for Law and Social Research (INSLAWI, a nonprofit, tax-exempt corporation that "provides assistance to public law agencies in the fields of computer systems, training programs, management analysis, social-legal research, and criminal justice policy development." (PROMIS News/etterl Among other things, INSLAW has developed and promotes the adoption of PROMIS, a computer-based management information system. PROMIS enables civil and criminal justice agencies to exel1 positive contl'Ol o\"er their work loads .... [It] permits justice agencies to manage cases with evenhandedness and infOlmed supervision. to give more attention to those cases that dese"'e it, to identity problem areas in a timely fashion, and to identity litigants whose cases present special problems. PROMIS also prmides management rep0l1s helpful to those responsible for planning and evaluating agency activities IPROMIS Newsletterl.
A computer system of this sort can be used, for example, to select cases for prosecution on the basis of criteria that the office of the prosecuting attorney has determined to be relevant. Such criteria need not reflect only the particular charge alleged in the case at hand, or the strength of the evidence; indeed, if the only criteria to be employed were such simple ones as these, a computer system would probably not be needed. But with computers on hand, other criteria, such as previous record and predictions regarding future criminality based on the personal traits of the defendant, can be taken into account as well. This will permit early dismissal of cases regarded as too trivial to merit prosecution, and allow prompt, vigorous prosecution of the "serious" cases, as well as more uniform handling of cases within a given office.
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Heydebrand points out that innovations to achieve greater substantive rationality in the courts are not proceeding unopposed. Judges are reluctant to relinquish their traditional professional prerogatives. Sacrificing principles of fonnal rationality (principles of distributive justice) in favor of substantive rationality'° can evoke ideological opposition. Feeley and Sarat (forthcoming) have shown that LEANs need to accommodate the vested interests of existing local law enforcement agencies has greatly weakened its ability to rationalize the administration of justice. The sentencing developments documented in Chapter 8 by Greenberg and Humphries likewise stand in the way of full substantive rationality, though perhaps not decisively. the use of systems like PROMIS at the low-visibility level of prosecution may avoid criticism on grounds of unfairness, while sentencing legislation which applies after conviction, will interfere with the achievement of substantive rationality only to a very limited extent. Harold Barnett, in Chapter 9, also draws on O'Connor's work. O'Connor has argued that in a capitalist society the state must fulfill two functions: promoting the accumulation of capital in the private sector (already implied in our discussion of O'Connor's work above), and legitimating the steps taken to accomplish this. Legitimation may be required because the state's fostering accumulation by providing special benefits to capitalists may run counter to popular belief that the government should be more evenhanded, or should aid the have-nots. Barnett applies this analysis to the enforcement of antitrust legislation. Radical criminologists have denounced the weak enforcement of laws involving corporate crime in stentorian tones. It is widely accepted that the total financial costs of corporate and governmental crime grossly exceed those due to conventional crimes such as theft and interpersonal assaults. Estimates of the annual financial losses due to corporate crime run in the vicinity of $100-$200 billion. There is every reason, therefore, to suppose that increased expenditure on enforcement would be highly cost-effective. Yet the resources devoted to enforcement have been very limited, and penalties extremely mild. A recent journalistic sUIvey of efforts to control white-collar crime (Taubman, 1979) substantiates this conclusion. Statistics on prosecutions and interviews with high-level enforcement officials confinn that most efforts directed at white-collar crime involve targets other than large corporations. For example, most of the tax cases referred to the Justice Department by the Internal Revenue Service involve doctors, lawyers, and small businessmen rather than large corporations. Justice Department investigations of fraud have involved welfare, Medicare, and Medicaid programs, but not large corporations. Of the 130 cases referred to the Justice Department for violations of environmental pollution laws between 1973 and 1979, only half a dozen have involved major corporations. Of course the bulk of law enforcement efforts are not directed even at petty white-collar crime, but at so-called street crime, usually committed by poor and unemployed workers or youths.
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This neglect of corporate crime cannot be explained by public sentiments that such violations are trivial. In a study conducted by the Center for Studies in Criminology and Criminal Law at the University of Pennsylvania, interviews were held with 60,000 individuals selected to represent the American population. These individuals were asked to rate the seriousness of different crimes numerically. It was found that illegal retail price-fixing by several large companies is considered more serious than a personal robbery in which the offendler intimidates the victim with a lead pipe and steals $1,000 .... FactOlY pollution of a city's water supply, resulting in only one person's illness, can'ies a serious score of lSI-more than twice the score of 69 assigned to a burjglary in which the offender breaks into a private home and steals $100. (Wolfgang, 19801
Barnett argues that while considerations of legitimacy alone might make a higher level of enforcement desirable for the state, vigorous enforcement is not undertaken because a higher priority is given to the state's accumulation function. The regulatory agencies, he suggests, fear that breaking up the monopolies would seriously impair the functioning of the economy. Barnett thus provides a structural explanation for a phenomenon that previously has only been deplored. It should be emphasized that Barnett's explanation of weak enforcement does not assert that enforcement agencies are necessarily headed by capitalists who protect their own interests through a do-nothing policy. Nor does he argue that officials are personally biased in favor of corporations or pressured by them, even though that may well be the case. Instead, he argues that vigorous enforcement would have such disruptive economic consequences that no government unwilling to break with capitalism altogether could afford it. This emphasis on the structural constraints that determine policy independently of the personal preferences or social background of individual officeholders is a fairly recent development in the Marxian theory of the state.l l Going beyond this level of analysis, Barnett also points to the relevance of such organizational considerations as limited budgets for enforcement and enforcement agencies' needs to sustain high rates of conviction. These considerations direct prosecution toward small fry who can be prosecuted cheaply. It would be of some interest to determine to what extent the health of the U.S. economy indeed depends on the continued existence of large corporations. In traditional economic thinking, competition invigorates and strengthens the economy, and innovation JLS expected to suffer when competition is reduced. Since if some businesses buy goods from other businesses that violate antitrust laws they must pay higher prices, they would presumably benefit from enforcement. If some of these arguments are incorrect, then some of the rationale for a private enterprise economic system would appear to be invalid.
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CONTEMPORARY PENAL CONDITIONS Most of the criminological work on the prison over the past few decades has concerned the origins of inmate subculture and social structure, and the effectiveness of the prison in rehabilitating inmates or deterring crime. Although penologists have often deplored the abominable standards of living in prisons, they have rarely subjected these conditions to sociological investigation. Herman and Julia Schwendinger attempt to do that in Chapter 10 by drawing on the "principle of least eligibility." Dating back at least to the early nineteenth century, the principle asserts that the standard of living in penal institutions cannot rise above the standard of living of the lowest paid "honest" laborers outside the prison. Otherwise (assuming that standard of living is defined in economic terms) honest people would break the law to gain admission to prison. Thus, prison conditions that are too comfortable would cause the crime rate to increase. Evidently, the principle will operate only if potential criminals know about the changes. Over the long run, of course, gross changes are likely to become known, particularly in communities where many residents are sent to prison. Even under those conditions, the principle may exaggerate the extent to which potential criminals will be deterred by marginal changes in prison conditions. To the extent that crime rates can be influenced by changes in prison conditions, the principle would appear to hold in any economic system. Nevertheless, the consequences of maintaining substandard prison conditions may be different in capitalist and socialist societies. Here, the Schwendingers explore the consequences of operating prisons in conformity with the standard in a capitalist society. By making it potentially costly for members of the working class to obtain income illegally, workers will choose wage labor at salaries that are less than would have to be offered if theft were not penalized. In other words, wage labor is a more attractive option than stealing, when the penalty for stealing is a possible prison sentence. Since wage labor implies exploitation in a capitalist mode of production, the substandard prison conditions underwrite higher capitalist profits. One question provoked by this analysis concerns the assumptions about the state that are implied when one assumes that prison conditions as they actually exist are governed by the principle of least eligibility. We might ask what is to prevent prison administrators, who are not directly controlled by a cohesive capitalist class, from establishing living conditions that are higher than the principle allows? The result might be higher crime rates, but crime rates have in fact been rising. It would be hard to establish that improved prison conditions are responsible, but the Schwendingers' analysis suggests the possibility. These questions aside, the Schwendingers' analysis suggests some intriguing possibilities for research. Since standards of living outside of prison differ from one state to another, their argument would predict variations in penal conditions from one state to another as well.12 The same reasoning
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would apply to cross-national differences in standards of living and penal conditions. If the Schwendingers are correct, the comparatively mild sentences in Holland and Sweden may reflect the extensive welfare provisions in those countries. Readers who are unfamiliar with the delbates on "just desserts" and "fair punishment" mentioned by the Schwendingers may wish to review the reading by Greenberg and Humphries (Chapter 8), where these issues are discussed.
NOTES 1 This is not to say that nomadical cIiminologists were uncritical of law enforcement. Often they were. but they considered defects to be largely the consequence of mistaken ideas about what should be done. and did not see them as structurally rooted. This led criminologists to hope that they could direct criminal justice along more humane lines and at the same time increase its efficiency by communicating their research findings and policy analyses to those responsible for framing policy. 2 Jeffery Reiman 11979) has recently quantified some of this endangerment. Citing relevant government documents. he counts the annual number of deaths from industrial disease to be roughly 100.000 lin addition to 390.000 job-related illnesses!. There were an additional 14.200 deaths from industrial accidents Iplus 2.2 million disabling work injuries) in 1970. Reiman goes on to cite medical studies suggesting that 60 to 90 percent of the cancers resulting in death each year were due to environmental factors ranging from cigarette smoking to pollution from industrial chemicals. 3 Hepburn (19771 suggests that laws inimical to capitalist interests really redound to their benefit by creating the illusion of pluralism. But of course if the laws are really inimical to capitalist interests. the impression is not entirely illusory. Indeed. if capitalists indirectly gain from laws inimical to their interests. one wonders why they don't favor such laws. Politically, Hepburn's position suggests that the working class is beller off when laws inimical to capitalist interests are defeated, because workers will then suffer from fewer illusions. At the very least. this is a controversial position. 4 For studies confirming the use of racial criteIia in sentencing. see Southern Regional Council119691. Pope 119751. Wolfgang and Riedel 119751, Gibson 119781, Lizotte 11978). and Myers and Hagan 11979); regarding parole, see Carroll and Modrick 11976). Other studies. it should be noted. have failed to find evidence that sentencing is influenced by racial criteria. 5 When historians do treat the role of the police in class conflict. their treatment can at times be frustrating. For example. Samuel Walker (19801 asserts that "in the nineteenth century working-class and ethnic groups mobilized considerable political power and captured control of criminal-justice agencies" Ip. 1041. At the same time. he notes that "Individual workers. especially those who might drink to excess on occasion. were among the principal victims of police activity. The history of the American labor movement, meanwhile. is punctuated by incidents of police attacks on strikers" Ip. 1211. Yet Walker fails to note, much less resolve the incongruity of a police force that had been captured by a politically mobilized working class which was not opposed to drinking or to strikes having workingclass drinkers and striking workers as its main victims. 6 It would be misleading. though. to think of coercion and legitimated consensus as opposite ends of a scale in understanding the sources of compliance. The manner in which coercion is delivered can itself be a source of legitimacy or of delegitimation. 7 Evan Stark develops this theme in relation to the juvenile court in article 18.
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8 On the other hand. conflict theory does not argue that any particular group will be inevitably disadvantaged in the sentencing process IGreenberg. 19771. Recent sentencing studies come after a period of black political mobilization. as well as increased public sensitivity to racial discrimination. The absence of evidence for bias in sentencing may reflect the success of the black struggle. 9 Between 1960 and 1980. the total number of persons arrested nationwide rose by a factor of
approximately 3.5. 10 Formal rationality would mean treating all those in similar legal circumstances alike. while
substantive rationality would permit diiTerent treatment in order to achieve policy goals. such as reducing crime. Thus. considerations of substantive rationality might lead to the use of legally irrelevant information about indh~duals in sentencing. For example. judges might decide that persons with poor work records are not good risks for probation and send them to prison where they could receive vocational training. even though it is not illegal to have a poor work record. 11 The structural sources of pressures toward weak enforcement are nicely illustrated by the
complaints now being voiced by American corporate executives about the consequences of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. passed by Congress in 1977. The Act prohibits bribing foreign officials and authorizes prison sentences of up to five years for individuals. as well as fines of up to $1 million for their companies. According to a White House task force. American businesses are losing an estimated $1 billion a year because they are handicapped in their ability to compete with foreign firms by their inability to offer bribes. Thus far. Congress has not yielded to pressure to revise the act. but if public complacency about corporate illegality returns. it may well decide to do so. 12 The Schwendingers assert that there are not significant regional differences in the standard
of living in prisons. but support the claim only with anecdotes. There do not seem to have been any empirical studies of regional differences in prison conditions.
REFERENCES Balbus. Isaac D. 119771. "Commodity Form and Legal Form: An Essay on the Relative Autonomy of the Law." Law and Society Review 11:571-88. Barak. Gregg 119771. In Defense of Whom? A Critique of Criminal Justice Reform. Cincinnati: Anderson. Barnes. Han}, Elmer 1196BI. The Evolution of Penology in Pennsylvania. Montclair. NJ.: Patterson Smith. Originally published in 1927. Beirne. Piers 119791. "Empiricism and the Critique of Marxism on Law and Crime." Social Problems 26:373-B5. Block. Fred 119791. 'The Ruling Class Does Not Rule." Socialist Review 7:6-2B. Can'oll. Leo. and Margaret E. Modrick 119761. "Racial Bias in the Decision to Grant Parole." Law alld Society Review 11:93-107. Cal1er. Timothy J .. and Donald Clelland 119791. "A Neo-Marxian Critique. Formulation and Test of Juvenile Dispositions as a Function of Social Class." Social Problems 27:96-10B. Chambliss. William J. 119741. "The State. the Law. and the Definitions of Behavior as Criminal or Delinquent." In Daniel Glaser led.l. Handbook ofCrimillology. Chicago: Rand McNally. ---119761. "Functional and Conflict Theories of Crime." In William J. Chambliss and Milton Mankoff leds.l. Whose Law. What Order? A Conflict Approach to Criminology. New York: Wiley. - - - 119791. "Contradictions and Conflicts in Law Creation." In Steven Spitzer led.!. Research ill Law and Sociology. vol. 2. Greenwich. Conn.: JAI Press.
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- - - and Robert B. Seidman 119711. Law, Order, and Power. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley. Chiricos, Theodore G., and Gordon P. Waldo 119i51. "Socioeconomic Status and Criminal Sentencing: An Empirical Assessment of a Conflict Proposition." American Sociological Review 40: i53.
Clarke, Dean 119i81. "Marxism, Justice and the Justice Mode!." Contemporary Crises 2:1i -62. Esping-Anderson, Gosta, Roger Friedland, and Erik Olin Wright t19i61. "Class Struggle and the Capitalist State," Kapitalistate 4-5:186-98. Foote, Caleb (19561. "Vagrancy-Type Law and Its Administration," L'niversity of Pennsylvania Law Review 104:603-50. Foucault, Michel119iil. Discipline and Punish: The Origin of the Prison. New York: Pantheon Gibson, James L. 119i81. "Race as a Determinant of Criminal Sentences: A Methodological Critique and a Case Study." Law and Society Review 12:455-i8. Gold, David, Clarence Y. H. Lo, and Erik Olin Wright t19i51. "Recent Developments in Marxist Theories of the Capitalist State," Monthly Review 2i INovemberl: 36-51. Greenberg, David l19iil. "Socioeconomic Status and Criminal Sentences: Is There an Association?" American Sociological Review 42:li4-i5. Hepburn, John R. 119iil. "Social Control and the Legal Order: Legitimate Repression in a Capitalist State." Contemporary Crises 1:ii-90. Heydebrand, Wolf 119i91. "The Technocratic Administration of Justice." In Steven Spitzer led.l, Research in Law and Sociology, vo!' 2. Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press. Hindus, Michael 119801. Prisons and Plantations: Criminal Justice in Nineteenth Century Massachusetts and South Carolina. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Hopkins, Andrew 119i91. "Pressure Groups and the Law." Contemporary Crises 3:69-82. Lewis, Orlando 119671. The Development ofAmerican Prisons and Prison Customs, 1776-1845. Montclair, N.J.: Patterson Smith. Originally publio,hed in 1922. Lewis, W. Davis 119651. From Newgate to Dannemora: The Rise of the Penitentiary in New York, 1796-1848. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Lizotte, Alan J. (19i81. "Extra-Legal Factors in Chicago's Criminal Courts: Testing the Conflict Model of Criminal Justice." Social Problems 25:5134-80. McCormick, Jr., Albert E. 119i91. "Dominant Class Interests and the Emergence of Antitrust Legislation." Contemporary Crises 3:399-418. McKelvey, Blake (19771. American Prisons: A History of Good Intentions. Montclair, NJ.: Patterson Smith. Marx, Karl, and Frederich Engels. "The German Ideology." In Collected Works, vol. 5. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Melossi, Dario, and Massimo Pavarini 119801. The Prison and the Factory. London: Macmillan. Michalowski. Raymond J., and Edward J. Bohlander 119761. "Repression and Criminal Justice in Capitalist America." Sociological Inquiry 46:95-11l6. Myers, Martha A., and John Hagan 119i91. "Private and Public Trouble: Prosecutors and the Allocation of Court Resources," Social Problems 26439-51. O'Connor, James 119i31. The Fiscal Crisis of the State. New York: St. Mm1in's. Platt, Anthony 119691. The Child-Savers: The Invention of Delinquency, Chicago: University ot Chicago Press. Pope, Carl E. IUli51. Sentencing of California Felony Qffenders. Washington, D.C.: Law Enforcement Assistance Administration. Quinney, Richard (1974). Critique of Legal Order. Boston: Little, Brown. Ray, Gerda (1977). "Police Militancy." Crime and Social Justice 7:40-8.
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Reiman. Jeffery H. 119791. The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison. New York: Wiley. Rothman. David J. 119711. The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic. Boston: Little. Brown. Ruo-Wang. Bao 119761. Prisoner of Mao. Baltimore: Penguin. Rusche. Georg. and Otto Kirchheimer 119391. Punishment and Social Structure. New York: Columbia University Press. Southern Regional Council 119691. "Race Makes the Difference." Unpublished Paper. Taubman. Philip 119791. "U.S. Attack on Corporate Crime Yields Handful of Cases in 2 Years." New York Times. July 15. pp. 1. 29. Thompson. E. P. 119751. Whigs and Hunters: Origins of the Black Act. New York: Pantheon. Walker. Samuel 119801. Popular Justice: A History of American Criminal Justice. New York: Oxford University Press. Wolfe. Alan 119741. "New Directions in the Marxist Theory of Politics." Politics and Society 4: 131-60. Wolfgang. Marvin E. 119801. "Crime and Punishment." New York Times. March 2. p. E21. Wolfgang. Marvin E. and Marc Riedel 119751. "Rape. Race and the Death Penalty in Georgia." American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 45:658-67. Wright, Erik Olin 119781. Class. Crisis and the State. London: New Left Books. Young. Jock 119791. "Left Idealism. Reform and Beyond: From New Criminology to Marxism." In Bob Fine et a!. leds.l. Capitalism and the Rule of Law: From Deviancy Theory to Marxism. London: Hutchinson.
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The Dialectics of Crime Control Drew Humphries and David F. Greenberg Portions of this chapter have been adapted from Drew Humphries and David F. Greenberg, "t,ocial Control and Social FOImations," in Donald Black led.l, Toward a General Theory of Social ControllNew York: Academic Press, 19801.
THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES ON CRIME CONTROL
Although criminologists have generally agreed that the explanation of crime control is one of the central tasks of criminology, our understanding of why changes in criminal law and its enforcement take place remains theoretically primitive. Historians have carried out many case studies of such changes, but often they have abstained from explaining the events they describe. Sociologists, on the other hand, commonly devise explanations for a particular change of interest without considering how widely the explanations can be generalized. Textbook treatments typically survey these explanations but without reconciling or synthesizing discrepancies of perspective. Until these matters are clarified, the continued multiplication of case studies will make only a limited contribution to our understanding of crime control. It is in the hope of contributing to this clarification that we point to deficiencies in the explanations currently in vogue, and show how Marxian theory can contribute to an understanding of historical changes in the scope, methods, and legitimating ideologies of crime control. The framework we develop will be used to discuss changes in crime control in England and the United States from the industrial revolution to the present.1 Because of space limitations, our treatment will necessarily be somewhat schematic; we focus on those features of selected developments that are of analytical significance. We begin by examining the logic of explanations for changes in crime control that appear often in the literature. Broadly speaking, these explanations fall into two types: systems theories and theories concerned with agency. We consider each in turn. Systems theories
Systems theories explain the features of a social system in terms of the functional needs of the system-the needs that must be met if the system is to
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continue functioning as a system. For example, laws prohibiting murder have been explained by the assertion that in the absence of such laws people would kill one another off to the extent that society itself would disappear. Systems theorists typically assume that crime control mechanisms prevent or contain disruptive or disequilibrating tendencies that arise from within the social system or from outside it. Criminal justice is thus a selfcorrecting or restorative mechanism (Parsons, 1951; Parsons and Gerstein, 1977). Functionalist sociologists who have interpreted repressive punishment in terms of its presumed effects of reinforcing normative consensus and restoring social solidarity in the face of deviance use this reasoning (Durkheim, 1893:67 -72, and 1895:70-110; Erikson, 1966; Inverarity, 1976). Although Marxists have criticized the functionalist characterization of society as consensual, and have argued against the proposition that a mode of production based on exploitation can be stabilized in the long run, some Marxian theorists have discussed crime control in similar terms. Thus Poulantzas, following Althusser, discusses the "state apparatuses" (which include the police, the courts, the prison system, and the army) in terms of their "principal role," which is "to maintain the unity and cohesion of a social formation by concentrating and sanctioning class domination, and in this way reproducing social relations, i.e. class relations" (Poulantzas, 1974: 25). Whereas earlier Marxist writings tended to argue that this was true because state officeholders were themselves capitalists or were directly subservient to them, the more recent structuralist Marxist literature holds that the constraints on state policy are so large that this will be true no matter what the social backgrounds of officeholders. It is the essence of a systems theory that the explanation of a social phenomenon does not refer to the meanings or goals of the members of the society.2 It does not see change as a consequence of the purposeful activity of identifiable social actors, but as a spontaneous and unwitting convulsion of the entire social system. Nor does it explain how or why anyone realizes what a system or a mode of production needs and insures that these needs are met. Thus the system or mode of production must itself be endowed with omniscience and omnipotence. (In this sense, systems theories reify social relations. Moreover, in supposing that a mode of production is always capable of securing its own reproduction, systems theories leave inexplicable the replacement of one mode of production by another. The Marxian notion of contradiction makes explicit the possibility that a mode of production will not be able to reproduce itself (Hirst and Hindess, 1975).) Since systems theories also fail to specify how the outcome (crime control) is connected to the cause (functional need of the system), they are at best incomplete. The implied assumption that there is always no more than one way to fulfill a given need remains to be demonstrated. One must also question whether an observed criminal prohibition is in fact always vital to the survival of the society. Is it plausible, for example, that in the absence of repressive legislation, homosexuality in late-nineteenth-century England
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and the United States would have increased to the point where it threatened population growth or destroyed the nuclear family? Nothing of the sort happened in France, where the Napoleonic Code abolished all legal prohibitions against homosexual activity among consenting adults. Can it be argued persuasively that the prohibition of alcohol was necessary for the survival of American capitalism in 1920, but not necessary a little more than a decade later when the Eighteenth Amendment was repealed? Claims such as these would not be credible. To understand this legislative history we must look beyond the "needs" of the social system, though without abandoning the obviously valuable insight that a society's social control machinery is in some way related to the character of the society in question. Theories of agency
Theories of agency derive from Becker's (1966) observation that legal rules prohibiting specified conduct do not create themselves, but are instead the product of "entrepreneurs" who crusade for the adoption of the rules they wish to see enacted, perhaps at the expense of others. In the words of one non-Marxian conflict theorist: If there were no groups trying to control the activities of other groups and
trying to enforce their wills upon those other groups through the legislative processes, there would be no laws making some activities "crimes" and there could, consequently, be no "criminals." ... the criminal laws are specifically enacted by the middle and upper classes to place the poorer classes under the more direct control of the police. (Douglas, 1971:xvii)
Theories of agency identify the social agents responsible for changes in criminalization and specify why they seek change. In this respect, they supply what is missing in systems theories. Becker's suggestion has been extended to include group or collective entrepreneurs as well as individuals, and Gase studies have implicated a number of different groups who have at one time or another widened or narrowed the scope of crime control, including government bureaucracies (Dickson, 1968; Belknap, 1977; Embree, 197'7), professional interest groups (Humphries, 1977) and status groups (Gusfield, 1963; Zurcher and Kirkpatrick, 1976). The Marxian literature, on the other hand, has paid more attention to class as the most salient category. Thus Quinney (1977:45) holds that "law ... is an instrument of the state that serves the interest of the developing capitalist ruling class .... Law and legal repression are, and continue to serve as the means of enforCing the interests of the dominant class in the capitalist state." Many instances where the historical evidence suggests that law did indeed serve dominant class interests have been located; for the best single summary of this literature, see Chambliss (1974). Many of the non-Marxian analyses of agency are vulnerable to criticism on grounds of voluntarism. Becker (1963), for example, never indicates why a
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particular entrepreneur chooses a particular category of behavior as the target of a campaign. The choice appears completely arbitrary and unrelated to any objective social conditions.3 There is no conception of social structure other than a kaleidoscope of groups defined by all kinds of criteria (age, race, sex, wealth, religion, etc.). Why groups form on the basis of any particular criterion, and why one group succeeds in its entrepreneurial efforts while another group fails is not addressed. The assertion that rules are made by "the powerful" (found in much of the labeling theory literature) doesn't take us very far in the absence of a theory of the sources of power (Uazos, 1972; Thio, 1973). Marxists conceptualize social structure more clearly, but their works frequently pose serious problems. As we noted earlier, many of the empirical studies carried out by non-Marxists show us groups defined along lines other than class. Marxists have largely neglected the implications that the existence of such groups have for a theory in which the only social differentiation recognized is that of class. Another set of problems revolves around the assumption made by some Marxist writers (e.g., Hepburn, 1977; Quinney, 1977; and with some minor reservations, Michalowski and Bolander, 1976) that the capitalist class is unified, all-powerful, and invariably capable of ensuring that legislation reflects its interests alone.4 Since at times capitalists are visibly divided, and since some legislation has been adopted despite capitalist opposition (much labor legislation, some consumer legislation, and recent environmental protection measures), this view can be sustained only if one is willing to suppose that the ruling class pretends to be divided and shrewdly decides to let other classes win a few legislative battles in order to deceive them into thinking that they really do have a chance to influence legislative outcomes. Surely this is preposterous. As Spitzer (1980) and Fine (1979) have noted, even when a crime control measure does embody the interests of a class, the form that the measure takes can rarely be explained in terms of the interest alone. In pursuing its interest, a class is checked by many constraints (e.g., the costs of implementation and the resources available for meeting them, the level and forms of class struggle, the character of the state, the need to legitimate its actions to other classes.) Insufficient attention has been given in this literature to the gradual and largely nonconflictual processes through which the appropriate targets and methods of crime control are redefined in response to changed social circumstances. If systems theorists err by neglecting consciousness entirely, theorists of agency err by neglecting the processes through which consciousness forms and actors acquire subjective interests. Seeing entrepreneurs, theorists attribute changes in public perception of social conditions to the entrepreneurs, without considering that the perceptions of the entrepreneurs themselves must be explained. In short, a theory of interests, and indeed, of consciousness generally, is missing from much of this work. What is needed in a theory of historical change in crime control is im-
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plicit in the criticisms we have raised of earlier work. A theo!)' must locate agents of change structurally, specify how they come to regard a particular form of change as desirable, and show why they are able or unable to achieve what they seek. Marxism can aid in the task of developing such a theo!),. A Marxian framework CLASS AND CONTROL Marxist theo!)' begins with the social relations of production. When direct producers are separated from the means of production, and distribution is not collective, society is divided into classes. The class that does not produce, but expropriates the surplus produced by others, is characterized as an exploiting class; while the producers, deprived of the use of their full product, are regarded as an exploited class. As several modes of production (e.g., capitalist, feudal, slave, and petty commodity production) may coexist in a single social formation (Marx, 1858:106-7),' there is typically a multiplicity of classes. Since classes are postulated to have opposing interests ""ith regard to the use of the means of production and the distribution of the product, a source of instability is present in all class societies. It follows that exploitative modes of production do not reproduce themselves through economic means alone. An exploited class will seek to reduce or eliminate its exploitation. On the other hand, an exploiting class will attempt to preserve exploitative class relations. Criminalization is one tactic among many that an exploiting class will attempt to use in doing this. Exploiting classes will thus define as illegal, and t!), to punish, actions that threaten its interests. For example, it may seek to eliminate forms of appropriation of wealth that are inconsistent with the mode of production in question by defining them as theft and attaching penal sanctions to those who "steal." This strategy, of course, requires that the state define as criminal those actions that run counter to the interests of the exploiting class. Marxists have generally held that the state will do just that. An exploited class need not necessarily accept the views of the exploiting class as to what actions should be criminalized. The exploited may oppose the views of the exploiters and attempt to gain acceptance for views that embody their own class interests. Lacking the financial and political resources of the exploiting class, however, they are likely to be relatively less successful. They thus may be compelled to rely on extra-legal or illegal methods of control, such as strikes and industrial sabotage. The exploiting class will in turn attempt to frustrate these attempts through its own control measures, ranging from firings to injunctions and criminal prohibitions. We thus have a dynamic picture of crime control as both the subject of class conflict and the instrument of class control. As class conflict evolves, so will the scope and forms of control employed by both exploiting and exploited classes.5
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Marxist theory does not exclude the possibility that the factual premises from which a class defines its interests and formulates control strategies may be wrong. Marx's comment to the reader of Capital is worth recalling here: If, as the reader will have realized to his great dismay, the analysis of the actual intrinsic relations of the capitalist process of production is a vel)' complicated matter and vel)' extensive; if it is a work of science to resolve the visible, merely external movement into the true intrinsic movement, it is self-evident that conceptions which arise about the laws of production in the minds of agents of capitalist production and circulation will diverge drastically from these real laws and will merely be the conscious expression of the visible movements. The conceptions of the merchant, stockbroker, and banker, are necessarily quite distorted. Those of the manufacturers are vitiated by the acts of circulation to which their capital is subject, and by the levelling of the general rate of profit. Competition likewise assumes a completely distorted role in their minds. IMarx, 1894:312-131
The same may of course be true of other classes as well. As a consequence, crime control strategies cannot be a simple reflection of the "objective" needs of a class. One must at times examine the ways in which the relations of production give rise to misconceptions that shape crime control. We must also note that the reproduction of class relations may require that a dominant class criminalize the actions of its own members. For example, the survival of individual capitalists would be jeopardized if a single capitalist were to gain control over an entire sector of the economy and use this control to raise prices to other capitalist purchasers or to undersell competitors. To prevent this, capitalists may support antimonopoly legislation. It is likevvise important to individual capitalists that no single capitalist gain control of the state and use this control to the detriment of all the others. Capitalists may thus support political arrangements that restrain the state, such as checks and balances between branches of government, and popular elections. The same is true of the working class. Its members have a common interest in discouraging workers who may be tempted to sacrifice the interests of their class for personal advantage, and thus may support criminal penalties for thieves and narcotics merchants who prey on members of their community. It need not be the case that classes "vill disagree about every aspect of crime control. After noting the existence of three classes in nineteenthcentury Europe-the feudal aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, and the proletariat-each vvith its distinctive morality, Engels notes (in a passage that should lay to rest the notion that Marxism can be refuted by evidence that classes agree about the wrongfulness of certain crimes) that the classes' moral theories have much in common: These moral theories represent three different stages of the same historical development, and have therefore a common historical background, and for
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that reason alone they necessarily have much in common. Even more. In similar or approximately similar stages of economic development moral theories must of necessity be more or less in agreement. From the moment when private property in movable objects developed, in all societies in which this private property existed there must be this moral law in common: Thou shalt not steal. (Engels, 1878:2711
This is so because workers no less than capitalists have an interest in holding on to their belongings. It is only where class interests diverge that we should expect class differences in attitudes toward crime control. In pursuing one interest, a class must not jeopardize more important interests. Thus slave owners cannot use imprisonment to punish their slaves, because to do so would deprive them of the use of their investments. Consequently, slaves in the American South were disciplined primarily with summary corporal punishment, not with imprisonment (Sellin, 1976; see also the reading by Shelden in this volume). Likewise, to consistently use brutal punishments might provoke slaves to revolt. Consequently, Southern legislatures passed laws protecting slaves from their masters in limited ways.6 To win broad support, a rising class must appeal to interests wider than its own. Thus Marx notes that no class can achieve the status of a ruling class unless it can arouse, in itself and in the masses, a moment of enthusiasm in which it associates and mingles with society at large, identifies with it, and is felt and recognized as the general representative of this society. Its aims and interests must genuinely be the aims and interests of society itself. of which it becomes in reality the social head and hem'1.. It is only in the name of the general interest that a particular class can cllaim general supremacy. (Marx, 1844a:55-56; emphasis in original.1
Note that it cannot merely pretend to serve general interests or assert that it does so. The aims and interests of the dominant class must "genuinely" be those of society. The dominant class must become "the social head and heart" "in reality." No doubt this passage is overstated and one-sided. A class need not gain universal enthusiasm to rule. But if it is to retain the support of its allies in a "historical bloc" of classes (to use the language of Gramsci, 1971), it must accommodate the interests of other classes. Thus it cannot establish forms of control that will evoke strong opposition from allied subordinate classes. As the example of the slave South illustrates, there are limits to the forms of control that can be imposed on exploited classes if class rule itself is not to be jeopardized. Engels (1890:404) noted the relevance of this consideration for the form that legal control takes: "A modern state law must not only correspond to the general economic condition and be its expression, but also be an internally coherent expression which does not, owing to inner contradictions, reduce itself to nought" (emphasis in original). He goes on to say that
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in order to achieve this the faithful reflection of economic conditions suffers increasingly. All the more so the more rarely it happens that a code of law is the blunt, unmitigated, unadulterated expression of the domination of a class-this in itself would offend the "conception of right." Even in the Code Napoleon the pure, consistent conception of right held by the revolutionary bourgeoisie of 1792-96 is already adulterated in many ways and insofar as it is embodied there, daily has to undergo all sorts of attenuation, owing to the rising power of the proletariat. THE IDEOLOGY OF CONTROL Although our discussion has been couched in terms of interest, much of the advocacy of change in social control is posed in other terms. Indeed, the phenomenon ofthe reformer who purports to be disinterested or altruistic has often been noted in studies of historical change in social control. It has, however, become fashionable to regard claims to disinterestedness as cynical cover-ups for the pursuit of selfinterest. In many instances, this cynicism may be warranted. After all, an appeal to humanitarianism could be a strategy to gain support for a policy favored on other grounds. Yet there is a problem of evidence. Where no documentation of hidden motivation can be found, the motivation has generally been inferred from the sometimes repressive consequences of the reform. But if consequences cannot always be anticipated because the relevant actors have a limited and perhaps mistaken understanding of social process, such inferences may be wrong. Marx's own writings do not require us to assume that all action springs from economic interest. When Marx proposes that "Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life" (Marx and Engels, 1846:247) and that consciousness arises on the foundations of a society's economic structure (Marx, 1859), he is not reducing consciousness to interest, nor life to economics. His conception of human nature certainly allows for sentiments of solidarity, but it views these sentiments and the forms in which they are expressed as being socially conditioned. Even when ideas do advance the interests of a class, their proponents are not necessarily aware that they do so. Thus Engels comments in letters responding to inquiries about Marxist theory:
The reflection of economic relations as legal principles is necessarily also a topsy-tul,y one: it goes on without the person who is acting being conscious of it; the jurist imagines he is operating with a pr~ori propositions, whereas they are really only economic reflexes, so everything is upside down .... It seems to me obdous that this inversion, which so long as it remains unrecognized, forms what we call ideological outlook. ... 11890:404; emphasis in OIiginal.l Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, it is tme, but with a false consciousness. The real motive forces impelling him remain unknown to him; otheIWise it simply would not be an ideological process. Hence he imagines false or seeming motive forces. (1893:408)
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In these tenns, many ideas about crime and its control have been ideological. This is not to say that they are mistaken, or that they have been disseminated for the purpose of deceiving anyone. Ideology is not necessarily propaganda. Rather, ideology consists of ideas that originate in social experience-particularly the experience of class relations-without the originator of the ideas being aware of it? In short, it is not bourgeois interests but bourgeois society that is the source of bourgeois ideas. These ideas may contain or express class interest, but cannot be reduced to class interest. NON-CLASS ACTORS Thus far we have assumed that historical change is always brought about by classes. Insofar as crime control is concerned, this is not always the case. As we noted earlier, collective actors that are not classes have frequently been important. However, Marxist theory views class consciousness as variable. Subjective classes-those whose members are aware of common class interests and share common political goals-form over time through struggle. The obstacles to the fonnation of class consciousness are many (and in some of Marx's writings were seriously underestimated). When class consciousness is weak, we can expect to see other entities, such as class fractions, or groups that cut across class lines, seeking change in crime controLS Occupational groups are especially likely to be important, because communication on the job, as well as through conventions and trade journals, strengthens identification with the occupation and facilitates the dissemination of conceptions of occupational interest. Professionals' high incomes provide them with greater financial resources in seeking or obstructing change than people in other occupations have, while the long period of professional training strengthens their identification with the profession. Furthennore, the mystique associated with the greater conceptual elaboration of occupational knowledge and the" service ethic" ofthe professionals provide advantages to the professions over other occupations in seeking support for social change. At various times physicians, psychiatrists, la"yers, and social workers have mobilized to gain acceptance for their own occupationally-derived conception of how society should respond to crime. Marxian theory suggests that the state would also be a relevant actor in promoting change. Although at times Marx and Engels wrote as if the state could be viewed as a simple tool of a single class, and therefore not an independent actor in its own right, on other occasions they recognized that this view was too simple. Thus, according to Engels:
Society gives rise to certain common functions which it cannot dispense with. The persons appointed for this purpose form a new branch of the division of labor within society. This gives them particular interests, distinct, too, from the interests of those who empowered them; they make themselves independent of the latter and-the state is in being .... The new independent power,
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while having, in the main, to follow the movement of production, reacts in its tum, by virtue of its inherent relative independence-that is, the relative independence once transferred to it and gradually further developed-upon the conditions and course of production .... The new political power ... strives for as much independence as possible. (Engels, 1890:402-3)
State officeholders may use this "partial autonomy" to advance their own immediate interests or to gain political support by advancing the interests of other social groups, such as classes. The enormous financial resources of the state, its ability to gain exposure for its views in the mass media, and its near monopoly on the means of violence give it an enormous importance in influencing the scope and forms of crime control.9 The mobilization of both class and non-class actors has often been the work of individuals or small groups who construct theories of crime causation, devise strategies of control and decontrol, and organize support for these strategies. Because this ideological and political work is ordinarily too time-consuming to be undertaken by those directly involved in material production, it is often carried out by others1o-hence the prominence in nineteenth-centuIY American and British reform movements of clergy, members of the landed gentlY, and the wives and daughters of wealthy men. In the twentieth centuIY, the financial support given to these functions by private philanthropic foundations and the federal government permits intelligentsia drawn from wider social backgrounds to undertake these tasks so long as their proposals pose no direct threat to dominant class interests.l l As Embree (1977) notes, however, the mere existence of "entrepreneurs," moral or otherwise, is not sufficient to guarantee their success. Groups seeking to change the scope and methods of crime control constantly appear, but not all of them achieve their goals. The success of such entrepreneurial efforts hinges on the ability of the entrepreneur to frame conceptions of deviance and devise strategies of control that mesh with the subjective interests and world view of those with sufficient resources to carry through an initiative and overcome possible opposition. These considerations derived from the writings of Marx and Engels provide a vocabulalY and insights that can be useful in understanding historical change in the scope, ideology, and forms of crime control. To illustrate their usefulness, we show how they can be applied to selected changes in these aspects of crime control over roughly the last two hundred years in England and the United States.
COMPETITIVE INDUSTRIAL CAPITALISM
The industrial revolution transformed the forces and relations of production in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, first in England and then in Europe and the United States. Technical innovations led to a more complex division of labor and increased labor productivity; factolY produc-
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tion replaced domestic industry; wage labor largely supplanted remuneration in kind; and the capitalist mode of production became dominant. Petty commodity production persisted as a subordinate mode of production, along with slavery in the u.s. South, until 1865. In the course of the industrial revolution major changes in the scope, ideology, and methods of social control occurred. These changes originated in the contradictions of mercantile capitalism; they contributed to and were transformed by the process of industrialization.
The scope of control REDUCTION OF CONTROL OVER THE ECONOMY The mercantile economy was subject to far-reaching state control. Wages and prices were regulated, imports and exports were controlled, and labor mobility was discouraged. Criminal penalties, at times severe, were imposed for violations. However, the growth and commercialization of the economy created a mass of small manufacturers and merchants who began to campaign against the legally enforceable monopolies, patents, and licenses that had been granted to large merchants by the cash-starved StuaJIis in the early seventeenth century. Some mercantilists supported these efforts on the grounds that monopolies raised prices and restricted output, thereby reducing exports. Parliament responded to these pressures by abolishing industrial monopolies, but owing to pressure from the great merchant capitalists who lent money to Parliament, nothing was done to "liberate" commerce. After the 1660s, the restrictive regulations concerning guilds and apprenticeships were no longer enforced, except in agriculture-another concession to the growing power of the smaller manufacturers. In 1688 the old commercial monopolies were finally abolished in response to industrialists' complaints that monopolies choked the expansion of industry (Hill, 1961:154,204,262)' Other mercantile restrictions, such as wage controls and regulations concerning the quality of goods, remained in effect. But by the middle of the eighteenth century, the fixing of wages by the state had become exceptional in London, primarily because the economy had expanded to the point where regulation had become unworkable (Heckscher, 1931:311). Yet only with the political victory of the middle class in 1832 was anything resembling a true laissez-faire policy adopted. The Corn Laws were repealed, tariffs were reduced, land became a commodity, slavery was abolished throughout the empire, legislation prohibiting the emigration of workers and the export of machinery was repealed, and the welfare payments that interfered with the free play of labor market forces ended. The flow of factors of production was now to be governed not by punitive legislation, but by the impersonal regulation of supply and demand. This flowering of economic freedom was predicated on the success of state intervention in the economy in preceding centuries. Ever since the mid-fourteenth century, the supply of labor had been secured through criminal legislation. So long as it was poss.ible to survive by begging, gam-
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bling, or peddling, by cultivating wasteland, or by using the commons, forests, ponds, and game preserves to gain a livelihood, it was possible to avoid becoming a wage laborer (Thompson, 1975:240-41). To close off these possibilities, Parliament had enacted severe penalties for vagrancy in the sixteenth century (Marx, 1867:734-40) and for poaching, stealing fruit from trees, taking fish from ponds, and gathering wood from forests in the eighteenth century (Thompson, 1975: Ignatieff, 1978:26-27). The criminal law thus became a means for separating potential laborers from the means of production, leaving them no other possible source of income than a wage. Once this task had been fully accomplished, the wage agreement no longer had to be subject to the direct regulation of the state: Direct force, outside of economic conditions, is of course still used, but only exceptionally. In the ordinary run of things, the labourer can be left to the "natural laws of production," i.e. to his dependence on capital, a dependence springing from, and guaranteed in perpetuity by, the conditions of capitalism themselves. (Marx, 1867:271)
At least in theory, the role of the state with regard to the economy was to be restricted to enforcing voluntary contractual agreements and maintaining the currency. The bourgeoisie favored this restriction on the role of the state because it prevented the state from giving any individual capitalist a competitive advantage over the others, and because the supply of labor was now sufficient to keep wages down; but laissez-faire policy had wider backing. Workingclass support for the repeal of the Corn Laws was won by the promise of cheaper bread, while the middle class supported repeal in the hope that wages could be reduced if the cost of workers' subsistence were to decline. In practice, the state was never as limited in its control functions as laissez-faire theory required. Thus in England, child labor was restricted by the Factory Act of 1819 and by subsequent legislation; factory inspection was begun in 1833; and hours legislation was passed in 1844. These protective measures were achieved, despite the opposition of most manufacturers,12 by an alliance of workers, artisans hostile to the factory, paternalistic Tory gentry resentful of the industrialists' victory in 1832, physicians and public health professionals, Anglican clergy concerned with retaining the loyalty of working-class worshippers, and even a handful of industrialists who were afraid that the working class would fail to reproduce itself unless working conditions were improved (Marx, 1867:270, Perkin, 1969:363, 401; Ward, 1970). The abundant supply of labor from the countryside, however, made the latter consideration irrelevant to most industrialists. The economies of the American colonies were, on paper, highly regulated as well, but not always effectively. The scarcity of labor, for example, turned wage regulation codes into a dead letter, since employers were willing to pay higher wages to attract workers. Later, during the Jacksonian period, laissez-faire doctrines spread, but even then they did not go so far as to exclude an active role for the state in subsidizing private entrepreneurial ef-
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forts that promised public benefit. Doctrines critical of governmental control over the economy had their greatest legal impact outside the criminal law (e.g., in contract law). ALCOHOL AND SELF-CONTROL In limiting state interference with the economy, the petty bourgeoisie secured one of the structural conditions it needed for its survival as a class. But individual entrepreneurs needed something more. In an individualistic, competitive economy, success required the possession of appropriate character traits. Entrepreneurs had to be self-motivated to take advantage of market opportunities. It was crucial for entrepreneurs who operated their businesses on thin margins to work hard for long hours and to eliminate the distractions and costs associated with unnecessary personal consumption (Howe, 1976). With labor costs comprising a large fraction of the cost of doing business, it was equally important for employers to minimize the wages paid to employees. Thus the emphasis placed on cultivating self-masteIJ!, assertiveness, industriousness, thrift, frugality, and abstemiousness, and the stress on avoiding laziness and ostentatious consumption in literature written for middle-class male audiences in the early nineteenth century reflected the needs of the individual entrepreneur quite accurately.13 As the weakening of community and extended kinship ties had reduced the effectiveness of external sources of contro\, and the increased industl'ial production of low-cost goods multiplied temptations to spend one's earnings, powerful internal sources of control were required. A sense of duty had to supply what neither formal nor informal external sources of control could continue to provide. This development can be seen in nineteenth-centUI), BI'itish and American thought concerning drunkenness. Levine (1978) has noted that American attitudes toward the consumption of alcohol shifted dl'astically at the end of the eighteenth century and in the early part of the nineteenth. The American colonists, including the Puritans, had valued alcohol for the contributions it made to health and conviviality. It was widely consumed by all social classes. Work discipline for artisans and cmftsmen in the petty commodity mode of production was not rigorous, and it included drinking rituals as part of a noncompetitive work culture. As the capitalist mode of production became dominant, these rituals disappeared among the middle class, and work discipline was tightened--though drinking remained an important element of male working-class culture. Fear that drunkenness would lead to the loss of self-control led to a rejection of alcoholic consumption by the middle class.14 Temperance societies were formed in both England and the United States to encourage moderation in drinking, and later, abstinence; and heavy chronic drinking came to be explained as the consequence of a pathology entailing the loss of self-control. The hysterical tone of much prohibition literature reflected the precariousness of middleclass status and the danger to that status that uncontrolled drinking posed.ls
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Following the American Civil War, industrialization shifted the emphasis of the petty bourgeois temperance movement away from an exclusive preoccupation with self-control. The expansion of capitalism gave the large corporation an increasingly prominent role in the economy; and the industrial proletariat grew rapidly, swelled by culturally alien immigrants attracted by high wages. Upwardly mobile fractions of the working class adopted the abstinence patterns of the middle class they aspired to join, and in some cases they became active prohibitionists, though most of them did not.16 Middle-class women, now fully excluded from the public economy (as they had not been at the time of independence), gave Prohibition strong support. Given women's financial dependence on men, wives' class positions were jeopardized by male drinking to the same extent as their husbands'. Furthermore, the association between the saloon and prostitution posed a potential threat of venereal disease. And, as an exclusively male preserve, the saloon symbolized male prerogative and privilege (Levine, 1979). Much of the leadership of the post-Civil War temperance movement came from women, as well as from evangelical clergy who were able to draw on the organizational resources of their churches to mobilize lowermiddle-class support for the cause, and whose involvement may have been provoked by their own declining occupational status (Hofstadter, 1956: 150-53). With the backbone of the movement remaining a middle class that was being squeezed economically and politically between labor and capital, antiIiquor agitation began to embody middle-class fears of the working classP The liquor trust, denounced for profiting by promoting human misery, became a symbol of capitalist greed (Isaac, 1965:123; Blocker, 1976). Middleclass Prohibitionists also linked alcohol with working-class crime, labor militancy,18 industrial efficiency and accidents, the level of wages (it was hoped that if workers stopped drinking, wages could be lowered and class conflict reduced), and political corruption (the saloon played a major role in the urban ethnic political machines). Thus alcohol control became joined with class control (Ostrander, 1957; Gusfield, 1963; Timberlake, 1963). Many states adopted prohibition legislation, and ultimately Prohibition was established nationally. This last development will be discussed below, when we take up crime control in the early stages of monopoly capitalism. NARCOTICS LEGISLATION The earliest legislation against smoking opium also grew out of the social conflicts engendered by competitive industrial capitalism, but through a different process. During the nineteenth century tens of thousands of Chinese immigrants had come to California to work in railroad construction, mining, and agriculture. So long as the economy remained prosperous, opium-smoking Chinese laborers attracted little attention. Then, as the labor market contracted during the depression of the 1870s, white workers organized to exclude new Chinese immigrants, whom they believed were taking away their jobs. These white workers gained sup-
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port from the white petty bourgeoisie, who also suffered from competition when unemployed Chinese workers opened small retail businesses. (They simultaneously suffered from the completion of the transcontinental railroad, which opened the California market to factory-produced goods made in the East). A considerable body of anti-Chinese legislation was passed at local, state, and federal levels in response to this sentiment. It was in this atmosphere that local and state legislation against the smoking of opium was adopted-in San Francisco, in 1875; in Virginia City, Nevada, in 1876; and in California, in 1881. Ingestion of opium and its derivatives by other means than smoking remained lawful; only the usage associated with the Chinese was banned. Until early in the twentieth century, the only federal restrictions on opium consisted of tariffs on its importation !Helmer, 1975; Morgan, 1976; Embree, 1977}. We see here a process in which an economic crisis occurs at a time of weak class consciousness, engendering conflict within the working class along lines of race, national origin, language, and class experience before immigration. Cultural practices of groups regarded as different but not deviant before the crisis become more salient in the face of economic competition, and by association with the competitor fraction of the class, come to be viewed as reprehensible in themselves. It is this ideological process that leads to the criminal prohibition of cultural traits associated with the politically weaker fractions of the class.19 The ideology of control FORMAL LEGAL EQUALITY The campaign to reduce state control of the economy in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century Britain was waged in the name of a theory that claimed general social benefits for laissez faire. According to the theory, as individuals pursued private gain, an "invisible hand" would maximize social well-being-provided that all exchanges were consensual. External interference with the terms of these mutually agreeable exchanges could only be detrimental. In aformal sense, this ideology is radically democratic, for it grants equal legitimacy to every individual's preferences for goods and services and is grounded in the realities of the marketplace, where what counts is cash, not the personal attributes of its possessor.20 The individualism of this philosophy had its origins in the progressive penetration of commodity exchange relations into communities where collectivist values had earlier prevailed. Laissez-faire philosophy provided a new rationale for the existence of the state and its control apparatus. Since the rational pursuit of gain would lead individuals to acquire wealth through nonconsensual taking, the state was needed to prohibit and penalize unwilling private exchanges. Thus the calculated balancing of potenifal costs and gains provided the theoretical explanation for the existence of crime and the justification for its repression. As individuals enter the theory only abstractly (through having the abstract faculty of rationality) and therefore equally, the sanctions for such ex-
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changes were to be formally equal as well. To avoid unnecessary costs in repressing crime, penalties were to be limited to what was necessary to outweigh the potential gain from the offense. These ideas were first developed by some of the leading figures of the French Enlightenment-Montesquieu, Voltaire, Helvetius, Diderot, d'Alembert-whose thinking had been influenced by the growth of commerce and industry. Generally loyal to the aristocracy or monarchy, they wanted to rationalize and depersonalize the state administration. Beccaria (1764) gave this" classical school of criminology" its most coherent and influential formulation. Scion of an old noble family, Beccaria expressed the ideology of that fraction of the aristocracy that had begun to engage in capitalist agriculture. These aristocrats were thus allied with the "new bourgeoisie/' which consisted of small commercial and industrial capitalists (mainly textile manufacturers) producing outside the guilds, and with the modernizing administration of the Austrian Hapsburgs, who wanted to revive the economy of Lombardy so that taxation could pay for the costs of administering the territory (Candeloro, 1956). Theirs was an ideology that simultaneously affirmed de facto privilege in the form of property ownership while denying de jure privilege in the form of legally recognized rank. It was a utopian response to a feudal order that was disintegrating politically and economically. Later, the doctrine of formal legal equality would be embraced by middle-class English reformers to legitimate the control apparatus against working-class criticism (see below). But it is doubtful that this was a major consideration for Beccaria, since the lower classes posed no threat in northern Italy when he was writing. The tenets of classical criminology seem to be less a defense of class interests than a reflection of the penetration of bourgeois ideology into the consciousness of the aristocracy. SCIENTISM The writings of the classical criminologists enjoyed great popularity in the u.S. around the time of the War of Independence. Then, as capitalism became the dominant mode of production, explanations of crime began to shift away from abstract rational calculation toward attempts to differentiate criminals from noncriminals on the basis of personal traits. For many writers, criminals were incapable of restraining themselves when faced with temptation (Boostrum, 1974; Currie, n.d.). Some attributed this inability to parental overindulgence and the subsequent failure to develop self-control. Thus the upbringing of a man released from a New York prison in 1831 after serving a sentence for L!ttempted rape is characterized as follows: "Lived with his parents who indulged him too much for his good; was Co very wild unsteady boy; fond of company and amusements; when he could not get his parents' consent, would go without it" (quoted in Rothman, 1971:70). Other writers paid more attention to other causes of weak self-control, ranging from inherited deficits to pathological social environments. These
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writings tell us little about crime, but say much about bourgeois preoccupation with such matters as raising children, resisting impulses in the face of temptation, and working-class movements for higher wages. Eclectic and empirically unsupported though these explanations tended to be, they mark the beginnings of an attempt to account for crime in scientific terms. The striking advances in technology made possible by discoveries in the physical sciences gave impetus to those who sought comparable understanding and control of socially troublesome populations. The individualism of nineteenth-century' explanations of crime may have reflected the atomism of the physical sciences, but it is perhaps more plausible that both reflect the social importance of the petty bourgeoisie and the individualizing tendencies of competitive capitalism. The greatest conceptual borrowings, though, came from biology. Lamarckian doctrine (the hereditary transmission of acquired characteristics), hereditary degeneracy, and Darwinian biology shaped explanations of crime in the nineteenth century. As immig!'ation and the sharpening of class conflict in latenineteenth-century America increased the social distance between working-class criminals and middle-class citizens, explanations of crime gave greater prominence to the role of biological defects, but without slighting environmental factors. Although it was increasingly cast in scientific form, it must be kept in mind that little of the nineteenth-century literature on crime met what would today be considered minimal scientific standards of methodological adequacy. For the most part, prescientific concepts of causality and elements of lay morality were simply cloaked in scientific trappings until well into the twentieth century. The methods of control THE POLICE Throughout the eighteenth century, poor harvests, the abolition of usufruct rights to land, forests, and streams, the discharge of soldiers at the end of wars, the export of wheat during times of shortage, the forestalling and engrossing by landowners and merchants, fluctuations in the supply and demand for manufactured goods, and the introduction of laborsaving machinery, all led to periods of rising food prices, unemployment, and social dislocation for the laboring poor. The weakening of paternalistic regulation of the economy exacerbated these problems (Rose, 1961; Thompson, 1963; Shelton, 1973). Excluded by property qualifications from voting or holding office, and therefore from using lawful political methods to deal with these developments, agricultural and industrial laborers rioted to ~nforce the "just price" of the vanishing "moral economy" (Thompson, 1971; Stevenson, 1975). And in the latter part of the eighteenth century, as capitalist social relations became more firmly established, they rioted for higher wages (Shelton, 1973:8). So long as their aims remained limited, however, riots were not treated as
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major threats; indeed, members of the upper classes even encouraged, manipulated, and at times led them (Thompson, 1963:74; Silver, 1967; Shelton, 1973).21 When riots got out of hand and threatened landed estates or houses of industIy, magistrates called out associations of gentry with their servants (in essence, another mob) to put them down-a form of control based on personal authority. At times the militia and army were also used; but magistrates mistrusted the loyalty of the militia, since its members' social backgrounds were similar to those of the mob, and the large landowners feared that a standing army or bureaucratic police force would strengthen the centralized state, weakening their own political power (Silver, 1967; Shelton, 1973). When it was first proposed in the late eighteenth century, a permanent, salaried civilian police force was unacceptable to the gentry because it would have tended to undermine their personal authority. Already weakened by the effects of the commercialization of rural society, their patrimonial authority was sustained by personal domination of law enforcement: by pardoning criminals and declining prosecution, the gentry could win popular gratitude (Hay, 1975). However, personal forms of enforcement had drawbacks as well as advantages. The hostilities generated in putting down riots continued to divide communities afterward, since the parties to the conflict all resided in the community. Calling out the army was too much an all-or-nothing affair; it risked exacerbating the conflict and escalating events unnecessarily. As the expanded reproduction of capitalism drew more and more of the population into capitalist social relations and exposed increasing numbers of the lower classes to the vicissitudes of the marketplace, labor militancy and radicalism grew. Conspiracies sprang up. Fear of a revolution, intensified by the French example, ultimately led the landowners to accept the creation of a regular police force, since the army would have been incapable of coping with a domestic uprising if it had had French support (Shelton, 1973; Stevenson, 1977). Merchants and industrialists concerned about riot and theft also supported the establishment of a police force. As Spitzer and Scull (1977a) note, riot was extremely disruptive to the marketplace. Farmers and middlemen traders would tend to avoid rural markets that had been threatened by mob action. In addition, owners of factories threatened with destruction by displaced craftsmen wanted protection (Shelton, 1973). Beyond the threat of riot, however, merchants wanted to reduce the costs of theft. Colquhoun (1795, 1800), the leading turn-of-the-century police reformer, bemoaned the enormous losses merchants suffered in the rapidly growing commercial centers. As the geographical extent of trade grew, private protection on an individual basis became less feasible. Yet, as Spitzer and Scull (1977a) point out, the "free rider" problem made collective private arrangements unfeasible.22 The existing system of enforcement, which relied heavily on rewards to informers, recovery of stolen goods for a fee paid
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by the victim, and private prosecution, had sprung up unplanned as the commercial revolution eroded the traditional enforcement arrangements based on communal solidarity. But it was ineffective, and may even have encouraged crime. A tax-supported, salaried police patrol was thus adopted as the only feasible solution to the problem of riot and theft in rural market and industrial towns and in commercial cities in the final stages of the transition from a mercantile to a competitive capitalist economy. Despite the clear and widely discussed advantages that a public police had for capitalist interests, for several decades only minimal steps to strengthen the existing system of enforcement were taken (Donajgrodzki, 1977); for instance, not until 1829 was the Metropolitan Police Force finally established in London,23 Opposition to strengthening the police came not only from those who feared the restoration of absolutism, but also from elements of the nascent working class, and from London officials who resisted the loss of patronage jobs that abolishing the watch and ward system would entail (Manning, 1977). Sir Robert Peel, a Tory poliitician and landowner, and son of a large textile manufacturer, was perfectly positioned to weld the alliance of landowners, manufacturers, and fractions ofthe petty bourgeoisie that finally succeeded in establishing a bureaucratic police force in England. The establishment of a salaried, preventive patrol was significant not merely as a more efficient way of carrying out social control. Policing represented two qualitatively new developments: rule through impersonal, bureaucratically administered general law; and a deeper, more finely tuned penetration of formal control into everyday social life (Spitzer, 1979). A bureaucratic mode of enforcement had become possible in a politically decentralized society because economic change had weakened patrimonial sources of authority in the countryside while exacerbating class conflict to the point where the propertied classes realized that they needed a new form of control-particularly one that was depersonalized. The landowner who, as magistrate, dispersed the mob was too readily identified with the interests he defended,24 A salaried police force, these classes felt, could more effectively claim to represent a law that embodied general interests rather than those of a particular class, since it would not be a direct party to the disputes that erupted into riots. The creation of the new police thus had an important ideological dimension having to do with the legitimation of control. Reformers argued that those who were punished would acknowledge the fairness of their punishment and feel guilty only if it were evident that the law was enforced impartially (Ignatieff, 1978:70-75). By remunerating the police with wage payments, bureaucratization also enhanced the legitimacy of enforcement, (as well as its efficiency). Abandoning the "service for fee" system made it possible for Ithe laboring classes to file complaints-an opportunity they used to a substantial degree (Philips, 1977:125-28).
The creation of a police force also pennitted the state to adjust its response to the magnitude of a perceived threat with greater precision. Thus the establishment of the police represented an attempt to bring the social
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control machinery itself under greater control. Furthermore, as a proactive force, the police were to prevent crime rather than merely respond to it after it had occurred. This was to be done by bringing a visible personification of the law into working-class communities on a regular basis. 25 Traditional popular working-class culture, a source of resistance to the discipline of the factory, was reinterpreted as a generating milieu of crime, and the police were called upon to eliminate it.26 The bureaucratization of enforcement made this possible, for the police could arrest and prosecute without regard to the wishes of complainants. Outside the context of bureaucratized enforcement this assault on working-class culture would have been unthinkable. The circumstances surrounding the establishment of police departments along the Eastern seaboard in the United States before the Civil War were quite similar to those in England. Riots were a frequent occurrence in preindustrial Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, St. Louis, and Cincinnati (Lane, 1967; Richardson, 1970; Walker, 1977). As riots in these cities took on social and political overtones in the decades preceding the Civil War, proposals for establishing a police system something like that of London were adopted. Again it took some years before reformers could overcome fears that the police would be used to establish a tyranny and the reluctance of local political leaders to lose patronage jobs. As Harring notes (chapter 4 in part 3) the mere establishment of police forces in preindustrial American cities did not necessarily have much practical consequence, since often little more was involved than a formal reorganization of existing watch systems under a single agency, with little administrative change. Before the invention of the telegraph and the telephone, administrative decentralization was a technological necessity. Moreover, budgetary constraints limited the growth of police departments. It was the post-Civil War strife that overcame capitalist reluctance to pay for increased protection with higher taxes. Together with petty bourgeois shopkeepers and professionals, American industrial capitalists lobbied successfully for appropriations to increase the size of urban police forces and helped to develop new strategies of deployment in response to strife involving factory workers and their employers.27 In times of crisis, the police could now be called on to inteIvene on behalf of owners. The extent to which a police force actually carries out class control functions is always limited by organizational and political factors. In nineteenth-century American cities, bribes paid by saloon keepers, who were important figures in urban politics, substantially nullified the enforcement of laws against saloons and vice, though not necessarily against drunkenness.28 One might expect that the widening of suffrage would have limited the use of the police against the working class. On occasion (e.g., in Boss Tweed's New York), big city mayors did refuse to use the police to break strikes. The loyalty of the police, who were themselves drawn from working-class backgrounds, could not always be guaranteed in actions against strikers; but in large cities, the conservatism of the larger middle
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class, and the inability of unnaturalized immigrants to vote, limited the ability of the working class to influence policing policy. The national divisions that separated the police from the policed, along with a variety of organizational strategies designed to preserve the loyalty of the force, generally sufficed to ward off large-scale political defection. In smaller industrial towns, on the other hand, the working class was proportionately larger and often had middle-class support during strikes. Under those circumstances, the small local police forces could not be used to repress strikers, and capitalists consequently relied more heavily on private forces (Gutman, 1963; Spitzer and Scull, 1977b). PROPORTIONAUTY IN PUNISHMENT Proposals to abolish the death penalty in England for most offenses and to establish a rough proportionality between the gravity of the offense and the severity of the penalty reflected concerns for both the legitimacy and the effectiveness of the law. The carnival-like atmosphere at executions, as well as occasional riots and defiance on the part of the condemned, seemed to erode respect for the majesty of the law (Cooper, 1974; linebaugh, 1975; Ignatieff, 1978). In addition, eighteenthcentury juries apparently refused to convict petty thieves to avoid sending them to the gallows. Frequent pardons further reduced the certainty of punishment. Insisting that these conditions jeopardized property by undermining the deterrent effect of the law,29 the petty bourgeoisie and capitalists from all over England flooded Parliament with petitions urging a reform of sentencing in the second decade of the nineteenth century (Rustigan, article 8 in this volume). In alliance with reforming Tory landlords, who were equally concerned with the legitimacy of the law, this middle class successfully pressured Parliament into eliminating the death penalty for most offenses. By the time Parliamentary reform gave the middle class formal political representation in 1832, much of this reform had already been carried out, though business interests continued to press for further reductions in capital punishment in succeeding decades (Cooper, 1974:41). The early-nineteenth-century argument for reducing the use of the death penalty was also posed on humanitarian grounds. Rusche and Kirchheimer (1939) attribute this humanitarianism to the industrial revolution, which increased the demand for labor and thus raised the social value of a human life. There is probably some truth to this explanation. The death penalty had been much less used in the American colonies than in England in the eighteenth century, possibly reflecting the comparative scarcity of labor in the colonies, though perhaps more plausibly reflecting the absence of a panicky landed gentry. But this is to take too narrow a view of the matter. The humanitarianism of the reformers was part of a shift in religious ideology associated with their upward mobility. The break from the Calvinist doctrine of predestination in favor of the belief that anyone could be saved came as the petty bourgeois dissenters prospered and became well-to-do capitalists. Their humanitar-
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ianism was a response to the contradiction between their former ascetic, self-denying orientation to the world, adopted by a lower middle class and sustained by religious doctrine, and the economic success that adhering to this doctrine facilitated. So instead of using wealth for personal enjoyment, they used it for public service. Humanitarian reform was a way of expressing a common humanity with the poor and outcast. At the same time, the new class position of the reformers gave a strong social control component to their paternalistic humanitarianism (Ignatieff, 1978:58).30 Pashukanis (192.9:180-81) has argued that there is a deep structural connection between the principle of proportionality in punishment advocated by eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century criminal law reformers, and the development of industrial capitalism: Deprivation of freedom, for a period stipulated in the court sentence, is the specific form in which modem, that is to say bourgeois capitalist, criminal law embodies the principle of equivalent recompense. This form is unconsciously yet deeply linked with the conception of man in the abstract, and abstract human labour measurable in time. Industrial capitalism, the declaration of human rights, the political economy of Ricardo, and the system of imprisonment for a stipulated term are phenomena peculiar to one and the same historical epoch.
Here Pashukanis does not assert that imprisonment for fixed periods was in the interest of capitalists, but rather that the reduction of human labor to abstract, interchangeable "labor time" in the industrial phase of capitalism in general lead members of a capitalist society toward specific notions of appropriate sanctions based on the metaphor of commodity exchange. Thus it was in the period when the capitalist mode of production became fully established that imprisonment for fixed periods of time proportional to the injury caused by the crime became a major form of criminal punishment. Since the doctrine of proportionality gained as wide an acceptance in Catholic parts of Europe as in Protestant regions, Pashukanis's attribution of the doctrine to the ideological effects of capitalism is by no means implausible. Yet it is important not to forget that public sentiment regarding punishment was translated into new penal practices only insofar as that sentiment was manifested politically. In England, this took the form of acquittals of defendants (made possible by the jury system, a precapitalist surviva}), petitions to Parliament, and representation in Parliament, after 1832.. The gentry, who enacted the Bloody Code in the eighteenth century and whose political authority was reinforced by gaining pardons for clients, had to be defeated politically before the new system could be established. THE PENITENTIARY The prison system devised by these English reformers reflected the same concerns that informed their campaign against the death
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penalty. To legitimate punishment, all prisoners had to be treated equally, regardless of social rank. Equal treatment meant eliminating prisons operated privately under contract from the state, for in these, a prisoner's standard of living was governed by the payments the prisoner made to the jailkeeper (Sheehan, 1977). The prison, like the police, was now to be impartially administered through a system of formal rules established by a bureaucratic government agency. Abuses of authority were to be prevented by opening the prison to public inspection IIgnatieff, 1978:77-78). Based on a vision of reconciliation between classes that economic and social change had driven apart, the prison was to reform miscreants, not demolish them (Ignatieff, 1978:210). Since crime was attributed to indolence, avarice, the decline of authority, and irreligiosity-that is, to the vices of the laboring classes-the new prison discipline was to consist of a regimented daily routine, hard labor, an abstemious alcohol-free diet, submission to authority, and religious exhortation. Since popular working-class culture was believed to sustain crime, prisoners were to be cut off from the outside world and from one another: visitors and correspondence were restricted, and the cell system and rule of silence were imposed to prevent even the slightest communication among inmates.3t The Federalist merchants (Quakers and other Protestants) who created the American penitentiary were motivated by somewhat similar concerns. To restore the social order that the conflicts of the Jacksonian era seemed to be destroying, they built prisons and other confining institutions, and organized systems of discipline (known as the Philadelphia and Auburn systems) that British and European administrators were to copy (Lewis, 1970; Rothman, 1971). Both the English and the American prisons were established as a response to a crisis in preindustrial capitalism.32 The architectural form that the prison took and the disciplinary methods it adopted, however, were not entirely determined by that crisis. They were also governed by the theories of crime causation then prevalent, and by the organizational innovations being introduced in connection with the industrial revolution. The failure of the houses of correction to turn a profit for the outwork masters who were given contracts for the use of inmate labor, had, along with the continuing difficulty of supervising cottage industry, stimulated the introduction of the factory. Many of the new disciplinary techniques the English reformers introduced into the penitentiary had first limen introduced as solutions to administrative problems in "free" production,33 as well as in the schools, hospitals, and other institutions that the same group of reformers managed for the poor (Hartwell, 1971:77; Ignatieff, 1~978:32,62).34 As in the case of the police, the prison evolved in a direction that diverged greatly from the plans laid by the founders because of economic and political developments connected with the evolution of capitalism-developments which the founders were neither able to anticipate nor to control (see the selection by Petchesky in this volume).
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THE TRANSITION TO MONOPOLY CAPITALISM At the end of the nineteenth century, the American economy undelWent a transition to what has conventionally been called monopoly capitalism.35 The size of business enterprises grew, and many sectors of the economy came to be dominated by a handful of giant corporations. With the domestic market for commodities saturated, farmers and industrialists began to seek markets abroad. The labor movement, recovering from its defeat in the late 1880s, was becoming increasingly large, organized, militant, and political. Employees working for capitalists constituted an increasing proportion of the labor force. The substantial middle-class stratum of self-employed businessmen and professionals that remained was under growing pressure from both labor and big business. The scope of control REGULATION OF THE ECONOMY The movement toward deregulating the economy that characterized the competitive phase of industrial capitalism was substantially reversed in the transition to monopoly capitalism. The state began to play a larger role in determining the price and quality of goods and the terms of the labor contract. Different classes and class fractions sought regulation on behalf of diverse goals. Labor had begun to seek economic gains through legislation to improve wages, hours, and working conditions in the post-Civil War decades, hoping that its political strength (votes) could be used to overcome its economic weakness. Labor support for state protection persisted in the Progressive Era (Ratner, 1981), but was by no means unanimous: many union leaders feared that state regulation would be detrimental to unionism and might limit the gains that the organized working class could win on its own (Weinstein, 1968:43-44; Domhoff, 1970:177-78). Some corporate leaders, academics, and clergy supported labor legislation in this period, even though it penalized employers for engaging in prohibited practices, since they hoped that modest improvement in the income and working conditions of workers would stem labor militancy. The major opposition came from small manufacturers, who could less easily bear higher labor costs. Although much protective legislation was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court on the grounds that it violated the contractual freedom of workers, ultimately legislation protecting wages, hours, and working conditions was put into effect. Having failed to eliminate competition through cartels and mergers, large corporations lobbied for regulation of business to stabilize the economy, with the support of middle-class consumers who had been alarmed by scandals of the sort revealed in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Farmers and small businessmen also sought regulation in the hope of offsetting the economic power of the railroads and other large corporations. In essence they wanted regulation to restore the competition that the growing power
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of the large corporations had destroyed. A host of state and federal regulations was adopted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in response to pressure from these constituencies (Kolko, 1963; Tipple, 1963; Weinstein, 1968).36 REGULATION OF ALCOHOL. PROSTITUTION, AND NARCOTICS The Prohibition movement, having abandoned its anticorporate rhetoric (i.e., having abandoned the attempt to build an alliance with labor), revived in the years 1907 -1919 after a period of dormancy. It gained broad support from a middle class whose anxieties over immigration and class conflict grew as industrial violence intensified (Blocker, 1976). Some historians have maintained that business funding of the movement at this stage was critical to its success:
Around 1908, just as the Anti-Saloon League was preparing for a broad, state-by-state drive toward national prohibition, a number of businessmen had contributed the funds essential for an effective campaign. The series of quick successes that followed coincided with an equally impressive number of wealthy converts, so that as the movement entered its final stage after 1913, it enjoyed not only ample financing but a sudden urban respectability as well. Substantial citizens now spoke about a new discipline with the disappearance of the saloon and the rampaging drunk. Significantly, prominent Southerners with one eye to the Negro and another to the poorer whites were using exactly the same arguments. (Wiebe, 1967:290-91) In this interpretation, the Eighteenth Amendment, establishing Prohibition on a national scale, was the work of the Progressive coalition of businessmen and middle classes.37 According to Pivar (1973), the crackdown on red light districts in cities throughout the country in the early twentieth century had similar sponsorship. The business and middle classes wanted to end the political corruption that surrounded vice and alcohol and that was bankrupting city treasuries (as well as forcing businesses to pay bribes to politicians) and to encourage a more viItuous, hygienic urban environment. Other criminal legislation arose from America's growing involvement in foreign affairs. Although physicians and pharmacists had taken some steps to regulate the consumption of narcotics for reasons having much to do with advancing their occupational interests (Embree, 1973; Musto, 1973:13-23), it appears that the 1914 Harrison Act criminalizing the possession and non-medical dissemination of opiates was adopted primarily in connection with American commerce in the Far East (Embree, 1973, 1977; Musto, 1973:24-68). The U.S. State Department sought a treaty prohibiting international traffic in opium because it wished to deprive England of the revenue it earned by importing opium into China. Since China had little interest in buying British manufactured goods, England depended on the opium trade to finance its foreign trade deficit with China. The State Department also hoped to advance the Open Door policy (opening Chinese
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doors to American products) by supporting the Chinese government's attempt to protect its own population from opium. The Hanison Act was adopted in fulfillment of America's treaty obligations under the International Opium Convention. The prohibition of domestic narcotics use was an outcome of the legislation, but not the main reason for its adoption. The greater industrial productivity achieved through the technical and organizational innovations of the Progressive Era (e.g., the assembly line), together with rising wages and a shift in the composition of the labor force toward managerial and clerical positions, began to undermine the social basis for the asceticism of the self-denying middle class. Business advertising encouraged hedonistic consumerism, not abstention. At the same time, political repression and curtailment of immigration after the First World War relieved middle- and upper-class anxieties over class conflict. These developments, together with the discovery that Prohibition had worsened rather than eliminated problems of corruption and crime, undermined support for Prohibition, leading to its repeal in 1933 (Blocker, 1976:13). Similar forces have undermined other legal restrictions. The recent trend toward repeal of laws forbidding marijuana, contraception, abortion, and homosexuality has at its origin a cultural shift from abstinence to consumption associated with the transition from competitive to monopoly capitalism (Reed, 1978:61-62). It is a trend, however, that is resisted by the middleclass and working-class aristocracies, whose economic position continues to rest in part on the inculcation of the traditional middle-class virtues. The ideology of control
Two competing political philosophies coexisted in the nineteenth-century America. The first, that of classical liberalism or laissez faire, has already been described. Based on the formal equality of all adult citizens, it prescribed a minimal role for the state with respect to the economy. The second was derived from medieval Christian notions of moral stewardship. In Puritan doctrine, the elect were to govern the community for its own good, using compulsion when necessary to prevent sin. Although the secularization of society weakened this doctrine in the nineteenth century, it never entirely died out. Thus, even though laissez-faire doctrine continued to be voiced during the Progressive Era, clergy and intellectuals began to reassert a vision of the state as an institutional expression of the general will, a super-parent who would guide the nation toward perfection (Hopkins, 1940; Levine, 1971). The doctrines of individualism and Social Darwinism were thus to be abandoned in favor of a Reform Darwinism in which social evolution was to be planned. The state was to stand above and reconcile conflicting parties, and to lead society toward social harmony. The anarchy of unregulated big business was thus to be rejected, along with the anarchy of the working class, in favor of state regulation (Fine, 1956). Such notions had in fact been expressed earlier (Lester Ward, one of the founding fathers of American sociology, had begun to articulate this position as early as
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1869); but this projected expansion of state function only gained wider acceptance when the growth of giant corporations undermined the institutional basis for individualism, and the fear arose that capitalism would be destroyed if class conflict were to go unchecked (Schwendinger and Schwendinger, 1974). Another major ideological development concerned the explanation of crime. As we noted above, nineteenth-century explanations of crime increasingly centered on biological defects. This doctrine gave scientific legitimacy to methods of controlling deviants that in their combination of coercion and ostensibly benevolent paternalism could not have been legitimated by philosophical individualism, though little along these lines was done until the early twentieth centUlY (see below). It is likely that the appeal of hereditary degeneracy and evolutionary atavism as explanations for crime and other social problems in the late nineteenth century had much to do with the legitimacy these notions gave to the political and economic supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon American upper and middle classes (and at the end of the century, to imperial expansion). As the economy was transformed during the course of the nineteenth century, ideological explanations of crime were revised to correspond with the changing legitimation requirements of these classes. So long as much of the economy consisted of small enterprises whose capital was derived from family savings, success could plausibly be linked with will power and selfcontrol, and crime with the absence of weakness of these faculties. But as the capital requirements of business grew and occupational success increasingly involved promotion as an employee in a bureaucratic hierarchy, success could no longer be attributed to such voluntaristic qualities alone. Thus degeneracy and atavism came to be regarded as relevant to criminality because of their implications for intellectual power, rather than for will power. The attention given to low intelligence as a cause of crime in the early twentieth century, particularly after the introduction of IQ testing, reflected these developments (Gonzalez, 1977; Hahn, 1978). Since symbolic and material rewards accrued to occupations that were able to gain jurisdiction over the control of deviance, old and new occupations-law, medicine, psychology, and social work-jockeyed for position by asserting the relevance of their specialized knowledge to the problem of coping with crime. Ideologies explaining deviance and justifying strategies for its control or decontrol thus came to be linked with occupational interests. State and private agencies charged with controlling deviance likewise developed conceptual systems in order to gain or maintain support for their organizational mandate, and to legitimate or defend strategies for managing their subject popUlations. Thus: New categories and sub-categories of deviance and control are being created .... All these agencies-legal and quasi-legal, administrative and professional-are marking out their own territories of jurisdiction, competence and referral. Each set of experts produces its own "scientific" knowledge: screening devices, diagnostic tests, treatment modalities, evaluation scales. And
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all this creates new categories and the typifications which fill them .... These creatures are then fleshed out-in papers, research proposals, official reports-with sub-systems of knowledge and new vocabularies .... (Cohen, 1979:3581
This process began with the need to manage the diverse categories of "idlers" locked up during the Great Confinement in the mercantile era (Foucault, 1965; Scull, 1977). It continued during the age of competitive capitalism and increased as the scope of control widened in the monopoly stage of capitalism. As the targets of control have widened, and the agencies of control have multiplied, so has the terminology of control. The methods of control
The transition to monopoly capitalism brought several new developments having to do with the methods of social control. Our discussion will take note of three: the establishment of state regulatory agencies, the indeterminate sentence, and the juvenile court. REGULATORY AGENCIES Regulatory agencies were the Progressive Era's solution to the problem of controlling business in a manner that did not delegitimize capitalism by tarnishing capitalists with the stigma of criminality. The first such agency, the Inter-State Commerce Commission, was established in 1887 in response to pressure from farmers, businessmen, and labor leaders whose interests were all injured by the economic power of the railroads (Wiebe, 1967:53). The Federal Trade Commission followed in 1914, again in response to business pressure (Kolko, 1963); now there are more than fifty federal regulatory agencies. The agencies' use of civil rather than criminal procedures, and the combination of legislative, executive, and judicial fimctions in a single agency permitted the achievement of greater substantive (technical) rationality in control than the formally rational procedures developed in the competitive stage of capitalism allowed. At a point when corporate capital was sufficiently powerful that it no longer needed procedural due process to protect itself from the state, it was willing to do without some of the protections that the bourgeoisie had demanded in earlier periods. Legitimation for this development came not from the formal equality of individuals, as in the competitive stage of capitalism, but from the ideological conception of the state as a neutral harmonizer of conflicting and not necessarily equal interests. INDETERMINATE SENTENCING The movement to revise criminal sentencing began in England in the 1840s and 1850s, and spread to the United States in the decades following the Civil War.38 Consistent with their belief that crime was due to weak impulse control, reformers criticized the Philadelphia and Auburn systems of prison discipline as too mechanical to reform criminals.
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By releasing prisoners at the expiration of a judicially fixed term, these systems gave prisoners no incentive to reform. Though infractions of institutional regulations were punished (quite harshly at Auburn), only outward, behavioral compliance was gained, not an inner conversion. As an alternative, reformers proposed that release from custody should occur in stages, with the duration of the sentence to depend on the comportment of the prisoner (Hill, 1857; Carpenter, 1864; Eriksson, 1976:81-97). Reducing custody in stages would permit prisoners to develop the power of self-control under supervision, while the rewards of greater liberty and early release would reinforce good behavior. The value of such an arrangement for controlling inmates at a time when corporal punishment of prisoners was drawing criticism was readily appreciated by penal administrators. Yet its deeper significance lay in its relationship to the creation of an appropriately motivated labor force (Currie, n.d.). The classical social contract theorists had supposed that all members of the society innately possessed the personal qualities required by capitalist social relations (notably rationality). As industrialization began and encountered resistance from workers unaccustomed to the discipline of the factory, however, it became clear that the production of appropriately motivated workers had to be secured through institutions not directly involved in the production process, namely the family, the school, and the church. When these institutions failed, as nineteenth-century crime and pauperism showed they sometimes did, the prison had to step in. Architecture alone could not do the trick, as the Jacksonians had believed. A system of discipline was needed that would more closely resemble the capitalist economy outside the prison. Rewards for performance in prison fulfilled this need. This phase of reform, then, reflected the contradiction between the capitalist-derived notion of punishment as exchange for past injury (equal punishment for equal offenses), and the individualization required by the social control function the prison was to serve in a capitalist society. The adoption of "time off for good behavior" systems adopted in many states in mid-nineteenth century may have been due to these considerations, but they did not go far enough to suit post-Civil War reformers. Comparing crime to a disease, these reforrners wanted sentences that were open-ended, regardless of offense.39 "As il is clearly impossible to predict the date of a sick man's restoration to bodily health," they argued, "so it is no less impossible to foretell the day when a moral patient will be restored to moral soundness" (Wines, 1880:620). Prisoners were to be held until reformed and supervised after release so that they could be reincarcerated at the first sign of relapse, without the necessity of waiting for a new crime to be committed. With the increased emphasis on hereditary degeneracy or atavism as a major cause of crime in the late nineteenth century, the indeterminate sentence would also allow the permanent incarceration of the incurable "born criminals." As criminals were deemed to lack responsibility, the concepts of blame, retribution, and even deterrence were considered to be irrelevant to the so-
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cial control response. Indeed, imprisonment was no longer to be considered a punishment at all, but a treatment bestowed on the prisoner by a benevolent state. The adversarial relationship between the criminal and the state that formed the basis for criminal procedure in the competitive stage of capitalism was now to be dissolved by the interest both were presumed to hold in the criminal's being cured. Consequently, limits on the state's power to coerce were no longer to be needed (Brockway, 1912:375-76i AFSC Working Party, 1971). Penologists campaigned vigorously for sentencing reform along these lines in the late nineteenth century, and won wide support from middleclass and capitalist constituencies who were attracted by the possibility of dealing more effectively with crime, insanity, pauperism, and labor and political unrest. But indeterminate sentencing was also favored by Populists (John Altgeld) and anarchists (Emma Goldman), who were presumably persuaded by the paternalistic dimension of the proposals (Currie, n.d.). Despite this impressive support, implementation remained extremely limited for several decades. Indeterminate sentencing bills fared badly in the legislatures and the courts. Not until the first two decades of the twentieth century were indeterminate sentencing and parole supervision widely adopted. Funding for research and publicity provided by leading capitalist families may have helped to gain wider acceptance for these reforms,40 though the broader middle-class Progressive acceptance of social engineering on the part of the positive state at the tum of the century is likely to have been at least as important. A possible explanation for the persistence of punishment based on the retributive equivalence of crime and punishment is suggested by Pashukanis. If popular retributive thought, including the principle of proportionality, is rooted in the exchange relations of an economy based on commodity production, then resistance to the full medicalizing of crime will persist as long as the social relations of commodity exchange persist (Pashukanis, 1978: 181-82). Monopoly pricing power and state regulation of the capitalist economy may lead to departures from the exchange of equal values, but only to a limited degree. If this reasoning is correct, the implementation of true indeterminate sentencing would necessarily remain limited, so long as sentencing systems are responsive to public opinion. THE JUVENILE COURT Chicago's juvenile court, the first in the nation, was established in 1899i twenty years later similar courts had been established in almost every state (Caldwell, 1961). According to the leading sociological treatment of this development (Platt, 1969, 1974), the juvenile court was established by upper- and middle-class reformers as part of a wider effort to stabilize corporate capitalism. This innovation is supposed to have worked to the detriment of the children it ostensibly aimed to help by depriving them of criminal due process, and subjecting them to punishment for noncriminal status offenses.
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Subsequent research on the Chicago court (Fox, 1970; Parker, 1976), as well as on the juvenile courts of Milwaukee (Schlossman, 1977), Oklahoma (Bryant, 1968), Memphis (Shelden, n.d'), Toronto (Hagan and Leon, 1977), and Norway (Dahl, 1974), requires some revision of this formulation. Although members of the upper class were involved in the court movement in Chicago, Milwaukee, Memphis, and Norway, they were not involved in Denver, Oklahoma, or Toronto. The Chicago court's procedural informality was not an innovation,41 and the establishment of juvenile courts elsewhere did not necessarily increase the number of reformatory commitments; in Buffalo (Almy, 1902) and Toronto (Hagan and Leon, 1977) it did not do so. The establishment of the American juvenile court reflected several distinct, though related developments. Organized labor and businesses that did not employ children secured the passage of laws forbidding child labor-in the former case to reduce competition for jobs; in the latter case, to raise the labor costs of competitors. This effort drew wider support from reformers and the public, who feared that child employment would increase adult unemployment and would weaken the race at a time when expansion abroad placed a premium on physical strength and vigor. These efforts and others on behalf of juveniles led contemporaries to call the reformers "child-savers," a label they accepted for themselves. To insure that children would receive the education demanded by a technologically advancing economy, and to aid the cultural and political assimilation of immigrants, these same forces joined to lobby successfully for mandatory school attendance laws toward the end of the nineteenth century (Felt, 1965; Levine and Levine, 1970). Given that parents would not necessarily be willing or able to force their children to go to school, enforcement had to be placed in the hands of the state.42 During the nineteenth century, children and adolescents were increasingly coming to be seen both as innocent and as subject to greater social influence than adults, a tendency no doubt related to the prolonged education that middle-class children began to receive. Special courts and specialized reformatories for juveniles were logical consequences of this view of children, as was the age-of-consent legislation of the turn of the century (Hamoway, n.d.). Though not entirely new, the procedural informality of the juvenile court and its orientation to the individual treatment needs of the child were in keeping with the tendency toward individualized, technical rationality in adult sentencing. This trend could be carried farther for juveniles than for adults because of the popular conception of children as not responsible for their actions. This conception grew in the nineteenth century as more and more children lost their social responsibilities as a result of child labor laws (Greenberg, 1977). Regarding the reformatory as a failure, the Progressive Era child-savers who campaigned for the creation of juvenile courts did not want to place more children in it, but to keep them out if at all possible.43 For this reason
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(and presumably to obtain salaried jobs for themselves), reformers made state funding for paid probation officers one of their major goals. The probation officers were to supervise children in their own communities, and through the children, were to cultivate American manners in their parents. Only where the family had disintegrated or could not be reformed did the child-savem want to remove the child from its family and place it in a family-like institution. The court was thus to be an agent of assimilation and uplift-an extension of benevolent, though coercive control into the community. In this respect, the juvenile court shared with campaigns against saloons, prostitution, and corruption in municipal government the goal of eradicating unsavory features of immigrant, working-class existence, and transforming public life along middle-class lines. Many of the same reformers were aCtive in all of these causes (Odegaard, 1966:85). Amelioration of class conflict was one aspect of this transformation, but not the only one. Like the settlement house, the playground, the extension of public education to the masses, and probation for adults-all begun or adopted by the Progressives-the juvenile court involved the recognition that positive social engineering could not be achieved through a purely repressive institution like the police (see the reading by Stark in this volume).44
DISCUSSION
We have not aimed to present a history of how crime control changed as mercantile capitalism was transformed into competitive and then monopoly capitalism; as such, our work would be entirely inadequate. Instead, we have presented an interpretation of selected changes in the scope, ideology, and forms of control in Marxian terms. It is the logic used in explaining the events, not the events themselves, that is our main focus here. Contrary to popular misconception, Marxian theory asserts neither that the ruling class manipulates the criminalizing process at will on behalf of its interests, nor that the economy wholly determines a society's crime control arrangements. It must be recalled that in the passage where Marx introduces the famous "base-superstructure" metaphor (1859:20-21), he asserts only that "The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political and spiritual processes of life" (emphasis added), not necessarily their every detail. The historical record seems to confirm this. Broad trends in crime control correspond to successive stages in the development of capitalism. State control of the economy expands in the mercantile stage, contracts in the competitive stage, and expands again with monopoly capitalism. New forms of crime control, such as the police and the prison, are associated with the transition from one stage to another. Explanations of crime causation become scientific rather than religious under the impact of capitalist indus-
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trialization, and the formal qualities of sanctions (e.g., formally or substantively rational! are transformed too. But many developments are not uniquely tied to a single stage. The police and the prison are present in both competitive and monopoly stages of capitalism, though their character is somewhat different in the two stages. The Volstead Act prohibiting alcohol and its repeal both occurred in the monopoly phase of capitalism. Temperance movements appeared in many countries in connection with competitive industrial capitalism, but very few adopted total prohibition. It follows that the explanation of such changes cannot be restricted to the analysis of the economy narrowly defined, but must also take into account such considerations as the character of the state, the content and degree of adherence to popular ideologies, the level of class consciousness, and the degree and forms of class mobilization of all classes (not just the ruling class), as well as divisions and alliances among classes and class fractions. This does not mean that political and social "factors" that are unrelated to purely economic "factors" should be "added in." On the contrary, they are all influenced by the forces and relations of direct material production, but are not totally determined by them. Taken by itself, a mode of production is too limited a concept to tell us much about crime control (Greenberg, 1£175). Suppose, for example, one wanted to explain the legislation prohibiting opium derivatives in the U.S. in the early twentieth century. There is nolhing about the concept of the capitalist mode of production that tells us that opium exists, that many Chinese smoked it in the nineteenth century, that Chinese laborers immigrated to the United States, or that these immigrants and other Americans used opium. Given all this information, one can still not deduce the passage of a law against opium on the basis of the implications of opium use for capitalist production and distribution. Many of the problems associated with heroin use today appear to be a consequence of the prohibition itself, and thus cannot have been a cause of it. Even if one were to concede that opium use had some negative consequences for capitalism (e.g., by reducing workers' efficiency or undermining their health), we would have to recall that opium was widely used as an all-purpose nostrum in the late nineteenth century without noticeably interfering with the rapid expansion of industrialization. Drug use remains widespread today despite the prohibition. Tobacco and alcohol are believed to be injurious to the user's health, and the costs to business and to the general public of excessive consumption of alcohol have been given wide publicity. Yet neither tobacco nor alcohol is prohibited. Nevertheless, one cannot understand how the Chinese came to smoke opium without understanding the role that the opium trade played in British economic imperialism. The Chinese immigration to America cannot be understood except in terms of the demand for labor created by the expansion of industrial capitalism in the United States. And, as Embree (1977) has argued, the prohibition of opium derivates under the Harrison Act is only
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comprehensible in terms of America's imperial expansion into the Pacific, a response undertaken by the state in response to tendencies toward stagnation in the American economy (Oglesby and Schaull, 1967). Capitalism provides the class experience from which ideologies of control are developed; thus the classical principles of formal equality and proportionality, and the "treatment model" which denies these principles, are both related to stages in capitalist development, though it is questionable whether either could be rigorously deduced from the concept of capitalism. The same is true of such social control methods as the police, the prison, the juvenile court, and the regulatol}' agency. If one were to borrow the language of variable analysis, these observations imply that a general Marxian theol}' of historical change in crime control cannot be framed in such a way that mode of production is treated as the independent variable. Social control must be understood in terms of social formations (containing an articulated set of modes, along with the political and ideological "levels"). Yet here too, the distinction between dependent and independent variables is somewhat misleading, for crime control is itself a part of a social formation, and thus the social formation cannot be considered as entirely prior to it, either logically or empirically. Indeed, the mode of production is not entirely distinct from social control conceptually, for crime control can be (though is not always) part of the forces and relations of production (consider penal slaveI}', prison labor, factol}' discipline). We are thus faced with a complex problem involving joint or reciprocal determination, rather than unidirectional causality.
Notes
1 Social control in the mercantile era is treated from the same viewpoint in Humphries and Greenberg 119801. 2 Thus according to Poulantzas 11973:771, "political class struggle has nothing to do with a " . process ... 'acted' by ... the class subject." 3 For example, Dickson 119681 never explains why the Federal Bureau of Narcotics chose to
expand its bureaucratic empire by seeking to prohibit marijuana instead of aspirin. See Galliher and Walker 119771 for a reinterpretation of Dickson's data. 4 Chambliss (1969:101 is one of the few Marxist criminologists to criticize this position
explicitly: "it would be a mistake to [assume] that all laws represent the interests of persons in power at the expense of persons less influential ... laws are passed which reflect the interests of the general population and which are antithetical to the interest of those in power." 5 For example, vagrancy law was created in fourteenth-century England as a form of wage control in the interests of feudal landlords (Foote, 1956; Chambliss, 19641, presumably because earlier forms of control, such as the manorial courts, had been weakened by the growth of cities to which serfs could escape. The efforts of a propertied class to frustrate a control strategy adopted by the working class can be seen in the legislative history of the Texas Minimum Wage Law, which for the first time subjected the wage contract in Texas to governmental control: "In 1915 two minimum wage bills were introduced in the legislature. Employers' opposition became aroused and no vote was taken. In 1917 a bill was again introduced and the retail merchants prevented its coming to a vote. In 1918 the state Federa-
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7
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10
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tion of Labor demanded of all candidates for the IE'gislature a pledge to vote for a minimum wage law. and the Democratic Party in the state included it in its platform. In the following year a law was passed .... The employers. however. continued their opposition to the law... [and] asked for delay in putting the rates into effect .... The legislature in 1921 asked the Commission to delay actions .... The Texas law came to an end before any rates were actually put into effect" (Brandeis. 1935:517-18. quoted in Ratner. 1981), However. to avoid undermining the authority of the owners. slave testimony was not admissible as evidence in court. a restriction that partly undermined the value of the protective legislation and damaged other interests of slave owners (Genovese. 1974:401. Sumner's (1979) treatment of ideology is consistent with our position. We note that experience itself involves interpretation. and thus makes use of concepts and ideas previously acquired. Consequently, ideas do not generally miiTOr social relations as they exist at any moment. Residues or traces of earlier forms of social relations can survive in consciousness long after the relations themselves have become extinct. Cutler et a1. (1977:232) note that leading Marxist theorists. including Marx and Lenin. recognized that the contending parties in political conllict were not always classes. but did not deal adequately with this fact in their more general theoretical statements about classes and politics. In earlier historical periods the state did not enjoy all of these resources, at least not to the degree that it does today. For a discussion of how the weakness of the English state in the mercantile era limited its ability to implement its policies. see Humphries and Greenberg: (19801. The degree to which the state has been autonomous from dominant class control is. of course. historically variable (Weisser. 1979). In The German Ideology Marx and Engels assert that one part of the ruling class" appears as the thinkers of the class (its active. conceptive ideologists) who make the pelfecting of the illusions of the class about itself their chief sources of livelihood. while the others' attitude to these ideas and illusions is more passive and receptive. because they are in reality the active members of this class and have less time to make up illusions and ideas about themselves" (quoted in Miliband. 1977:58). Although this oversimplifies the functions of intellectuals, it does suggest. consistent with our view. that classes must legitimate their domination to themselves as well as to subordinate classes. For example. the Rockefeller Foundation played a major role in drawing up legislative proposals for ending Prohibition (private communication from Hany G. Levine) and for decriminalizing abortion and contraception !Humphries. 1977). It also helped to fund the development of methadone as a strategy for controlling heroin addiction (Klein. 1976). Criminal sentencing reform proposals have grown out of policy analyses financed by both private foundations and the federal Law Enforcement Assistance Administration. While these proposals need not represent dominant class interests. they cannot directly challenge them. Control over the distribution of financial resources thus implies a substantial measure of control over ideological resources and helps to shape the definitions of deviance and proposals for social control that enter into public discussion and receive political consideration. By 1861. many of the manufacturers who had opposed factory legislation a few decades earlier admitted that it had not had the pernicious consequences they had antiCipated. and they were now happy to have it (Ward. 19701.
13 As Marx put it. "The science of a marvelous industry is at the same time the science of asceticism" (1844b:171; emphasis in original). 14 Boyer (1978) argues that fear of downward mobility in the middle class was responsible for other sorts of efforts aimed to bolster self-control in the Jacksonian era as well. 15 Gusfield 11963:36-44) points out that in the first two decades of the nineteenth century. temperance was promoted by Calvinist ministers and Federalist lay leaders concerned with
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the cultural dimensions of their own displacement by the new middle classes. They, however, had been unable to gain wide popular support for temperance. 16 For documentation of working-class involvement in the American temperance movement see Isaac 11965:551 and Timberlake 11963:80-91); for the British temperance movement, see Harrison 119711. Isaac 11965:36) also notes the support of black leaders, such as Frederick Douglass, for Prohibition. Working-class and black leaders shared the belief that drinking interfered with the struggle for group advancement. 17 Several historians have shown that Gusfield's 119631 claim that the temperance movement was primarily based in the rural middle-class is wrong. The relationship between urbanism and Prohibition sentiment was weak; the important variables were class and ethnicity. 18 Within months of the great Chicago riot of 1877, the middle classes had inititiated "a broad movement of reform, directed toward temperance legislation and Christian missions and charity societies and the public school system, all oriented toward converting workingpeople to middle class notions of work and thrift, sobriety and respectability" IKann, n.d.). In addition, they strengthened the police force and state militia. 19 Economic competition between Mexican and Anglo laborers in the American Southwest in the 1930s gave rise to marijuana legislation through a similar process IHelmer, 1975). 20 In a substantive sense, this is not necessarily true: formal equality does not take real social differences into account, and may lead to very unequal consequences for different parties to an agreement. In Capital, Marx claimed to show that the wage contract, though formally equal, nevertheless had as its consequence the capitalist exploitation of workers. 21 According to Shelton (1973), landowners and industrialists channeled popular discontent toward middlemen, who were made scapegoats for economic hardship. As long as riots were directed against middlemen, the holders of major wealth were not threatened. 22 Attempts along these lines were made. Thus, manufacturers in eighteenth-century industrial towns formed associations to finance the prosecution of laborers accused of offenses connected with the "putting out" system, stich as embezzlement of raw materials (Shelton, 1973:71). 23 The first police force for the entire city of Paris was established in the same year IWeisser. 1979:161). 24 The lower gentry who as parish judges sympathized with the rioters and did little to suppress them failed to serve the interests of property IShelton. 1973:95). The local militia posed much the same problem. When called upon to put down rioters who were their own family and neighbors. their loyalty could not be trusted. The reformers who urged the creation of a police force hoped that full-time employees salaried by the state would be more loyal than a militia of community residents who were not paid by the state. 25 The fathers of the English police saw the force not merely as a deterrent to crime. The police were also to engage in moral exhortation, and lead the poor to adopt middle-class morals and living habits 1D0najgrodzki, 1977). 26 Thus Philips 11977:84-87) notes: "Studies of the introduction of new police forces into communities suggest that one immediate effect which they produce is a marked increase in prosecutions for minor public order offences-brawls, drunkenness, disorderly conduct in public, etc." In the industrial Black Country of northern England the establishment of a "new" police force led to "a general campaign against drunkenness. disorderly behavior and fighting in the streets. and against the hitherto tolerated blood sports [bullbaiting, prizefighting, cockfighting and dogfighting]. Middle class opinion had moved decisively against such "barbarous" sports .... The new police played an important role in stamping out these sports ... the police sought them out, broke them up, arrested and prosecuted the participants" (Philips. 1977:86). The police carried out similar campaigns against working-class culture in Boston ILane, 1975), Salem IFerdinand. 1972), and other Northeastern industrial cities of the United States (Harring, article 10 in this volume).
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27 Policing in the Black Country was reorganized in the nineteenth century in much the same way (Philips, 1977:57-60). 28 The necessarily decentralized character of police patrol always reduces the organization's
29
30
31
32
ability to gain officers' compliance with organizational policy. In this period, however, police corruption seems to have been less a case of individual police refusing to enforce the law in return for payoffs, than an organizational policy of nonenforcement in return for bribes at the highest levels of the administrative hierarchy. The merchants who petitioned Parliament blamed the upswing in crime after 1815 on the weakness of law enforcement, but with little basis. The increase is now generally attributed to the difficulty that soldiers discharged at the end of the Napoleonic War had in finding employment. A similar combination of pragmatic and humanitarian concerns seems to have been responsible for the campaign against the death penalty in the United States just after the War of Independence. In New York, for example, the campaign of businessmen was led by Thomas Eddy, a prosperous Quaker merchant (Lewis, 1965:4), For evidence concerning a similar shift in religious doctrine in the United States and a discussion of the effect of this shift on the way crime and punishment were viewed, see Davis (1957) and Griffin (1960). To achieve this strict control, imprisonment for debt had to be abolished. Since debtors had not been convicted of a crime, they could not be subjected to the rigorous discipline of the penitentiary (Ignatieff, 1978:31). As business indebtedness and bankruptcy were becoming a more normal feature of the capitalist economy, imprisonment for debt also came under increasing criticism from business classes. Most of the committals to the Gloucester penitentiary between 1792 and 1809, for example, involved breaches of labor discipline on the part of agricultural workers and workers in the "putting out" system (Ignatieff, 1978:108-9, 179-83).
33 Geis (1972) notes that Jeremy Bentham's Panoptiean design for penitentiaries and work-
34 35
36
37
38
houses was adapted from a plan his brother S,amuel had devised to stop carpenters employed in a shipyard from pilfering materials. For similar diffusion of control strategies in the French prisons see Foucault (1975). We follow the conventional usage in characterizing the economy during this period as "monopoly capitalism," even though the concentration of capital in most sectors of the economy never reached the point of complete monopolization. Chambliss (1976) has noted that support for federal regulation of the meat-packing industry came from the industry itself. The larger meat packers hoped that inspection would increase their sales by reassuring foreign customers that American meat was safe. Since smaller meat packers could not afford the methods required by the new regulations, federal regulation gave the larger meat-packers a competitive advantage. According to Wiebe (1962:212), "at least one segment of the bltsiness community supported each major program for federal control" of the economy. On the other hand, Boyer (1978:214, 348-49) argues that active business support for Prohibition was exceptional, and cites evidence that in some localities the business community strongly opposed Prohibition, since it threatened investments in tourism, real estate, hotels and restaurants, and the liquor industry. Divisions on this issue within the capitalist class may have given the middle classes greater political strength than would otheIWise have been the case. An additional factor in the success of the Prohibition movement was clearly the liquor industry's failure to put together a unified opposition. The wine, beer, and liquor sectors of the industry could not agree on a common strategy; indeed, the liquor industry was the one major sector of manufacturing that had not developed a national trade association. A few reformers, such as Samuel Gridley Howe, had already publicized the British experiments before the Civil War, but not until after the war were they given much attention.
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39 They really meant this. Macdonald (1893:32), a leading figure in this movement, noted that sentences totally indefinite in length would pennit someone convicted of drunkenness to be imprisoned for life should that prove desirable. 40 Major contributors included such names as Adler, Astor, Carnegie, Dodge, Guggenheim, Harriman, Letchworth, Lowell, Morgan, Rockefeller, Schiff, and Vanderbilt, along with foundations established by these and other leading capitalist families !Hahn, 1978), 41 Juveniles were being committed to asylums in the absence of a criminal conviction even in the Jacksonian era. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court upheld the practice in Elf. parte Crouse (1838). In Chicago this was the practice from 1855 to 1870. when a court decision based on laissez-faire doctrine severely curtailed the state's powers to incarcerate juveniles not convicted of a crime. Proceedings involving juveniles after this date still appear to have been procedurally infonnallFox, 19701. 42 Working-class salaries in this period did not rise veIY much with age. Consequently, parents often depended on their children's income (private communication from Steven Dubnoffl and would have been reluctant to send their children to school. Even when willing, they might not have been able to control their children. Lacking substantial capital, workingclass parents were able to do relatively little to secure their children's future, and thus were much less able to control them than were peasant parents in Europe, who could bequeath land to their children. It is noteworthy that in the early years of the juvenile court, many parents filed complaints against their adolescent children, alleging refusal to work or to tum over their earnings (Schultz, 1973; Schlossman, 1977). Thus parents responded to the weakening of their traditional sources of authority over children by turning to the new institutional source of control for assistance. 43 Platt (1969) appears to have erred on this point because of his tendency to overlook changes in the child-saving movement between the Jacksonian and Progressive eras. In this classical study of the origins of the juvenile court, Platt maintains that its originators wanted to send more youths to refonnatories. This was true of pre-Civil War refonners. but was no longer true at the end of the nineteenth centulY. 44 Recent discussions of the child-saving movement have given too much attention to the class backgrounds of the movement's leaders and participants !Platt, 1969, 1974; Hagan and Leon, 1977). The native middle and upper classes shared a common perspective on most aspects of the Progressive program, including this one. Ben Undsey, for example, the founder of the Denver juvenile court, came from a poor family background and entered the middle class by becoming a lawyer. A leading figure in the Progressive movement, he campaigned nationally for the juvenile court, and hobnobbed with corporate executives and national political figures such as Theodore Roosevelt. Hea\)' upper-class involvement did not preclude significant political defeats for the movement, as in Illinois (Fox, 1970). While capitalist support for the movement may have been helpful. it was not essential. as the examples of Denver, Toronto, and Oklahoma illustrate. We know of no theoretical reason to think it should have been. The middle class is quite capable of acting politically on its own, without upper-class leadership.
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A Reinterpretation of Criminal Law Reform in Nineteenth-Century England Michael RU5tigan Reprinted with permission from Journal of Criminal Justice, Michael Rustigan, "A Reinterpretation of Criminal Law Reform in Nineteenth-Century England," Copyright 1980, Pergamon Press, Ltd.
\tVhat is it that makes a person a pioneer in criminology? Hermann Mannheim asks this question in the introduction to his book of selected essays entitled Pioneers in Criminology. He suggests that this title should be reserved for those scholars who have distinguished themselves both by the the intrinsic value of theiir writings and by the degree to which their accomplishments have achieved a measure of lasting success in the field (1960:4). Understandably, Mannheim has designated Jeremy Bentham as a pioneer in criminology. Bentham is associated with the emergence of the classical school of criminology and has been widely celebrated for his achievements in criminal law reform. Leon Hadzinowicz (1966:18) indicates that it was clearly the "ideological current" flowing from Cesare Beccaria's Essay on Crimes and Punishments (1764) that prompted, particularly through the work of Bentham, a century of criminal law reform in England. Similar tributes to Bentham as a criminal law reformer can be found in most criminology textbooks.1 Moreover, some of the most distinguished English historians have given their praise to Bentham in this regard? Henry Maine, for example, flatly states that "I do not know a single law reform effected since Bentham's day which cannot be traced to his influence" (1966:397). The central argument of this paper is that these scholars have vastly over-
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rated Bentham's role in effecting criminal law reform. In focusing on the reform struggles of Bentham and his disciples, they have slighted the underlying socioeconomic determinants of the movement. It appears that the large-scale repeal of capital statutes which took place during the first half of the ninete{lnth century was prompted essentially by middle-class demands for effective crime control legislation. The following overview briefly describes the historical context of this movement. English common law during the medieval era generally restricted the penalty of death to crimes against the person. Even at the outset of the eighteenth century the number of capital statutes did not exceed fifty (Radzinowicz, 1948:4; Stephen, 1883). By the beginning ofthe nineteenth century, however, the number had nearly quadrupled. Even the conservative William Blackstone had to admit the "melancholy truth that, among the varieties of actions which men are daily liable to commit, no less than a hundred and sixty have been declared by act of parliament to be felonies without benefit of clergy; or, in other words, to be worthy of instant death" (1830:18). This sanguinary development was generated by the industrial revolution. The new machine age transformed the agrarian way of life in England into an urban-industrial complex. Between the years 1760 and 1830 great masses of people from rural England were transformed from settled country folk into mobile urban dwellers.3 No longer could the government depend on the old mechanisms of informal social control provided by the village.4 To the aristocratic, Tory-dominated Parliament, the extension of capital punishment to the vast number of newly created offenses against property was the only sure method of curtailing the rising crime rate.5 By the second decade of the nineteenth century, various urban business groups had begun to condemn the harsh criminal law as an ineffective deterrent against crime. In numerous petitions sent to Parliament, they indicated that jurors were growing increasingly reluctant to convict petty property offenders when the prescribed penalty was death. Allegedly, this served to encourage crime by holding out to the offender the strong hope of immunity. The petitioners clamored for less severity and more swiftness and certainty in the administration of punishment.6 The need for criminal law reform was mirrored rather clearly in the growing divergence between legislation and practice. In the middle of the eighteenth century more than half of all persons convicted of capital crimes were executed. At ~he close of the century, the ratio dropped to less than one in three. In the period between 1765 and 1820, the number of capital statutes in force climbed to about 220; during the first decade of the ninp.teenth century, only one in ten persons convicted of a capital offense was executed (Hay, 1976:22-23; Radzinowicz, 1948:158-59). Summarizing the state of the criminal law during this period, James Fitzjames Stephen remarks that,
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It was admitted to be much too severe, especially in regal'd to the punishment of death. It was immensely cumbrous. It was lIltedy unsystematic. Its
punishments were to the last degree capriciOlls, and it stood in the greatest need of compression, definition and rearrangement, in nearly m'ery part. 11890:511
UTILITARIANISM AND THE CRIMINAL LAW In view of Cesare Beccaria's considerable impact on continental criminal
legislation, Bentham hoped that his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789) would be actualized into widespread reform. To his great disappointment, it attracted but scant attention in his home country. Bentham's second major work was published abroad in French in 1811 as Theorie des Peines et des Recompenses and eventually appeared in English as The Rationale of Reward (1825) and The Rationale of Punishment (1830). These works were first published on the continent because he felt that, at the time, legislative opinion in his own country was too opposed to reform (Balmy, 1966:79-80)7 The bulk of Bentham's ideas on criminal law reform are contained in the Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation and under the two titles above. These writings are included with his other important works in a collection of eleven volumes edited by John Bowring and published in 1843.8 Since the reform of the English criminal law has been directly or indirectly attributed to these writings, the essentials will be described in brief. Utilitarian thought flourished during the eighteenth and up to about the middle of the nineteenth century. According to John Plamenatz there were utilitarian writers on the continent at this time, but basically the school was English. Bentham's writings can be placed into the English empiricist movement which passed from Bacon to Hobbes, Locke, Hume, James Mill, and on to John Stuart Mill (1949:2-3). Bentham in no way tried to claim originality for his utilitarian philosophy. He makes numerous and grateful acknowledgements to all the above, including Beccaria and particularly the French philosopher Helvetius.9 The utilitarians based their systems of morality, law, economics, and politics on the strength of posited universal laws of human nature. Upon these laws they believed they could build a science of mind and society as exact as Newton's explanation of the physical order. It was with the work of Jeremy Bentham, however, that the term "utilitarianism" originated and the doctrine became well known (Halmy, 1966:6-7). Bentham defines the principle of utility as "the greatest happiness of the greatest number" (1843:vol. 9, p. 5). As to the definition of happiness, he sets forth the axiom that happiness is "the possession of pleasures with the absence of pains, or the possession of a preponderant amount of pleasure over
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pain." The distinction between pleasure and happiness, says Bentham, "is that happiness is not susceptible of division, but pleasure is. A pleasure is single-happiness is a blended result like wealth" (1843: vol. 10, p. 585). According to Bentham's principle of utility, any human action can be analyzed with regard to its tendency to produce pleasure or pain. Ultimately, the sum total of a person's activity can be judged by his so-called felicific calculus, which is Bentham's term for the quantitative balancing of pleasure and pains in a ledger. Not only does pleasure and pain refer to the simplest physiological reactions but involves a whole series of emotional satisfactions and deprivations. In his classification of pleasures, Bentham includes, for example, health, friendship, and income along with the corresponding pains which the deprivation of each would entail (1843:vol. 1, pp.2-3). Bentham views people as acting fundamentally in their own self-interest and assumes that this drive is desirable in itself.1° It is only the consequences of self-seeking behavior which must be evaluated. Thus, according to the utility principle, it is bad for a person to do that which brings him nine units of pleasure if it is likely to bring ten units of pain to others. Bentham argues that the sole purpose of legislation is to promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number. "The lawmaker should be no more impassioned than the geometrician. They are both solving problems by sober calculation" (1834:vol. 2:19). In utilitarian terms the inclination to commit a crime arises from the expectation that it will increase the individual's pleasure or decrease his pain. This is not to say that pleasure or pain causes behavior; it is the anticipation of pleasure or pain that guides a person's actions. Consequently, the belief that a criminal act will result in pain should weaken the inclination to commit it, provided that the administration of punishment is swift, certain, and severe enough to offset the advantage derived from the offense (1843: vol. 1, pp. 90-91).11 The most important penal doctrine in Bentham's system is that prevention is the sole justification for punishing the offender. Retribution is precluded because punishment is just only if it is oriented to the future and not to the past. According to Bentham, punishment must be administered, not to avenge crime, but to deter it, since what was done cannot be undone. To inflict punishment simply because a wrong has been done is to commit another wrong (1931:272). The second salient doctrine is that all punishment is evil; therefore, it should only be used when it is capable of preventing a greater evil. "Laws are everywhere very imperfect on this point," says Bentham. "Punishment, ... if it goes beyond the limit of necessity, is a pure evil" (1931:284).12 Since punishment inflicts pain, it must be as "frugal" as possible-that is, just severe enough to achieve deterrence. For Bentham, the main objective of punishment is not to be found in the
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actual infliction of pain on a handful of offenders (special deterrence), but in the threat of penalties against the great number of potential offenders, which includes everyone (general deterrence). The efficacy of the punitive sanction is illustrated when it rarely has to be invoked. This is achieved when it is generally known that punishment is administered with swiftness and certainty. The punished individual is therefore to be viewed as the indispensable sacrifice to the greatest happiness of the greatest number.13 Bentham's main argument against the death penalty was based on his observation that "severity breeds impunity" and that the rapid profusion of capital offenses against property was undermining the swiftness and certainty so central to effective deterrence. Also, he argued that capital punishment precluded restitution and, in the case of error, was irrevocable. Bentham's condemnation of the multiplicity of capital statutes in England was based on highly pragmatic reasoning: 1. It makes perjury appear meritorious, by founding it on humanity. 2. It produces the contempt for the laws by rendering it notorious that they are not executed. 3. It renders convictions arbitrary and pardons necessary ... (and) all these causes of uncertainty in criminal procedure are so many encouragements to malefactors. (Geis, 1955:159, Bentham, 1843:v01. 4, pp. 225-26)
ROMILLY'S PLIGHT
Samuel Romilly was the first of Bentham's, disciples to plead in Parliament for the practical application of utilitarian principles. On May 18, 1808, he informed the House of Commons that he had chosen to devote his energies to reforming the penal code. He announced that he would commence a piecemeal attack on those capital statutes which had become unenforceable on moral and technical grounds. Romilly struggled inexhaustibly to assure the reactionary Tory Parliament that the prevention of crime rested on the swiftness and certainty of punishment rather than its severity. Yet the only reforms that he achieved were the repeal of capital punishment in 1811 for pocket picking and stealing from bleaching grounds (Hale\)', 1966:299-3001. The repeal of the latter was strongly influenced by petitions from calico printers demanding that the death penalty be abolished on the grounds that convictions had declined while at the same time offenses against their property were increasing. The following is the Petition of the Master Calico Printers in the Vicinity of London, dated February 27,1811 (Journals of the House of Commons [hereafter H.C.], 1811:vo1. 66, p. 123; see also Radzinowicz, 1948:727).
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Michael Rustigan
TO THE HONORABLE HOUSE OF COMMONS The Petition of the Master Calico Printers in the Vicinity of London RESPECTf1JLLY SHEWETH, That your petitioners' property is much exposed, especially while lying out to bleach, and great depredations are annually committed on your petitioners. That the laws which punish the offense with death have been found ineffectual to restrain these depredations, for that owing to the lenity of prosecutors, the unwillingness of juries to convict, and the general leaning to the side of mercy, when the punishment is by the common opinion of mankind considered as disproportioned to the offence, vel}' few convictions take place, and consequently offenders mostly escape, and are encouraged in the commission of crimes, which are multiplied from the probability of escape being increased, and from the impunity which lax prosecutions frequently afford. That your petitioners are strongly impressed with the sentiment, that by certainty of punishment being substituted for severity of punishment, the number of crimes would be diminished, and your petitioners' property better secured, and therelore humbly pray that Parliament may in its wisdom alter the punishment of death in case of robbing printing grounds into transp0l1ation, or such period of confinement in penitential}' houses as to them may appear eligible, provided a system of confinement in such houses should thereafter be adopted by the legislature. Jo. Tagg & Co. David Taylor & Co. Moore, Johnson & Mason Whane & Son Fosters and Theobald W. Nayler & Son Stevens, Stevens & Co. Francis Hicks Littler and Morey Tho. Silling & Co. Dudding and Chesler John Coleman Burford and Middleton Edw. Gibbon
Gould, Edwards & Gould W. Fenning & Sons Newton, Langdale & Co. James Howard B. Austin & Co. James, Thwaites and Dickson Wm. Birch Harvey, Gardiner & Co. Thomas Barnett George Ancell
Romilly wisely used this petition and one signed by 150 proprietors of bleaching grounds in Ireland to support his bill in the House of Lords. This was the first time a business group whose property was supposed to be protected had formally protested the state of the criminal law. Even the arch-conservative Lord Ellenborough, Chief Justice, had no reservations in approving this bill "on account of the petition from those who were to receive the protection ofthe law" (Radzinowicz, 1948:513). The crux of the issue
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was perceived by Romilly when he said, "The Petitioners ... were not stating the opinions of speculative and theoretical reasoners, but the sincere belief and conviction of experienced men representing the injuries which their property had sustained in consequence of the inefficacy of the laws made for their protection lRadzinowicz, 1948:51:1). At that time the ultimate significance of the petition could not be perceived. Yet, the eventual triumph of criminal law reform was already in the making. Romilly met constant failure during the period between 1813 and 1818. In the estimation of Lord Ellenborough, Romilly "went to alter those laws which for a century had proven to be necessary, and which were now to be overturned by speculation and modern philosophy" (Parliamentary Debates, 1811:Vol. 20, p. 299), A. V. Dicey refers to this period as one of "old Toryism" marked by a priggish concern for all things English (1914:70).14 Parliament was hostile toward any plan to relax the severity of the criminal law during the social disturbances between 1780 and 1820. This animosity was deepened by the horrors of the French Revolution.15 Romilly, the most persistent English criminal law reformer, died in 1819. As of that year the state of the criminal law remained unaltered. No significant progress was made until the 1820s. It was at this time that the influence of the business community was truly beginning to be felt in Parliament.
THE DEMAND FOR RATIONAL CRIMINAL LEGISLATION Agitation for criminal law reform was expressed in a torrent of petitions received by the House of Commons in 1819. Pro-reform publicity began to appear in popular newspapers and periodicals, and intensified throughout the 1820s.1 6 The overriding message came across loud and clear-the increasingly harsh English criminal law was no longer working. The opponents of criminal law reform were being told, in effect, that the justice system was repudiating the precepts of John Locke. In short, the government was failing to protect property. The birth of this law-reforming opinion cannot be understood apart from a brief description of rising middle-class consciousness. In the preindustrial period, social commentators depicted society as composed of "ranks" or "orders," or more grossly, in terms of "gentlemen" and "non-gentlemen." The language of "class" began to flourish during the political struggles between the manufacturers and the landed gentry during the industrial revolution. The increasing productivity of the industrialists resulted in an enormous expansion of the middle class. Industrial capitalism needed the skills of those groups connected with what Marx calls the "circulation of commodities"-that is., shopkeepers, traders, bankers, wholesalers, brokers, and so forth. It also needed those who could "com-
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mand in the name of capital" and their assistants, such as managers and foremen. Since class consciousness is largely a matter of propaganda and organization, it also needed its ideological groups, including reformers, journalists and pamphleteers.t 7 Although the legislative process was dominated by the Tories, the economic future of England lay unquestionably with the middle class. The alliance between the aristocratic and bourgeois interests was based on economic interdependence to a degree which did not exist in France. Each class was economically strong and apprehensive of revolutionary discontent from below. In time the aristocracy became increasingly dependent upon the economic authority of the bourgeoisie, which in turn demanded rational and systematic legislation.t 8 "The creation of a law effective in combatting offenses against property was one of the chief preoccupations of the rising urban bourgeoisie," according to Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer. "Whenever they had a monopoly of legislation and jurisdiction they pursued this demand with the greatest energy" (Rusche and Kirchheimer, 1939:15). Parliament persisted in endorsing the medieval policy of maximum terror in punishment. This was understandable. Parliament was composed largely of the old regime, landed gentry steeped in tradition. The drive for penal reform reflected the transition from a feudal to a capitalist economy and the rise of a social class whose prosperity was derived from profit and whose consciousness, therefore, was governed by the calculation of results. The bourgeoisie had no respect for policies of church or state that did not protect their interests. Imbued with the pragmatic ethos of the marketplace, they were more concerned with the effectiveness of punishment than with its capacity to wreak vengeance. The objective, says Michel Foucault, "was not to punish less, but to punish better ... to insert the power to punish more deeply into the social body" (1977:81). "Petition! Petition! Petition!" exclaimed middle-class property holders when government policy threatened their interests or when reforms were denied or delayed. The demand for criminal-law reform could no longer be ignored by Parliament. By mid-1819 James Mackintosh estimated that "the number of petitioners whose petitions are on our Table, praying for a mitigation of the criminal law, exceeds 12,000" (Radzinowicz:1948, 527). Mackintosh entered Parliament in 1812 and became a devoted supporter of Romilly's bills to reform the criminal law. Prior to sufficient representation in Parliament, the chief vehicle of middle-class interests was the petition. Its use constituted the popular right of asking Parliament for redress of local grievances. It was mainly the increase of middle-class demands that produced a centralized system of petitioning which was capable of representing on a single petition a number of unified groups in a given city or county. The influence of petitions bearing distinguished signatures could be measured by the discussions which they
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engendered. The most popular subjects, that is those that produced the most petitions, usually led to protracted debates. The need for a centralized system of petitioning first became apparent in 1779 due to the multiplication of petitions connected with the abolition of the slave trade (May, 1896: vol. 2, p. 412). In 1819 one of the most important petitions presented to Parliament for criminal-law reform was the Petition of the Corporation of London, which the sheriffs presented on January 25. This was the first time that the Corporation of London expressed its opinion on the subject. The following is the petition of the Corporation of London in full: THE PETITION OF THE CORPORATION OF LONDON (January 25, 1819) THE PETITION, As presented by the Sheriffs of London
and Middlesex, January 25., 1819 To the Honourable the Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in Parliament assembled. The humble Petition of the Lord Mayor, Aldermen, and Commons of the City of London, in Common Council assembled. Showeth, THAT your Petitions are greatly interested in the Police both for the City of London, and for the County of Middlesex, where His Majesty's commissions for the trial of offenders issue yearly, and eight sessions at the least are held every year; and they are impressed with the conviction, that their representations upon the present state of the Criminal Law, and its effects on public morals, will be deemed worthy the consideration of your Honourable House. That upwards of 200 crimes, very different in their degrees of enormity, are equally subject to the punishment of Death, which is enacted not only for the most atrocious offenses, for burglary, for rape, for murder, and for treason,but for many offences unattended with any cruelty or violence, for various minor crimes, and even for stealing privately to the amount of five shillings in a shop. That from the returns upon the table of your Honourable House, it appears that crimes have for some years been rapidly increasing, both in number and malignity, to the injury of the rising generation, and the debasement of the national character. That there were committed for trial in Middlesex in the years 1812 1,663 1815 2,005 1813 1,707 1816 2,226 1,646 1814 1817 2,686
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The capital convictions in Middlesex were, in the years 1812 132 1815 139 138 227 1816 .. . 1813 ... 1814 ... 1817 .. . 208 158 There were executed in Middlesex in the years 1812 19 1815 17 1816 .. . 1813 .. . 1814 .. . 1817 .. . 21
11
29 16
There were committed for trial in the different Jails in England and Wales, in the years 4,605 1815 ... 7,818 1805 1816 ... 9,091 6,576 1812 1817 ... 13,932 7,164 1813 1814 6,390 There were confined in Newgate, of boys only, of 17 years and under, in the years 1813 123 359 1817 '" 1816 247 That without the interference of your Honourable House, in adapting the state of the Criminal Law to the state of the moral and religious sentiments of the nation, the increase of crimes must be progressive, because, strong as are the obligations upon all good subjects to assist the administration of justice, they are overpowered by tenderness for life-a tenderness which, originating in the mild precepts of our religion, is advancing, and will continue to advance, as these doctrines become more deeply inculcated into the minds of the community. That many injured persons have refused to prosecute, because they cannot perform a duty which is repugnant to their natures, by being instrumental in the infliction of severity contrary to their ideas of adequate retribution; and by such impunity young offenders, instead of being checked in their first departure from virtue, are suffered to advance from small offences to crimes of great atrocity. That some Jurymen submit to fines rather than act as arbiters of life and death in cases where they think the punishment of death ought not to be inflicted. That some Jurymen are deterred from a strict discharge of their duty, and acquit or mitigate the offence so as not to subject the offender to the punishment of death, and thus assume a discretion never intended to be vested in juries, and relax the sanctity of a judicial oath, upon which the integrity of the trial by jury much depends. That this determination by juries to oppose the severe enactments of our laws is of daily occurrence. That, amongst other instances, a jury, rather than be instrumental in inflicting the punishment of death for larceny to the amount of 40s. from a dwelling, found a 10£. note to be worth only 39s.
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That another jury. influenced by the same motives. found two bills of exchange. value of 10£. each. and eight Bank notes. value of 10£. each. worth the same sum of 39s. That your petitioners cannot omit to urge upon your Honourable House. that even this disinclination to enforce the law is not confined to the injured parties. and to juries. but extends to the learned judges. who. impressed with a similar feeling. have exercised their ingenuity in discovering means by which the real value of the property stolen should not be found by the jury; and where convictions have taken place. constantly recommend a great part of these convicts to the royal mercy; and His Majesty's advisers. influenced by the same anxiety to preserve human life. readily apply and easily obtain from the throne a remission of the sentence. That your Petitioners do not apply to your Honourable House with any feeling but of gratitude and respect. for the administration of the law by the learned judges. or for this exercise of the royal prerogative. by causing law and justice in mercy to be executed in every judgement; but they are impelled to submit to your consideration the state of the law itself. which produces evasions dangerous to the community. and which must continue to produce them. as they depend not upon the sentiments of any individuals. but upon certain and general principles of our nature. upon the advanced state of civilisation in the country. and upon the dilfusion of Christianity. by which we are daily taught to "love each other as brethren. and to desire not the death of a sinner. but rather than he should turn from his wickedness and live." Your Petitioners. therefore. humbly pray. that your Honourable House will take the premises into your most serious consideration. and adopt such measures as the importance of the subject requires. and as the wisdom of your Honourable House may seem meet. /H.c.. 1819:Vol. 74. p. 33; see also Radzinowicz. 1948:7281 In noting the grievances and requests contained in the petitions there are two extant issues that require explanation before turning to the reform efforts of Robert Peel. The first is the expressed desire for a police force; the second is the contention that juries in particular had grown reluctant to convict property offenders under the existing capital statutes. It is significant that only after the flood of petitioning in 1819 did the criminal law reformers in Parliament (Mackintosh. Buxton. Peel) recognize that without an organized police force any large-scale attempt to reform the criminal law would be doomed to failure. It became apparent that a wholesale mitigation of severity in the law would be meaningless without better law enforcement. Such a system was established in 1829 by Peel. and it worked so well that by the middle of the century. the fears of an earlier generation that the police would become an instrument of class domination had been entirely forgotten (Mather, 1959:226-32). The bourgeoisie, according to Allan Silver, "turned toward a bureaucratic police system that insulated them from popular violence, drew attack and animosity upon itself, and seemed to separate the assertion of 'constitutional' authority from that of social and economic dominance" (1967:11-12).19
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The central issue addressed by the petitioners was the increasing unwillingness of jurors to convict property offenders under capital statutes. The courtroom practice of nullifying the death penalty on felonies was accomplished in two major ways. The first took place when jurors would reduce the value of stolen property. The other involved active collaboration of the judge, the jury, and the prosecutor whereby the judge would apply any one of a number of technicalities in return for a conviction on a non-capital offense. The process, says Jerome Hall, "was clearly outside the contemplation of the legislature, and sometimes directly opposed to known legislative intent" (1935:87).20 In the traditional view, the turning point in the movement to reform the criminal law occurred in 1822 when Peel took up the cause. Yet if one takes the force of organized petitioning into account, the turning point appears distinctly in 1819. Between 1819 and 1832 the influx of petitions amounted to no less than an onslaught. They came in from all over Britain.21 When Peel became Home Secretary in January, 1822, the movement had found its leader. Almost immediately he set about the reform of the police and the criminal law. Although he was a Tory, he tended to be in tune with the interests of the business community.22 Peel was basically a conservative politician who had no sympathy whatsoever with Bentham's utilitarian schemes. He was a shrewd, practical legislator who was clever enough not to jeri de the English legal tradition. This was "the clue to Peel's success, and it is the clue to Peel," says G. Kitson Clark. As a result, "he was trusted by the very men who had spent their lives opposing reform, and was successful where radicals and philosophers were failures" (1936:47).23 The task of reform was now placed squarely on the shoulders of an esteemed government official. The House of Lords, furthermore, was no longer dominated by the older reactionary aristocrats. Much to their distaste, the cabinet was being infused with that new blood described by W. R. Brock as "liberal Toryism" (1941). Before the end of the 1823 session, Peel was able to pass a number of bills urged a decade earlier by Romilly. Under the initiative of the Home Office, bills which formerly had been defeated with much agitation were now passed with relative speed and calmness. In 1826, Peel introduced his carefully prepared measure to consolidate the criminal law. His proposals included both substantive and procedural amendments aimed at reducing the chances of impunity. By 1828, the death penalty had been abolished for more than one hundred offenses and a multitude of procedural reforms had been enacted.24 "When he finally left office in 1830," claims A. A. W. Ramsay, "he had reformed and consolidated practically the whole of the criminal law of England" (1928:69). Focusing on Peel's vast administrative ability, it is easy to forget that Peel was, as Lord Rosebery pointed out, "a representative of the great middle class" (1921: vol. 1, p. 189). The impact of the petitions combined with the official sponsorship of the Home Office was decisive. By 1864 murder and
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treason were the only remaining offenses punishable by death. Remarkably, just over forty years earlier, there had existed over 200 capital crimes. ANALYSIS AND CONCLUSION
It is widely held that the movement for reforming the criminal law in early nineteenth-century England was generated by the enlightened doctrines of Jeremy Bentham. "Only in the nineteenth century," says M. Maestro, "owing to the commendable efforts of Samuel Romilly and Jeremy Bentham, did Parliament enact the most necessary reforms which cleansed the English law of its most revolting abuses and cruelties" (1973:134). Anyone who carefully examines the records of Parliament is bound to reach the conclusion that nothing is more mistaken than the facile prima facie assumption that the criminal law reforms were chiefly due to Bentham. By 1823, Parliament began substantially to reduce the number of capital statutes in force largely in response to sustained pressure from the business community, a community whose members demanded more effective enforcement of property laws by making the corresponding punishments more acceptable to juries. It could be argued that Bentham's writings served to generate lawreforming opinion in the community. However, specific references to Bentham are not at all evident in the content analysis of the many petitions and corresponding legislative debates on the subject of criminal law reform as recorded in the journals of Parliament during the first three decades of the nineteenth century. Significantly, the petitioning for criminal law reform began to mount well before the widespread promulgation of Bentham's doctrines in England. According to Halevy, "certain reforms in the political, economic and juridical orders had been demanded by certain distinct sections of public opinion since the end of the eighteenth century" (1966:306). It is doubtful that the business community of early nineteenth-century England was strongly influenced by the writings of Bentham. \lVhen the petitioning for criminal-law reform was at its peak, William Hazlitt wrote in 1825 that "Bentham's name is little known in England, better in Europe, best of all in the plains of Chile and the mines of Mexico" (1825:121). Bentham's teachings did not gain popularity in England until after 1832, the year of his death. The businessmen of the day hardly needed a legal philosopher to tell them that effective criminal legislation should proceed from more rational principles. Crimes against property were rapidly climbing, and sheer practical expediency moved them to press Parliament for swift and certain penalties. As Fowell Buxton remarked in a speech to the House of Commons, the existing system had against it the "authority of practical men who draw their conclusions from real life" (Parliamentary Debates, 1821:Vol. 5, p.951).
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The question arises as to why juries had grown reluctant to convict property offenders under capital statutes. What was the source of this apparent squeamishness? Were jurors acting out of a sense of justice against their own property interests? Since eligibility for jury duty was based on sufficient property holdings or a minimum annual income, jurors were frequently drawn from the business community, with a heavy representation of merchants, particularly in the large cities. The prospering middle class was inspired by religious Evangelicalism, which supposedly triggered an awakening of conscience. It is apparent that a strong current of humanitarianism was gaining momentum and undoubtedly contributed to a climate favorable to the mitigation of the death penalty. It was "the protection of human beings from unnecessary pain and suffering," says Dicey, "that underlay the attenuation of a severe criminal law" (1914:306).26 A materialist interpretation of the law-reform movement would not deny the significance of humanitarianism, but it would seek to discover the deeper origins of this social force. It would deny any ultimate validity to the idealist interpretation. In examining the language of the many petitions, one is struck with the repeated claims of humanitarianism side-by-side with the complaint that the harsh criminal law was failing to protect property. This dual theme illustrates how difficult it is to delineate what was religious and what was political in early nineteenth-century Britain. "The conflicts between classes or parties took on a religious form and color," writes G. Kitson Clark, "and religious growth served to emphasize the struggles between classes and parties" (1962:38).26 Historians who have dwelled on the humanistic component in the agitation for criminal-law reform have obscured the practical aspects of that movement. By 1820, the ground was fertile for criminal-law reform only because the weapon of organized moral indignation coincided with the crime-control necessities of the time. The sudden outcry against severity in favor of swiftness and certainty was the result of a perfect marriage between utility and morality. The actual reforms that took place were brought about by effective administrators such as Peel who cared little about the teachings of Bentham. Bentham's life began in 1748 at the dawn of the industrial revolution and ended with the passage of the Great Reform Act in 1832, which marked the advent of bourgeois liberalism. Bentham did his writings at a time of great social and economic upheaval. That England was able to survive the turmoils of industrialization without a revolution continues to vex modern historians. Bentham foretold that the increasing threat of disorder from below would eventually unite the aristocracy with the middle class in the quest for effective criminal legislation. By the end of the century Bentham's prophecies were fulfilled. The criminal law was reformed and the police and prison systems were well established. "The proportion of offenders who were detected and were punished had increased," says J. J. Tobias, "and the punishment inflicted on them had moderated" (1967:250-51). During the period between 1815 and 1875, "the contrast is between two
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states of society, one with severe punishments for a small minority of its criminals and the other with moderate punishments for a higher proportion of its criminals." What happened, Tobias claims, "is that improvements in policing and in legal procedures and Ireduction in the level of punishment went hand in hand and the three movements reinforced one another" (1967:251).27
Many of the reforms attributed to Bentham occurred after his death. His proposals were, as J. B. Brebner points out, "amazingly prophetic and precise anticipations of the collectivised policies under which so much of the world lives today" (1948:63-64).28 He correctly anticipated the needs of the advancing industrial order. The entire field of English law was burdened with obsolete rules enacted for a feudal agricultural economy. These restrictions stood directly in the path of industrial capitalism. According to Julius Stone, the reforms most directly linked to Bentham were in procedure and evidence, and undoubtedly "he remains a champion of liberty of contract" (1965:141-42). Nevertheless, says Stone, "Bentham ... may often have been merely rationalizing changes already proceeding." Much of this legislation "seems to have resulted from self-interested pressure of new large-scale employers, and not from any conscious theory of freedom of contract" (1958:295).
In later periods, idealistic interpretations of successful law-reform movements have the advantage over critical analysis. The wise legal philosopher who translates lofty moral doctrines into actual reforms is an old theme in legal history.29 It protects national prestige and enhances the image of an advancing civilization. Critical research in legal history has been limited by the need to defend the ideological integrity of the law and of the great jurists credited with its development. "One cannot examine nineteenth century legislation," says Roscoe Pound, "without perceiving that organized pressure from groups having a common economic interest is the sole explanation of many things on the statute book" (1929:8). The "great man" interpretation of criminal-law reform in the early nineteenth century is deficient in explanatory structure. It does not establish the ultimate origins of the movement because it does not start with the class interests of the class which carried it into effect. A major purpose of this study has been to indicate the need to go beyond the mere examination of "pioneers" and their ideas in writing historical accounts on the development of the criminal law. Notes 1 Authors of criminology textbooks find it essential to incorporate a brief discussion of the classical school of criminology into the history of the development of criminology. Certain highlights of the works of Cesare Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham are usually presented together with an enumeration of the many legal reforms attributed to these scholars. The distinct explanation derived from these readings is that the Classical School was basically an outgrowth of the age of enlightenment in eighteenth-century France. This view continues to
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be drawn from earlier works in criminology, particularly Individualization of Punishment written by Saleilles in 1898 and translated from the French in 1911. Subsequently, the most extensive discussions of the Classical School are contained in Parmelee (1908), Gillin 11926), Barnes and Teeters 11943), Void 11958), Stephan Schafer 11969), and Kittrie 119711. The most recent elaboration can be found in Taylor, Walton, and Young 11973). Here again the reform movement is portrayed almost entirely within the pUr\~ew of European intellectual history. Briefer discussions of the classical school appear in virtually every North American criminology textbook from 1930 to the present. Most of them are beholden to the idealistic foundation set down originally by Saleilles and the later entrenched by Parmelee and Gillin. With the exception of the work done by Radzinowicz, British criminologists have not taken interest in the historical discussions concerning the "schools" of criminology. Radzinowicz 11948-56) provides a massive, detailed narrative of the movement for criminal law reform in England between 1750 and 1833. His orientation, however, parallels the traditional interpretation of his American counterparts. Emphasis is placed on the efforts of particular reformers at the expense of deeper sociological analysis. An excellent critique of the idealistic interpretation of the classical school appeared in 1939 with the publication of Punishment and Social Structure by Rusche and Kirchheimer. At several points in their treatise they mention that the widespread nineteenth-century criminal law reforms in Europe cannot be understood without starting with the interests of the middle class which carried them into effect. 2 At first glance one might assume that Bentham served as a mere conduit in England for the ideas originated by Beccaria. British historians, however, have tended to dismiss this notion. Montague, for example, points out that "Beccaria has indicated certain axioms with the light touch of an essayist; Bentham grasped them with astounding firmness, gave them their sharpest definition, and developed them into numberless consequences 11891:321. Lecky maintains that, although Beccaria was the first to start the movement for the reform of criminallaw, "in England, the philosophical element of the movement was nobly represented by Bentham who in genius was certainly superior to Beccaria" 11882:3491. John Stuart Mill pays homage to Bentham by claiming that he "found the philosophy of law a chaos, and he left it a science; he found the practice of law an Augean Stable and he turned the river into it which mined and swept away mound after mound of its rubbish" 11950:751. Stephen says that "Bentham's theories upon legal subjects have had a degree of practical influence upon the legislation of his own and various other countries comparable only to those of Adam Smith and his successors upon Commerce" 11883:2161. Dicey remarks that "the history of legal reform in England in the 19th century is the story of the shadow cast by one manBentham" 11914:1461. Holland asserts that, "to trace the results of his teaching in England alone would be to write a history of the legislation of half a century" (1910:7491. Trevelyan praises Bentham by saying, "to him is owing the first suggestion of almost every one of the long series of law reforms which, beginning about 1820, in 40 years swept away the sanguinary and unintelligent code ... that hanged men for theft and struck about in blind panic with the sword of justice" 11966:1821. Phillipson goes so far as to say, "we are tempted to proclaim Bentham the greatest legal reformer the world has ever seen" 11923:2341. 3 Between 1760 and 1820 almost one-fifth of England's land was enclosed. The essence of the enclosure movement was that large, heavily capitalized farms took over the smaller farms, resulting in the displacement of labor. Village workers who had earned their livelihood by domestic manufacturing were unable to compete with the large-scale factory system. The enclosure movement and the development of urban factories meant an increasing surge of population toward the towns. London, by far the largest employment center in the country, was like a "magnetic field" due to its great assortment of specialized markets. Its population tripled during the first half of the nineteenth century and, as Trevelyan puts it, "all around London, bricks and mortar were on the march across green fields" 11953:148). See also: Deane 119691, Polanyi 119671, E. P. Thompson (19631, Briggs (19591, and Toynbee (1884).
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4 At the beginning of the nineteenth century the labor supply in urban centers was large enough to create a "redundant population." In hiiring from this desperate pool of migrants the overriding concern of many employers was to pay as little as possible and to extract as much as possible in hours. The fear of unemployment continually haunted the unskilled worker. P. Colquhoun claims that when conditions were at their worst as many as 20,000 people in London awoke every morning without any assurance that they would have food or housing for the next night. He notes further that cases of death from starvation appeared on the coroner's lists daily 11797:3131. Many vivid observations have been recorded by Mayhew 118841, Chadwick 119651, Booth 118911, J. L. and B. Hammond 119171, and Hobsbawm 11963:1281. Of course the writings of Charles Dickens provide a wealth of impressions. 5 Basically, three possibilities were open to the poor during the industrial revolution: they could accept their lot, they could endeavor to become middle class, or they could rebel. The increasing harshness of the criminal law was in no small way associated with the latteI'. One could well look at the years between 1790 and 183.2 .. as ones in which the class war is fought out in terms of Tyburn, the hulks, and the Brideswell on the one hand and crime, riot and mob action on the other" IThompson, 1963:601. By the nineteenth century, English criminal law came to represent a morass of haphazard and conflicting statutes. As propeI1y offenses increased, "legislators responded, as prejudice or panic might suggest. with a profusion of repressive and incoherent legislation" 1Fifoot, 1932:1151. The range of commercial acti\'ities ushered in by the industrial revolution pro\'ided new oppol1lmities for offenses against property. As Pike states, "Trade and the de\'ices for its promulgation were continually outgrowing the primitive laws ... the extension of the list of felonies, in the eighteenth centllIy was, in one aspect, a sign of progress. Every new de\'elopment of trade brought a new form of fraud, or a new adaptation of old forms" 11952:40001. According to Hall. the eighteenth century produced "almost the entire law on crimes against property with \'iolence" 11935:51. During the reign of George 1111760-18201, capital crimes were enacted at the rate of almost two a year. By 1820 the total had reached well over 200 and ranged from treason to stealing fish from a fish-pond, to being in the company of gypsies. The same penalty of death was as applicable to an offender who shoplifted or picked a pocket as to one who murdered 1Radzinowicz, 1948:8-24; Stephen, 18831. 6 See, in particular, the Journals of the House of Commons, 1818-1819, vol. 74. 7 Bentham's introduction 10 the Principles of Morals and Legislation 117891 was poody received in England, says Halevy, because "the idea of coditying the laws was a continental and not a British idea." Hale"}' makes mention of the medals and prizes which were offered in various countries for plans to revise the penal codes. New monarchical al1'angements had just occurred on the continent and imp0l1ant heads of state were clamoring for refOlm schemes 11966:79-801. 8 For illuminating biographical accounts of Bentham see Macdonnell 119111, Everett 119311, Montague 119311, Stephen 119001, Atkinson 119051, Phillipson 119231, and Mack 119631. Volumes 10 and 11 of The Works of Jeremy Bentham contain a biography written by Bowring from Bentham's reminiscences in his old age 118431. 9 In regard to the origins of the utilitarian principle, Bentham states that. "Before it was Beccaria's it was Helvetius, before it was Helvetius it was some sort anybody's, enough? Helvetius for plaCing it in full light was persecuted. The light shone in the darkness, but the darkness comprehended it not" (Baumgardt, 195;~:371. Bentham's point of departure from the ideas of Beccaria was in effect his quest to become the "Newton of the Moral World," In a letter to one of his utilitarian disciples, Bentham exclaims that, "Our way will cover the whole earth. We shall, we will, be despots of the moral world: Locke and Helvetius, offering incense to us every morning, both of them on their knees" 11843:vol. 10, p. 701. 10 Bentham's image of the nature of man is similar to the theme of Bernard Mandeville's Fable of the Bees 117141 in that what has been called evil in this world, i.e., pride, greed, and so forth, is the essence of what makes for greatness and prosperity.
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11 Since the recent demise of the rehabilitative ideal in criminology land the posith1st orienta-
tion of searching for the causes of crime) there has been a vast amount of research published on deterrence. Much of it is premised upon the notion that it is the swiftness and certainty of punishment that offers the best promise of reducing crime. The intellectual revival of the classical school of criminology begins with an article by Becker 119681 and the publication of the popular Struggle for Justice 119711 authored by the American Friends Service Committee. The dissatisfaction with the positive school of criminology is underpinned by essentially the same issues that ushered in the classical school in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe-rising street crime and widespread public indignation about the ineffectiveness of the justice system. For a general re\1ew of current deterrence theory and research see Zimring and Hawkins 119731. Andenaes 119741. Gibbs 119751. Fattah 119771. and Blumstein et al. 11978). 12 Bentham also insists that the punitive sanction is "pernicious" when there is no e\11 to prevent. or when punishment cannot prevent evil. He was very critical of the legal repression of the various "victimless" crimes of his day. 13 "To forgive injuries." says Bentham. "is to invite their perpetuation" 11843:vol. 1. p. 400), Moreover. "On so simple a condition as that of seeing government. and with it society itself perish. you may avoid inflicting punishment altogether" 11843:vol. 1. p. 476). 14 The two major political groups or parties during this period were the Tories and Whigs. They endorsed opposing principles of government. The Tories favored the supremacy of the King. whereas the Whigs favored the supremacy of Parliament. This conflict was rooted in the struggle between Parliament and James I in the late seventeenth century. Both the Tories and Whigs represented landed interests. The Tories. however. were the conservative party and stood for the monarchy. the church and the aristocracy. 15 Hay stands alone among historians in arguing that Parliament's aversion to reforming the bloody criminal code was based not on a reactionary mood but on the desire of the ruling class to maintain its historical discretion over the exercise of terror and mercy. "The benevolence of rich men to poor. and all the ramifications of patronage. were upheld by the sanction of the gallows and the rhetoric of the death sentence" 11975:631. 16 The two leading daily London newspapers which began to push the cause of criminal law reform were the Morning Chronicle and the Morning Herald. A fruitful way of gaining insight into the struggle for and against criminal law reform is to examine the debates that appeared in the leading contemporary intellectual and juridical periodicals. The liberal Edinburgh Review established in 1802 marked the first journalistic effort to promote the law reform movement. The Quarterly Review was founded in 1809 mainly to oppose the progressive opinions of the former. It was the chief literary apologist for the landed interests of Britain. In 1824 The Westminster Review. the quarterly periodical of the Benthamites. was founded by James Mill. In this same year the Edinburgh Review was able to state. "Legal matters are at this time among the most fashionable topics of conversation. All the newspapers abound with reports of trials" 11824:vol. 40. p. 1711. In 1828 the Edinburgh Review exclaimed. "The proper execution of laws must always depend in great measure upon public opinion; and it is undoubtedly most discreditable to any man entrusted with power. when the governed turn around upon their governors. and say. 'Your laws are so cruel. or so foolish. we cannot and will not act upon them'" IVOI. 42. 431. The persistent struggle of the conservative quarter of the legal profession against law reform is clearly indicated in their periodicals. The Legal Observer. founded in 1830. and the Jurist. established in 1837. rendered valiant sUpp0l1 to English legal tradition. In the face of an increasingly critical press. the Legal Observer characteristically remarked. "For the last 250 years the complaints against the present system have been continual and unvaried ... it is obvious. therefore, that ... the supposed evils ... cannot. after all. have been very enormous. or they would not have been thus endured" 11831:VOI. 2. p. 40),
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17 In studying the rise of middle-class consciousness, it is essential to remember that the term "class consciousness" is an abstraction. Class consciousness is a matter of degree. Some members possess it in higher degree than others, while some do not possess it at all. Class acth1ties such as the struggle for or against trade unions relate to class interest but represent, empirically, the work of specific groups. This point is important in the study of middle-class agitation for criminal law reform. The majority of petitioners were small businessmen, particularly urban merchants. For valuable studies of the rise of the English middle class see R. L. and A. Maude (1950), Palm 119361, Cole 119501, Briggs 119601, and Raynor 119691. 18 When capitalism emerged as the dominant mode of production, old feudal restrictions were gradually eliminated and replaced by fornlal legal lights which reflected the interests of the triumphant class. Statutory law provided the bourgeoisie with the formal rights of non-interference in enterprise, freedom of contract. and equality under the law. AccOl'ding to Max Weber, "The alliance of monarchical and bourgeois interests was one of the major factors which led toward legal rationalization" 11966:2311. For detailed discussion of class, politics and parliamentary reform see Jennings 119601, Maeh1119671, Cahill 119691, and Cantor and Werthman 119671. 19 Bittner and Platt note that "the very same forces that advocated the reduction of sevBlity of punishment also advocated the establishment of a stable police force, while their opponents were as much opposed to mild treatment of ollenders as they were opposed to the police" 11966:951. 20 In contrast to Hall and Radzinowicz, Hay contends that the legislators enacted many new capital offenses because they knew they would not be strictly enforced. Hay's argument. however, lacks adequate documentation. 21 See, in particular, vols. 74 through 77 of the JOllrnals of the HOllse of Commons fOl'lengthy listings of short petitions received by Parliament during the years 1819 through 1822. 22 Robert Peel was born in 1788 in Lancashire, England. He was the eldest son of a wealthy businessman who made his f0l1une in the cotton industJy as a calico printer. Peel's role as a spokesman for middle-class interests was strikingly revealed when he successfully prompted Parliament to repeal the unpopular Com Law of 1815. This law was \iewed as a sin against the national interest. It revealed the moml evil of aristocratic prhilege. In excluding foreign grain from England in ordel' to bolster domestic grain prices, it became wholly apparent that the landed aristocracy governed solely in its own interest. 23 It is no surprise that Bentham showed little interest in Peel's mode of operation. Bentham had developed a codified system of law designed to replace rather than reform the mass of tangled, erratic criminal legislation. The Westminister Review was the organ of "Philosophic Radicalism." The term "radical" was applied to the Benthamite movement mainly because of its professed radical reform intentions. In time, as Hale\y notes, "it tended to be assimilated into the thesis of traditional English Liberalism. The party tended to lose its utopian and revolutionary character, and to become a party of bourgeois doctrinaires" 11966:2641. 24 For an excellent discussion of Peel's accomplishments as a criminal-law refOlmer, see Radzinowicz 11948:567-6071. 25 The Evangelical movement broke with the Church of England on avowed matters of doctrine. From the schism of Dissenters a fornlal organization emerged, led by John Wesley, which came to be known as Methodism. This led to the eventual fornlation of a church second largest to the Church of England. The Evangelical movement and the religious groups connected with it played a significant role in the making of Victorian England. Evangelicalism, according to Hale\y, "constituted a link ... between the governing classes and the general public, as represented by the great middle class ... and was decisive in
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26
27
28
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securing from Parliament the legislation which embodied the dictates of national conscience" (1949:458-59l. The application of the death penalty to lowly property offenders was a point at which the growing strength of humanitarianism lent new power to the attack on the Tory government. In the Vicar of Wakefield, Oliver Goldsmith expressed his indignation by writing, "Nor can I avoid even questioning the validity of that right which social combinations have assumed of capitally punishing offences of a slight nature. In cases of murder their right is obvious ... but is it not so against him who steals my property?" (1786:228-291. It was Nietzsche who first expressed skepticism about the purity of the humanitarian ideal. Nietzsche, living during the time when the ideas of the Enlightenment were being strongly articulated in France, interpreted these ideas as instruments for gaining power. These speculations were later taken over and refined by the German philosopher Max Scheler in 1912. Scheler claims that the humanistic "bourgeois spirit" was an expression of "ressentiment." He invented the concept to refer to the cumulative repression of feelings of hatred, revenge, envy, and the like in contrast to "resentment," which suggests a more specific complaint. Secular humanitarianism, he argues, "is by no means based on a spontaneous and original affirmation of a positive value, but on a protest, a counter impulse against ruling minorities .... Mankind is not the immediate object of love (it cannot be, for love can be aroused only by concrete objectsl it is merely a trump card against a hated thing." Scheler goes so far as to say that even "the alleviation of the penal code, the abolition of torture, and of the qualified death penalty are demanded in its name" (1961:121/. Sutherland and Cressey maintain that "the wide distribution of police control, together with mild forms of punishment, probably has given us an internal pacification of society hitherto unknown in the civilized world" (1978:386/. For a penetrating analysis of the development of the British prison system between 1750 and 1850 see Ignatieff (19781. For Bentham, "the greatest happiness of the greatest number" meant the expanding middle class. Himmelfarb points out that "one of Bentham's disciples was asked whether the greatest number always had a right to indulge its greatest happiness, whether the twentynine out of thirty people who decided to feast upon the thirtieth had the right and power to do so-to which the disciple with the impeccable logic of his master, cooly replied, 'Yes'" (1968:761. Karl Marx describes Bentham as the "arch-philistine ... that insipid, pedantic, leather-tongued oracle of the ordinary bourgeois intelligence of the nineteenth century: a genius in the way of bourgeois stupidity" (1906:670/. Fry remarks that, "It is obviously more difficult to assign Bentham's exact share in the development of the criminal law as we get further away from him in time, yet very competent authorities are decisive in affirming its force" (1948:361. Fry's main authority is Dicey, who refers to himself as an "impenitent Benthamite." In 1913 Charles Beard stated that England had not "advanced far beyond us in the critical interpretation of legal evolution ... its explanation in terms of, or in relation to, the shifting economic processes and methods in which the law is tangled ... in passing, no interpretation has been ventured, and no effort has been made to connect legal phases with economic changes" (1913:8/.
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Editor's notes 1 Early in the article. Rustigan attributes the legislative extension of capital punishment during the eighteenth century to the industrial revolution. This is an oversimplification. A number of the capital statutes were adopted early in the eighteenth century and involved threats to agriculture. not industry (see Humphries and Greenberg in this volume. as well as E. P. Thompson. Whigs and Hunters: The Origins of the Black Act [New York: Vintage. 1975]1. 2 The petitions cited in the article attribute a riSE' in crime rates to the infrequency of conviction-or more specifically to the unwillingness of judge and jury to convict people of
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minor crimes that bore harsh punishment. The petitions do not actually show that conviction rates were declining, or that crime was in fact increasing for this reason. Today it seems more plausible that crime was rising because of economic difficulties related to the Napoleonic Wars (see Brian Inglis, Poverty and the Industrial Revolution [London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1971]1. 3 With only a few exceptions, recent advocates of deterrence have favored harsher penalties, reasoning that an ounce of punishment will be less effective in discouraging crime than a pound. It is worth noting that the evidence presented here indicates that a desire to deter crime led early nineteenth-century reformers to favor a reduction in the severity of punishment, in the hope of increasing its certainty. Contemporary deterrence theorists have sometimes overlooked the possibility that certainty and severity of punishment may be related in such a way that one cannot be increased without decreasing the other. Bentham himself regarded the criminal as one of the members of the community whose welfare had to be taken into account in the search for the greatest good for the greatest number. On this ground, as well as on practical grounds related to the reduction in the certainty of punishment caused by excessive severity, Bentham argued for less severe punishments. 4 Rustigan identifies the rising commercial and industrial bourgeoisie as the moving force behind the reforms he discusses. Can any single class be identified as spearheading present-day proposals for reforms in criminal justice? If so, what class is it? If not, then where do the proposals originate?
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The Walnut Street Jail: A Penal RefCllrm to Centralize the Powers of the State Paul Takagi Condensed by peImission from Paul Takagi. "The Walnut Street Jail: A Penal Reform to Centralize the Powers of the State," Federal Probation !December 19751:18-26.
Most of us have been led to believe that the "gentle and humane" Quakers founded the prison as an alternative to the sanguinary English laws then in effect, and that the idea of a prison was based upon the prevailing theory of humane reason. There are problems with these interpretations. Thorsten Sellin (1970) and more recently Smith and Fried (1974) have shown how the prison was not an American invention. Sellin went so far as to conclude: "The philosophy of the system was a British importation and the 'penitentiary house' of the Walnut Street Jail was no innovation. English reformers gave us both the fundamental ideas and their application in practice to such an extent that no Pennsylvanians can lay claim to be inventors of the 'Pennsylvania System'" (p. 14). Sellin collected data to show how the ideas introduced in the Walnut Street Jail were already in operation in the reformed English jails, but he did not offer an explanation of why the Pennsylvanians adopted the system. Smith and Fried, in a brief chapter, argue that the prison reform was a product of "changing productive relationsihips that in turn required new justifications of both the state and the law" (p. 4). They suggest that the argument of humanitarian principles was invoked to legitimize the political basis for a new social order, and that the prison was designed to moderate the social conflicts resulting from the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie. Thorsten Sellin in his book, Pioneering in Criminology (1944), invoked a similar argument to explain the emergence of the rasp house [a penal institution whose inmates rasped wood to make dyes] in mid-16th century Europe. The modifications that occurred in class relations, that is to say, the breakdown of feudalism and the rise of mercantilism and the change in the nature of labor relations, caused considerable dislocation among the work-
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ers, begging, wandering, idleness, and petty thievery, which led to the establishment of workhouses for "sturdy beggars" (pp. 9-22). The formulation by Sellin and by Smith and Fried is the point of origin for this article, to sketch out how and why the Walnut Street Jail became a prison.
THE EARLY JAIL AND WORKHOUSE
The first prison society, called the Philadelphia Society for Assisting Distressed Prisoners, was formed in 1776 following the work of Richard Wistar, a member of the Society of Friends; and is generally believed to be the parent organization of the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons, credited with the penal reforms introduced in the Walnut Street Jail. The first society apparently gathered food and clothing for the convicts, and its activities centered about improving the physical comforts of the prisoners. When the British army entered the city of Philadelphia in September 1777, the organization was disbanded. During its brief existence there is no evidence to indicate that it effected any changes in the several jails, including the Walnut Street facility. The work of Richard Wistar was apparently with prisoners lodged in the colonial workhouses (or houses of correction). Although jails designed for criminals existed as early as 1635, their use as punishment was chosen relatively less often than fines or whippings for two reasons: the jails were small and could hold but a few at one time, and the cost of maintenance was a burden the colonial people wished to avoid (Powers, 1966:234). It seems that colonial authorities were much more concerned with the discipline of laborers, servants, debtors, and political prisoners, housed in workhouses, which made their appearance sometime around 1655. Jail sentences were short and most sentences were indefinite. One might be sentenced, for example, "for a time," or "during the pleasure of the Court," or "till Saturday morning next," or "until the last day of the week at night." If a criminal sentence of a servant ... to "years of imprisonment" proved to be prejudicial to his master, the court frequently modified the sentence and released the offender (Powers, pp. 234-36). A servant in colonial America was not only one who gave personal household services, but was bonded to perform agricultural labor and other work for manorial lords, merchants, shippers, and plantation owners. The workhouses began to appear with the establishment of a landed aristocracy, the plantation owners in Virginia, the manorial lords in New York, and the merchant class and shippers in Massachusetts. The triangular trade of "rum, molasses, and slaves" transformed the industrial base, and one of the first signs of this was the adoption of a "money economy." In 1652 the Massachusetts colony established a mint to coin the Pine Tree Shillings. The change to a money economy marked the beginnings of a wage-working class; the wages were fixed by law and the social position of laborers carefully defined (Simons, 1913:39-40). These laws were elaborated to form a
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pennanent class of practically hereditary working people. In all the colonies, laws were passed for the imprisonment of debtors. These laws were not directed at the poor, but applied to wage laborers, the purpose of which was to create a constant supply of subservient workers. Falling in debt because of misfortune or because of the extortions of landlord and tradesman, the worker was summarily dispatched to the workhouse and remained there until the imprisoned worker agreed to pledge himself in servitude to the creditor (Myers, 1925:64-65). In Pennsylvania the laws provided the landlords the right to recover debts by seizure of the imprisoned debtor's goods and chattels; the laws heaped further abuse upon the worker by authorizing the jailer to be a creditor to collect his "fees" (Myers, p. 65). Originally the workhouse was a separate facility constructed next to the jail, but ... William Penn's Great Laws attempted to fuse the original distinction between the jail and the workhouse. It declared: "All prisons shall be workhouses for felons, vagrants, and loose, abusive and idle persons" (cited in Barnes, 1968:56). But when the English laws were reinstituted in 1718, they substituted for the imprisonment of criminals, restitution, fines and corporal punishment, and "where the offender proved not of ability to make such satisfaction then he should be kept in prison or a house of correction at hard labor" (cited in Barnes, p. 60). The distinction between a jail and workhouse became increasingly blurred although the concept of a workhouse was retained under different names. In New York they were called poorhouses for "vagabonds, beggars, idle persons, and those without manual crafts" (Myers, p. 61), while Pennsylvania in 1766 authorized the establishment of a house of employment for "rogues, vagabonds and other idle and dissolute persons" (Myers, pp. 60-61).1 The Walnut Street Jail which concerns us here was authorized by the act of February 26, 1773, to replace the High Street jail constructed shortly after the English laws of 1718 went into effect. The High Street jail consisted of two buildings, one for criminals, and the other for debtors, runaway apprentices, and the idle poor. The new Walnut Street facility was to be a "gaol, workhouse, and house of correction in the City of Philadelphia" (cited in Barnes, p. 62). The new jail began to receive prisoners in January of 1776, and some 105 prisoners were moved to their new quarters from the old High Street facility. About the middle of the year the prisoners were returned to the High Street jail, the new prison having been requisitioned by the Continental Anny for the confinement of captured enemies. It served as a military prison until 1784, including the period when the British army used it for the same purpose (Sellin, 1953:326). It would appear then that Richard Wistar and the Society of Friends, in organizing the first prison society on February 7, 1776, worked in the Walnut Street Jail for only a brief period. Their main work was in the High Street facility, where the pillory and the whipping post were used as punishment for the criminals, while imprisonment was the mode of punishment in the workhouse.
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THE SOCIETY
Shortly after the end of the Revolutionary War, Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Rush, William Bradford, and Caleb Lownes led a movement to reform the English criminal code of 1718, which was still in effect. The new laws of September 15, 1786, called for the penalty of "hard labor, publicly and disgracefully imposed" (Barnes, p. 81; Lewis, 1967:16-17). This meant that prisoners would be employed in "cleaning the streets of the city and repairing the roads" and authorities were "to shave the heads of the prisoners, and to distinguish them by infamous dress ... and to encumber them with iron collars and chains, to which bomb shells would be attached" (R. Vaux, cited in Barnes, p. 86). The Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons (hereafter referred to as the Society) was formed shortly after the new laws went into effect. Significantly, the Society's first campaign, aside from introducing religious services in the Walnut Street Jail, was to amend the law. In January of 1788, the Society prepared a report noting "that the good ends thereby intended, have not hereto been fully answered" and recommended that "punishment by more private or even solitary labor, would more successfully tend to reclaim the unhappy objects" (Vaux, cited in Barnes, pp. 86-87). In the widely cited passage from Roberts Vaux's Notices, the justification for the law change was that public punishment "begot in the minds of the criminals and those who witnessed them, disrespect for the laws" (cited in Barnes, p. 86; also Lewis, p. 18): Why did powerful men like Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Rush, signers of the Declaration of Independence, and William Bradford, later appointed to the Supreme Bench of Pennsylvania, call for a change in punishment to "hard labor, publicly and disgracefully imposed," and then change their minds within one year to "punishment by more private or even solitary labor"? Existing works on the history of American penology generally assume that the Society was identical with the Society of Friends and conclude that Quaker beliefs were instrumental in early penal reform. As a matter of fact, no more than 136 out of 340 members from 1787 to 1830 were affiliated with the Society of Friends, and the president of the Society during the first 49 years of its existence was William White, Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church of Philadelphia (Barnes, p. 84). This does not mean that the ideas of William Penn and the Quakers in the 1780's did not have some influence on the penal reforms, but it is important to note that when actual changes were introduced in the Walnut Street Jail, the Society was dominated by Episcopalians. The work of the Society, as contrasted to Richard Wistar's earlier efforts, had nothing to do with alleviating the miseries of the prisoners. Instead, [some of its members] worked closely with some members ofthe legislature, lobbying or issuing propaganda material, while the powerful remained in the background by not signing any of the Society's position papers. They nevertheless followed closely the activities of the Society if not actually di-
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recting them. Benjamin Franklin then wa.s the president of the Supreme Executive Council (the chief executive officer) of Pennsylvania and signed the message to the legislature containing the recommendations of the Society. This would suggest that during the early years of the Society's operations, it functioned pretty much like the modern presidential commissions on crime. The 37 charter members were prominent citizens of the community representing the major religious faiths, medicine, law, and commerce, and served to legitimize the idea of a state prison, which meant the creation of a State apparatus. To put it differently, the transformation that was to occur had implications far beyond the matter of penal reform. The political process of creating a state prison system reflected in miniature the problems of the Confederation in centralizing the powers of the State. The demand for a strong centralized government was to guarantee the development of a new economic order on the one hand, and on the other, to solve the problem of law and order.
REVOLUTIONARY TIMES The American Revolutionary War was not based upon mass popular support for national independence, and like most wars, it was fought by those who had the least interest in its outcome. For some members of the working class, conscious of their oppression, there was a sense of revolt, but it was a revolt against the tyranny of the manorial lords, the system of servitude, and the repressiveness of the laws. At times it had broken out into uprisings, but they were quickly put down, and the leaders imprisoned or executed. The war was supported by the merchant class, and to get recruits, bounties were held out as inducements. In some instances paper money as high as $750 to $1000 was paid out, and in others, land grants were offered. It is reported that "muscle men" were hired to terrorize and coerce the unwilling to volunteer (Myers, pp. 73-134; Simons, pp. 70-80). Pennsylvania adopted a Bill of Rights to inspire the masses and to win their support for the war. Clause I of this document asserted: "That all men are born equally free and independent, and have certain natural, inherent and inalienable rights, amongst which are ... life and liberty, (and) acquiring, possessing and protecting property." In different ways the other colonies asserted the same principles. In 1776 the ruling elites were all for paper money, restriction of the power of the courts, natural rights, and the string of democratic principles espoused to promote the war. By 1786 they had rejected all of these principles. As Louis Hacker (1970) puts it: "It was one thing to obtain peace abroad; it was another to assure the success ofthe Revolution at home." From 1781 to 1789 was a critical period, as the fledgling government was near collapse. It was the Constitution and the establishment of a strong central government
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that provided the political means for survival, stability, and future growth (Hacker, p. 45). Up until then, the governing document was the Article of Confederation (a league of friendship among sovereign states), but it did not provide for a chief executive, a judiciary, or a taxing system to support and develop a central authority; it had no control over the money supply, it could not regulate domestic or interstate commerce, and it could not protect private property (Hacker, pp. 45-46). The condition of the Confederation's finances had gone from bad to worse. It was aggravated by the arrears in unpaid interest [which] had increased from 1784 to 1789 by about eight and a half million dollars in the case of domestic debts and by nearly one and a half million dollars in the case of foreign debts. The Continental currency, with which the government had paid for supplies and soldiers, had become valueless, but new bills of credit (paper money) were issued in an attempt to add to the money supply. The financial crisis had a profound effect upon the working class. The farmers experienced unusual distress. The crops had been good, and in many places the yield had been great. "Yet the farmers murmured, and not without cause, that their wheat and their corn were of no more use to them than so many bushels of stone .... That when they wanted clothes for their family, they were compelled to run from village to village to find a cobbler who would take wheat for shoes, and a trader who would give everlasting in exchange for pumpkins. Money became scarcer and scarcer every week. In the great towns the lack of it was severely felt" (McMaster, cited in Brooks, 1903:74). McMaster says of New Hampshire: "It was then the fashion, as indeed it was everywhere, to lock men up in jail the moment they were so unfortunate as to owe their fellows a six-pence or shilling. Had this law been rigorously executed in the autumn of 1785, it is probable that not far from two-thirds of the community would have been in prison" (cited in Simons, pp.86-87). The courts attempted to force the collection of debts from those who had nothing, and increasingly the desperate poor focused their attacks upon the legislative and judicial systems. In Rhode Island the debtors seized the legislature in an attempt to force legislation that would require creditors to accept the worthless paper money (Simons, p. 91). In some states people refusing to accept the paper money were subject to heary fines and the loss oftheir rights as freemen (Wright, 1941:236). But this only served to aggravate the situation, as shops were closed, farmers refused to bring their produce to the cities, and creditors fled from the debtors. In North Carolina the courts were shut down to protect the judges, who were denounced and threatened for ordering the forfeiture of property for nonpayment of mortgage interest and for the jailing of debtors (Hacker, p. 50). But more than any other single event, Shay's Rebellion in western Massachusetts alarmed the ruling class, when the local courts would not, or from intimidation feared to punish the dissidents. The Shayites directed their protests against the
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courts, disrupting their proceedings to prevent them from handing down indictments. Initially they directed their protests against the Court of Common Pleas on August 29, 1786, and extended their activities against the same court ... in other counties. When a thousand demonstrators assembled at Springfield on September 26 to disrupt the proceedings of the Supreme Court, the militia was ordered out with a call for volunteers, but public sympathy was with the demonstrators. The Federal Government then attempted to enlist recruits, ostensibly to fight against the Indians, but this plan also failed. Finally the wealthy merchants and bankers in Boston organized a mercenary army of 4,400 to put down the insurrection in January of 1787. These events were reflections of the fiscal crisis, and members of the ruling elite rapidly moved toward the establishment of a strong centralized government. In November 1786, Washington wrote to Madison warning that: "We are fast verging to anarchy and confusion .... Thirteen sovereignties pulling against each other, and all tugginjg at the federal head, will soon bring ruin on the whole" (cited in Hacker, pp. 50-51). Madison, in February 1787, recognized the Confederation could not last unless some very strong props were applied to force respect for the government. The success of the Revolution at home was brought about by the creation of a class-divided society based upon private property, and the ratification of the new Constitution was to guarantee the privileges and power of the bourgeoisie. James Madison, who is said to be the father of the Constituton, made this very clear in one of his Federalist papers: "The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property flow, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government. From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results; and from the influence of these on the sentiments and views ofthe respective proprietors, ensues a division of society into different interests and parties .... The most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society.... A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations and divide them into different classes .... The regulation of these various interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the government" (Madison, 1961:78-79). Thus Fisher Ames said in the first Congress: "I conceive, sir, that the present constitution was dictated by commercial necessity, more than any other cause. The want of an efficient government to secure the manufacturing interests, and to advance our commerce, was long seen by men of judgment, and pointed out by patriots solicitous to promote the general welfare" (cited in Simons, p. 88).
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A STATE PRISON BEGINS TO EMERGE
Pennsylvania's new penal laws of September 15, 1786, of "hard labor, publicly and disgracefully imposed," went into effect just about the time when mass rebellions were taking place in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and North Carolina. The formation of the Society and its immediate efforts to change the laws came about because, rather than deterring "crime" among the masses, the prisoners at work in the city streets drew large crowds of sympathetic people. Friends and families of the prisoners made contact, and at times liquor and other goodies were given to the prisoners (Sellin, 1953:327). Roberts Vaux, the chronicler of the Society's work, said that the public spectacle of "fighting among the prisoners" was another reason for changing the laws. Rather than fighting among the prisoners, the fights referred to were undoubtedly public attacks upon the guards. The [effect of the] Society's call for "punishment by more private and solitary labor" was to export out of public view the sufferings and degradation heaped upon the poor. The Society's report, issued in January of 1788 to change the methods of punishment, "caught" the attention of the legislature and, on November 20, 1788, it asked for specific detailed information and recommendations. The Society responded with its long memorial on December 15, 1788, in which it recommended the separation of criminals and debtors, and solitary confinement to hard labor. Following the memorial, the legislature on March 27, 1789, adopted in principle the recommendations of the Society, but it still required additional legislation to put the ideas into practice. Most works on the origins of the American prison assumed on the basis of subsequent events that the recommendations of the Society were routinely accepted by the legislature, and by not examining the lobbying efforts of the Society, concluded erroneously that the changes were inventions of the society and failed to see the political significance of the reform. The Society prepared a propaganda pamphlet to influence the needed legislation. The contents of this pamphlet provide clear evidence that the origins of the reform were English. The pamphlet, entitled "Extracts and Remarks on the Subject of Punishment and Reformation of Criminals," was designed "to make the minds of the assembly (legislature) more susceptible to the aims of the reformers" (Barnes, p. 91). The significance of this pamphlet is that it referred to the "successes" of the recently reformed English jails and what was being proposed for Pennsylvania was the same model. The pamphlet cited the experiences at Wymondham, where imprisonment at hard labor was found to be profitable, and by providing hard labor for all on 6 days of every week the prisoners earned more than double the cost of their own maintenance. It noted that the English jails had developed separation for different types of offenders and sexes as well as provisions for solitary confinement. The pamphlet declared that "exactly what was
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needed at home was to follow the English example" (Barnes, p. 92). In this connection, Barnes was reluctant to make any conclusions on the origins of the American prison other than to acknowledge the influence of European developments. Sellin, as noted earlier, was quite adamant that the American prison was an import from England. Sometime between January of 1787, when the Society called for an amendment of the law of September 15, 1786, and the long memorial issued on December 15, 1788, the idea of a state prison began to emerge in the minds of the Society's members, and the key element in the reform package was the issue of solitary confinement to hard labor. The other reforms were simply dressed as humanitarian principles to persuade recalcitrant legislators. Sutherland (1939) was frankly puzzled by this early effort to establish a state prison. He believed that this was designed to obtain greater security for those sentenced to long terms, since the number of prisoners with long sentences was increasing because of the opposition to the death penalty (p. 413). Actually, the Walnut Street Jail, which came to be designated as the state prison, was a county jail no different from the other jails in each of the several counties. To designate this one county jail as a state prison goes beyond the question of penal management. Sutherland had failed to see the political significance of a state prison system. The law of March 27, 1789, took the first hesitant step toward the creation of a state prison by providing that any felon convicted in any part of the state and sentenced to at least 12 months at hardllabor might be sent to the Walnut Street facility. This did not mean that the Philadelphia jail would assume complete cost for the maintenance of the prisoner. The law also provided that the expenses of operating the prison would be defrayed by the counties in proportion to the number of prisoners from each county, and that Philadelphia was to receive 100 pounds annually for maintaining a state prison system, although expenses toward the county could be deducted by any proceeds received from prison labor. The option to confine prisoners in the Philadelphia jail was initially left to the individual counties, but this option was rapidly closed. Following the lobbying efforts of the Society, the necessary law to implement solitary confinement was enacted on April 5, 1790. This famous law provided for imprisonment at hard labor for the punishment of crime; directed the separation of witnesses and debtors from convicts; the segregation of sexes; and ordered the erection of a block of cells in the Walnut Street facility for solitary confinement of the "more hardened and atrocious offenders." The 1790 law ordering the imprisonment at hard labor for all, and the solitary confinement of the "more hardened and atrocious offenders," placed the counties in the situation of having to undergo the expensive proposition of constructing cell blocks for solitary confinement and to enlarge their jails to confine all at hard labor, or to utilize the facility at Philadelphia and pay for the maintenance of the prisoner as well as the 100 pounds per year assessment. The counties apparently balked. Commit-
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ments to the Philadelphia prison totalling 131 in 1789, had fallen by 1793 to 45, the lowest commitment figure in the decade 1789 to 1799 (Sellin, 1970:13; Lewis, p. 29). While the reduction in prison commitment was being hailed in some quarters as the direct result of the new prison to deter crime, the process of monopoliz!ng the penal powers by the State was carried further in order to bring the counties into line. The law of April 22, 1794, directed that all persons in any county, convicted of any crime (except murder, a capital crime), should be sent to the Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia. The punishment of solitary confinement was no longer reserved for the "more hardened and atrocious offenders"; it was to apply to all for a period of one-twelfth to one-half the term of imprisonment; and in order to provide flexibility in managing the prison, discretionary powers were granted to prison inspectors to determine the length of solitary confinement (Barnes, pp. 116-17). The Walnut Street Jail, as a state prison, came into existence when penal powers came to be monopolized by the State. The significance of a state prison and the adoption of the model by New York in 1796 and by other states, was not so much the architectural design and the classification of prisoners, but the concept of a centralized state apparatus. Here, the issue is not the level of government operations, that is to say a state versus a county operated prison; it has to do with the establishment of a special public force with powers to exact revenue, to appoint officials with special privileges and power, and the right to use force to whatever degree is necessary. Engels (1972), in his analysis on the origins of the State, said that a coercive State apparatus emerges in a society at a certain stage of development, a stage in which society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction. The contradiction referred to by Engels is that so ably described by James Madison: The antagonisms of classes with conflicting economic interests. In the words of James Madison, the responsibility of the State is "to protect the different and unequal faculties of acquiring property." On one level the idea of a state prison was to export out of view the contradictions of being poor in a society that professed certain inalienable rights. The new prison, as someone else noted, was a new form of penal colony; it banished the prisoner from one's family and friends. No visitors were admitted except the inspectors, employed lawyers, and ministers. The isolation of the prisoners kept families and friends uninformed, isolated, and prevented their interaction from forming a potentially dangerous protest group. That the prison contained mostly debtors, servants, and paupers, is evidenced by a memorial issued by the Society in 1801. It called for additional reforms, this time the construction of another prison, the Arch Street Jail, specifically for debtors. According to McMaster, the early American prisons contained debtors on a ratio of five to one (cited in Brooks, p. 87). At another level, the establishment of a state prison took the initial steps to create a judicial system. It did this by taking away the discretionary powers of the judges, ordering the confinement of all prisoners, except capital
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cases, to the Philadelphia jail. For more than a century the judges acted arrogantly and often corruptly in sentencing the poor to the jails and workhouses. The reform of the judiciary, however, was not motivated by any sympathy for the poor. The royal judges, who served the interests of the manorial lords, validated titles obtained by fraud and corruption and usurped powers never granted to them, often voiding laws whenever it was convenient to do so. The ascendancy of the bourgeoisie required establishing a rational judicial system and curbing the discretionary powers and the capricious acts of the judges. This was accomplished by referring to the attacks upon the courts during the 1786 uprisings and the necessity to promote among the masses a respect for the laws.2 That the architects of the State executed this feat by focusing upon the sentencing powers of the judges, adds another dimension to the significance of the first state prison in the United States. Rusche and Kirchheimer (1968) and Sellin (1944) understood the relation of the formation of the early workhouses and houses of corrections to the need for socially useful labor. In America, the turn of the 19th century was no exception. Nascent capitalists, with the establishment of woolen, cotton, and linen manufactories in Philadelphia, planned to employ 'the poor where a certain portion of the work could be done in their homes. The colonies then were largely agricultural, and to assuage the apprehension of the great landholders that the faotories would absorb men who were wanted as tillers of the soil, it was argued that "two-thirds of the labor will be carried on by those members of society who cannot be employed in agriculture, namely, women and children" (Niles, cited in Myers, pp. 80-81). The conscription of women and children from the workhouses and houses of corrections, it was argued, would lower the cost of manufacturing cloth so as to make the products competitive with the British imports. That the severe laws against paupers and petty offenders were not changed can only be explained by the labor needs of the emerging commercial system. Chronologically, the next major penal reform was the work of the New York Society for the Prevention of Pauperism. The organization was founded around 1816 and established the first separate juvenile institution in the United States, the House of Refuge. The members of the organization were mainly shippers and merchants, and it is no accident that the young boys committed to the House of Refuge were indentured out as cabin boys to America's expanding fleet of clipper ships to contest Great Britain's worldwide mercantilism.
Nates 1 It might be noted that juveniles were not initially confined in workhouses, but were bound out. As early as 1642, Massachusetts law decreed that unruly poor children were to be bound out for service. In 1720 it was further elaborated, whereby all children of the poor, whether their parents received alms or not, and whose parents were, in the judgment of authorities,
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unable to maintain them, were to be bound out-male children until the age of 21, and the females until age 18. 2 See especially the writings of Alexander Hamilton in the Federalist Papers. The control of mass uprisings is a major theme.
References Barnes, Harry E. The Evolution of Penology in Pennsylvania. Montclair, NJ.: Patterson Smith, 1968 lorig. 19271. Brooks, John Graham. The Social Unrest. New York: Macmillan, 1903. Engels, Frederick. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. New York: International Publishers, 1972 lorig. 18841. Hacker, Louis. The Course of American Economic Growth and Development. New York: Wiley, 1970. Lewis, Orlando. The Development of American Prisons and Prison Customs, 1776-1845. Montclair, NJ.: Patterson Smith, 1967 lorig. 19221. Madison, James. "No. 10: Madison." In Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay, The Federalist Papers. New York: Mentor, 1961 lorig. 17871. Myers, Gustavus. History of the Supreme Court of the United States. Chicago: Charles Kerr, 1925. Powers, Edwin. Crime and Punishment in Early Massachusetts, 1620-1692. Boston: Beacon, 1966. Rusche, Georg, and Otto Kirchheimer. Punishment and Social Structure. New York: Russell and Russell, 1968 lorig. 19391. Sellin, Thorsten.Pioneering in Criminology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1944. - - - . "Philadelphia Prisons of the Eighteenth Century." Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Series, 43, Part I, 1953, pp. 326-30. - - - . "The Origin of the' Pennsylvania System of Prison Discipline.''' Prison Journal, Summer 1970, reprinted in George C. Killinger and Paul F. Cromwell. Jr.leds.1 Penology. St. Paul: West Publishing, 1973 pp. 12-22. Simons, A. M. Social Forces in American History. New York: Macmillan, 1913. Smith, Joan, and William Fried. The Uses of the American Prison. Lexington: D.C. Heath, 1974. Sutherland, Edwin. Principles of Criminology. New York: J. B. Lippincott 14th ed.l, 1939. Wright, Chester. Economic History of the United States. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1941.
Editor's notes 1 Michel Foucault describes the spectacle that accompanied the march of the chain gangthe last surviving element of punishment in public-in France in 18371Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison [New York: Pantheon, 1977]1. At times, the crowd was hostile to the prisoners; at times, sympathetic. These interchanges seem to have been no less unsettling to authorities in France than they were in Philadelphia. The French response was similar, too: steps were taken to cut off all interaction between prisoners and the public by making the administration of punishment invisible. The similarity between developments in France and those in the United States tends to confirm Takagi's argument that the role of the Quakers has been overstated; similar steps were taken in the two countries despite the differences in religion. However, the French developments make one wonder whether the Philadelphia crowds who interacted with prisoners working on the roads were invariably friendly. Roberts Vaux, writing long after the events, suggests that hostile as well as suppor-
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tive exchanges took place (quoted in Harry Elmer Barnes, The Evolution of Penology in Pennsylvania [Montclair, NJ.: Patterson Smith, 1968), pp. 86-871. On the other hand, Vaux's advocacy of the new system makes his testimony somewhat suspect. (Roberts Vaux, Notices of the Original and Successive Attempts to Improve rhe Discipline of the Prison at Philadelphia, and to Reform the Criminal Code of Pennsylvania, with a Few Observations on the Penitentiary System [Philadelphia, 1826)1. 2 Does Takagi's analysis of penal reform in the early years of the American Republic suggest insights that might be applied to more contemporary penal reform. Has the main tendency in recent years been one of centralization, or of decentralization? Might the "community corrections" movement be an instance of the latter? (See the introduction to Part III for discussion of centralizing tendencies.1
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Policing a Class Society: The Expansion of the Urban Police in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries Sidney L. Harring
Marxists place the development of the police as a major social control institution in the context of the contradictions of rapidly expanding industrial capitalism. Karl Marx himself noted that the state "employs the police to accelerate the accumulation of capital by increasing the degree of exploitation oflabor" (1967:742). He further noted that as soon as workers try to organize to protect their class interests, capital "cries out at the infringement of the eternal and so to say 'sacred law of supply and demand'" and tries to check this collective action by forcible means (1967:640). Taking Marx's observations as a starting point, this analysis will place the rapid expansion of the American urban police institution during the years 1870-1915 in the context of the intense class conflict that characterized this period. My argument is simply that the emergence of the contemporary police institution cannot be understood outside of the class forces of the period. The police institution was shaped by the class struggle and also contributed (along with other institutions of socialization) to shaping the class struggle.1 No student of American history needs to be reminded of the intensity of the class struggle during the period, perhaps the most violent in any West-
I wish to acknowledge the many librarians who have helped me with this research, in particular Dee Rago, Marjorie Lord, and Betty Plewniek of the Butler Ubrary at Buffalo State College. David Greenberg, Gerda Ray, Kenneth Kann, and others reviewed this work and improved my thinking substantially. Doris Goggins typed the manuscript. Part of this research was financed by a fellowship and grant-in-aid from the Research Foundation of the State University of New York.
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ern industrial society. Thousands of strikes occurred; hundreds of them reaching major proportions. 'Whole cities were involved in these struggles. Thousands were injured, mostly beaten by the police; hundreds were shot, and perhaps a hundred were killed, again mostly by the municipal police. (Taft and Ross, 1969:281; Kolko, 1976: ch. 1-3; Jeffries-Jones, 1978, ch. 1-8, App.). As the major local source of state violence, the municipal police played a crucial role in the class struggle of the peliod, working repeatedly to break working-class resistance to corporate power, to socialize new immigrants to the demands of monopoly capitalism, to provide protection services to strikebound companies and those threatened with strikes, to control rebellious segments of the working-class population, and to control and gather intelligence in working-class communities. Although there were numerous contradictions in the police role, in general they performed these functions fairly well. This conception of the police role in the American industrial revolution breaks sharply with the existing conception of the municipal police as inefficient and corrupt adjuncts of the political machine, who were ineffective in the class struggle until the reforms of the early to middle years of the twentieth century.2 While no one would deny the corruption and inefficiency of the police in this period, it is equally clear that this corrupt and inefficient institution nevertheless exerted a powerful impact on urban working-class life. Thus, corruption and political controL while obviously important, must be understood in the context of the totality of police capabilities of the period. These capabilities, which will be examined below, were expansion; technological innovation; and increased bureaucratization and organizational efficiency. We will consider first the rapid expansion and transformation of the police institution in the late nineteenth century, second, the class basis of policing during the same period, and third, the consequences of class-based policing practices.
THE EXPANSION AND REORGANIZATIONI OF THE POLICE In conSidering the role of the police in the class struggle, it is important to determine exactly what the capabilities of the police institution were, and how they changed during the rapid urbanization and industrialization of the late nineteenth century. Robert Fogelson, who has studied this period, has argued that "what was noteworthy about the American police in 1the 1890s was not how much but how little they had changed since the mid-nineteenth century" (Fogelson, 1977:13). I, however, will argue that after the riots of 1877, and continuing through the "great upheaval" of the mid-1880s, the institution of the urban police was largely transformed into a far more efficient, well-organized, and disciplined system, capable for the first time of attempting to regulate urban life. Although no current scholars of police history agree with my interpreta-
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tion, the chiefs of police of major cities in the late 1890s did (International Association of Chiefs of Police, 1893-99). As in current debate, police capabilities in the nineteenth century were often linked to considerations of manpower-more police officers were presumed to do more police work. The single most notable change in urban police forces during the late nineteenth century involved expansion of personnel. Buffalo, New York's force increased from 200 to 900 in about twenty years, and all other forces followed this pattern. Obviously part of this increase reflected population growth, but more was involved. Increases were infrequent and erratic, generally occurring when some segment of local political forces demanded a change. Particularly noteworthy was the impact of waves of class violence-the "Great Strike" of 1877, the "Eight-hour" movement and the Haymarket violence of 1885-86, and the extended class violence linked with the depression of 1893-97. Demands for day-to-day patrol raised by middle and ruling classes fearful of "uncontrollable" immigrant workers also led to demands for increased police manpower. These increases were every bit as politically motivated as the rapid increases following the black rebellions and antiwar demonstrations of the mid to late 1960s.3 While there is disagreement among scholars about the sources of these increases, there can be no doubt of their impact. These large, late nineteenth-century police forces became increasingly capable of policing urban society, that is of using the police institution to structure urban patterns of social behavior. This marks a clear departure from urban police forces of the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s, which were little more than day and night extensions of the old watch forces, primarily concerned with simple "watch" tasks. A force of 300, 500, or 1,000 men, such as existed in cities like Buffalo, St. Louis, and Chicago by the 1880s, was a powerful weapon in restructuring urban life, for with a force of this size, month-long strike control measures could be mounted; antis pitting crusades could be carried out; efforts could be made to contain, control, and re-educate entire immigrant communities. While many urban police forces approached their present size by 1910 or 1915, efficient policing was more than a function of size. The period between 1880 and 1900 saw a major technological "revolution" in urban policing-the advent of the patrol wagon and signal system. Invented in Chicago in 1881, the system swept urban policing and was employed in more than a hundred cities by 1900 (U.S. Department of Commerce, 1904:4; Flinn and Wilkie, 1974:398-401). The patrol wagon and signal system laid the technological infrastructure for modern policing-rapid police response to efficiently communicated calls for assistance. Alarm stations were placed throughout the city, often at two-block intervals. Here officers on the beat could regularly check in for instructions or could call for assistance in an emergency. "Reputable" citizens could apply for keys and hence have access to the system, or could
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even purchase alarm stations for their homes or places of businesscreating an important class distinction in access to police services. Connected to the system was a central dispatch network ordering fast patrol wagons from centrally located patrol barns. The horses, often hitched by mechanical harnesses dropped from the ceiling, charged out of their barns in less than a minute, making possible a police response to most calls in a matter of five or ten minutes. This dispatching or signal system marked the beginning of modern "reactive" policing techniques, further reducing the impact of "watch" styles and increasing the ability of the police to intervene in a wide range of urban situations-not randomly, but as part of a systematic effort to restructure social relations in the city (Flinn and Wilkie, 1974:403-7). like increases in police manpower, the advent of the patrol wagon and signal system cannot be understood simply as an efficiency measure, although clearly it did increase police efficiency-otheIWise we could expect that it would have been adopted much earlier. Rather, its development cannot be separated from the intense class conflict of the 1880s and 1890s. From the beginning, the effectiveness of the system in the class struggle was one major selling point. The Cincinnati Police Department, the second one to adopt the system (in 1883) after Chicago, attributed the invention of the system to the "Great Strike" of 1877, and noted its effectiveness in strikes. A dock strike in Buffalo in 1884 prompted that city to adopt the system too. Not only did the patrol wagon permit faster and more mobile response to workers' strikes and other potentially dangerous street gatherings, but the wagons themselves were weapons-they could be driven zigzag through crowds, dispersing them (Roe, 1976:284-8S; 230-32; Harring, 1976: 92-100). Late nineteenth-century police departments were not only much larger and more mobile than those of the immediate post -Civil War period, but they also were reorganized to provide the organizational infrastructure for further expansion and for technological innovation. A larger share of police authority was centralized downtown, at police headquarters, reducing the authority of precinct captains. The early precinct structures had approximated small fiefdoms, each captain operating independently of headquarters. But this structure was outdated by the patrol signal system, which made city-wide response possible. Similarly, policies to control immigrant communities did not follow precinct lines; nor did strike control actions.4 As power on the precinct level declined, the career patterns of individual members of the force became more stable, particularly at lower levels-a development that preceded civil service legislation. Many departments reported a turnover rate as high as 50 percent annually in the 1870s. By the 1880s and 1890s, even before civil service protection, these turnover rates had dropped to nearly 10 percent a year--a figure about the same as that achieved by the reform efforts that removed police jobs from direct control of political machines. Simply put, a police force with a simple watch mission does not require great stability and is not impaired by high turnover;
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but exercising regular supeJVision over complex immigrant community life, or over labor unrest, requires a much higher level of police proficiency and therefore greater stability. The tenure of rank-and-file police officers became increasingly formulated by centralized policies, reducing the power of police captains, who had been able to engage in corrupt deals for those jobs. Through the 1880s and 1890s, disciplinary measures, training, and manpower allocation practices emanated more and more often from downtown headquarters, largely independently of reform efforts. These practices were legitimated and strengthened by civil seJVice laws-first applied to the police in Brooklyn (1883) and Milwaukee (1884) and spreading rapidly thereafter, although for many years these rules were both weak and commonly ignored (Buffalo Police Dept., 1872-92; Milwaukee Police Dept., 1884-85; Haller, 1975: 306-7; Walker, 1977:39). The increase in stability of tenure for individual patrolmen led to increasing skill levels. Initially this was only informal: skills were learned on the street after an initial orientation patrol or two in the company of a senior patrolman. By the early 1890s "schools for instruction," usually part-time, were in place in a growing number of police departments. More important, they were run by headquarters, and replaced the captains in the initial training of new police officers. Often they retrained existing patrolmen as well as new officers. Finally, a much higher level of bureaucracy was needed to maintain this new police organization. During the 1870s, headquarters often had had no more than a superintendent, an assistant, and a secretary. By the 1890s headquarters staffs were much larger. Specialized bureaus such as identification bureaus, the patrol wagon and signal system, and detective bureau were headquartered there. One or more inspectors, also under the direction of central administration, exercised direct control over captains. Sergeants or "roundsmen" supeJVised (and often spied on) rank-and-file patrolmen (Milwaukee Police Dept., 1884-95; Buffalo Police Dept., 1885-97; International Assn. of Chiefs of Police, 1894-1900). Analyses of late nineteenth-century police forces that focus on corruption, inefficiency, and political control ignore these important changes, which profoundly revolutionized police work. Here I have sketched the nature of these changes, and have emphasized that police departments of 1900 were significantly restructured and much stronger than those of the 1870s. While there are obviously contradictions between corrupt urban police forces and an active police role in the class struggle, they are not mutually exclusive. One example may make the point more clearly. The Chicago Police Department in the 1880s and 1890s was an inefficient, corrupt, adjunct of the machine. It was also viciously antilabor: it smashed a streetcar strike in 1885, a McCormick Reaper strike in 1886 (an event leading to Haymarket and the roundup of most important working-class leaders), and the Pullman strike of 1894. On a day-to-day basis it hauled nearly a million
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workers off to jail between 1875 and 1900, mostly for trivial public order offenses. Immigrant communities were regularly harassed in their pursuit of recreational activities (Chicago Police Dept. 1875-1900; Chicago Tribune, June 26-July 20,1894; Piper, 1904; Flinn and Wilkie, 1974; Haller, 1975). The complexities of this seeming contradiction will be explored in the next section.
THE CLASS BASIS OF POLICING: CLASS STRUGGLE OVER THE POLICE INSTITUTION
Corruption, inefficiency, and political control, three themes common to most analyses of the late-nineteenth-century police, and "reform," the common solution to those three themes, will be considered here as elements of the class struggle for control of the police. As applied to the police in this period, the term "reform" has been used to denote two distinct but related phenomena. The first is the series. of structural and technological innovations that transformed the institution; these were described in the preceding section. The second usage refers to those who introduced the innovations. In the struggles for control over the police, it was common for one faction to call itself "reformers," implying that its goals were improvements-the sorts of changes that any right-thinking person would unquestionably favor. We must keep in mind, though, that claims of this sort can be made to gain public support, and should not be taken at face value. More than fifteen years ago, historian Samuel Hays alerted us that "reform" is a value-laden term that can conceal class struggle behind notions of value-free improvement of social institutions wrongly conceptualized as lying outside the class struggle.5 The police institution must be conceptualized as having been fundamentally bourgeois and anti-working class from its inception. In the 1840s, 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s, police institutions were generally solidly in the hands of local commercial and industrial elites, who often administered them directly through police commissions on which they sat. Buffalo's two commissioners, for example, represented every major industry in the city at one point or another, and met 150 times each year on police business (Harring, 1976:67-87). But the influence of these businessmen was more than a matter of day-to-day control-it extended to the conceptualization of the police role in society, police rules and regulations, police disciplinary measures, and standards of police work. Even police chiefs often came directly from the ranks of businessmen, bypassing men with police experience. Local working-class interests very often opposed the creation of police institutions, most often through the electoral process, forcing various maneuvers to circumvent their participation. In Buffalo, local businessmen went directly to Albany and got a state bill to create a local police, entrusting control of the police to the same Republican businessmen who wrote the
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bill. In Lynn, Massachusetts, Republican manufacturers pushed through the expansion of the police while the predominantly working-class Democrats were disproportionately away fighting the Civil War (Dawley, 1976: 105-10; Harring, 1976). Some more traditional manufacturers, particularly in smaller industrial cities, opposed police expansion, too, deterred by its high cost and their desire for low municipal taxes; but the strikes of 1877 changed their minds. Scranton, Pennsylvania industrialist William Scranton, leading an army of local businessmen and professionals, personally met the strikers in the middle of the city and opened fire on them. Events like this persuaded the doubtful of the desirability of creating police institutions to carry out such tasks. Such an institution obviously would have a higher level of legitimacy, besides being less personally risky. Even the financial reason for holding back on police expansion was undercut when Pittsburgh, which had dramatically reduced its police force to save money just before the riots, was ordered by the courts to reimburse the Pennsylvania Railroad for its property losses (Mann, 1889:115-116; Caye, 1972: ch. 5; Walker, 1974). Once police forces were well established, the elites who ran them were gradually replaced by trusted police administrators and a "neutral" legal code that accomplished the same functions of class control, but with more legitimacy. This occurred at least in part before the "reform" movements of the turn of the century, particularly at the middle administrative levels. Direct control of the police institution by the bourgeoisie in a democracy is vulnerable in a democractic system. Workers in Lynn, Massachusetts, defeated manufacturer mayors three times, largely over the issue of police strikebreaking activities, in the 1860s and 1870s. Although the manufacturers recaptured the mayoralty (and thereby recaptured the police) each time, they obviously lost some of the value of police services because they lost their ability to control and direct police actions at all times. (Dawley, 1976: 100-10,198-210). Political machines that were responsive to workers had the same power over the police as the local bourgeoisie had when they won the right to exercise that power through the ballot. While the bourgeoisie did not see any problem demanding "reform" as long as they were in control, they did when political machines controlled city hall. As long as control over the police flowed through normal political channels-i.e., democratic politics-their vulnerability would continue. The movement to take the police out of normal political control measures, was a logical next step. Three important misconceptions have plagued discussion of the class character of nineteenth-century policing. First, the urban political machines that dominated the big-city police forces have wrongly been characterized as working-class machines. Second, the police have been viewed as so corrupted by bribes that they exercised no effective control over the working class. Third, it has been argued that the police force was a working-class institution because most police recruits had working-class backgrounds. Since these claims obscure the relationship between class and policing that actually prevailed, each will be analyzed in some detail.
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First we consider the contention that control of the police by political machines implied control by the working class (Walker, 1977: xii, 31). While it is clear that in a liberal democracy the working class can become a force that must be acknowledged through the sheer force of its votes, it is also clear that the nineteenth-century urban working class exercised less political influence in these machines than its numbers would indicate. Immigrant workers could not vote until they became citizens. Equally important, historian David Montgomery reminds us that before the electoral successes of the Social Democratic Party in Milwaukee, there was no working-class political program that managed to survive more than one election (Montgomery, 1978:426-28). The key to understanding the urban political machines of the period is to see them as power brokers: a temporary form which incorporated some working-class participation into heretofore bourgeois and petty-bourgeois political circles, and thereby maintained a reasonably effective urban government, promoted political stability, and maintained conditions favorable to the orderly expansion of capital. While workers clearly had some influence over the actions of such machines, they never controlled them. The involvement of those machines in using the police to carry out strikebreaking activities, mass arrests of public order offenders, and arrests of tramps thoroughly disproves this argument. When Mayor Carter Harrison of Chicago, a model machine politician, withheld police strikebreaking services from Cyrus McCormick in 1885, McCormick went off to see him. When the strike was resumed the next year, police were barracked inside the McCormick reaper works, and Cyrus himself poured coffee for common patrolmen. When the workers persisted in their strike and marched on the company, police shot them down, inciting the Haymarket demonstration (Mandelbaum, 1965:ch. 16; Ozanne, 1968:ch. 1; Callow, 1976:3-9). Working-class protests against oppressive police behavior was an immediate incentive for building a police system insulated from working-class political power, but it was more a matter of preventive action than of wresting control from the working class. Even when workers gained control of municipal government they did not have an affirmative model of a "workers' police." Such electoral victories were usually limited to one-time actions following particularly repressive strikebreaking by the police, and the newly installed chief usually did no more than promise not to engage in such behavior-hardly an adequate means of protecting mass interests. Not even the Socialists came up with real proposals for eliminating the class bias of the police, beyond Emil Seidel's utopian proposal to rename Milwaukee's policemen "safetymen" and merge the police and fire departments. The police policy innovation that probably did the working class the most good came from a petty-bourgeois Christian progressive tradition. In 1907 Mayor Tom Johnson of Cleveland adopted a "Golden Rule" policy of releasing petty offenders from the police station under their own recognizance, with a warning. This experiment was hotly debated at the annual meetings of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, and was tried in dozens of
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cities, where it usually cut aITests by 50 percent or more, until the practice waned after 1914 (Cleveland Police Dept., 1908-15; Howard, 1934:ch.15 and 16; Bremner, 1954; Carlin, 1961:54-64).6 What the working class typically got for voting for a political machine was (1) preferential hiring for city jobs that no other class particularly wanted including tl-tat of police officer; and (2) some concessions on public order standards relating to drinking and other working-class recreational behavior. This hardly translates to working-class "control" of the police institution? It is just as misleading to abstract corruption from its class context as to define machine power as working-class power. The corruption of the police, or any other public institution, is not fundamentally a "working-class" problem. It is the bourgeoisie and the petty-bourgeoisie that make routine business practices of wholesale bribery, and who corrupt entire institutions. Taking bribes, as a class phenomenon, refers to the sale of one's class interests to a more powerful and wealthy class (Seidman, 1978:167-70). This does not mean that the police did not routinely shake down workers-once initiated, the process is vicious and not very discriminatory. Rather, this means that the corruption of the police during this period cannot be distinguished from the wholesale corruption of major corporations, the entire railroad industry, the U.S. Senate, and many other public institutions (Steffens, 1931). Within police departments, widespread corruption added a pettybourgeois entrepreneurial character to police work. The major source of pay and/or advancement derived more from providing special services to some small sector of the population than from truly public service. This had a number of effects on routine police work. For example, arrests were often structured to maximize chances of soliciting money for immunity from arrest (Howard, 1934:ch. 6-8). Thus, in order to extort money from saloon keepers for late hour privileges, plenty of arrests had to be made to create a market. Strikers in Chicago in the early 1900s charged that the police were brutal during strikes both because they were paid for their brutality by the employers and because they wanted to compensate for their corruption with rigorous antistrike work-both implicitly forms of corruption (Myers, 1929:715; 825-26). Corruption, in other words, clearly structured some portion of police work. Necessarily it made some types of policing less efficient, but it did not negate its overall effect. More important, it did not mean that the police were more working class than bourgeois in their outlook. Rather, it had the opposite effect, since it gave many of the rank-and-file a petty-bourgeois class interest in the form of rewards for illegal entrepreneurial activity, and for illegal services to various bribe-paying petty-bourgeois interests. The final source of the notion that the working class "dominated" the police follows from the simplistic argument that since most policemen were of working-class origin they represented working-class interests. Since the majority of workers in most enterprises are members of the working class,
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the corollary should be that all of these enterprises are controlled by the working class. Obviously they are not, for reasons that are commonly understood and involve considerations of power. A number of forces effectively check the class loyalties of individuals in mass organizations, public and private. Yet the loyalties of working-class police have frequently been problematic, and have had to be repeatedly renewed. Moreover, within police institutions the class struggle of the larger society is reproduced, with rank-and-file officers and police administrators often in opposition.9 Four measures were adopted to ensure the loyalty of individual rankand-file police officers to the goals of police administrators rather than to the working class. Of these, mass police discipline was initially the most important. Officers were drilled as a force and instilled with an esprit de corps. Difficult class control situations were almost always handled by groups, under the direct command of a superior. Defection by an individual officer under these conditions was difficult. The penalty for disobeying an order could be dismissal from the force (Harring, 1976:106-7; Fogelson, 1977, ch.2). A second measure was to provide secure work at high pay, creating a class distinction between the police and most of the people they controlled. Police salaries were often double those of unskilled or even semiskilled laborers, and the steady nature of the job often put pay levels above even skilled workers. In the 1890s police pay ranged from $800 to more than $1000 a year in cities where dockworkers earned perhaps $400 (International Assn. of Chiefs of Police, 1899:14; Watts, 1975:174-75). A third measure was to use the notion of legality and legitimacy as a socializing influence on rank-and-file police officers. Police administrators constantly reminded them that they were to "enforce the law"; and the law was presented as being outside class conflict and above legitimate challenge. A brutal beating of a crowd of strikers against a Chicago street railroad company was preceded by a lofty statement about the necessity of "valuefree" law and order from Captain Bonfield (later famous for his Haymarket work): "If the railway company wants to run its cars it is entitled to protection and should have it. The cars shall be run if the company desires it, and people who do not wish to get hurt had better keep out of the way" (Flinn and Wilkie, 1974:239). The next day Superintendent of Police Doyle addressed the men from the steps of the police station: "Whatever your private views or mine may be, property must be defended, the law just be upheld, and you are its defenders" (Flinn and Wilkie, 1974:240-46). The unchallengeable authority of the law has been used repeatedly to justify police actions, both within the department and to the public at large. Finally, ethnic divisions were widely used to undermine working-class solidarity during the nineteenth century. The police were very often ethnically distinct from large segments of the population they controlled, and these distinctions often perpetuated traditional hostilities. The German police in Buffalo's Polish community reopened old wounds, for the Poles were refugees from Prussian depredations in Poland. Chief Fred Kohler of
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Cleveland had a strong distrust of his Irish officers, and discriminated against them in promotions, showing that ethnic differences were important even within police departments (Howard, 1934:ch. 14; Harring, 1976: 117-126). All of these measures went a long way toward neutralizing the workingclass basis of policing. Individual officers came to see themselves as detached "professionals" outside the class struggle-exactly the role reformers saw for the police institution. A study of the late-nineteeth-century police in Atlanta, Georgia, shows that rank-and-file officers had moved out of working-class neighborhoods, and into middle-class areas populated by small businessmen and other marginal professionals (Watts, 1973:175), But the class loyalty of the police rank and file was always seen as tenuous, by both the police administrators and the local bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, and as needing to be constantly regenerated. This was due in part to the working-class origins of the rank-and-file police, who, as today, often saw their friends and family members striking or getting in trouble with the law, and in part to the ambivalent class position of police work. No matter how high their pay, or how much rhetoric of "professionalization" they heard, and despite quiet suburban neighborhoods for their families, police officers on the beat enjoyed little social status, worked long hours, and were often abused by their superiors. Police work was monotonous, and the average officer exercised little control over his working conditions.lO Direct mutinies, while not everyday occurrences, did occur, and police adminstrations greatly feared them, often discharging men wholesale at any sign of resistance to administrative authority. Thirty-three Indianapolis patrolmen were suspended for refusing to ride on streetcars driven by scabs during a 1913 strike (Indianapolis Star, Nov. 14, 21-24, 1913). During a similar strike in Columbus in 1910, 32 patrolmen mutinied. (Ohio State Journal, Aug. 13-14, 1910). Both the mayor and a police commissioner made speeches reminding the men of their duties under the law, but to no avail. One patrolman put the issue succinctly in his speech: "I would rather lose my job and take another which made me work 24 hours a day than to be called a scab and lose the respect of the workingmen" (Ohio State Journal, Aug. 13, 1910). In Chicago's Pullman strike and in Buffalo's switchmen's strike, in 1892, smaller numbers of police officers were suspended for failing to carry out their orders (Myers, 1927: 247-48; Buffalo E1(press, Aug. 19-21, 1892). Two Cleveland officers were fined for refusing an order to arrest bystanders in the Brown Hoisting strike of 1896 (Cleveland Plain Dealer, Aug. 9, 1896). The problem was equally serious on the level of day-to-day patrol work. Individual police officers were adept at figuring out ways to reduce the monotony of ten- or twelve-hour patrol shifts, often "cooping up" out of the elements (Piper, 1904). Individual officers also often refused to carry out departmental arresting policies: during Buffalo's 1893-94 crackdown on tramps, some officers continued to run them out of town despite orders to arrest every one (Harring, 1977).
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This class contlict within police departments reflected material differences between police administrators and police officers, as well as differences in their control over conditions of work. Underscoring this was the reproduction of the class relations of the larger society within police departments. Although most rank-and-file officers came from the working class (mostly skilled and semiskilled sectors), a minority came from various petty-bourgeois backgrounds, primarily merchants and marginal professionals. While the average patrolman was never promoted, and retired a patrolman after many years' service, most of the patrolmen from pettybourgeois backgrounds eventually became police administrators (Maniha, 1970:ch. 4). Many police chiefs in the late nineteeth century had joined the force after leaving a petty-bourgeois occupation, such as a marginally successful small business. The view of the working class toward the police, while not unaffected by such factors as the predominantly working-class composition of the force, friendly experiences with "the corner cop," and similar highly popular legitimating police functions, took full cognizance of the function of the police in the class struggle. Such police acltivities as strike control, control of working-class recreational activities, petty harassment of immigrant groups, and tramp act enforcement were solidly located in their anti-working-class context. These were class laws, and the police force that enforced them was the police force of the ruling class. Particularly resented was police "scabbing"-strikebreaking activities ranging from simply protecting scabs to actually operating strike-bound enterprises. The class context of police work took a number of forms. They will be analyzed in the next section.
THE CONSEQUENCES OF CLASS-BASED POLICING FOR LAW ENFORCEMENT
One of the keys to a Marxist analysis of the police institution is that the core police function is analyzed in class terms: a class-based legal order necessarily produces class-biased law enforcement. Some of the major activities of the late-nineteenth-century police forces clearly show the limits of a liberal analysis that ignores class issues and focuses on reform or professionalization. Here, we will briefly sketch the class bias in five important and controversial police enforcement activities: controlling strikes; keeping public order and policing working-class recreational activities, (chiefly drink related); controlling tramps and vagrants and unemployed members of the working class; controlling vice, chiefly gambling and prostitution; and controlling the most common types of felony crimes, the "street-crimes." While all police activity in these areas was controversial, the clearest class-based disagreement over the urban police concerned their attempts to control strikes and other class-linked forms of riotous disorder. Every major industrial city had major industrial disputes, often disrupting urban life for weeks or even months. These occurred repeatedly from 1877 to 1913 and
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after (U.S. Commissioner of Labor, 1901:29). It is hard to overestimate what was at stake in labor strikes of the period-labor did not have the right to collectively bargain conditions of work, living conditions were deplorable, and job related injuries were frequent. The strikes were massive working class collective reaction to the oppression of industrial capitalism, and were the highest form of class struggle in the late nineteenth century.ll While little police time was spent on strikes, the impact of these events was serious and longlasting-both because the stakes for both sides were so high, and because here the class basis of law enforcement often became so clear. Even a cursory examination of the urban strikes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries-both major and minor strikes in large and middle-sized cities-shows quite clearly that local police were most often the major antistrike institution, did effective antistrike work, and almost always took an aggressive stand against the workers and in favor of the corporations. This is true even where the police may have had some sympathy with the workers' cause. For example, in the two cases of police mutiny in Indianapolis and Columbus (the only two I have been able to find in over seventy strike accounts), the rest of the force continued to protect the running of the streetcars by scabs (Ohio State Journal, July 10-Aug. 31, 1910i Indianapolis Star, Nov. 1-14, 1913). The officers who mutinied did so after first protecting the cars. Those in Columbus were severely worn down after weeks of almost 24-hour-a-day strike work. Later in Columbus the state militia was twice called in, but only after the local force was clearly exhausted and the strike had spread beyond the physical capabilities of a two-hundred-man force (Ohio State Journal, July 27-29; Aug. 16-18, 1910). Historian Philip Foner has referred to police mutiny in the Buffalo switchmen's strike of 1892, but the men involved were part-time deputy sheriffs, sworn in specifically for strike duty; no Bulfalo police officers were involved. Indeed, the strikers complained that the city police were busy throwing switches (working as switchmen), setting brakes on the cars (working as brakemen), and beating workers in the strike neighborhood (Buffalo Express, Aug. 19-21, 1892). At the mere hint of sympathy with strikers in Chicago's Pullman strike, a number of officers were suspended from the force, and the rest were put into redoubled strike control work (Myers, 1927:247-48). What then was the normal component of police strike control work? City police generally worked closely with strike-bound businesses, providing guard services for company property. Additional measures involved controlling the streets to protect scabs and disperse crowds of workers. The police also prevented workers from meeting in hired meeting halls, closed saloons in working-class districts during important strikes, and made arrests for the catchall otfense of disorderly conduct, often jailing workingclass leaders.12 Beyond these routine services that the police provided for employers, the urban police often engaged in mass terrorism during strikes. Hundreds of thousands of striking workers were chased, threatened, beaten, and other-
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wise abused by the police. Hundreds were shot, an unknown number of them fatally. During garment strikes in Chicago and New York, young immigrant working women were repeatedly beaten (Myers, 1927:650-727; 797-856). Entire crowds of men, women, and children who turned out in support of striking streetcar workers in Cleveland, st. Louis, Buffalo, Duluth, Houston, Columbus, Indianapolis, Chicago, Providence, Wilkes-Barre, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, and San Francisco were ruthlessly beaten.13 Polish street laborers were attacked and beaten by the police in Buffalo in 1893 and shot in Detroit in 1894 (Buffalo El(press, Aug. 24-26, 1893; Detroit Evening News, April 17-23, 1894). Police in Allegheny City and Pittsburgh repeatedly used massive force against the "Huns," Hungarian working-class immigrants (Allegheny Police Dept., 1889-90; Pittsburgh Police Dept., 1890-95). During the switchmen's strike in Buffalo, railroad workers and their supporters were beaten blocks away from the strike district (Buffalo El(press, Aug. 18-20, 1892). Chicago workers were beaten all over the city during the teamsters' strike of 1905 (Chicago Tribune, April 27 -July 14, 1905). These accounts, taken from a largely conservative press, may well underestimate the frequency of these activities. These police excesses cannot be understood simply as a neutral response to violations of a code of laws that placed employers' property rights far above workers' rights to organize and strike. There is a consistent pattern of police repression here that far exceeds legal requirements, clearly demonstrating police identification with bourgeois rather than working-class interests on an individual basis. The police enforced a legal order that undermined workers' rights within institutional channels. There can be no question that workers resorted to a great deal of violence in attempting to win strikes; but since police and scabs provoked considerable violence, police repression must be seen as more than simply defense. A second controversial and class-biased area of police work was the enforcement of public order laws, mostly involving public drunkenness and disorderly conduct, and saloon laws regulating closing hours or Sunday closing. The police drew criticism from both bourgeois and petty-bourgeois elements (but not from the working class) for failing to enforce these laws. There is not much question that the police were lax in these areas. The meaning of this, though, is complex and easily misinterpreted. The antiworking-class function of public order law enforcement cannot be overestimated. In many communities 60 to 70 percent or more of arrests-or many thousands per year-fell within this category, despite this "laxity." Whole communities were oppressed by the randomness of these arrests, and families had to collect funds for fines or bail money-five or ten dollar fines were one or two weeks' pay for unskilled workers, a terrible hardship on families that often paid their rent from week to week, and bought food almost daily because it could not be effectively stored. Some measure of this hardship can be seen from the fact that nearly half of those fined in Milwaukee had to serve out their time in jail because the money for the fines could not be raised (Milwaukee Police Dept., Annual Reports, 1880-1900l.
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But even with all these arrests, ten times as many jailings could not have stopped the working class from enjoying leisure hours as it chose (as Prohibition later proved). Local police wisely chose to conserve resources by avoiding a costly losing struggle. Even more, they appear to have been willing to sacrifice effectiveness in this area to gain legitimacy for the attainment of more important goals. Police legitimacy with working-class neighborhoods was necessary for them to have any effect at all in trying to control more serious crimes. Finally, liquor law enforcement was a major source of bribes and corruption. Individual saloons were in effect "licensed" to do after-hours work through bribes to police captains and lower ranking officers. Saloon keepers were also powerful petty-bourgeois politicians with an access to workingclass support, and in a position to protect their interests through local political structures (Ouis, 1975:214-24). Public order law enforcement had another class aspect too. It was used selectively to insure some measure of police control of the marginal sectors of the working class, without offending powerful saloon keeper interests or totally wasting police resources. Particular targets often included recently arrived immigrant working-class communities, where urban police were powerful socializing influences. Charged with Americanizing their recreational activities (as industrial discipline was inculcated at the workplace, and children were taught at schoo}), the police were in a position to go far beyond other socialization institutions. In the early 1880s the Buffalo police arrested all the Italian men in Buffalo, searched them, gave them lectures on carrying knives, and let them go (Buffalo Express, April 10, 1884). Milwaukee, Chicago, and Cleveland police engaged in attempts to control the sex lives of working-class young people through well-publicized crackdowns on popular dance halls and pool rooms (Chicago Tribune, Nov. 30, 1903, Feb. 16-26,1906; Milwaukee Reference Bureau, 1912; Howard, 1934:ch. 12). Even a crowded merry-go-round was subjected to careful police surveillance both because of the amount of familiarity exhibited between the sexes and because of its effect in dissipating the earnings of young people (Chicago Tribune, Dec. 8, 1903). Police repression of unemployed workers through anti-tramp and antivagrancy laws became an increasingly important police function after the 1880s, particularly during the periodic recessions that put millions of workers on the road in search of work. These workers became both a symbol of the capitalist system's abuse of the working class and a major source of working-class political protest. "Tramp armies" marched on Washington during the depression of 1893-97 demanding federal works programs. These unemployed workers also became linked to the rising level of strikes and violent protest because they were among the most vocal and militant sectors of the working class. Special "Tramp Acts," passed in many states beginning in the 1880s, criminalized the status of traveling "without visible means of support"-making unemployed workers subject to long jail or prison tenus at the whim of
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local police. These laws went far beyond existing public order laws, automatically criminalizing 25 percent or more of the labor force during depressions, and the entire work forces of whole industries-railroad track workers, lumberjacks, miners, seasonal agricultural workers, and construction laborers. Obviously, just as with other public order offenses, the police could not fully enforce these acts, but full enforcement was not their purpose. Rather they were designed to provide the police wit h a weapon powerful enough to exercise any level of control over this dangerous segment of the working class that local conditions required. Although these laws were erratically applied, at key periods they served as awnll weapons of class repression, aimed at the weakest members of the working class. During the summer of 1894 more than 80 percent of the inmates of the Erie County Penitentiary near Buffalo were held on "tramp" charges (Harring, 1977). The enforcement of vice laws followed the same class lines. Workingclass "dives" were their most common targets. Their working-class patrons were hauled off to jail, while higher class operations were ignored. Working-class prostitutes were locked up in jail or repeatedly shaken down for petty bribes by individual police officers, while again higher status operations met no police interference. Moreover, vice operations probably were the largest source of direct police corruption. Many cities had large numbers of gambling and prostitution "joints," such as Chicago's levee, Milwaukee's River Street, and Buffalo's Canal Street, and they paid high fees for operating privileges. These "fees" as I have pointed out, were important factors in changing the class loyalties of individual police officers (Howard, 1934:ch. 6-8; Fabishak, 1974:ch. 4). Class bias can even be seen in police e~Drts to control major felony offenses. Serious violent and property crime affected all classes, but hit hardest at the working class. There can be no question but that the police forces partly legitimated themselves by genuinely serving workers injured by serious crime. Yet corruption reduced the effectiveness of the police in dealing with serious crime. And workers received much less police protection from this sort of crime than middle-class and wealthy people did. Workers were not given keys to the signal boxes as "reputable" citizens were. Milwaukee police threw the brother of Hattie Zynda, a nine-year-old Polish girl, out of the station when he came to report her missing, and suggested that he look for her in "nickel movie houses." She turned up murdered in the dock district the next day (Milwaukee Sentinel, Dec. 1, 1909). Chief Kohler of Cleveland stretched his own credibility by announcing that the horribly murdered and abused three-year-old son of a butcher had smothered accidentally while playing alone (Howard, 19:J4:ch. 12). Even worse, the police often participated in the robbing of workers by accepting bribes from the professional criminals that preyed on working-class communities. This practice was rife in the mill towns of the Pittsburgh district. Confidence men, holdup men, and their like would hit town, visit the local police, and buy permission to operate unmolested for a short period of
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time, and then leave town. If something went amiss and the criminal was apprehended by one of his victims, the police would return the victim's money and "run the criminal out of town" (Forbes, 1974; Haller, 1975: 310-11).
CONCLUSION This somewhat schematic discussion lays out some of the parameters for the analysis of the urban police in the late nineteeth and early twentieth century. As I suggested at the outset, the police institution in this period cannot be understood outside an understanding of the changing class relations of the period and the role ofthe police institution in the class struggle. The rapid social change of the period produced a complex set of rapidly changing class relations. Social institutions that dealt with this shifting situation assumed a variety of forms. The paradox of the "friendly comer cop" who directed immigrant families to local sources of welfare assistance, brought home lost kids and drunk husbands and wives, and called the ambulance when a friend fell and broke an arm, but who later broke strikes, locked family members in jail, and beat friends, is but one symbol of the period. This is much less a paradox, though, when the necessity of legitimating the police and having relatively friendly and easy access to workers' communities is considered. This necessity demanded a friendly, nonpunitive approach much of the time. Most workers undoubtedly learned to distinguish between the local cop and the police institution where it was appropriate. Similarly, after local power elites saw their day-to-day ability to directly influence police work decline, attacks on some aspects of policing and local police institutions set the stage for "reform" and "professionalization." But this did not indicate that the elite did not appreciate the services that the urban police still provided. They still called up the chief of police when a strike threatened, applied for private keys to patrol boxes, demanded heavier police patrols for their own residential districts, and called the police when juvenile gangs congregated too close to their shops. The entire conception of a "policed society" emerged from the requirements of the ruling class of an increasingly complex urban society. These forms of policing cannot be understood as value-free and inevitable, but as structured by those class requirements. The police departments designed by ruling class civic activists of the mid-nineteenth century were altered by the necessities of the actual practice of policing the class struggle. The earlier forces, dominated (in fact virtually run) by members of the ruling class, gave way to forces dominated by political machines that only partly depended on ruling class support, and that operated, at least in part, according to legal-bureaucratic procedure. These forces were clearly more than simply adjuncts of the machines. When, beginning in the late nineteenth century the political machines proved too unreliable and undependable,
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"reform" movements shifted further toward legal-bureaucratic organizational forms, completing the shift to the police force that we know today.
Notes 1 The contemporary interest in police history can be traced to the dissertations of Roger Lane . (19711 and James Richardson (19701. The most accessible sources of information are a series of laudatory official and semi-official "house" histories of various local police departments. Especially important for this analysis are Flinn and Wilkie, 1887 (reprint 19741, Roe, 1890 (reprint 19761, Sprogle, 1887 (reprint, 19741, Hubbell. 1893, and Mann, 1889. Police reports of the period were often very detailed essays on police work (from the official point of view1accompanied by many statistics. I have used annual reports from Buffalo, Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit, Toledo, Pittsburgh, Allegheny City, Cleveland, Saginaw (Michiganl, San Francisco, and Cincinnati. I also drew on archival and newspaper sources in Milwaukee, Chicago, Buffalo, Toledo, Cleveland, Akron, Detroit, Minneapolis, and Pittsburgh; archives in New York and San Francisco; and newspapers in Indianapolis, Columbus, Cincinnati, Duluth, and Grand Rapids. 2 The most recent historical analyses (Richardson, 1974; Walker, 1977; and Fogelson 19771, all write police history in terms of "reform" and the trend toward "professionalization." Fogelson and Walker contain good critical analyses of the conduct of "professionalized" police forces during the 1960s and 1970s, but not of the foundations of the process nearly a century earlier. Walker (19771 explicitly attempts to I'efute a Marxist analysis of the police in a half page in his introductory chapter, largely with the argument that if the bourgeoisie really controlled the police it would not have had to exer1 so much energy in "refOiming" them, This argument rests on a simplistic understanding of the mechanisms the bourgeoisie uses to maintain its hegemony in social institutions, and neglects the need for peliodic reforms (even in dominated social institutions 1created by more complex police wOl'k in a period of increasing class struggle and by countervailing working-class power within the marginal democratic framework of the American political structure. The phrase "adjunct of the machine" is from Fogelson. 3 Perhaps the most interesting debate on the issue of simple demographic change as the cause of rapid police increase arises from recent quantitative studies: Allan Levett 119751 argues that increases in size were a response to elite fears of the rising prop0l1ion of working-class immigrants in cities; Eric Monkkonen 119771 disagrees, and using similar techniques argues that the most important variable in the expansion of police forces is simply increasing city population. My findings more closely agree with Levett's, but rely on qualitative analysis of the political process of expanding police forces, rather than on statistical analysis, which does not necessarily establish causality. Clear'Iy there is a "correlation" between expanding city size and expanding police forces, but the causal process is much more complex than this correlation suggests. 4 The police captains of the New York City Police Department seem to have exercised a particularly high degree of independence from headquarters (Richardson, 1970:ch. 9; Levine, 1971), One significant consequence of their power was that New York City adopted an effective patrol wagon and signal system only in 1898, far later than any other major city in America, and after nearly a hundred other cities had adopted the system. 5 Hays's (1964) persuasive article on the class basis of reform movements has many implications for students of police reform that have not been adequately grasped in existing literature. Returning, for example, to Walker's (19771 ar'gument about who really controlled the police, we can see that elites needed virtually complete control of the police institution so as to create conditions favorable for the expansion of their class interests. Working-class political power, under our democractic framework, reduced their ability to do so, neces-
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sitating continual reform movements, beginning in the 1850s 1I0ng before the 1890s where Fogelson and Walker locate them), continuing through the present. 6 The "Golden Rule" policy of Cleveland Police Chief Fred Kohler was one of the most important and complex police developments of the early twentieth century, and one of the few efforts at police reform that both came from within the police establishment and aimed at altering the role of the police in urban society. The roots of the policy were in Ohio's strong Christian progressive tradition. Samuel "Golden Rule" Jones of Toledo had, as early as 1894, focused attention on the exploitation of working-class people by the criminal justice system, particularly the police. Chief Kohler actively promoted "his" policy around the country, particularly choosing as his forum the Annual Meetings of the International Association of Chiefs of Police. In Detroit 11908), Buffalo 11909), and Birmingham 11910) he vigorously championed his policy. In Birmingham it was finally adopted by the Association. Although elements of the program were tried in dozens of cities, no one embraced it with Kohler's enthusiasm IIA.C.P., 1908-101. Kohler's own motivations may have been somewhat contradictory. He was a "man about town" and closely allied with some of the saloon interests in Cleveland. Obviously going "soft" on common drunks fit in closely with those interests. Kohler cannot be regarded as a "working-class"-controlled police chief. His men viciously broke a streetcar strike in 1908, and beat up women and children in a garment strike in 1911. He treated many rank-and-file police officers badly, demoting them at will and transferring them as a form of harassment !Howard, 1934; Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 16-24, 1908; and June 5-Aug. 20, 19111. 7 Two recent studies of large city police departments that were "unreformed" Ihence under "working-class control" in the analysis of conventional police historians), actually establish that something much more complex was occurring IShaw, 1972; Haller, 19751. 8 Corruption as a key to understanding the cross-class character of policing, and the ease with which rank-and-file police officers have often betrayed working-class causes, emerges quite clearly in Ed Greer's 119791 history of the police in Gary, Indiana, a steel industry company town. 9 Recent work on police productivity, published under the sponsorship of the Police Foundation, shows quite clearly that class distinctions between police management and rankand-file police workers are very important for understanding the contradictions within police institutions today IWolfJe and Heaphy, 19751. Officers are becoming more highly. paid, highly educated, and "professionalized" at the same time that police administrators are trying to get more work out of each officer by organizing and rationalizing their work. This process has recurred throughout the history of the urban police. 10 Emil Seidel and the Milwaukee Socialists became popular with many rank-and-file officers in part because they recognized the oppressive nature of police working conditions, and fought to improve them. Chief Jansen, an enemy of the Socialists, vigorously resisted, once arguing that it was impossible to administer a police force where officers got two days off each month. Although Milwaukee wage levels were high, such issues as hours of work, days off, and departmental discipline, all linked to the control of conditions of labor and of the labor process, were of great importance to the rank and file ICarlin, 1961:54-60). 11 Part of the picture of working-class unrest during the 1880-1900 period can be seen from simple strike statistics. New York City had 5,090 strikes involving 962,470 workers; Chicago, 1,737 strikes involving 593,000 workers; Pittsburgh and Allegheny, 500 strikes involving 175,795 workers; SI. Louis, 256 strikes involving 71,889 workers; Cincinnati, 250 strikes involving 57,098 workers; Cleveland, 207 strikes involving 45,569 workers; Milwaukee, 187 strikes involving 38,977 workers; and Buffalo, 164 strikes involving 40,627 workers. These data do not include strike supporters, or strikes by nonworkers, such as the unemployed Polish laborers' self-proclaimed "strikes" to gain employment at decent wages. The frequency of strikes increased after 1900 IU.S. Department of Labor, 1901:291.
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12 These examples are drawn from three typical major strikes: the Buffalo railroad switchmen's strike of 1892 IBuffalo El'press, Aug. 14 and 2.2, 1892.1; the Milwaukee streetcar strike of 1898 IMilwaukee Sentinel, May 4-13, 18981: and the Brown Hoisting Company strike in Cleveland in 1896 ICleveland Plain Dealer, May 2.5--Aug. 10, 18961. Chief Taylor of Philadelphia made parallel suggestions in his speech on the subject at the International Association of Chief's Annual Meeting in Birmingham in 1910 IBirmingham Age-Herald, May 11, 19101. ·"his. was a major address, and Taylor was well known for his vicious antistrike work in a streetcar strike the same year. 13 Some of the most important strikes in late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century cities were the streetcar strikes. There were dozens in addition to those listed, and most of them involved substantial community mobilization in Sllpport of strikers, largely because streetcar companies, often held by national conglomerates or syndicates, so exploited the general public. The companies similarly exploited workers, and engaged in a national effoI1 to remain nonunion. The strikes were also exceptionally violent. The companies retained "professional" strikebreakers-often thugs-who moved from city to city. Streetcar property was hard to protect because, unlike a plant. its lines covered dozens of miles. See Richter 118951 for one account of a particularly vicious streetcar strike in Brooklyn, and Cox 119701 and Molloy 119781 for accounts of streetcar strikes in other cities.
References Allegheny Police Department 11889-19001. Annual Reports. Bremner, Robert H. 119541. "Police, Penal. and Parole Policies in Cleveland and Toledo." The American Journal of Economics and Sociology 14::387-98. Buffalo Police Department 11880-19101. Annual Reports. Callow, Alexander 119761. The City Boss in America. New York: Oxford llniversity Press. Carlin, Kathleen M. 119611. "Chief Janssen and the 'Thirty-Three-Year War.' Law Enforcement in an Urban Society: The Concepts of Police Chief Janssen." MasteI-'s thesis, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Caye, James Francis 119711. "The Pittsburgh Police and the Roundhouse Riot." Master's thesis, University of Pittsburgh. Chicago Police Department 11975 -19001. Annual Reports. Cleveland Police Department 11890-19151. Annual Reports. Cox, Harold E.119701. "The Wilkes-Barre Street Railway Strike of 1915." Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 94111:75-94. Dacus, J. A.119691.Annals of the Great Strikes. New York: Arno Press Reprint. Dawley, Alan C. 119761. Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn, Massachusetts. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Duis, Perry 119751. "The Saloon in a Changing Chicago." Chicago History 4 141:2.14-2.4. Fabishak, Mary Clare 119741. "The Rhetoric of Urban RefOIm: Milwaukee During the Progressive Era." Master's thesis, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Flinn, John, and John Wilkie 119741. History of the Chicago Police. New York: Arno Press. Reprint of 1887 ed. Fogelson, Robert M. 119771. Big City Police. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Forbes, James 119741. "The Reverse Side." In Paul U. Kellogg led.l, Wage-Earning Pittsburgh. New York: Arno Press Reprint. Greer, Edward 119791. "The Police." Ch. 5 in Big Steel: Black Politics and Corporate Power in Gary. New York: Monthly Review Press.
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Haller, Mark 119751. "Historical Roots of Police Behavior: Chicago 1890-1925." Law and Society Review 10 121:303-23. . Haning, Sidney L. 119761. "The Buffalo Police, 1870-1915: Industrialization, Social Unrest and the Development of the Police Institution." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, Madison. Haning, Sidney L. 119771. "Class Conflict and the Enforcement of the Tramp Acts in Buffalo, 1892-94." Law and Society Review 11 151: 873-911. Howard, N. R. 119341. "I, Fred Kohler." Photocopy of series of articles appearing in the Cleveland Plain Dealer beginning February 2, held in Cleveland Public Library. Hubbell, Mark S. 118931. Our Police and Our City. Buffalo: Bensler and Wesley. International Association of Chiefs of Police 119741. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting. New York: Arno Press. Reprint of proceedings from 1893-1900. Jeffries-Jones, Rhodri 119781. Violence and Reform in American History. New York: Franklin Watts. Johnson, David R.119791 Policing the Urban Underworld. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Ketchum, George 119671. "Municipal Police Refonn: A Comparative Study of Law Enforcement in Cincinnati, Chicago, New Orleans, New York and St. Louis, 1844-1877." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Missouri, Columbia. Kolko, Gabriel 119761. Main Currents in Modern American History. New York: Harper &. Row. Lane, Roger 119671. Policing the City: Boston, 1822-1885. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Levett, Allan E. 119751. "Centralization of City Police in the Nineteenth-Century United States." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan. Levine, Jerald E. 119711. "Police, Parties, and Polity: The Bureaucratization, Unionization, and Professionalization of the New York City Police." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, Madison. Mandelbaum, Seymour (19651. Boss Tweed's New York. New York: Wiley. Maniha, John K. (19701. "The Mobility of Elites in the Bureaucratizing Organization: The St. Louis Police Department, 1861-1961." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan. Mann, Henry 118891. Our Police: A History of the Pittsburgh Police Force. City of Pittsburgh. Marx, Karl (19671. Capital, vol. 1. Tr. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. New York: International Publishers. Milwaukee Muncipal Reference Bureau 119121. "Dance Halls." File of newspaper clippings covering ten years of dance hall regulation in Milwaukee. Milwaukee Police Department 11880-19001. Annual Reports. Molloy, Scott 119781. "Rhode Island Communities and the 1902 Cannen's Strike." Radical History Review 17 (Springl: 75-98. Monkkonen, Eric 119761. "The Unifonned Police: A Dispersion Mode)." Unpublished paper. Montgomery, David 119781. "Gutman's Nineteenth Century America." Labor History 19: 416-28. Myers, Howard B. 119291. "The Policing of Labor Disputes in Chicago: A Case Study." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago. Ozanne, Robert 119671.A History of Labor Management Relations. Madison: University ofWisconsin Press. Piper, August 119041. "Report of an Investigation of the Discipline and Administration of the Police Department of the City of Chicago." Chicago: City Club of Chicago. Pittsburgh Police Department (1887-19001. Annual Reports. Richardson, James 119701. The New York Police: Colonial Times to 1900. New York: Oxford Un:versity Press.
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Richardson. James 119741. Urban Police in the United States. Port Washington. N.Y.: Kennikat Press. Richter. G. Emil 118951. "Monopolism and Militarism in the City of Churches: A Review of the Brooklyn Street Railway Strike." Arena 13 !Junel: 98-117. Roe. George M. 119761. Our Police. New York: AMS. Reprint of 1890 ed. Seidman. Robert B. 119781. The State, Law, and Development. New York: SI. Martin's Press. Shaw. Douglas V. 119721. "The Making of an Immigrant City: Ethnic and Cultural Conflict in Jersey City. New Jersey. 1850-1977." PhD. dissertation. lInh'ersity of Rochester. Amo Press Reprint. 1976. Sprogle. Howard 0.119741. The Philadelphia Police: Past and Present. New York: Amo Press. Reprint of 1887 ed. Steffens. Lincoln 119311. Autobiography. New York: Harcourt. Brace. Taft. Phillip. and Phillip Ross 119691. "American Labor Violence: Its Causes. Character. and Outcome." In Hugh Davis and Ted Gurr leds.l. The History of Violence in America. New York: Praeger. United States Commissioner of Labor 119011. "Strikes and Lockouts." 16th Annual Report. Washington. D.C. United States Depal1ment of Commerce. Bureau of the Census 119041. "Municipal Electric Fire Alarm and Police Patrol Systems." Bulletin 11. Walker, Samuel 119741. "Law and Order in Scranton: The Role of the Police in an Industrial Community. 1866-1884." Unpublished paper. Walker. SamueI11977I.A Critical History of Police Re,form. Lexington. Mass.: Lexington Books. Watts, Eugene 119731. "The Police in Atlanta. 1890-1905." Journal of Southern History 39121: 165-82. Wolfle. Joan. and John F. Heaphy 119751. Readings on Productivity in Policing. Lexington. Mass.: Lexington Books. Woods. Joseph G.119731. "The Progressives and the Police: Urban Reform and the Professionalization of the Los Angeles Police." Ph.D. dissertation. University of Califol'llia. Los Angeles.
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The Political Economy of Policing Steven Spitzer
Richard Quinney has argued that to understand the political economy of criminal justice "is to understand a crucial part of the capitalist system" 11977:1081. If we are to discover the inner workings of capitalism through the activities and structures that we call the "criminal justice system," we must base our inquiry on a clear and systematic conception of the relationship between capitalist development and the changing character of crime control. We vvill examine the political economy of policing from a historical, materialistic, and dialectical perspective. Our perspective vvill be historical in the sense that it examines how capitalism (or any other mode of productionl transforms and is in turn transformed over time by the organization, the problem focus, and the methods of control that characterize police systems. It should attempt to explain, for example, how the transformation of feudalism into capitalism, or laissez faire into monopoly capitalism has influenced the organization, priorities, and focus of police work. In other words, in adopting a historical perspective, we recognize the dynamic features of the social formations under scrutiny. Instead of treating capitalism as a monolithic and static entity, we need to remember that it has changed significantly since its birth and that the shape and substance of the relationships we choose to study are continually modified.! Our perspective vvill be materialistic in that it starts vvith an examination of the productive forces and the relations of production (Marx's central analytic categoriesl under a given set of sociohistorical conditions. This materialistic perspective stands in clear contrast to that of conventional sociology, which emphasizes ideas, motives, attitudes, and beliefs as the methodological and theoretical starting points for investigations of policing (Skolnick, 1966; Westley, 1970; Reiss, 1971).
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While it is important to ground a study of the political economy of policing in a thorough consideration of economic structure, we must avoid becoming reductive. At best, the relationship between patterns of economic organization and policing is indirect. It is mediated by a number of different structures, processes, and contradictions that make it impossible to deduce the precise anatomy of the economic order from a study of police work, or vice versa. These mediating influences will be explained below. By "loosen. ing" the functional relationship between Grime control and economic organization (Greenberg, 1976) and acknowledging that the form and content of legal structures are rarely, if ever, a "direct expression of the interests, narrowly defined, of the bourgeoisie" (Tushnet, 1978:96), we can retain a materialistic focus without succumbing to reductionism or oversimplification. Although it is clear that political arrangements and structures, like the police, are tied to and conditioned by economic relationships, we cannot assume a simple, direct relationship. What makes the study of policing materialistic is not, therefore, the positing of a frictionless economic determinism, but rather an emphasis on the concrete conditions of social existence and the significance of these conditions in the changing relationship between the economic order, the state, and the targets of the state's coercive measures. In analyzing these coercive measures, we must not forget that the state is more than a reflexive cudgel brought to bear on the rebellious and troublesome. It is a sophisticated system of incentives and disincentives that is far more complex and diversified, and far more dependent on ideological controls than any "police state" scenario would lead us to suspect. Others who have tried to substitute a materialistic for a subjectivist analysis of crime and crime control have uncritically accepted an instrumentalist theory of the state. This theory defines the state "in terms of the instrumental exercise of power by people in strategic positions, either directly through the manipulation of state policies or indirectly through the exercise of pressure on the state" (Gold, et al., 1975, Part 1:34). The problems with this theory are that (1) there is no systematic analysis of how the strategies and actions of ruling class groups are limited by impersonal structural causes; 12) it fails to take into account the significance of struggles and conflicts of interest both within the state itself and between the state and the class that it ostensibly represents; and (3) there are important realms of state-related activity which are clearly not manipulated by specific capitalists or coalitions, such as culture, ideology and legitimacy
and these realms "possess a degree of autonomy which tends to place them outside the realm of simple manipulation" (Gold, et al., 1975, Part 1:35). It might even be argued that the effectiveness of the police as agents of class rule and representatives of the capitalist legal order depends, at least in part, on the ability of the state to act with a certain degree of independence.
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In an important critique of the conspiracy theory of criminal law, Steinert (1977:439) has pointed out that for the state to truly selVe the logic of capital
accumulation and protect capitalist interests as a whole, it must "step out of the competition between capitalists" and "have a certain amount of independence from capital and its factions." Because of its relative independence and autonomy, "the State cannot be collapsed back into, and 'read' as if directly expressive of the narrow class interests of a particular ruling group. It is not, except in a mediated form, the 'executive committee of the ruling class'" (Hall, et aI., 1977). Two examples of the application of the instrumentalist theory to American police systems may be found in The Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove (Center for Research on Criminal Justice, 1975, hereafter CRCJ) and in Richard Quinney's Class, State and Crime (1977). While these works represent important first steps in the development of the political economy of policing, they also suffer from a preoccupation with the repressive and instrumental features of police organization and behavior. In emphasizing the "functional" contribution of police work to maintaining capitalist rule (Quinney, 1977:115-16) and policing's tie "to the repressive needs of the system as a whole" (CRCJ, 1975:11; my emphasis), these works define policing in terms of its functions for either the ruling class or the capitalist system as a whole. But this connection is developed at the cost of interpreting all variations in the structure and organization of policing in terms of the competitive interests and activities of two specific groups: capitalists and the working class. While it is certainly true that the intentions and actions of these two groups will have an important impact on the form and content of policing, by ignoring the complex and changing structural context within which relations between them develop and unfold, the instrumentalists cannot move beyond an interest-group model of social order and social change. From their perspective, when expenditures in policing increase, the increase is related to the use-value of criminal justice workers in maintaining domestic order, making society safe for capital accumulation, and protecting class relations (Quinney, 1977:115-16). Similarly, since it is assumed that "the instruments of force and coercion are on the side of the capitalist class," resulting in the fact that "much of the activity of the working class struggle is defined as criminal" (Quinney, 1977:59), the analysis of crime and crime control is narrowed to the arena of class struggle. By devoting most of their attention to "the dialectics of police power, its larger political functions in society and its relationship to those ruling interests that are beyond incrimination" (Platt and Cooper, 1974:5), the instrumentalists have exaggerated the political side of the political-economic matrix.2 This orientation does not simply ignore underlying economic relationships and contradictions that bind the police, more or less firmly, to their repressive role; it forces us to reconstruct an understanding of poliCing entirely through the prism of political interests and activities. However, we cannot develop a materialist conception of policing by limiting our investigation to the relationships between police policies and procedures on the
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one hand, and the interests and "needs" of the capitalist class on the other. On the contrary, our understanding of police work and police institutions in class society must be forged from an examination of the entire framework of material .relationships, conditions, and conflicts within which these armngements and interests emerge. Finally, our perspective on the political economy of policing will be dialectical. A process is dialectical when it is based on an inner contradiction that cannot be reconciled within an existing set of relationships (Colletti, 1975; Applebaum, 1978). Because the contradiction is inherent in a particular configuration of historical conditions, it can only be resolved by creating a new social form. Moreover, "because of this dialectical development out of contmdiction, nothing is consltant; eVeIything that comes into being already carries the seed of its own decay" (Reich, 1966:28). Even a superficial examination of police practices and organization over the last three centuries reveals extensive changes in response to internal and external forces (Spitzer and Scull, 1977a). To understand how these forces develop, interact, and come to influence policing under capitalism is to begin to construct a dialectical approach. \tVhile it is clear that we must neither make the dialectic into a fetish, nor use it as a means of "predicting" the fate of capitalist armngements,3 it can become an important analytical tool in understanding endogenous sources of change in police systems, the uneven rate at which change occurs, and the way these changes are related to broader contradictions in capitalist life. One of the most important advantages of being sensitive to the dialectical character of change in police systems is that it enables us to understand not only why policing emerged and changed under specific historical conditions, but also why it did not. Because a dialectical view aleI1s us to the fact that social formations always "exhibit the simultaneous existence of stabilizing and disruptive elements," and encourages us to study stable social structures "with reference to the elements which undermine them, and social change with reference to its constraints" (Johnson, 1976:901, we are better able to grasp the vicissitudes of reform and retrenchment through which policing has evolved. Put in a slightly different way: the dialectical model gives us a way of interpreting continuities and directions in the development of policing without either missing the pattern exhibited in general historical tendencies (rationalization, centralization of control, bureaucratization, etc.), or turning those tendencies into ineluctable laws. In the political economy of policing, therefore, our task will be to comprehend the necessary, yet contradictory relationship between policing and the transformation of capitalist society. What is perhaps most important in this endeavor is that we not confuse policing with its modern personification-the public "cop." In the discussion that follows, therefore, policing will not be examined as a limited set of actions by a group of public (or even private) officials. It will be understood, rather, as a pattern of social development through which coercive regulation is established, decomposed, and recomposed in class societies. In this formulation, the important
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issue is not why police officials think or behave as they do, but why and how a particular system of coercive control develops and is transformed under specific historical conditions.
THE RATIONALIZATION OF SOCIAL RELATIONS AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF POLICING The policing of social life under capitalism means enforcing public order and intimidating the working class, as well as protecting the assets, profits, and all concrete forms of capital itself. It is this feature of policing, with its emphasis on the overt and repressive control of labor by capital, that has received the majority of the "new criminology's" attention (CJRC, 1975j Harring and McMullin, 1975). However, we have more to gain from recognizing that policing emerged as part of a far more general historical process. This process we may describe as the rationalization of social relations. In the discussion that follows I will argue that it has significantly shaped the social organization of policing under capitalism. More specifically, I will suggest that the forms of policing which have emerged over the last two centuries are both a reflection of and a basis for the progressive rationalization of 80ciallife in capitalist societies. To establish a baseline against which these developments can be compared, I will first examine the organization of policing in several different types of precapitalist societies. Then I will show how the economic and political setting of eighteenth-century England necessitated new forms of policing. Finally, I will show how the police continue to be implicated in the ongoing contradictions of capitalism.
Precapitalist policing Under feudal and patrimonial forms of domination it was only possible to rule at a distance. One reason for this was the political incapacity of ruling elites. The limited technical ability and superintending resources of the precapitalist state made it hard to penetrate the day-to-day lives of subject populations. In consequence, techniques of managing social conduct tended to be indirect, crude, and sluggish, and in many cases ad hoc. For example, at an early level of political development it was necessary for certain patrimonial and feudal rulers to establish a system of collective liability to effect even nominal control over social behavior. This arrangement, typified in the English system of the frankpledge (Lee, 1901: ch. 1), provided a mechanism for enforcing compliance by holding entire local populations responsible for the conduct of their members. Lee (1901:4-5) describes how this system of collective responsibility operated under the early AngloSaxon kings: The Hundred ... was a group of ten tythings, under a responsible head. Hundreds as well as tythings had definite police functions to perform: when a
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crime was committed, information had to be at once given to the hundredmen and tythingmen of the district, and it was their duty to pursue, arrest, and bring to justice all peace-breakers. In the event of non-appearance of a culprit at the court of justice to which he was summoned, his nine fellow pledges were allowed one month in which to produce him, when, if he was not forthcoming, a fine was exacted, the liability falling, in the first place, on any property of the fugitive that might be available, in the second place, on the tything, and-should both these sources prove insufficient to satisfy the claim-on the Hundred. Furthermore, the headboroughs were required to purge themselves on oath, that they were not privy to the flight of the offender, and swear that they would bring him to justice if possible. A remarkably similar, although far more sophisticated and hierarchicalized, system was organized in China under the Ch'ing dynasty during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This system, known as the paochia, is described by Hsiao (1960:45-46). Each inhabitant was required to report to his pao-chia head the presence of criminals and the commission of criminal or culpable acts; the pao-chia heads were responsible for reporting them to the local authorities. The failure of anyone to perform the required duty would bring punishment not only upon himself but upon all his neighbors who belong to his ten-household group. Since obviously the police duties of the pao-chia could be carried out only if records of the inhabitant were available, the imperial government imposed penalties on any person who failed to register.... Under this system the people became potential informers against wrongdoers or lawbreakers among their own neighbors-in other words they were made to spy upon themselves. Such mutual fear and suspicion were instilled in their minds that few of them dared to venture into seditious schemes with their fellow villagers. Thus even if individual criminals could not be completely eliminated, the opportunity for instigating concerted uprisings was greatly reduced. At least in principle, systems such as the frankpledge andpao-chia would seem to permit a reasonable degree of control over the manners, morals, and rebellious tendencies of local communities. In practice, however, their efficacy as modalities of fine-grained rule was frequently compromised. As Lee points out, the frankpledge "can only be applied with success to.an agricultural community that is content to live always in the same spot, or whose migratory instincts the authorities are prepared to suppress." Furthermore, "such a system puts a premium both on the concealment of crime, and on the commission of perjury, since a tything had every inducement to forswear itself in order to escape the infliction of a fine or to save one of its members (1901:13). In China too, compliance became a problem "since landowners had a stronger motive than other inhabitants to evade registration." Not surprisingly, "the law provided heavier punishment for such delinquency among them" (Hsiao, 1960:45). But even these penalties eventually proved inadequate, and" as time went on, disturbances occurred, and the authorities
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had to raise bands of militia to deal with them, thus acknowledging the inadequacy of the pao-chia machinery" (Van der Sprenkel, 1962:47). In sum, the absence of direct information about miscreants, the centrifugal pressures of local centers of power, and the structural incentives to avoid collective penalties, militated against using "integral systems" like the frankpledge and pao-chia as methods of policing. In other instances of precapitalist social organization, political control was achieved by a combination of bribing, using paid informants, and cultivating and/or intimidating local leaders. In these cases, ruling-at-adistance required the articulation of elite and subelite interests in such a way that general patterns of exploitation and domination could be superimposed on existing relations of production and dp,pendence. Under conditions of this sort, most commonly found in certain redistributive economies and hydraulic civilizations (Wittfogel, 1957), political and economic objectives were frequently achieved by coopting and monitoring local centers of power. For the cooptation to prove effective, however, a chain of legal liability had to be forged between the masses, their immediate overlords, and the dominant elite (Genovese, 1974:661-65). An interesting example of these relationships is found in Tokugawa Japan, where, In order to maintain the Shogunate and wal"lior supremacy, the primary concern of the new positive law was to enforce compliance with the status law by a harsh law of crimes. The technique was to give the repl'esentatives of groups both unfettered authOlity and complete responsibility for the peJ1'OImance and conduct of the group members based on principles of \1calious liability. Individuals were subordinated summarily to the authority of their chief, who was responsible to the Shogunate for their conduct; against their chief they had no legal lights, only the duty to obey. Within this authOlitarian li'amewOl'k the whole area of "private law" was left largely to the customalY practice of the locale, to be enforced by the local authorities" iHenderson, 1965, I:61l.
The fact that local elites had to be kept in place and manipulated under Tokugawa law, rather than totally destroyed, is one indication of the political and ideological weaknesses characteristic of certain types of precapitalist states. Moore (1958:69) describes the operation of another such arrangement under the Inca empire: Another imp0l1ant consideration is the jealous b'l.larding of power and sumptuary symbols on the part of central government. While local rulers were not removed when conquered, and while they were not stripped of their property, neither did they enjoy their previous governing powers. They could not exploit the local popUlation for their own ends beyond a fixed point. But it is unnecessary to assume that this was entirely a question of central government benevolence .... Far more probably, there was a great concern lest there be rebellion against the central government or competition with it for resources. Even the Inca governors, who must have fOlmed a relatively trusted
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inner circle, were spied on, checked on, and limited by law to dependence on the Inca for some sumptumy al1icles. This fear of local strength suggests that a good deal of local power and loyalty remained in the conquered kingdoms.
But the reliance on indirect controls was not limited to early empires and "despotic" societies. Even in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century England we can find evidence of social controls that were established and improvised in the absence of effective means of direct surveillance and punitive certainty. In these cases, the techniques used seemed to reflect the relative underdevelopment of a fiscal base (Ardant, 1975), resistance to political centralization (Barker, 1944), and the lingering hegemony of the squirearchy and the squires' preference for ceremony, paternalism, and private rule (Hay, 1975).
Entrepreneurial forms of policing Crime control in eighteenth-century England was based on the theory that fear and greed could be harnessed as a single force to orchestrate a type of popular-based discipline of the "criminal classes." Without an effective public police system or other mechanism to "penetrate the social body," domestic pacification could only be attempted by expanding the number of offenses punishable by death on the one hand tRadzinowicz, 1948), and broadening the network of rewards and pardons to stimulate "community responsibility" on the other (Pringle, 1958; Spitzer and Scull, 1977a). Since it was not possible to rely on either direct supervision or bribed subelites to achieve regulation of refractory urban populations, the strategy of crime control came to be based on suspicion, betrayal, and appeals to the selfinterest of the criminal and respectable classes alike. In Pringle's words (1958:212), the architects of legal controls came to ask "private individuals for no higher motive than self-interest, and were confident that they could, by a system of incentives and deterrents-rewards and punishments, bribes and threats-so exploit human greed and fear that there would be no need to look for anything so nebulous and unrealistic as public spirit." In contrast to the Inca and Tokugawa patterns, eighteenth-century England could not manage evildoers by "proxy" through manipulation of traditional subelites such as clan chiefs or rulers of conquered territories. In this instance the social organization of policing and crime control was thus emergent rather than imposed. The peculiar relationship between weak government and disorganized community life on the one hand, and the widespread use of rewards to encourage cooperation on the other, led to the appearance of at least one type of relatively specialized group mediating between the errant masses and the ruling elite-the "thief-takers." As middlemen between thieves and victims, and as operatives on both sides of the law, thief-takers were in a strategic position to establish an imperium in imperio: a concentration of local power over criminal classes which had to be acknowledged, if not
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condoned, by the state (Rock, 1979). Although thief-takers were typically receivers of stolen property themselves, they were regularly called upon to regulate and provide official access to the nether world of crime. Perhaps the most notorious and powerful of English thief-takers who operated at this time was Jonathan Wild. By the 1720s Wild was able to establish a virtual monopoly over thief-catching, receiving, and thieving in southern England. As the "Thief-taker General" (Howson, 1970) Wild organized a lucrative enterprise as a broker in stolen goods and became a quasi-legitimate precursor to the modern police. The paradoxical position that he occupied as a "subcontractor" in both crime and its control is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that before his career was cut short by public execution in 1725, he was called upon by the Privy Council to supply advice "about ways and means to check the growing number of highway robberies" (Howson, 1970:125). By straddling the ill-defined boundary between crime and law enforcement, Wild became the personification of a system which could neither separate the thief-taker from the thief, nor penetrate the local milieu within which crime had become a way of life. The use of private entrepreneurs to regulate the underclass may actually have encouraged the very behavior they were supposed to suppress. Thieftakers consorted with organized thieves in committing an offense and then acted as a go-between to effect the return of the stolen property for a feei they also entrapped innocent victims into crimes to obtain rewards. Thus the attempt to harness private greed on behalf of a collective interest in crime control was unsuccessful (Spitzer and Scull, 1977b). The use of mercenaries to govern and/or suppress local populations was also common under precapitalist political organization. Where indigenous leaders and local functionaries could not be trusted, patrimonial or feudal elites frequently brought in paid agents to administer, tax, or coerce local populations. Their objective was to insure the loyalty of their administrators by "the use of officials who did not come from socially privileged strata, or even were foreigners, and who therefore did not possess any social power and honor of their own but were entirely dependent for these on the lord" (Weber, 1968, 111:1043). As long as these mercenaries were alien (stammfremd) to the subjects, they were less likely to sympathize with or support those whom they were expected to control. The advantages of mercenary-based control thus derived from its ability to insulate the immediate administrators and regulators from community ties, and to insure that supervision was organized in the direct interests of the sovereign. But these relational characteristics of the mercenary system were also its fatal flaw. Since mercenaries were necessarily "private" representatives of those who could afford their services, it was virtually impossible for them to legitimate their actions in the eyes of those they governed. Although they might claim that they were acting to restore "public" order and protecting "public" interests, it was highly unlikely that they could convince the subject population that they were enforcing anything other than the sovereign's "personal" rules. The absence of a legitimate foundation for
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the power of mercenaries, at least for their role as managers of domestic populations, meant that this form of policing frequently proved unstable. The politically transparent and personal character of policing for profit, as well as the fiscal limitations of precapitalist states (Weber, 1968; Ardant, 1975), restricted its use to situations where rebellion was imminent or traditional forms of "self-policing" had completely broken down. But in spite of its origins in precapitalist systems of domination, it is interesting to note that under certain circumstances mercenary-based policing could provide the basis for establishing a capitalist order. In the "company towns" that grew rapidly in the United States after the Civil War (Brandes, 1976), a variety of factors combined to stimulate the development of mercenary-based controls (Spitzer andl SculL 1977bl. Company towns were modeled, to an extent, after the feudal manors of an earlier era. At least initially, relations between workers and the "captains of industry" were paternalistic: they combined the immigrant laborer's willingness' to judge "the economic and social behavior of local industrialists by ... older and more humane values" (Gutman, 1963:43) with the proclivities of these industrialists toward a personal style of rule. However, under the pressure of working-class militancy in the last quarter of the nineteenth century (there were nearly 23,000 strikes between 1880 and 1890 alone) and the unreliable and sometimes hostile reactions of local middle classes and law enforcement officials (Johnson, 1976), industrialists began to look outside the local community to obtain more effective repressive controls. The hiring of private police during this period thus represented an effort on the part of industrial elites to preserve their hegemony and economic superiority within "closed towns." Strikebreaking and labor espionage were among the most important services provided by agencies like the Pinkertons' (Horan, 19671, which were quite willing to provide "private police" under conditions where local enforcement was either inadequate or antagonistic to the interests of the capitalist class. The demise of this "big stick" system was related to (11 the decline of company towns, (2) the "socialization" of the costs of labor controL (3) the increased power of organized labor, and (41 major changes in the economic infrastructure itself (Spitzer and Scull, 1977bl. But no matter what its proximate cause, it is clear that the use of mercenaries to divide and coerce an industrial proletariat was only possible under a peculiar combination of historical circumstances associated with primary capital accumulation and rapid industrial growth. As closed towns were gradually engulfed by and absorbed into the increasingly atomized and impersonal society of twentieth-century corporate America, the structural supports for the mercenary system were swept away along with the patrimonial relationships upon which it was built. Moreover, once it was no longer possible to achieve a "monopoly by exclusion" in company towns, it became evident that the private authority under which mercenaries operated had to give way in favor of "publicly" legitimated (rational-legal) forms of coercive control.
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The rationalization of surplus extraction Up to this point, we have been examining the way in which the political shortcomings of precapitalist social formations prepared fertile ground for the development of policing arrangements to support a system of indirect rule. But if we are to understand how policing has become part of a far more direct and intensive system of social control, we must also consider the economic forces that have supported and shaped these political arrangements. Before full-blown capitalist economies emerged, most state systems treated their populations as economic resources only in a very limited sense. For the most part, domestic populations under slavery-based, feudal, "Asiatic," and mercantile productive systems were regarded as a relatively inexhaustible reservoir of wealth and labor. The orientation of precapitalist elites toward the laboring and dependent classes and their efforts to regulate these classes were thus both e}(tractive and e}(tensive. The economies were socially extractive in the sense that the economic value of the laboring class was defined almost completely in terms of the level of surplus value that could be pumped out of it under existing conditions of social and economic organization. The system "proceeded essentially by levying (levying on money or products by royal, seignorial, ecclesiastical taxation, levying on men or time by corvees or press-ganging, by locking up or banishing vagabonds)" (Foucault, 1977:219). Because the productive capacities of domestic popUlations were assumed to be finitelimited by the physical and mental capacities which were brought to the work setting-the elites gave little, if any, attention to improving the quality of the work force. Accordingly, methods of controlling and exploiting the population were primarilye}(tensive; treating both labor power and material wealth as fixed quantities that could only be increased by expanding the e}(tent of exploitable resources (land, labor, raw materials, etc.) available to the elites. In other words, what was of paramount importance to precapitalist elites was the number of laborers who could be employed and the proportion of their absolute wealth (surplus labor) that could be appropriated. Because economic relationships were cast in these terms, the elite limited their interest in the masses to establishing the amount of deployable surplus and labor (including military labor) that could be plundered, taxed, tithed and otheJwi.se transferred from the laborers to the elite, and to insuring the willingness of domestic populations to acquiesce in these arrangements. Under these conditions the majority of the population was affected less by what the state did to them than by what it did not do to them in order to preselVe their taxpaying capacity. The peasant, that is, was exploited for taxes, he was occasionally impressed into the army, he was compelled to perform various kinds of (mostly locally inspired) forced labour on roads, buildings or manori but he was otheIWise hardly touched by central policies. In his habits of work and
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leisure, in his beliefs and values, he was barely affected by interests of state or by any rationalizing pressure. (Moffett, 1971:157) As long as the minimum conditions of domination and exploitation could be met, that is, as long as sufficient levels of tribute and obedience were forthcoming, there was little reason for patrimonial, feudal, and other precapitalist elites to directly control and supeIVise the habits, intentions, and private lives of their subjects. Since these precapitalist regimes were far more interested in the results than the methods of exploitation, the details of social administration could be "farmed out" or "subcontracted" or otherwise delegated to representatives, agents, intermediaries, or existing local elites without doing violence to either the foundations or the mechanisms of class rule.4 The forms of mediated and decentralized rule that were discussed above, despite their many contradictions and chronic flaws, were thus reflective of economic as well as the political priorities of many precapitalist states. The decisive break with the extractive and extensive approach to economic organization and social control came as the result of two major forces: (1) the progressive rationalization of productive and social relationships and, (2) the revolutionizing of administrative practices and principles under the modern capitalist state. The increasing pressure for rationalizing production and all spheres of social existence on which production was based can be traced to the growing preoccupation of capitalists with capital accumulation and its prerequisite-productive efficiency. The efficiency of production, it was learned, could be increased not only by promoting the division of labor, but also by making twOl additional innovations: first, by taking into account and gaining control over the social environment within which production takes place (e.g., eliminating riots and other disruptions to business), and, second, by taking into account and gaining control over human labor (i.e., treating living laborers more and more as "instruments of production") . Capitalist development thus came to be predicated on economic rationalization, which came to depend, in turn, both on regularizing the social context that surrounds and conditions all economic acitivity on the one hand, and on cultivating and investing in human capital on the other. These developments created enormous pressure on the traditional institutions and policies of social regulation. And despite its claims to be based on principles of "laissez faire," as capitalism sought to free itself from the fetters of feudal society it was forced to tighten rather than loosen its grip on the everyday lives of domestic popUlations. If capitalism was to triumph it was no longer possible to (1) ignore the background, training, and social development of the work force; (2) allow diiscretionary control over populations by self-interested intermediaries OJ' local elites, or (3) permit social relationships outside the productive sphere to either evolve at random or be governed by precapitalist priorities or sources of authority. These developments signaled a significant shift in the long-standing theory and practice of exploitation in class societies. Instead of viewing
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domestic populations as "finished products," available for simple and direct exploitation, these populations came increasingly to be seen as potential sources of investment. From the point of view of the new (capitalist) logic, these investments should be made for the same reason all other prudent investments were made-to yield profit and provide a further basis for capital accumulation. The management of domestic populations could thus no longer be extensive and extractive; it had to become intensive and based on the concept of sound investment. The need to distinguish between "good" and "bad" investments in human capital stimulated a futher development: the emergence of screening, sorting, and classifying institutions for processing workers (schools, welfare systems, therapeutic facilities, prisons, arid the like). And as capitalism continued to dissolve the traditional institutions of socialization, integration, and social regulation (e.g., the family, the church, the community), bureaucratic institutions became more and more important as mechanisms to differentiate and supmvise categories of "worthy" and "unworthy" human material (Rim linger, 1966; Foucault, 1977). As these efforts to shape the labor force along lines indicated by the needs of capital were begun, parallel efforts to bring the external world under control were initiated. This development, which was based on the same imperatives of capitalist growth, took the form of internalization: the effort to identify, take into account, and manipulate what were previously unpredictable, disruptive, and potentially costly "externalities" through a centralized, and highly rationalized, system of administration (Spitzer and Scull, 1977b). At the very minimum, the regulation of external relations required social order-predictable, stable patterns of social intercourse. Accordingly, it became more important to eliminate outbreaks of discontent and disorder (Polanyi, 1944). In both early-nineteenth-century England and the United States rioting was a major precipitant of the formation of bureaucratically organized police departments (Miller, 1977; Silver, 1967; Spitzer and Scull, 1977b). In contrast to the precapitalist era, where collective disorder had served as a form of communication between the classes (Thompson, 1971), the new order required that social relationships remain pacific, if only to guarantee that production and exchange were not impaired. But domestic tranquility was only the first step in capitalism's penetration of social life. As profits under capitalism have come to depend less on price competition and costs of production (Baran and Sweezy, 1964; O'Connor, 1974) and more on maintaining monopolistic control over markets and elevating levels of demand, the cultivation of consumer habits, the creation of "consumption communities" (Boorstin, 1973:89-174), and the shaping of consciousness itself (Ewen, 1976) have become the sine qua non of capitalist growth. It is in this sense that rationalization has not only meant the extension of control and supervision over individual (private) existence, but the increasing management and regulation of social existence as well. To more thoroughly pervade private and public existence and overcome the "irrationalities" of pre capitalist rule, it was necessary to establish a mechanism
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to articulate, coordinate, and direct the rationalization process. This mechanism was the modem capitalist state. In the first stages of its development, capitalism relied on the state only to create the infrastructure for capital accumulation. That infrastructure took two forms: physical and social. The physical infrastructure includes such "social overhead capital" as harbors, roads, bridges, canals, and railways that "require much greater outlays of capital than the individual entrepreneur can normally be expected to get access to" and that "take a long time to construct and even longer to yield a substantial profit" (Dean, 1969:69). The social infrastructure, on the other hand, comprises all those institutions, habits, casts of mind, and patterns of social intercourse that promote the capitalist economic order. In establishing the social infrastructure the state is called upon to guarantee public order; regulate conditions of production, distribution, and exchange; and provide the structural supports necessary for the emergence of a mature market system. It was the provision of social infrastructure that led, among other things, to the initial socialization of crime controls in England and America during the nineteenth century (Spitzer and Scull, 1977a). But as capitalism evolved, the state was. called upon to take a more and more active role in solving its chronic problems. In addition to establishing the minimum conditions for capital accumulation, the state was forced to become more affirmative in character: to take a more active and direct role in the guiding, coordinating, planning, and supporting of economic activity. This shift from reactive to promotive involvement has become more and more pronounced as the problems confronting capitalist societies have changed in both degree and kind. And because of the relationship between economic development and social control outlined above, the state has become increasingly involved in the habituation, supervision, training, and pacification of domestic populations. Under the spur of the rationalization process, proprietary, hereditary, and other prebureaucratic forms of indirect rule were gradually replaced by hierarchically organized "public" organizations. These organizations, which came to include the public police, were speCially designed to achieve a more thorough and effective penetration of subject populations than earlier methods had allowed and to remain responsive to the dictates of central authority. The precapitalist state had to depend on the cooperation of intermediaries to achieve its relatively modest goals, but with the bureaucratization of state administration it became possible to transform the cumbersome process of indirect and personal rule into an impersonal and ·'objective" system of centralized command (Weber, 1968). Just as the economic development of capitalism required the supplanting of the early capitalist's personal authority with that of the impersonal corporation (Chandler, 1962; Braverman, 1974), and the unification of independent production and distribution units within a single economic complex (the vertically integrated corporation), its political development required the substitution of centralized state bureaucracies for the decentralized pock-
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ets of personal rule and the unification of previously autonomous arenas of power. Bureaucratization attacked all forms of local discretion by removing managerial authority from direct overseers to bureaus that were directly accountable to the executive, suppressing special privileges attached to hereditary or proprietary offices and removing "unauthorized opportunity for profit in the office" including bribery, graft, and embezzlement "which had earlier constituted the normal sources of remuneration for officials" (Moffett, 1971:126-27). In each of these ways an attempt was made to "reform" the administration of local populations and more effectively concentrate authority in the political apparatus of the state. The history of the development and reform of public policing (Carte and Carte, 1975; Miller, 1977; Walker, 1977) can quite easily be read as one tendency within this more general process.
Resistance to rationalization Thus far we have only been concerned with the general tendency toward the rationalization of social control in capitalist societies. Before we consider the more specific relationship between this tendency and the development of police systems, it will be useful to remind ourselves that rationalization is only a tendency, not a law, and to remain aware of some of the major contradictions in the rationalization process. Even though the streamlining, regimentation, and synchronization of social life can be understood as part of the movement toward a "totally administered society" (Marcuse, 1964), it is quite obvious that the rationalization imperative has also called forth forces which have impeded, undermined, and come into conflict with this trend. Some of the most obvious countereffects are readily identified. They include: (a) the enormous social costs and political problems created by the corrosive effects of capitalist development on traditional social institutions and modalities of informal control (the family, the church, the community, etc.)-effects which were a necessary consequence of the destruction of "pockets of resistance" and other impediments to the leveling and atomization of subject popUlations for both economic and political purposes;
the growing problems associated with the management of superfluous (surplus) populations-populations rendered "socially useless" by the progressive increase in the organic composition of capital (Spitzer, 1975) and the movement of capitalism from its accumulation to its disaccumulation phase (Sklare, 1969); (b)
(e) the conflicts associated with the continued legitimation of the increasingly differentiated and hierarchicalized social order-differentiation and ordering which is essential to rational population management and
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the new forms of economic organization, but which nonetheless comes into conflict with the leveling ideology of equality and democratic participation in capitalist societies (Bowles, 1973)5; (d) the creation of new "pockets of resistance" to the rationalization process: special interest groups (e.g., professionals,6 civil servants, bureaucratic functionaries, and unionized workers,) that were themselves formed to destroy structures of privilege and to facilitate rationalized peopleprocessing in an earlier age; and (e) the fact that while the arena for developing capitalism's productive forces has gradually become the sphere of "human services" (i.e., health, education, welfare, and crime contro})? these are the very areas which are most likely to be contracted or eliminated as capitalism faces the fiscal crisis of the state (O'Connor, 1973; Hirschhorn, 1978).
\lVhile it is still too early to tell whether these contradictions can provide strategic levers for social change and the creation of a viable alternative to the capitalist order, it is clear that the rationalization process that we have described thus far is neither "functional" in a narrow sense, nor one of capitalism's inexorable laws.
THE POLICING OF PRODUCTION AND THE PRODUCTION OF POLICING IN CAPITALIST SOCIETY
If we examine the development of policing in two capitalist societies, England and America, we find a similar, although histOIically variable, pattern of structural evolution. During the precapitalist era in England (up to the seventeenth century), policing of locally concentrated popUlations was carried out as a community service by unpaid members of the community who periodically accepted the "obligation" of serving as watchmen and constables (Critchley, 1972). Although the functions of these offices included "regulating" strangers, gypsies, laborers, peddlers, errant servants, vagabonds, and lunatics, as well as apprehending "night-walkers, or any other persons whatsover that are uncivil, or cannot give a good account of themselves, and the Reason for their being abroad" (De Laune, 1681:2881, the great bulk of policing still depended on the direct participation of the community as either complainants or respondents to the "hue and cry." These arrangements were thus "socialized" in the same sense as those characteristic of the frankpledge system: they were based on the generalized participation and support of the entire community. Between the seventeenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, the history of policing if} these two societies can be read as a process of successive specialization and privatization, gradually removing more and more of the enforcement, investigative, and repressive functions from the community and" alienating" them within a separate sphere. Policing became
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more specialized as first deputized constables and then thief-takers began to sell their seIVices privately. Deputizing evolved because "as the duties of constables increased in volume and perplexity, the office became more and more unpopular. The middle classes in particular regarded it as a waste of their time, and disliked having to assume for a whole year an unpaid, arduous office which might entail enforcing unpopular laws. They therefore took to paying deputies to do the job for them" (Hart, 1951:24). Thief-taking, as we have already seen, developed as part of a market in police seIVices-a market mediating the relationship between criminals and their victims under conditions of ineffective political control. At first, therefore, specialized police seIVices were provided in England and, following the English model, in America on an individualized, private and profit-making basis. This individualized pattern was, of course, characteristic of many forms of production and exchange during the transition from a mercantile to a capitalist economy. The essential feature of economic relationships during this period was that the "relations of economic dependence between individual producers or between producer and merchant were not directly imposed by the necessities of the act of production itself, but by circumstances external to it: they were relations of purchase and sale of finished or half-finished products, or else relations of debt incidental to the supply of the raw materials or tools of the craft" (Dobb, 1963:260). Within this context policing was "produced" in much the same manner as other "personal" services: through exchange between the "producer" (thief-taker/constable) and the "consumer" (wealthy individual or organization). The conditions of production, which often included collaboration and conspiracy between "police" and criminals, remained completely under the control of the producer, who was only asked to supply thefinished product (stolen goods, protection of property, etc.) to those who were willing and able to pay. To the extent that the efforts of individual thief-takers were coordinated, as was achieved in some degree by Jonathan Wild (Howson, 1970), the coordination took place beyond the direct control of consumers, despite their collective wealth and power. Insofar as policing was imbedded in the precapitalist patterns of petty commodity production and exchange, it was impossible to harness it as an effective tool either for regulating and managing economic relations (production, distribution, and exchange) or for pacitying the masses. The subsequent "socialization" of police services, which dates from the beginning of the nineteenth century in England and several decades later in America, therefore depended on and reflected two interrelated processes: (1) the effective concentration of the means of production, pacification, and social administration in the hands of a single class (the capitalists), and (2) the "progressive alienation of the process of production from the worker" (Braverman, 1974:58). In other words, before policing could be returned once again to its status as a "public service," it had to be wrested from the social structure that had promoted its development as a petty commodity form. Of course, this "de-privatization" in no sense represented a return of
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policing as a locally defined and organized community responsibility. To the contrary, it meant that policing could be "socialized" only as part of the overall rationalization of social life: as a means to enforce the conditions and deflect the costs of capitalist growth. But socialized ("public") policing did not spring full-blown from the head of the capitalist class; it evolved dialectically through several imperfect and at least partially "privatized" forms. A number of problems, in addition to those associated with extending administrative control over police functions, had to be solved before socialization could be significantly advanced. The general principle that has governed the interplay between private and public forms of policing and the eventual ascendance of the latter is the following. Policing in capitalist society tends to be bureaucratically organized, tax-supported, and carried out by full-time employees of the state-that is, to be socialized-to the extent that (1) the centralization of police functions within the state can be legitimated in the eyes of the masses;8 (2) the fiscal organization of the state is sufficiently developed to provide a sound budgetary basis for tax-supported police s'ystems (Ardant, 1975); and (3) enclaves of private capitalist interest and control, give way in favor of a generalized expansion and diffusion of the "capitalist way of life." The historical evidence suggests that the third process takes place under the force of competition between individual capitalists over the cost of investing in human capital; the destruction of the geographic boundaries between capitalist-controlled social units (e.g., company towns) and "public space"; and the blurring of social boundaries between public life, economic relationships, and private existence (Sennett, 19741. The significance of the first two general conditions (i.e., political and fiscal) for the socialization of policing should be clear from our earlier remarks. The third, however, requires more detailed discussion. One of the most important reasons for the development of the state was the problem of providing social infrastructure. Once capitalists began to recognize that profits depended on the habituation, training, health, obedience, and general welfare of the work force, they had to decide whether they should bear the costs of these services and problems themselves or find some other mechanism. As long as capitalists could operate in relative isolation from market forces and preserve a structure of paternalistic rule (McKendrick, 1961), it made sense to provide social services directly and "watch over" the welfare of their workers. However, once it became clear that the benefits leducation, health care, recreational facilities, etc.) provided for their workers and the obedience that they expected in return could not be bottled up within their personal "fiefdoms," it made sense to promote the socialization of these costs. In other words, as soon as individual capitalists realized that competitors might benefit from their investments in human capital and the preservation of social order, they had a collective interest in turning these responsibilities over to the state.9 Similarly, once it became apparent that the policing of workers lives and the repression of worker organization might
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give rise to a "crisis of legitimacy" if it continued to be carried out under the personal authority of individual capitalists (see the discussion of mercenaries above), and that this repression would have to become more and more "public" as the boundaries between capitalist enclaves and the rest of society began to dissolve, there were important political and ideological, as well as economic incentives to transfer the responsibility for this policing to the "public authorities." One example of how organized policing-for-profit mediated between the "old" and the "new" systems of social control is to be found in our earlier examination of private policing as a form of labor control in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century America. However, another interesting transitional experiment in private policing occurred at the turn of the nineteenth century in England with the establishment of the Thames River Police. This organization, created through the efforts of the West India Company merchants in the port of London and the social reformer Patrick Colquhoun (1800), represented the first large-scale sponsorship of policing in England. The force, which subsequently became the model for the establishment of the Metropolitan Police in 1829, was essentially "private" at the outset: receiving 80 percent of its initial operating funds from the West India merchants and explicitly designed to control pilferage and other threats to maritime commerce (House of Commons, 1799-1800:723). While the private funding of the Thames River Police was shortlived-in 1800, two years after it began operation, the Marine Police Establishment was formed as a publicly authorized and supported force-its raison d'etre as an organizational device to protect private capitalist interests was quite clear. Although the English and American variants of private policing differed in important respects, they did share this in common: in each case it was possible to establish a privatized form of social regUlation because of the effective monopoly that existed over economic activity within a geographically circumscribed area. In both these cases, despite the growing pressures to socialize the costs and rationalize the structure of police systems, private policing came to play a mediating role in the creation of capitalist infrastructure and the preservation of "public order." The defining characteristics of these transitional forms of private enforcement was their utility within geographically insulated "private domains." It was only after capitalist development transformed the social relations of production, and with them the relationship between public and private life, that "public policing" (along with "public education," "public health," "public recreation," "public welfare," etc.) could emerge as a dominant organizational form (see Gough, 1975, on the expansion of the public sector). The resurgence of private policing
As we move to a consideration of the modern period of capitalist development, we find that the triumph of socialized poliCing has neither been as
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one-sided nor complete as it initially appeared. In fact, what we find is not a single structure of public policing devoted to the tasks of crime controL but a dual structure comprised of both private and public forms. This structure has come into existence through a process of functional specialization. In it, modern forms of private policing have emerged as yet another way of rationalizing "productive relations," while public police have become increasingly involved in coordinating, regulating, and pacifying "nonproductive" social life. In light of this development it is fair to say that in the modern era private policing has become a social investment: increasing the productivity of a given amount of labor power and the rate of profit. Public policing, on the other hand, has become a part of the services "which are required to maintain social harmony-to fulfill the state's 'legitimization' function" (O'Connor, 1973:7)-capitalism'ssocial e?qJenses. Policing thus bears the imprint of the more general contradiction of advanced capitalist societies-the contradiction between accumulation and legitimization. To understand this development historically, we must recognize that the same forces which first destroyed the private police as a small-scale enterprise, and later as a crude tool in the hands of the "captains of industry," have, ironically, given rise to privatization in yet another guise. In its most modern manifestation, private policing has become a multi-million-dollar capitalist industry in its own right, selling most of its services to major corporations and expanding at an incredible rate (Klare, 1975; New York Times Magazine, 1976). Unlike their infamous ancestors, however, the private police corporations of today are rarely, if ever, part of the "big stick" system. The "protection management" and security services they sell are coming to be more and more a simple extension of the effort to rationalize capitalist production through human and social engineering (Hirschhorn, 1978). The el(tensive techniques of lockouts, agents provocateurs, and strikebreaking have been replaced by the intensive techniques of security screening, surveillance, fingerprint analysis, and polygraph examinations geared toward the prevention of such problems as employee theft. Moreover, the efforts to protect private industrial domains, which were the essential functions of management's first mercenaries, have increasingly been replaced by sophisticated methods and devices designed to penetrate the physical and social environment. In the modern capitalist world, businesses no longer achieve monopoly by excluding competitors, but by penetrating and subsuming the entire social mass. As corporations expand and are more effectively enmeshed in the public domain, it is not only possible for private policing to lower its profile and become smoothly integrated into the routine forms of planning, producing, selling and consuming, it is also possible for many of the functions of public law to become privatized as well. The movement from competitive capitalism to monopoly capitalism has thus not only given rise to new contradictions and attempts to "police them out of existence," it has also profoundly influenced the relationship between public and private law. The
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internalization of many spheres of social existence (e.g., working, consuming, recreating, thinking, and feeling) into the corporate domain has thus blurred the boundary between private and public life in another way: it has become more and more difficult to determine whether the regulation of social conduct is taking place under private, public, or quasi-public authority. As Franz Neumann (1957:171) has observed, "when an interest approaches monopolistic control, its private power becomes quasi-legislative and therefore public." The other side of the coin of privatization is the rise of a public police force which is primarily involved in "dirty work" (Rainwater, 1967). The progressive fragmentation of social existence has forced the public police to become not only philosophers, guides, and friends (Cumming, et al., 1965), but also the last remaining means of cleaning up the growing pile of social debris which has been left in capitalism's wake. As the superfluous population grows in size, and the web of social intercourse becomes ever weaker, more tangled, and more fragile, it becomes more and more important for policing to provide the glue to hold together the remnants of a "civilized" world. The enormity of this task has meant that specialized "crime control" is rarely, if ever, effectively carried out (Bercal, 1970; Mankiewicz and Swerdlow, 1977). In fact, as community resources and traditions are swept away, the functions of public policing are progressively restricted to the regulation of the "private" problems and crises that spill over into the public sphere and threaten its stability. For this reason the maintaining of order (Wilson, 1973) has become the special province of socialized policing. Socialized policing has "colonized" what is "external" to capitalist interests under existing historical conditions-the social and personal needs of those who populate the "nonproductive" and "marginal" sphere.
CONCLUSION This study of policing has been guided by three general assumptions. First, that policing has taken a number of qualitatively different forms within capitalism. Second, that each of these forms bears the imprint of the economic and political contradictions pervading specific historical periods or "stages" in capitalist development. And third, that a critical perspective on policing must provide a genuine alternative to the most popular forms of sociological reductionism: (1) the view that policing is nothing more than the flexing and pounding of the "iron fist" of a single-minded and reified bourgeois state, (2) that policing is simply the "professional," "evenhanded," and "objective" enforcement of transcendent and just legal rules, and (3) that policing is the sum total of the beliefs, customs, rituals, and practices that can be discovered among a number of self-enclosed and culturally autonomous "tribes"-modern police departments. Each of these portraits preserves its purity by ignoring the complexity of the subject, that
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is, by foreclosing our investigation of the historical and dialectical character of policing as a changing social relationship. When policing is treated as a historicallly specific and structurally linked social phenomenon, a number of the distinctions and boundaries that have shaped the sociology of policing begin to be effaced. As soon as policing is understood relationally, the familiar separations between public and private policing, between law creation and law enforcement, between law and society, and between political, economic, and ideological control begin to crumble. And with this disintegration it becomes possible to see policing as something much more than the flip side of the study of crime; it becomes possible to reinvent the study of policing as an inquiry into the very marrow of social control in capitalist society and to begin to penetrate the reasons why that control continues to be carried out in the interest of the few, at the expense of the many.
Notes But to argue for a historical explanation of policing is not to suggest that we succumb to historicism. The "snapshot" histories of the origins and episodic reform of public police ILane, 1967; Haller, 1970; Richardson, 1970; Miller, 19771 offer us little sense of historical development or structural change. Unfortunately, "critical" histories of criminal justice systems have done little better. As Johnson 11976:1141 points out, "New criminologists often declare it their intention to view social phenomena historically. However, few of them have acted on this pledge. The few pieces of work in the new criminology which have dealt with the past have tended to be historical only in a weak sense. They have either been antiquarian analyses of the remote origins of present institutions or a mere rummaging through the past for examples of repression, racism and other hon'ors." 2 An additional problem with viewing the state "as nothing more than a power factor" has been discussed by Lukacs 11971:2631. He argues that such a stance Iwhich he calls putschisml is likely to lead to a "romanticism of illegality." One consequence of such romanticism is that "by surrounding illegal means and methods of struggle with a certain aura, by conferring upon them a special, revolutionary' authenticity,' one endows the existing state with a certain legal validity, with a more than just empirical existence. For the rebel against the law qua law, to prefer certain actions because they are illegal, implies for anyone who so acts that the law has retained its binding validity." For a further discussion of the problems associated with the "romanticizing of illegality" in the new criminology see Spitzer 119801 and O'Malley 119801. 3 As Oilman 11971:601 argues, "when used for predictions the dialectic can never be shown
wrong, only foolish and worthless .... Like a balloon, when hit in one place, it bulges out in another. The real fault lies in harnessing the dialectic for predictive purposes in the first place ... Marx himself does not share in this guilt. He never rests a proof on the grounds that an entity is the 'negation of the negation,' or says some particular event must happen because 'spiral development' requires it." 4 The practice of "farming out" was in no sense restricted to the organization of political control over domestic popUlations. It became, for example, an important economic prop for the expansionist monarchies of Europe who could find no other mechanism to increase their fiscal base. As Moffett 11971:112-131 notes: Under ... circumstances of irregular budgets, uncertain revenues, and erratic financial practices, the crown could typically .. , raise
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money only by mortgaging the patrimony of the crown. Tax-farming led the way among these practices. See the discussion of "deviant farming" in England, in Spitzer and Scull 11977al. 5 Max Weber 11946:ch. 81 was well aware of this contradiction in capitalist development, which he summarized in the obsen'ation that the leveling which accompanies the advance of political democracy makes possible an unprecedented subjugation of the masses to central authol1ty. Jacoby 11975:108-121 has also examined this process in his discussion of "repressive equality," which is "progressive in its democratic content against feudal privilege, and regressive in that it is ultimately grounded in the market of 'equal' exchange and works to further the domain of the market." See also Neumann 1957:ch. 2). 6 On the resistance to rationalization by la"yers' guilds in England see Weber 11946:21), and on the relationship between bureaucracy and professionalization see Larson 119771. 7 One measure of this development is the percentage of the labor force involved in providing social services. Singelmann 119781 has disclosed that social sen'ice workers had increased as a percentage of the total labor force in the United States from 8.7 percent in 1920 to 21.5 percent in 1970. This more than two-fold increase over the last fifty years also occurred in such capitalist nations as Gel1nany 12.9 timesl, France 12.8 timesl, Canada 12.8 times), England 12.2 timesl, and Japan 12.1 times!. 8 In both England and the United States there was considerable popular resistance to the creation of uniformed, centralized, and state-operated police systems IThompson, 1950; Miller, 19771. 9 This problem is typically discussed by economists 10lson, 1965; Buchanan, 1968) as the "free rider" problem of collectil'e goods. If a collective good like public order lor other transferable benefits like education, welfare, or health carel were to be prodded privately, those who did not contribute but were able to reap the rewards would get a free ride.
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Bercal. T. E. 119701. "Calls for Police Assistance." In H. Hahn led.), Police in Urban Society. Beverly Hills: Sage Publications. Boorstin, D. J. 119731. The Americans: The Democratic Experience. New York: Vintage Books. Bowles, S. 119731. "Contradictions in United States Higher Education." In H. Weaver led.), Modern Political Economy: Radical Versus Orthodox Approaches. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Brandes, S. 119761, American Welfare Capitalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Braverman, H. 119741. Labor and Monopoly Capita/. New York: Monthly Review Press. Buchanan, J. M. 119681. The Demand and Supply of Public Goods. Chicago: Rand McNally. Carte, G. E., and E. H. Carte 119751. Police Reform in the United States. Berkeley: University of California Press. Center for Research on Criminal Justice 11975). The fron Fist and the Velvet Glove: An Analysis of the U.S. Police. Berkeley: Center for Research on Criminal Justice.
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Chandler, A. D. 119621. Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the American Industrial Enterprise. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press. Colletti, L. 119i51. "Marxism and the Dialectic." New Le.tt Rel'iew 93:3-30. Colquhoun, P. 118001.A Treatise on the Commerce and Police of the River Thames. Montclair, NJ.: Patterson Smith. Critchley, T. A. 11972I.A History ofPolice in England and Wales. Montclail', N. J.: Patterson Smith. Cumming, E., I. Cumming, and L. Edell 119651. "Policeman as Philosopher, Guide and Friend." Social Problems 12:2i6-286. Dean, P. 119691. The First Industrial Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. De Laune, T.116811. The Present State of London. London: George Larkin. Dobb, M. 119631. Studies in the Development ofCapitalism. New York: International Publishers. Ewen, S. 119i61. Captains of Consciousness. New York: McGraw-HilI. Genovese, E. D. 119i41. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slal'es Made. New York: Pantheon Books. Gold, D. A., C.Y.H. Lo, and E. O. Wright 119i51. "Recenl Developments in Marxist Theories of the Capitalist State." Monthly Review 5:29-43 and 6:~16-51. Gough, I. 119751. "State Expenditures in Advanced Capitalism." New Le.tt Review 92:53-92. Greenberg, D. F. 119761. "On One-Dimensional Marxist Criminology." Theory and Society 3:610-21. Gutman, H. G. 119631. "The Worker's Search for Power." In H. W. Morgan led.l, The Gilded Age: A Reappraisal. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Hall. S., D. Clarke, C. Critcher, T. Jefferson, and B. RobeI1s 119iil. Policing the Crises. London: Macmillan Co. Haller, M. 119701. "Urban Crime and Criminal Justice: The Chicago Case." Journal Q(American History 57:619-35. HalTing, S., and L. M. McMullen 119i51. "The Buffalo Police 1872-1900: LabOl' Unrest. Political Power and the Creation of the Police Institution." Crime and Social Justice 4:5-15. Hart, J. M. 119511. The British Police. London: George Allen and Unwin. Henderson, D. F. 119641. Conciliation and Japanese UIW: Tokugawa and Modern, vol. 1. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Hirschhorn, L. 119781. "The Political Economy of Social SeJ'\1ce Rationalization: A Developmental View." Contemporary Crises 2:63-81. Horan, J. D. 119671. The Pinkertons. New York: Crown Publishers. House of Commons 11799-18001. Journals 55:723-84. Howson, F.119701. ThieFTaker General: The Rise and Fall ofJonathan Wild. London: Hutchinson and Co. Hsiao, K. C. 119601. Rural China: Imperial Control in the Nineteenth Century. Seattle: llniversity of Washington Press. Jacoby, R. 119751. Social Amnesia: A Critique Q(Contemporary Psychology from Adler to Laing. Boston: Beacon Press. Johnson, B. 119761. "Taking Care of Labor: The Police in American Politics." Theory and Society 3:89-117. Klare, M. T. 119751. "Rent-a-Cop: The Boom in Private Police." The Nation 221:486-91. Lane, R. 119671. Policing the City: Boston, 1822-1885. Cambridge, Harvard University Press. Larson, M. S. 119771. The Rise of Professionalism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lee, W. L. M. 119011.A History of Police in England. London: Methuen. Lukacs, G. 119711. History and Class Consciousness. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press.
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McKendrick, N. (1961), "Josiah Wedgwood and Factory Discipline." Historical Journal 4:30-55. Mankiewicz, F., and J. Swerdlow (1977), Remote Control: Television and the Manipulation of American Life. New York: New York Times Books. Marcuse, H. (1964), One Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon Press. Marx, K. (19631. Theories of Surplus Value, Part 1. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Tr. Renate Simpson. - - - (1974). Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 3. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Miller, W. R. (1977), Cops and Bobbies: Police Authority in New York and London 1830-1870. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Moffett, J. T. (1971). " Bureaucracy and Social Control: A Study of Progressive Regimentation of the Western Social Order." Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University. Moore, S. F. (19581. Power and Property in Inca Peru. New York: Columbia University Press. Neumann, F. (19571. The Democratic and the Authoritarian State. New York: Free Press. New York Times Magazine (1976), "In Guards We Trust," Sept. 19:20-41. O'Connor, J. (19731. The Fiscal Crisis of the State. New York: St. Martin's Press. - - - (19741. The Corporations and the State. New York: Harper and Row. Oilman, B. (19711.A/ienation: Ma17"s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Olson, M. (19651. The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. O'Malley, P. (19801. "The Class Production of Crime: Banditry and Class Strategies in England and Australia," In Steven Spitzer (ed.l, Research in Law and Sociology, vol. 3. Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press. Platt, A., and L. Cooper, eds. (19741. Policing America. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. Polyani, I. (1944). The Great Transformation. Boston: Beacon Press. Pringle, P. (1958). The Thief-Takers. London: Museum Press. Quinney, R. (19771, Class, State and Crime. New York: David McKay. Radzinowicz, L. (1948 - 56).A History ofEnglish Criminal Law and Its Administration from 1750, 4 vols. London: Stevens and Sons, Ltd. Rainwater, L. (19671. "The Revolt of the Dirty-Workers." Transaction 5:2,64. Reich, W. (1966), Sex-Pol: &says 1929-1934. New York: Vintage Books. Reiss, A. J. (19701. The Police and the Public. New Haven: Yale University Press. Richardson, J. F. (19701. The New York Police: Colonial Times to 1901. New York: Oxford University Press. Rimlinger, G. V. (1966), "Welfare Policy and Economic Development: A Comparative Historical Perspective." Journal of Economic History 26:556-71. Rock, P. (1979), "Law, Order and Power in Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Century England." In Dennis Szabo (ed.), Annals of the International Society of Criminology. Montreal: The International Society of Criminology. Schurmann, F. (19661. Ideology and Organization in Communist China. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sennett, R. 119741. The Fall of Public Man. New York: Vintage Books. Silver, A. (19671. "The Demand for Order in Civil Society: A Review of Some Themes in the History of Urban Crime, Police and Riot." In D. Bordua (ed.), The Police. New York: Wiley. Singlemann, J. (19781 "The Sectoral Transformation of the Labor Force in Seven Industrialized Countries, 1920-1970." American Journal of Sociology 83:1224-34.
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Sklare, M. J. 11969). "On the Proletarian Revolution and the End of Political-Economic Society." Radical America 3:1-41. Skolnick, J. H. 11966) Justice Without Trial. New York: Wiley. Spitzer, S. 119751. "Toward a Marxian Theory of Deviance." Social Problems 22:638-51. ---11980). "'Left-Wing' Criminology-An Infantile Disorder?" In James Inciardi led.), Radical Criminology: The Coming Crises. Beverly Hills: Sage Publications. - - - and A. T. Scull11977al. "Social Control in Historical Perspective: From Private to Public Responses to Crime." In D. F. Greenberg led.), Corrections and Punishment. Beverly Hills: Sage Publications. - - - and A. T. ScullI1977b). "Privatization and Capitalist Development: The Case of the Private Police." Social Problems 25:18-29. - - - and A. T. Scull 11977c). "The Privatization of Public Services: The Case of the Private Police," Paper presented at the 72nd Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association. Steinert, H. 11977). "Against a Conspiracy Theory of Criminal Law Apropos Hepburn's 'Social Control and the Legal Order.'" Contemporary Crises 1:437-40. Thompson, E. P.119711. "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century." Past and Present 50:76-136, Thomson, D. 11950). England in the Nineteenth Century. Middlesex: Penguin. Tushnet, M. 119781. "Marxist Analysis of American Law." MarlCist Perspectives 1:96-117. Van Der SprenkeL S. 11962). Legal Institutions in Manchu China. London: The Athlone Press. Walker, S. 11977). A Critical History of Police Reform. Lexington: D.C. Heath
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Co.
Weber, M.11946),From MalC Weber: Essays in Sociolog,y, New York: Oxford University Press. Tr, H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. - - - 11968). Economy and Society, 3 vols. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittick, eds. New York: Bedminster Press. Westley, W. A.11970). Violence and the Police: A Sociological Study ofLaw, Custom and Morality. Cambridge: M.LT. Press. Wilson, A. A., S. L. Greenblatt, and R. W. Wilson 11977). Deviance and Social Control in Chinese Society. New York: Praeger. Wilson, J. Q.11973). "The Dilemma of the Urban Police." In A. B. Callow Jr.led.),American Urban History, 2d ed. New York: Oxford University Press. Wittfogel, K. 11957). Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Editor'S Notes lOne of the major developments discussed in Spitzer's paper is the transition from policing arrangements that were largely private to those administered publicly by the state. Jeremy Palmer has called attention to the ideological elements of this transition I" Evils Merely Prohibited," British Journal and Society 3 [1976]:1-16). In mid-eighteenth-century England, when private initiative still played a large role in the apprehension and prosecution of criminal suspects, English jurisprudence regarded the theft of property as mala prohibita, that is, a crime by convention, not mala in se, i.e., something intrinsically evil, a violation of the law of nature, The former category of offenses was, and still is, regarded as less serious than the latter. Moreover, theft was considered a matter of exclusively private concern, of interest only to the one who suffered a loss. As late as 18113, opponents of a publicly salaried police
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force ar~,'ued that it was completely inappropriate to ask anyone other than the victim to pay the cost of apprehending a thief. To overcome this ideological obstacle to a public police force. refomlcl'S argucd that propCl1y crimc had to be takcn more seriously. and that it was conscqucntial not just for \lctims but for the general population. 2 For ti.II·ther treatment of the growth. decline. and revival of pli\'ate policing. scc Robel1 Weiss. "Thc Emcrgcncc and Transformation of Pri\'atc Dctecti\'e Industrial Policing in the Unitcd Statcs. 1850-1940." Crime and Social Justice 9 [19781; 35-48.
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At Hard Labor: Penal Confinement and Production in Nineteenth-Century America Rosalind P. Petche!sky
INTRODUCTION The involuntary confinement of social deviants on a systematic, massive scale arose and developed along with capitalism. Moreover, the structure and techniques of confinement were from the beginning articulated with the economic and social needs of capitalist development.1 In the early-to-mid-nineteenth century, with the growth of a fiscal base and an administrative apparatUls, the state in both England and America began to construct large publicly owned and operated institutions, such as prisons and asylums. Yet the symbiotic relationship between the state and private capital that had characterized the earlier mercantilist economy did not subside. On the contrary, it became more and more complex, and, as we shall see, in the case of prison labor systems it continued in a direct and unmediated form throughout the nineteenth century. Social and labor historians of all stamps have tended to regard prison labor as a subject of minor interest, since the product of prison labor has been thought to have little economic value . It is the purpose of this paper to look at the contract labor system in nineteenth-century American prisons with a new eye, to try to understand its social and economic importance. During much of the century, as I shall argue, prison labor was both highly productive and highly profitable; its productivity is inseparable from its ideological functions of enforcing discipline and the work ethic. The prison labor system was and is integrally connected to the capitalist system of production as a whole, even though divisions within the working
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class-"skilled" and "unskilled," "part-time" and "full-time," "free" and "confined"-often obscure the connections between them. Prison labor is a system of production that is controlled and operated by the state on behalf of private property. Thus, analyzing that system in some detail-both the conditions of its survival and the conditions of its decline-should help us understand the relationship between the capitalist state and the capitalist economy at a particular stage of their development. What is usually the more obvious side of this symbiotic relationship is the dependence of private capital on the state-in this case, the use of the state's coercive instrumentalities and traditional jurisdiction over captive or dependent subpopulations as a means of mobilizing cheap labor for private entrepreneurs. But it is equally important to understand the other side of the relationship. The early nineteenth-century institutions of confinement were crucial sources of revenue for the state, and they indicated the rising state's dependence on private capital at least as much as the capitalists' dependence on the state's coercive power and legitimating authority. Among the limited sources of revenue at the state's disposal were dependent and deviant human beings, who could be traded, conscripted, and put to work. The broad context for this exercise of state power was, of course, the growth of a market in labor, which put value on persons and populations as economic resources. Moreover, as penal institutions became centers of production, prisoners' labor came more and more to be viewed as a means of enforcing discipline and thus enhancing the authority and power of state institutions. Within the institutions "discipline" meant willingness to work as exhibited in the doing ofwork , as it did in factories. And the most effective measure of discipline-particularly for state auditors and legislative committees as well as potential contractors-was productivity. Thus, institutions of confinement were both a means whereby the state broadened a fiscal base and legitimacy, and a means whereby private owners accumulated capital and secured disciplined labor. These purposes were mutually reinforcing.
LABOR AS DISCIPLINE
Two themes appear and reappear throughout the nineteenth century as ideological justifications for inmate labor in American prisons. The first, supported by state budgetary constraints and middle-class doctrines of self-reliance, was that inmates of public institutions should help defray their own costs through physical labor. Thus the 1828 statute establishing the contract labor system in New York State prisons declared it "the duty of the agents to use their best efforts to defray ail the expenses of the said prisons by the labor of the prisoners."2 The second rationale for inmate labor was its supposed rehabilitative value. The conventional assumption in managing prisons was, as E. C. Wines and Theodore Dwight put it in their 1867 report to the New York leg-
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islature, that "work is an essential condition of the prisoner's reformation."3 This notion was a remnant of the "moral treatment" or "moral management" doctrines that prevailed in all American institutions of confinement in the earlier decades of the century. Yet, from the outset, a large gap often separated the rhetoric of reform through work from its implementation. Despite the occasional suggestion that prison labor could teach inmates useful trades, enabling them to lead an "honest life" once released, the New York State legislature began to forbid training programs in prisons during the 1830s as a concession to trade unions, who feared the competition of cheap prison labor.4 In their sUIVey of prison conditions throughout the United States and Canada, Wines and Dwight were appalled to discover that in prisons everywhere, prisoners, who were mostly unskilled laborers at the time of incarceration, remained so; that "they get, for the most part, only a little piece of a trade."5 The only acknowledged purposes of prison labor that bore any relation to objective reality were the production of a disciplined work force and the realization of profits. The common aim of all Jacksonian institutions was to reduce idleness and propagate a strict work ethic in the society at large (a society whose dominant conception of deviance was idleness). One way of doing so was resocializing deviant members of the propertyless class into the mentality required for industrial labor. The asylums and prisons of antebellum America were to instill the values of discipline, work and "respect for order and authority" among those who defied the work ethic through idle and delinquent habits. Gustave de Beaumont and Alexis de Toqueville, in their report on U. S. penitentiaries, which they toured in 1831, made this telling obseIVation: We have no doubt ... but that the habits of order to which the prisoner is subjected for several years ... the obedience of every moment to inflexible rules, the regularity of a uniform life, in a word, all the circumstances belonging to this severe system, are calculated to produce a deep impn~ssion upon his mind. Perhaps, leaving the prison he is not an honest man, but he has contracted honest habits ... and if he is not more virtuous, he has become at least more judicious."6 In their isolation and remoteness from society, they would also stigmatize idleness as the product of individual fault. In practice, less emphasis was given to the teaching of skills or the internalization of moral values than to the conditioning of outward behavior to conform to the standards of mechanical regularity required by the early factory system. The architectural features of the Jacksonian institutions appeared to contemporary observers as "exceptionally ... 'factory-like,'" as did the regimented routines, standardized schedules, dress, and rigorous programs of daily labor that characterized their interior life? A contemporary reformer, applauding the emphasis on severity and order, put it thus: The object of prison discipline is to induce [the convict] not merely to form good resolutions ... but to support himself by honest industry. The only
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effectual mode of leading him to do this is to train him ... to accustom him to work steadily and diligently 8 to 10 hours a day, with no other respite .... The discipline best adapted to such men is that which inures them to constant and vigorous toil.8
Two methods of prison discipline, the Auburn and Pennsylvania methods, represented alternative strategies for achieving this goal. In the former, known as the "congregate" method, prisoners performed labor collectively in dark workshops surrounding the prison yard. They were kept under constant sUIveillance through openings in the wall. Indeed "the whole routine resembled the operations of a vast human filing system, allowing the men to be removed for work in the shops during the day and then filed away at night."9 Although prisoners were held to a rigid silence at work, the workshop was the one place in the institution where they experienced any human contact. Thus the principle of collective labor was in part intended as an incentive to "willing industry"-although it was also far more efficient from the standpoint of productivity than was individual, isolated labor. The Pennsylvania system of solitary confinement involved the isolation of every prisoner in a separate cell. There he was fed "moral medicine" (such as Bible readings) and put to work with simple tools on some craft, usually shoemaking. The reverse of Auburn in conception, the solitary system was equally aimed at inculcating routines of discipline and steady labor, using methods that anticipated operant conditioning: after a period of total isolation, without companions, books, or tools, officials would allow the inmate to work in his cell. Introduced at this moment, labor would become not an oppressive task for punishment, but a welcome diversion, a delight rather than a burden. The convict would sit in his cell and work with his tools daily, so that over the course of his sentence regularity and discipline would become habitual.1o
In the words of Jacksonian reformer Francis Lieber, "uninterrupted solitary confinement at labor" was superior to the "congregate" system because it "makes the lonely prisoner love labor as faithfully as the dearest companion -a companion who will be with him for life."ll
DISCIPLINING LABOR
Apart from its effect on the work habits and attitudes of inmates, prison production also affected the relationship between workers and employers outside the institutions. As labor organizations complained throughout the nineteenth century, inmate labor, which could be hired for one-half to one-quarter of the cost of "free labor," constituted a persistent threat to workers in many trades. It thus reminded workers of their replaceability and discouraged protest movements and strikes. Tailors, shoemakers, hatmakers, stonecutters, coopers, molders, machinists, toolmakers, and miners
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in the South all sensed that prison labor endangered their jobs and wages. Although prison labor probably did not comprise more than a small percentage of the total labor employed in the industries in which prisoners were used, its ideological and psychological importance should not be underestimatedP Prison labor was widely perceived by workers as a potential or immediate threat, and thus lurked in the background of the general conflict between labor and capital as an instrument of discipline that could be wielded by the state on behalf of the capitalist class as a whole. Every major labor organization in the l880s-the American Federation of Labor, the National Labor Union, and the Knights of Labor-strongly opposed convict labor and expressed their position in petition campaigns, lobbying, convention platforms, and politicalliterature.13 In the long run, the opposition of organized labor to prison labor was not very effective. In part this was a consequence of the organizational weakness of the labor movement, but a contributing factor was the unions' and federations' neglect of prisoners as a potential organizing base. There is no indication that any of them ever attempted to go beyond protests or lobbying against prison labor to organize prisoners themselves. Because the labor organizations in this early period, including the more radical and broadbased Knights of Labor. did not question wage labor and the capital-worker relationship as such. they tended to draw a sharp distinction between "voluntary" and "involuntary" labor. regarding confined workers with an undisguised contempt and disdain. This exclusiivity precluded what might have been the only effective weapon against competition from prison labor: helping the prisoners themselves to organize tor improved wages and working conditions.
ACCUMULATION: PRISONS AND PROFITS In their evaluation of state prisons, Wines and Dwight reported:
One thing is harped upon ad nauseam-money. money. money. This crops out evel)'Where. in executive messages and the reports of the wardens. boards of inspectors. legislative committees and special commissions. To bring the prisons to the point of self-support, to secure net profits from convict labor. to make financial exhibits that will gratifY the public craving for such profits-this seems to be the supreme object of all ... connected with their administration and sharing its responsibility. The directors of a bank or a railroad could hardly be more anxious for large dividends than these gentlemen are for good round incomes from the labor of their prisoners.14
Thus Wines and Dwight summed up "the primary object of prison discipline." Ultimately, the overriding criterion for evaluating prisons became their capacity to generate an economic surplus, especially through prisoner labor. In fact, different state systems competed over who could produce the highest fiscal surpluses; "output and profit were the primary goals, regard-
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less of possible penological objections." Reformers like Francis Lieber, who stressed the importance of reform through punishment, deplored the pecuniary orientation of the prisons even in the Jacksonian period. And such objections were voiced more and more frequently as the century wore on-for example, by Wines and Dwight themselves, representing the reform-oriented Prison Association of New York.IS But as we shall see below, the question of profits for whom and by what means became the critical question a few years later when the compatibility between fiscal interests (state profits) and contracting interests (private profits) became more and more difficult to maintain. In the Northern prisons throughout much of the nineteenth century, prison labor was organized on the basis of the contract system.I6 Private contractors furnished the raw materials, which prisoners, working under the close surveillance of prison officials, turned into manufactured goods in return for wages (sometimes paid on a daily basis, sometimes at a piece rate).17 In exchange for the prisoner's labor power, the state received a fee from the contractor, setting aside the prisoner's low wages in an account in his own name. During the 1830s and 1840s, prisoners at Auburn made shoes, barrels, carpets, ticking, tools, combs, harnesses, furniture, clothing, steam engines, and boilers under the contract system.IS Elsewhere, prisoners were engaged in weaving, hatmaking, cigarmaking, mining, and construction-in short, in nearly every major industry. Census data show that by 1870 between 75 and 100 percent of all prisoners were engaged in some form of productive labor; of these, some two-thirds were employed in production for profit in the lease system or the more popular contract system.I9 Prison discipline quickly came to be subordinated to considerations of production. The long-standing debate between advocates of the Pennsylvania and Auburn systems was finally settled by the priority of profits and productivity, which ultimately led every state but Pennsylvania to adopt the Auburn method. Auburn was, after all, a system of relatively advanced production, using collective workshops, division of labor, and water or steampowered machines. It was a factory-in its technology and output as well as its physical layout-and was clearly the more productive and profitable of the two systems. Even where the Pennsylvania method was tried, as in New Jersey and Rhode Island, it was quickly abandoned as being both uneconomical and unproductive.2o The lesson seemed to be that social conditions are more conducive to productivity than is solitude-an idea that capitalism itself embodied. Punishment came to be perceived as an ancillary of the machine. Even the notoriously harsh Elam Lynds, "keeper" of Auburn during its early years, argued that flogging was superior to other forms of discipline because "it was quick; it took only a small amount of the convict's time away from his labor."21 As the century wore on, controversy developed over the issue of "overwork" (overtime) and bonus payments. On one hand, penal reformers and some administrators charged that such extra payments tended to corrupt
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prisoners, subvert the authority of administrators, and undermine inmate discipline. On the other hand, most administrators, often businessmen or ex-contractors themselves,22 tended to agree with the growing conviction of contractors that the wage itself was the best means of discipline. According to Wines and Dwight, the rule of silence was often laxly enforced in Auburn-type prisons, without any visible prejudice to labor productivity. In most of the prisons they inspected, they found "busy hives of industry" where "the men work as they do in other great manufactories ."23 Nevertheless, when fees were paid to the state on a piecework basis, officials had an incentive to apply repressive measures to inmates in order to increase their outpUt.24 In this way, the disciplinary aims and methods of prison officials and the productivity standards of contractors reinforced each other. Prison labor appealed to nineteenth century American manufacturers for a number of reasons. While prison labor was usually just as productive as free labor, or more so, prison wages, as already noted, were far below prevailing wages on the outside. This low price reflected the objective conditions of prison life: prisoners maintained the lowest imaginable standard of living, were not supporting families, and, above alL received their subsistence from the state. The use of prison labor was thus one manifestation of the more general tendency among employers-in a period of extreme competition, rapid accumulation, and weak labor organizations-to increase profits by reducing wages. But the meager remuneration of prisoners was also legitimated by the stigma of criminali~y and imprisonment, which contractors turned into profits. As Wines and Dwight complained, "they [the contractors] have been known to decry, in the strongest terms, the labor of the convicts, and to impugn the rigor of the regulations as affecting contractors, with a view both to discourage competition and reconcile the public to a low compensation for convict labor.//25 Besides providing contractors with cheap labor, the contract system provided manufacturers with a ready-made factory: a plant (usually rent-free), free or low-cost energy (water or steam power), storage facilities, and sometimes even machinery and tools.2 6 In addition, confinement was a valuable adjunct to the enforcement of strict labor discipline. By providing a nearly, though far from perfectly controlled environment, constant surveillance, and a rigorous system of reward and punishment, the prison represented a practical model for reducing unwilling workers to an efficient, collective machine. There had been recurrent outbreaks of strikes by free workers during the 1840s. Shoemakers, coal miners, weavers, ironworkers, tailors, carpenters, cabinet makers, and textile operatives struck repeatedly against the reduced wages, speedups, and rising prices. They agitated for a ten-hour day and resisted the degradation of work that the industrial revolution had brought.27 It is in the context of free workers' resistance to the rapid mechanization and degradation of the traditional crafts that we must see the conscription of prisoners as workers in. these occupations. Finally, the organizational contribution that the prison provided contractors was no less important than the direct financial subsidy. What prison
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labor provided to an entrepreneurial class that was still more involved in accumulating capital than in managing production was an integrated system of supervision and discipline that contained within it the techniques needed to keep the production process going: "control of large bodies of workers," "gathering of workers under a single roof," enforcement of "regular hours," "coercive methods to habituate the workers to their tasks and keep them working throughout the day and the year," "a paralegal structure of punishment," as well as rudimentary processes of accounting and recordkeeping-in short, a system of management. The "total economic, spiritual, moral, and physical domination" of laborers required by the factory system found its prototype in prison industry.28 The prison labor system from the 1820s to the 1880s and 1890s must thus be seen as a special form of "subcontracting"-one that "represented a transitional form, a phase during which the capitalist had not yet assumed the essential function of management in industrial capitalism, control over the labor process."29 This subcontracting function was more important to the development of capitalist manufacturing than was the state function of collecting and hiring out pools of cheap labor to work in the primary and extractive industries. Under the convict leasing system, employed primarily in the South, the coercive power of the state was used to furnish a scarce commodity, labor (or "well-regulated labor," as it was usually put), for the most grueling tasks. But in doing so, the state served largely as a procurer, remaining uninvolved in the organization and management of the work, which was left in private hands. Where penal institutions were equipped as manufacturing establishments and made available to private entrepreneurs, however, the state's role in production was active and innovative. Manufacturing un'der the contract system both reflected and reinforced factory discipline, as well as providing a large array of subsidies that contributed directly to the accumulation of private capital.
THE DECLINE OF PRISON LABOR-CAUSES AND CONDITIONS
Through the 1870s, the contract between the state and manufacturers was reciprocally advantageous. State legislators, at least until the Civil War, perceived it as a source of revenue; and prison officials regarded contract labor as the most effective antidote to "disciplinary troubles," bitterly opposing moves to abolish it. In the end, however, "bringing the prisons to the point of self-support" and" securing net profits" for private capital often proved to be contradictory goals. Predictably, collusion and bribery among contractors and between contractors and prison officials kept prison wages down and undermined competitive bidding for contracts. Contractors were able to influence the appointment and dismissal of wardens, and occasionally they even moved their offices right into the penitentiary premises. Some contractors brought frequent suits against the state for damages, alleging deficiencies in the water supply, absenteeism on the part of prisoners, and
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other dubious charges of breach of contract, frequently winning awards that exceeded the profits of production. Wines and Dwight referred to "Napoleonic achievements ... in the science of public plunder."30 To the extent that prison labor enriched capitalists (who wore the hats of local politicians and inspectors as well as cbntractors) at the expense of the state, the prison contract system contained the seeds of a fiscal crisis. This is not to suggest that prisons always operated at a deficit, however. Until the mid-1860s or even '70s, they were highly profitable, piling up impressive surpluses for the state during most years.31 But at that point, the contract system, though still profitable for contractors, incurred increasing lossesand occasional scandals-for the state.32 Testimony before the New York State Prison Commission in 1876 revealed constant swindles, frauds, misuses of funds, overassessment of the value of contracts, a lack of careful accounting procedures, false entries, exorbitant prices paid for materials-" all of which evils tended to produce the general result of pecuniary loss to the finances of the state."33 The more that private profits from prison labor came to depend on the forms of subsidization and fraud just described, the more the prisons were unable to maintain their fiscal self-sufficiency and sank into debt to contractors. By 1880, the states of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Massachusetts had set up commissions to investigate the convict labor system, under pressure from many diverse voices, and in New York, the 1880s also saw a series of referendums and legislative measures, all of which moved in the direction of abolishing first the use of machinery in prison production and then the contract system itself. Initially, such proposals had little effect.34 Finally, an amendment to the New York State constitution enacted in 1894 (but taking effect in 1897) made it illegal to farm out or contract the labor of any state prisoner to any private contractor, substituting the "state use" system, which confined prison labor to road building, public works, and the provisioning of public institutions. But a deeper understanding of the demise of the contract system of prison labor must go beyond the sordid details of scandals to examine larger structural transformations under way at the end of the nineteenth century: the changing character of production as well as the labor force, and the changing role of the state with regard to the growing resistance of both confined and free workers. The decline of convict labor after the Civil War is usually attributed to the opposition of organized labor groups. Although organizations of skilled and craft workers did oppose prison labor, even before the Civil War, it is implausible that they were responsible for its defeat. They had been heard for half a century before prison labor actually began to be abolished in the 1890s.35 In the years when the system was solidly profitable, their protests had little impact. Furthermore, the workers most involved in opposing prison labor were the displaced artisans and mechanics whose skills had already become obsolete due to advanCing industrialization. For these groups, who longed for a return to the master-journeyman and "free com-
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petition" days, prison labor became a convenient scapegoat; in reality it was neither more nor less threatening than mechanized factol)' labor as a whole.36 While some legislation restricting prison labor was passed as a concession to labor opposition in New York, the power of the declining artisan trades was hardly formidable, particularly outside New York City.37 Finally, there is little evidence that industrial labor groups, including the Knights of Labor, put vel)' much political energy into the campaign against convict labor during the 1880s and 1890s when the system really did meet defeat. Other forces were at work that diminished the importance of the prison labor system in this period and led to the mobilization of large industrial interests against it. By the late nineteenth centul)', manufacturers had taken the leadership of the campaign to abolish prison labor. For example, the National AntiConvict-Contract Association, based in Chicago, maintained an executive board consisting entirely of top officers of midwestern manufacturing firms in such industries as transportation vehicles, boots and shoes, furniture, stoves, and agricultural machineI)'. Stressing the common interest of capital and labor in abolishing the convict labor system, the association claimed to represent "some of the largest manufacturing companies in the countl)', in many different lines of business, millions of invested capital, and the interests of tens of thousands of operatives." Its main complaint against convict labor was that it introduced an element of unfair competition into the market, resulting in lower prices, forcing employers of free labor to lower wages, and thus encouraging labor unrest; and that this condition tended to generalize itself from those industries directly affected to the capitalist economy as a whole.38 Testimony offered by investigators and assemblymen before the New York State legislature in the 1880s and 1890s shows that this point of view had come to prevail in most industries using prison labor (with the exceptions of the mining and iron industries, which remained highly labor intensive and thus relied heavily on the convict leasing system in the SouthJ.39 Beyond this concern with unfair business competition, there were more fundamental reasons for business opposition to prison labor. These had to do with changes in managerial requirements generated by large-scale production, the breakdown of prison discipline, and the growth of immigration and labor militancy at the close of the centul)'. Given the enormous growth in the scale of production, mechanization, and the volume of capital investments in manufacturing during the 1880s, the continuation of prison labor probably would have required either that the state become a real capitalist, running the prisons as full-scale enterprises, or that capitalist management take over Virtually the entire administration of the prisons. In fact, the latter tendency was already in evidence in some states immediately after the Civil War, when bribing of officials increased, contractors' offices were installed on prison premises (rent-free), and more and more outside foremen were hired to supervise the production process on the inside. As might be expected, this infiltration of the prisons by industrial managers
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tended to create a "dual power" situation within the prison (one set of officials for "discipline," the other for "production") and was the source of friction between state legislators and prison administrators on the one hand, and individual contractors on the other. State legislative hearings investigating prison labor during this period reveal these tensions as well as the specific complaints that contractors voiced.40 On the prison officials' side, there was a constant effort to show that the reins of discipline were still firmly in their hands and had not been yielded to industrial supervisors. On the contractors' side, the most persistent complaint heard was that concerning the lack of "efficient discipline" -which supervisors and contractors clearly equated with productivity. Prisoners were accused of wasting materials, stealing them, spoiling products, talking too much, and, above all, slacking. These deficiencies in discipline were attributed to various causes, sometimes by wardens as well as manufacturing interests: the rapid turnover in prison personnel (owing to elections and patronage); the fall-off in old-style means of imposing discipline, such as flogging and cold shower baths; and the continuation of a piecework system of payment rather than a time work, or "bell-to-bell," system. This last point was made frequently by the contractors, who argued that "it was the duty of the State to see that [they] had, from each convict, a fair day's work," in other words., to abolish the piecework system, which was uneconomical in times of short demand, in favor of a daily wage.41 What was at stake here was the attempt to impose modernized, rationalized methods of industrial management on the organization of prison labor. But capitalists were not prepared to take over the entire penal system (nor would their doing so have been politically acceptable). Neither was the state prepared to undertake large-scale capitalist operation of the prisons. Just as the contract system had been introduced by employers and the state in response to rebelliousness among free workers as well as inmates, so the abolition of that system was a response to mounting resistance from workers within and without the institutions to a later phase in the reorganization of capitalist production. (The rationalization of industrial management at the tum of the century was, of course, a response to the same pressures on a much larger scale). With regard to inmate workers, there is considerable evidence that they were active in opposing the "bell-to-bell" system of payment. In the 1876 hearings cited above, there are many indications that prisoners preferred the piecework system because it meant a shorter day. They recognized the attempt Ito impose the "bell-to-bell" system as a form of speedup, and resisted this change in the terms of their employment in a conscious, organized, and sometimes militant manner.42 One strongly suspects that behind the chronic complaints by private contractors of a "decline in discipline" there lay a rise iln the incidence of acts of resistance on the part of prison workers, a rise which itself was a response to worsening conditions for prison labor (speedups, low pay, increased
606
Rosalind P. Petchesky
mechanization-conditions not unlike those in factories). ObseIvers suggest that it was particularly in times of economic recession, overcrowding, and deteriorating conditions and treatment, such as characterized the 1850s and 1880s that episodes of prisoner organizing and insurgency rose.43 There is evidence that the communication among inmates that the Auburn system made possible, whether illicit or not, facilitated acts of organized sabotage, slowdowns, and occasionally, strikes. It is evident, too, that the consensus among manufacturers to abandon prison labor took into account the increasing wave of strikes and labor militancy outside the institutions. Legislation outlawing convict contract labor was portrayed by its business supporters as a (not very costly) concession to labor militants and therefore as a means of pacifying the "uprising of the working people throughout the state and throughout the nation."44 In its 1886 report, the business-oriented National Anti-Convict-Contract Association explicitly related its campaign to the organizing efforts of the Knights of Labor, implying that to abolish the "prison-labor element" might help to mollify workers who were organizing" assemblies," agitating, and striking, largely under the leadership of the Knights.45 Indeed, the year 1886 marks the height of the Knights' organizing efforts, the eight-hour-day struggle, and mass strikes, culminating in the May Day Haymarket Rally. Many workers whose industries claimed "unfair competition" from prison labor, particularly in upstate New York-stove-molders, construction workers, furniture makers, Troy collar workers-were actively engaged in these activities.46 However, the fact that the workers themselves were focusing their energies on very different and more pressing issues-on increasing wages, ending speedups, shortening the workday, and creating permanent fighting organizations-suggests that the supposedly prolabor movement to abolish prison labor in the 1880s and 1890s was more a sop to labor militants in general than a response to an explicit demand.47 Evidently, the system of perfect labor discipline that the prisons had seemed to offer proved to be far from perfect. It was, in fact, riddled with some of the same contradictions and disturbances that plagued ordinary factory owners. Moreover, it proved to be ineffective in controlling free workers, since it could not threaten them sufficiently to deter strikes and agitation. It was primarily for these reasons, as well as because of scandals and competition, that the system was ultimately abandoned by manufacturers. The capitalist strategy of evading the consequences of class struggle by exploiting captive workers failed, for confinement itself became a terrain of class struggle.
THE CENTRALIZATION OF CONTROL The abandonment of prison labor contracts was one part of a larger movement to establish centralized and consolidated bureaucratic control over the prison system. The contract labor system had represented a colla bora-
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tion between local capital and local politicians in an economic context of early industrialization and a political context of relative administrative autonomy for state and county institutions (and their directors). In the decade following the Civil War, both contexts began to change. The mode of production was transformed from small to large-scale industry, organized on a regional rather than a local basis; and the state began to centralize and consolidate its control over social welfare and social control institutions. The latter process involved state investigatOlY commissions (such as the one that reviewed the New York prisons in 18,'6), legislative committee reports, and the establishment in many states and cities of centralized bureaucratic agencies to administer prisons, asylums, jails, and social welfare. These new, centralized administrations (such as the Massachusetts Board of State Charities, established in 1863) were set up to deal with the fiscal crisis, as well as the decline in the productivity of prison labor, by introducing "greater accountability and efficiency" through "tighter and more effective controls."48 In large part, they represent an effort to exert a broader stateand class-control over local political and economic interests, including the old-style warden or "keeper," whose paternalism and autonomy had grown obsolete and ineffectual. But they also pmsuppose a substantial development of the state's tax base and credit system, making it financially possible for the state to operate prisons and other institutions without the intermediation of private contractors. Likewise, the prison labor system, which provided the prison warden with his base of power and patronage in the local community, was of little interest to the large-scale manufacturer. The end of the nineteenth centUIY thus saw a struggle between institutional administrators and professionals on the one hand, and state bureaucrats and legislators on the other, over the issue of centralization and control-·a struggle which reflected that between small and large capital. Prison officials' and local businessmen's allegations that prison conditions had deteriorated after the abolition of contract labor was an important manifestation of this conflict.49 Underlying this process of bureaucratization and state control, however, was another process that directly affected the function of prisons as centers of productivity and sources of cheap labor: the swelling of the labor surplus toward the end of the nineteenth century and the rise of organized labor militancy and general social discontent. The new centralized, rationalized administration of penal and social welfare institutions was in part a response to this unrest. The crowding of these institutions in the last decades of the century with large numbers of unemployed and unskilled immigrants -diagnosed as "irremediable" or "incurable" and left in idleness5 0-reflected the state's efforts at containing an increasingly unwieldy and heterogeneous working class. Thus, on the broadest level, we should see the decline of prison labor and the absorption of prison administrators into larger bureaucratic structures as merely one aspect of the general process of consolidation of the capitalist state, particularly its social control functions.51 This process represents the
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Rosalind P. Petchesky
establishment of a state administrative apparatus (mainly in the seaboard states where immigrant populations clustered) that could "rationalize" the contradictory functions of penal institutions: contributing to local capital accumulation and "creating the conditions for social harmony" byabsorbing and stigmatizing deviancy.52 At the turn of the century, widespread social unrest and unemployment required that the earlier institutional goals of productivity and profit be subordinated to that of social control. In the next historical period, the primary function of American prisons would be containment.
Notes 1 Michel Foucault. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison INew York: Pantheon Books. 19771. pp. 220-21. 2 Philip Klein. Prison Methods in New York State INew York: AMS Press. 19691. p. 251. 3 E. C. Wines and Theodore W. Dwight. Report on the Prisons and Reformatories of the United States and Canada IAlbany. 18671. p. 248; and W. David Lewis. From Newgate to Dannemora: The Rise of the Penitentiary in New York, 1796-1848 IIthaca: Cornell University Press. 19651. p. 181. 4 Lewis. p. 193. 5 Wines and Dwight. p. 248. Thus. by the 1860s-the peliod of Wines and Dwight's sur.'eythe degrading and deskilling tendencies of large-scale manufacturing had been replicated in the prisons. Only in the "separate system" of the Eastern Penitentimy in Pennsylvania were prisoners found to learn a whole trade Ishoemakingl. but under conditions of solitary confinement and primitive cottage industry which made that skill entirely irrelevant to the growing industrial economy. as the proponents of the Pennsylvania system were well aware. 6 David Rothman. The Discovery of the Asylum IBoston: Little Brown. 19i11. pp. 144, 152. Beaumont and Toque\'ille quoted in Rothman. p. 103. 7 Rothman, "p. 151-53. 8 Quoted in Rothman. p. 103. 9 Lewis. p. 120. 10 Quoted in Rothman. p. 86. Wines and Dwight. p. 56. also note that "the separate and silent systems have a common basis. Isolation and labor lie at the foundation of both." 11 Francis Lieber. A Popular Essay on Subjects of Penal Law. and on Uninterrupted Solitary
Cunfincment at Labor. as Contradistinguished to Solitary Confinement at Night and Joint Labor by Day IPhiladelphia. 18381. p. 64. 12 See State of New York. Assembly. "Repor1 of the Superintendent of Prisons Relative to the Contract System. in Response to a Resolution of the Last Assembly." Doc. No. 96 (March 24. H1801. pp. 7. 13. A Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics rep0l1. based on the 1870 U.S. Census and cited extensively in the New YOl'k Superintendent's report. showed that. in general. convict labor represented "less than four per cent" of labor "employed at the same industries in the same states." and "less than two per cent of that employed in tbe U.S. as a whole." In the boot and shoe industry. convicts comprised 2.06 percent of the total work force: in the iron goods industry. 1.10 percent; and in the hatIl1aking industry. 1.73 percent (p.71. 13 Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the U.S. Vol. 1 INew York: International Publishers. 19471. p. 125; Vol. 2 (19551. p. 81. Gerald N. Grob. Workers and Utopia: A Study of Ideological Conflict in the American Labor Movement, 1865-1900 (Chicago: Quadrangle. 19611. pp. 36-39.
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14 Wines and Dwight. p. 289. emphasis added. See also Lewis. pp. 179-81. 15 Lewis. p. 181. 16 In the South. the convict leasing system was more common (see ch. 13 by Shelden in this volumel. A more comprehensive description of the different forms of organizing prison labor can be found in Dario Melossi and Massimo Pavarini. Prisons and Factories (London: Macmillan. 19801. 17 Klein. pp. 139ff.. 251: Lewis. p. 44. 18 Lewis. p. 182. 19 State of New York. Assembly. "Repol1 of the Superintendent of Prisons" (March 24.18801. p. 12 (Table 11 and p. 16 ITable 41. 20 Lewis. p. 109. Wines and Dwight. p. 53. quote a joint committee of the New Jersey legislatme. which reported in 1859 that "the advantages of the workhouse system are so ob\10US that this committee does not consider it necessary to go into lengthy details .... It will be perceived that the committee are justified in recommending the workhouse system for its pecuniary advantages." Likewise. they quote the warden of the Rhode Island State Prison as having justified abandonment of the Pennsylvania system in favor of the Auburn system in the following terms Ip. 1761: "in the peli'ormance of sociallabOl·. in silence. the men have been better subject to control. and have required less li'equent exel1ions of authority than before .... When the strict seclusion of the cells was done away .... and the social nature had been partially relieved. by permitting company without conversation. a velY marked change came over the prisoners. and they manit£lsted most c1eal'ly to the obser\'er by their greater cheerfulness. alacrity in labor. and prompter compliance with orders. that their condition was much improved .... 21 Lewis. pp. 88. 94-97. Lewis notes. p. 98. that the most severe heatings were given to inmates accused of feigning insanity in order to a\'()id work! 22 At least one of Auburn's wardens. Da\1d Foot in the 1840s. had been a "contractOi' for many years" prior to becoming waJ·den. Auburn State Prison. "Annual Rep0l1." New }'ork Senate Documents Ilan. 13. 18471. p. 2. 23 Wines and Dwight. pp. 176-77 (emphasis addedl. Note that this remark is made hy reformers who were staunch critics. not supp0l1ers. of prison lahor. 24 Lewis. p. 183. 25 Wines and Dwight. p. 257. 26 Wines and Dwight. pp. 249. 258. cite testimony from one prison keeper regm'ding"a contract given out at Auburn. in 1863. on which the men were let at 40 cents a day. Water power. worth $1.500 a year. was charged to the contractor'S at $240: and yard and shop room. which would have rented outside for $2.000. was. as usual. thrown in without charge. This contract was to run 5 years. At the expiration of the second year. the halance of the contract was sold to another party for a bonus of $30.000. In this case. a considerahle f0l1lllle was realized li'om a single contract in the bl;ef space of two yeill'S." 27 Norman Ware. The Industrial Worker, 1840-1860 INew York: Quadrangle. 19241. pp. 116-18. 150-51,200-202.227-29. 28 Hany Braverman. Labor and Monopoly Capital 1New York: Monthly Review Press. 19741. pp. 64-67. Braverman discusses the eighteenth-centlllY ironworks of Amhrose Crowley as a prototype of the company town and eal'ly capitalist paternalism. His analysis of eal'ly methods of worker control. however. ovel'looks the significance of institutions of confinement as both forerunners and models for the development of techniques of labor discipline. 29 Braverman. p. 63 (emphasis addedl. For examples of such subcontracting in the private sector see Braverman. pp. 60-62. and Katherine Stone. "The Origins of Job Structmes in the Steel Industry," Radical America (Nov.-Dec. 19731. 30 Wines and Dwight, p. 261.
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Rosalind P. Petchesky
31 Lewis, pp. 185-86; Auburn State Prison, "Annual Report" 11847), pp. 1, 11. 32 Wines and Dwight. pp. 266-267; Klein, p. 254; Lewis, pp. 259-60. 33 State of New York, Prison Commission, Investigation of the State Prisons and Report Thereon IAlbany, 1876), pp. 16-19. 34 In agreement with his counterparts in other states, the New York Commissioner recommended to the legislature that it maintain the contract system as the best in existence, producing "the best financial results" Ip. 6) and not at all an unfair form of competitio{l. State of New York, Assembly, "Report of the Superintendent of Prisons" IMarch 24, 1880), pp. 1-3. See also State of New York, Bureau of Labor Statistics, 14th Annual Report, for the Year 1896 IAlbany, 1897, Part VI, "Report of the Debate on Prison Labor in the New York Constitutional Convention of 1894," pp. 949, 951-54. 35 In some states there was a lag between legal prohibition and implementation. A survey carried out in 1910 indicated that the contmct system was still in use in 26 states. National Free Labor Association, Bulletin No. 17, "Some Data in Relation to Prison Contracts," Oct. 6,1910. 36 Ware, pp. 200-201; Lewis, pp. 187-91. 37 Legislation was passed in 1842 restricting the manufacture of goods that would compete with domestic industries, and the use of inmates' labor in tasks involving skills they did not have before imprisonment ILewis, pp. 194-97, 259-60; Klein, pp. 252-53). Since prison labor was becoming mechanized and unskilled, the intent of the latter provision was easily circumvented. 38 National Anti-Convict-Contract Association, Proceedings of the National Convention IDee. 1, 1886), pp. iii-\,. 39 State of New York, Assembly, "Report of the Superintendent of Prisons" IMarch 24, 1880), pp. 42-44, indicates widespread opposition to the prison contmct system on the part of local manufacturers, especially those in the shoe, hat and stove-making industries. See also State of New York, Bureau of Labor Statistics, 14th Annual Report 11897), Part VI. 40 See State of New York, Prison Commission, Investigation of the State Prisons 11876); and Commonwealth of Massachusetts, House Report on the Insane, No.4 11883), Appendix, "Convict Labor," cited hereafter as Massachusetts Report, "Convict Labor" (1883). Most of the following information is taken from these two sources. 41 State of New York, Prison Commission, Investigation of the State Prisons 11876), pp. 316-19. 322,696,768-69; Massachusetts Report, "Com~ct Labor" 118831 pp. 180-81. 42 Massachusetts Report, "Convict Labor" 11883), p. 171; Siale of New York, Prison Commission, Investigation of the State Prisons 11876), pp. 768-69. The latter source quotes one supervisor, representing a contractor who manufactUl'ed saddlery hardware, as saying that "the convicts will insist when we ask them to do what they ought to do that they are doing as much as they used to do; they seem to be banded together not to do a stroke more than they formerly did; there is a system of terrorism by which a decent convict dare not do what he considers a fair day's work" Ip. 317, emphasis addedl 43 Lewis, pp. 268-74; and Wines and Dwight, pp. 50-57. 44 State of New York, Bureau of Labor Statistics, 14th Annual Report 11897), p. 965. 45 National Anti-Convict-Contract Association, Proceedings lDec. 1, 1886), p. v. 46 See Jeremy Brecher, Strike! IGreenwich , Conn.: Fawcett, 1972), ch. 2; and Eleanor Flexnor, Century of Struggle INew York: Atheneum, 19721, pp. 194-95. 47 See the remarks by the Troy Assemblyman Iquoted in State of New York, Bureau of Labor Statistics, 14th Annual Report [1897], p. 967), who argues that the proposed constitutional amendment to abolish prison labor would "protect" the women collar and shirt workers in Troy. His patronizing attitude toward "honored and industrious womanhood," who, he implies, will be satisfied with the anti-prison labor law (enough to stop striking and renounce the struggle for the votel, contrasts sharply with the 1905 account of the collar
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starchers' sllike by an anonymous collar' stretcher from TI'OY, in Leon Stein and Philip Taft, eds·., Workers Speak INew York: Arno Prllss, 19711. 48 See Gerald Gl'Ob, Mental Instilutions in Americ.a INew York The Frlle Pr-ess, 19731, PI'. 262-65, for an excellent description of this pl'Ocess of bureaucratic centralization. 49 See, for example, State of New York, Superintendent of State Prisons, Annual Report for the rear 1888 ITI'OY, 18891, pp. 6-7, andAllIlIIal ReportJar the rear 1894 IAlbany, 18951, p. 19, as well as Klein, pp. 262-73. 50 See Rothman, pp. 253-55. 51 Broader tr-eatments of this pl'Ocess may be found in Bar'bara G. Rosenkrantz, Public Health and the State: Changing Views in Massachusells, 1842-1936 ICambridge, Mass.: Har,'ard lIni\'erosity Pr-ess, 19621; Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism IChicago: Quadrangle, 1963): James O'Connor, The Fiscal Crisis oflhe State (New York: St. Mal1in's Pr-ess, 1973); and Andr-ew Scull, Decarceration (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.; Prentice-Hall, 1977!. 52 O'Connor, pp. 6-7, 68-70.
Editor's Note Further work on nineteenth-century American prison history has confirmed the centrality of the organization of penal labor to systems of punishment (John A. Conley, "Prisons, Production, and Profit: Reconsidering the Importance of Prison Industries," Journal of Social History 14 (1980): 258-76; Conley, "Revising Conceptions about the Origins of Prisons: The Impol1ance of Economic Considerations," Social Science Quarterly 62 (1981): 247-58; Conley, "Economics and the Social Reality of Prisons," Journal of Criminal Justice 10 (1982): 25-35; Christopher R. Adamson, "Hard Labor and Solitary Confinement: Effects of the Business Cycle and Labor Supply on Prison Discipline in the United States, 1790-1835," Research in Law, Deviance and Social Control 4 (1984): 19-56; Adamson, "Towards a Marxian Penology: Captive Criminal Populations as Economic Threats and Resources," Social Problems 4 (1984): 435-58; Robert P. Weiss, "Humanitarianism, Labour Exploitation or Social Control? A Critical Survey ofTheOlY and Research on the Origin and Development of Prisons," Social History 12 (1987): 332-50). Paul Knepper argues ("Prison Historiography and the Maternity Question," paper presented to the American Society of Criminology, 1991) that the exploitation of prison labor by private entr-epreneurs was so important that Kentucky, the first state to contract prisoners' labor to private entrepreneurs, should be given credit for having given bil1h to the modem prison.
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7
Convict Leasing: An Application of the Rusche-Kirchheimer Thesis to Penal Changes in Tennessee, 1830-1915 Randall G. Shelden
"In the back woods of the GulfStates,jor miles and miles, he may not leave the plantation of his birth; in well-nigh the whole rural South the black jarmers are peons, bound by law and custom to an economic slavery, from which the only escape is death or the penitentiary... W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, 1903.
" ... the authorities simply lengthened the chains binding man to man, and the railroads and other companies that leased such labor gladly pushed their construction camps jarther into the mountains, the swamps, or the mining region . ... Race hatred, slave-driving traditions, necessities jor economy, public ignorance of the facts, and desperation among convicts-all combined during the .first trying years of reconstruction to saddle a damnable lease system on the southern states ... Blake McKelvey, American Prisons, 1936.
Some decades ago, Georg Rusche and DUo Kirchheimer argued in their classic study Punishment and Social Structure that changes in forms of punishment reflect changes in economic and political institutions in the larger society. "Prison labor," for example, "is impossible without manufacture or industry" (1968:6). Put differently, their argument says that changes in the dominant mode of production result in changes in the dominant mode of punishment. In this paper I will argue that as the Southern United States changed from a slave economy to a capitalist
Convict Leasing
613
economy after the Civil War, imprisonment became the dominant mode of punishment. More specifically, I will argue that, as in the early development of capitalism in general, capitalist development in the South required an abundant and steady source of cheap andlforced labor. One source of this labor was offenders sentenced to Southern prisons and utilized by a unique form of forced labor, the convict lease system. To illustrate the application of the Rusche and Kirchheimer thesis, this paper will focus particularly on penal changes in the state of Tennessee after the Civil War. The data reported here are derived from a larger study of the origins of the juvenile justice system in Memphis (Shelden, 1976). As suggested in the quotations by DuBois and McKelvey, the convict lease system was one of the outstanding features of the post - Civil War penal system in the South. The burden of this system rested primarily on the shoulders of black convicts. Despite their alleged "freedom," Southern blacks were still subjected to forms of slavery. The development of the convict lease system can be seen as one among many attempts to control and oppress blacks in particular, and the working class in general, and to aid in the development of capitalism in the South. More important, convict leasing helped to manage the labor force, especially blacks.
PRISON DEVELOPMENTS BEFORE THE CIVIL WAR
The first prison in Tennessee was opened in 1831 in the state capital of Nashville (Crowe, 1956:114; Folmsbee, 1969:304; Sellin, 1976:140). Like eastern prisons, this prison adopted the Auburn plan of organization and discipline and concentrated on making profits so that the prison could become economically self-sufficient. From 1831 until the start of the war, convict labor primarily involved work for state use. Even so, as early as the 1840s, complaints of competition with free labor were being registered by state officials, corporations, and labor unions. The problem of competition was partially solved after the war by convict leasing. This was because, in the 1870s, there was a great demand by private companies (especially railroads) for unskilled and cheap labor. Prison officials believed that such employment of convicts would ease the complaints of the mechanics' unions, the major complainants. But complaints arose anyway. Eventually such complaints ceased for a few years when convicts were leased to mining companies (Crowe, 1956:13-132). Although complete data on prison populations before the war are not yet available, a few reports give some indication of who was in prison during this time. Crowe, for instance, reports that about 14 percent of the inmate population at the Nashville prison was under 20 years of age in 1843 and that most of the offenders were white (195():121). A visitor in 1841 found that there were 173 white and six black prisoners, all male (Sellin, 197():140). The building of prisons and the establishment of imprisonment at hard labor reflected the need of the state to provide private employers with labor.
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Randall G. Shelden
(This was also one of the reasons behind the abolition of capital punishment for most crimes in Tennessee and the South generally.) It was believed, furthermore, that prisoners should be taught a trade, as "this would make a penitentiary selfsustaining rather than a burden on the taxpayers" (Sellin, 1976:1411. The leasing of white convicts actually began before the Civil War. Kentucky introduced this system in the South in 1825. Missouri began leasing convicts in 1841, when several "were led to work in the city to help masons in building ice houses or dwellings, or marched several miles to chop wood and split rails" (Sellin, 1976:1421. Louisiana, Virginia, and Mississippi soon followed with their own lease plans. The convict lease system developed even more rapidly after the Civil War, especially in Tennessee. The most noteworthy change in the system was the dramatic increase in black prisoners, as we shall see shortly.
PRISON DEVELOPMENTS AFTER THE WAR
The South was faced with crucial economic and political problems immediately after the war. Prisons, railroads, and factories were almost totally destroyed in many areas, as was much of the land itself. Economic and political recovery were thus among the highest priorities facing the South. These priorities influenced the kind of penal sanctions that were imposed on the newly emancipated black population. Controlling the black population
All available evidence, including the reports on the Nashville prison cited above, shows that blacks were not sent to prison in great numbers before the war (Cable, 1888; McKelvey, 1936; Meier and Rudwick, 19701. When blacks did commit a crime, the matter was usually dealt with locally (Wisner, 1970:1061. Sellin states that "Criminal slaves were hanged, mutilated, or flogged. Free blacks of whatever hue who had committed serious crimes but had not been hanged were flogged, sold as slaves, and deported" (1976:140). After the war, the South was faced with the problem of how to control the ex-slaves. The following statement by a Tennessee physician (quoted in Sellin, 1976:146) shows how this "problem" was perceived by white racist Southerners: We have dilliculties at the South, which you at the North have not .... We have a large alien popUlation, an inferior race. Just what we are to do with them as prisoners is a great question as yet unsettled. The Negro's moral sense is lower than that of the white man .... The Negro regards it as no disgrace to be sent to the penitentiaIY. He never cares to conceal the fact that he has been there. How we are going to reform that race we do not know.
615
Convict Leasing
Several methods for controlling freed blacks were employed. The method of the Ku Klux Klan and similar groups was to use extra-legal force and terror. As several writers have noted, the use of force (especially lynching) to subjugate blacks increased after the war (Cable, 1888; Johnson, 1930; Woodward, 1955, 1969; Friedman, 1970; Meier and Rudwick, 1970l. Klans appeared in many parts of the South (Chalmers, 1965), Much of the control function, however, was carried out under law. For example, a series of laws known as the Black Codes was enacted during 1865 and 1866. These codes became" a system of social control that would be a substitute for slavery" by fixing blacks to a subordinate social status; they also provided a "manageable and inexpensive labor force" through the use of vague criminal statutes prohibiting vagrancy and loitering. These laws made it possible to arrest blacks at will (often for simply looking "suspicious" or for looking at white women the "wrong" way) and sentence them summarily to prison (Meier and Rudwick, 1970:154), Moreover, as Woodward (1955) notes, Jim Crow legislation began to sweep the South during the 1880s, and by the end of the century had become the law of the land. One result of these laws and statutes was the shift in prison populations from predominantly white to predominantly black. Data for Tennessee prisons demonstrate this change. As indicated in Table 13.1, while blacks represented only 33 percent of the population at the main prison in Nashville as of October 1, 1865, two years later their proportion had inTable 13.1 Racial Composition at the State Penitentiary at Nashville. Tennessee: 1865-1914
Date 1865, Oct. 1 1867, Nov. 29 1869, Oct. 1 1874, Dec. 1 1877, Jan. 1 1879, Jan. 6 1880, Dec. 1 1898, Dec. 1 1900, Dec. 1 1902, Dec. 1 1910, Jan. 1 1912, Dec. 1 1914, Dec. 1
Number of Inmates 200 485 551 963 997 1153 1241 899 1110 923 1066 1206 1243
White
Black
1M 202 HI8 380
66 283
3':W
3i'2 4'~0 3'~4
418 408 3!15 474 5'!O
353 583 671 781 821 575 692 525 671 732 723
Percent Black 33.0% 58.3 64.0 60.5 67.3 67.7 66.1 63.9 62.3 55.7 62.9 60.7 58.2
Sources: Taylor 11941:421; Tennessee. Board of Prison Commissioners 11897-98. 1898-1900, 1902-4, 1911-12.1913-141; U.S. Census Bureau 11918:288-901.
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Randall G. Shelden
creased to 58.3 percent. By 1869 it had increased to 64 percent, and between 1877 and 1879 it reached an all-time high of 67 percent. The percentage remained around 60 well into the second decade of the twentieth century, even though the proportion of blacks in the general population of Tennessee was rarely higher than 20 percent (U.S. Census Bureau, 1904; Taylor, 1941). The decrease in the number of inmates (especially blacks) at the main prison in Nashville between 1880 and 1898 can be explained in part by the opening of two branches, Brushy Mountain and Inman, in the 1890s. As indicated in Table 13.2, the population of Brushy Mountain Prison was never less than 78 percent black. The only data available for the branch at Inman are for prisoners on hand as of December I, 1898. At that time there were only' 58 prisoners, all of whom were black. Table 13.2 Racial Composition of Brushy Mountain Prison: 1898-1914
Date
Number of Inmates
White
1898, Dec. 1 1900, Dec. 1 1902, Dec. 1 1910, Jan. 1 1912, Dec. 1 1914, Dec. 1
525 634 762 747 704 616
127 145 131 139 131
84
Black
Percent Black
441 507 617 616 656 485
84.0% 79.9 80.9 82.5 80.3 78.7
Sources: Tennessee Board of PJison Commissioners 11897-98, 1878-1900, 1902-04, 1911-12, 1913-141; U.S. Census Bureau 11918:288-901.
The political economy of convict leasing
The social and economic context of the above changes was the period known as Reconstruction and the emergence of the "New South" after the Civil War. It was the beginning of the shift from a slave society to a caste society (with a capitalist economy) in which the basic social structure and value system of slavery was, for the most part, preserved (Johnson, 1930). The convict lease system contributed both to economic recovery and to the perpetuation of white dominance. After the slaves were freed, "the prison population rapidly became black workers and peasants. Negroes convicted of minor 'crimes' were hired out to private businessmen under slavery conditions. It was undoubtedly a deliberate move by the ruling class to secure forced labor on a large scale as a partial substitute for chattel slavery" (Wilson, 1935:40). Under leasing, convicts were released from prison during the day to work outside the prison walls for a particular company. At night they were re-
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turned to their cells, in some cases after working 10 to 12 hours under grueling conditions (deaths, attempted escapes, and escapes were quite common). In return, the corporation paid the state a certain fee. For instance, one lease in Georgia involved a hundred black convicts who worked on the Georgia and Alabama railroad for one year, for which the state was paid $2,500 (Mancini, 1978:341). In some cases leases were signed for longer periods, thus insuring a steady supply of cheap labor and keeping convicts in bondage, as under slavery. Sellin notes that in some of the Southern states convicts "became the temporary or lifelong slaves of private employers or corporations" 11976:145). The major victims of this form of slavery were blacks, as the vast majority of convicts 160-70 percent in Tennessee, 70 percent in Louisiana, 88 percent in North Carolina) were black (Sellin, p.146)' So far we have been discussing convict leasing in the South in general. We now turn our discussion to the particular case of Tennessee. The first lease in Tennessee was arranged with a Nashville furniture company in 1866. It corresponded exactly with the shift in prison populations from predominantly white to predominantly black (Crowe, 1956: 125-27)' The lease period was for four years and the state was paid 43 cents per day for each convict. By the end of the decade and during the early 1870s it was becoming apparent to state officials that leasing to just one firm was inefficient because the inmate population increased each year, posing control problems. The idea of using convicts to rebuild the wardevastated railroad system became popular. This idea was fully acted upon by the Tennessee legislature, which appropriated almost $14 million to relieve the railroad companies. As complaints from labor unions continued, the state eventually began to lease convicts to mining companies, who wanted a very cheap and unskilled labor force. In 1871 coal mining companies began to use convict labor, and by 1882 more than half of the inmates at the Nashville prison were leased out to them. Then, in 1884, the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railway Company took complete control and leased the entire prison population at Nashville for $101,000 a year (McKelvey, 1936:175; Crowe, 1956:131-33; Williams, 1973:323; Sellin, 1976:161). Apparently the labor provided by the state prisons was not enough, because while the above was occurring, city and county workhouses began to emerge. These institutions, evolving from almshouses for the poor, were an obvious method of acquiring cheap labor. The typical sentence at the Shelby County Workhouse in Memphis, for instance, was for failure to pay court costs and/or fines (which usually amounted to five or ten dollars), and therefore the sentence was for the purpose of working off the amount owed. A tremendous increase in workhouse popUlations resulted from a bill passed by the Tennessee legislature in 1875 requiring those convicted even of misdemeanors to work out the costs of conviction in city and county workhouses. These convicts sometimes worked for local counties le.g., building roads, bridges, etc.) and sometimes for local companies. The
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"crimes" that sent men and women of all ages to these local institutions were usually vagrancy, loitering, and petty theft (Taylor, 1941:279). The "crimes" that sent people to the state prison were petty. A report by the directors of the Nashville State Prison in 1868 states, "It is a matter of documentary proof that many [black] criminals are sent here for offenses ranging from eight cents, the value of a fence rail, to all intermediate sums not reaching $5, from remote counties of the state" (Crowe, 1956:124}. Usually the sole source of relief for the convict sentenced to prison and turned over to the lease system was death or escape. Escapes were common, but the mortality rate was also quite high: the rate of mortality in the South was 41.3 per thousand convicts, while in northern prisons it was only 14.9 (McKelvey, 1936:183}. These convicts sometimes worked for local counties (e.g., building roads, bridges, etc.} and sometimes for local companies. Although the most critical years of poverty in the South were over by 1878, the convicts continued to pay retribution, not only for their own sins, at a time when that old pl'inciple was losing fOI'ce in the North, but also for the public crimes of Civil Wal' and Reconstl'Uction. Many thousands of happy-go-lucky Negroes awoke from rosy dreams of freedom and forty acres and a mule to find themselves shackled to the task of rebuilding the wealth of the South in hopeless penal slavmy. 11936:180)
The preceding discussion and the facts that have been presented suggest that changes in penal policies after the Civil War were closely related to changes in the political economy of Tennessee and of the South, in particular the transition from an agricultural, slave society to a capitalist society in the early stages of industrialization. The convict lease system was abolished in Tennessee at the turn of the century because labor opposed it: "Free miners had for years agitated against the system; they had seen convicts used as strikebreakers and their own wages depressed" by the convict lease system (Sellin, 1976:161}. In other parts of the South, convict leasing survived into the twentieth century. As late as the 1930s, one commentator observed, Just as great railway, oil and telegraph companies in the N0I1h have been capable of controlling legislation, so the corporations of the South which take the prisoners of the State oft· the hands of the government, and then speculate upon the labor of the prisoners, are able to control both court and jury. It has been the practice, and is now, in some of the Southern States, to pronounce long sentences upon able-bodied young colored men, whose offenses in a northern cOUl1, could not be visited vvith more than a few months confinement and a trifling fine. The object in giving Negro men a long term of years is to make sure the tenure of the soulless cOlVOI'ations upon the convicts whose unhappy lot it is to fall into their own grasp. (Quoted in Taylor, 1941:431
Road camps and the chain gain are perhaps the most common forms of convict leasing that survive to the present date.
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619
References Allen, Robert L. 1974
Reluctant Reformers: Racism and Social Reform MOl'ements in the U.S. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press.
Cable, George 1888
The Silent South. Montclair, N.J.: Patterson Smith, reprinted 1962.
Chalmers, Da\id 1965
Hooded Americanism: The History of the KKK. New York: Doubleday.
Crowe, Jesse C. 1956 "The Origin and Development of Tennessee's Prison Problem." Tennessee Historical
Quarterly 15
(21.
Folmsbee, Stanley J., et al. 1969
Tennessee: A Short History. Knoxdlle: liniversity of Tennessee Press.
Friedman, Lawrence J. 1970
The White Savage: Racial Fantasies in the Post-Bellum South. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.
Genovese, Eugene 1965
The Political Economy of Slavery. New Yo ['k: Random House.
Johnson, Charles S. 1930
The Negro in American Civilization. New York: Henry Holt.
MCKelvey, Blake 1936
American Prisons. Montclair, N.J.: Patterson Smith, reprinted 1968.
Mancini, Matthew J. 1978 "Race, Economics, and the Abandonment of Comict Leasing." Journal o.rNegm History 63 (Falll: 339-52. Meier, August. and Elliot Rudwick 1970 Fmm Plantation to Ghetto. New YOlk Hill and Wang. Rusche, GeOl'g, and Otto Kirchheimer 1968
Punishment and Social Structure. New York: Russell and Russell. Originally published
in 1939. Sellin, J. Thorsten 1976
Slavery and the Penal System. New YOlk Elsevier.
Shelden, Randall G. 1976 "Rescued from E\il: Ol'igins of the Juvenile Justice System in Memphis, Tennessee, 1900-1917." Ph.D. dissel1ation, Southern Illinois liniversity, Carbondale. State of Tennessee 1917
Public Acts of Tennessee. Nashville, Tennessee.
State of Tennessee, Board of Prison Commissioners 1897-98 Report to the Governor. Nasll\ille, Tennessee. 1898-1900 1902-4 1911-12 1913-14
Taylor, Altrutheus Ambush 1941 The Negm in Tennessee, 1865-1880. Washington, D.C.: Associated Publishers. United States, Census Bureau 1918 Prisoners and Juvenile Delinquents in the [I.s., 1910. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.
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Williams, William A. 1973 The Contours ofAmerican History. New York: Watts. Wilson, Walter 1935 Forced Labor in the U.S. London: Martin Lawrence. Wisner, Elizabeth 1970 Social Welfare in the South: From Colonial Times to World War I. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Woodward, C. Vann 1955 The Strange Career of Jim Crow. New York: Oxford University Press. 1969 Origins of the New South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
Editor's notes 1 Shelden refers to the Tennessee miners' opposition to convict leasing. Philip S. Foner provides details of how convict labor was used to undermine the attempts to miners to organize collectively, and of their extremely militant opposition to this practice (History of the Labor Movement in the United States, vol. 2 [New York: International Publishers, 1955], pp. 219-291. 2 Michael Hindus explicitly compares Northern and Southern penal systems in the nineteenth century (Prisons and Plantations: Criminal Justice in Nineteenth Century Massachusetts and South Carolina [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980]1. 3 More recent work on convict leasing in the postbellum South can be found in Christopher R. Adamson, "Punishment After Slavery: Southern State Penal Systems, 1865-1890," Social Problems 30 11983): 555-69.
621
8
The Coopta1~ion of Fixed Sentencing Reform David F. Greenber!1I and Drew Humphries RepMnted from David F. Greenberg and Drew HumphMes, "The Cooptation of Fixed Sentencing Refonn," Crime and Delinquency IApMl 19801, pp. 206-25.
The cOITectional philosophy and programmatic goals of American penal reformers have recently shifted away from the "rehabilitative ideal" or "treatment model" toward what is coming to be known as the "justice model" of correction. Although the early advocates of justice model principles saw themselves as advancing prisoners' interests and contributing to a broader process of radical social change, the model has taken on an increasingly conservative cast in the past few years. This essay documents the ideological transformation of the justice model, examines the consequences of this transformation for 1the administration of justice and social change more generally, and identifies the social forces responsible for this shift.
THE ESSENCE OF THE TREATMENT MODEL The treatment model of correction originated in the period following the Civil War, when reformers criticized judicially imposed sentences of fixed duration as retributive and too mechanical to reform prisoners effectively. In place of fixed sentences they advocated! a sentencing scheme that would enlist the prisoner's will in the cause of reformation by providing an incentive in the form of early release from incarceration, and that would at the same time permit the extended imprisonment of incorrigibles. Thus, prison sentences were to be indefinite in extent le.g., five to ten years, or five years to life), with decisions concerning release to be made on the basis of rehabilitative criteria. Implementation, though slow at first and always partial, made major strides during the Progressive Era. By the early decades of the twentieth century, the federal government and almost all state legislatures had established parole boards authorized to release prisoners administratively at any
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time within legislatively or judicially determined minimum and maximum limits. Though isolated features of the system had received sporadic criticism over the years,1 the treatment model continued to enjoy extremely wide support. It was embraced in such popular works as Karl Menninger's The Crime ofPunishment2 and Ramsey Clark's Crime in America, 3 as well as in the report of the President's Crime Commission.4 In interviews carried out as recently as 1973, the "correctional elites" of several states overwhelmingly said that they regarded the rehabilitation of offenders to be a goal of the highest priority.5
THE ATTACK ON THE TREATMENT MODEL The long-held consensus about the goals of penal reform began to fall apart around 1970. One of the first and most far-reaching criticisms of the accepted wisdom appeared in a report prepared by a Working Party of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and published under the title Struggle for Justice.6 The AFSC Working Party pointed out that criminal justice practitioners had never developed the technical capabilities required to implement the model. Evaluations of rehabilitation programs had consistently failed to find persuasive evidence for the success of treatmenti after fifty years of research on the prediction of criminality, postrelease recidivism still could not be predicted accurately. The prospects of major improvement in these areas were questioned on theoretical grounds: If crime is not the product of an individual pathology, then it cannot be "cured." However, even if these programs did become effective, it was argued, they were limited in the effect they could have on the crime problem because such a small proportion of the population of law violators was actually subjected to imprisonment and exposed to "treatment." Going beyond this technical criticism, the Working Party rejected coerced therapy as undignified and potentially repressive, and attacked individualization in sentencing as a violation of fundamental norms of distributive justice and proportionality. These violations were placed in the political context of a dual system of justice which ignores or provides minimal punishment for immensely destructive actions of corporations and the state, while reserving the full weight of repressive enforcement for the poor and members of racial, political, and cultural minorities whose infractions are frequently minor or harmless. This inequality oftreatment, it was argued, is not solely a reflection of the substantive provisions of the criminal code. Although these provisions do reflect inequalities of wealth and power, in both the offenses included and those excluded, the Working Party pointed to differential enforcement ofthe law, itself a product of institutionalized arrangements that contribute to or encourage discretionary decision making, as another important mechanism
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by which social inequality is translated into legal inequality. Where decisions are unstructured by law, regulation, or even meaningful guidelines, and are for the most part unreviewed and unchecked, decisions supposedly to be made on the basis of criteria related to rehabilitation can be and sometimes are made on the basis of other criteria that are legally irrelevant and discriminatory in their impact, such as race, class, sex, life style, and political affiliations. Disproportionate represen1ation of the poor and minorities in prison was attributed not to their greater criminality, but to the covert use of these criteria in decision making. Seen in this light, rehabilitation was not merely a laudable goal that scientific research had unfortunately failed thus far to achieve, but something far more insidious-an ideology that explained crime in highly individualistic terms and legitimated the expansion of administrative powers used in practice to discriminate against disadvantaged groups and to achieve covert organizational goals (such as alleviating court backlogs and repressing political opposition). This analysis provided the foundation for a set of proposals to restructure criminal sentencing. These proposals had two aspects. One involved the prosecution and sanctioning of crime according to its social harmfulness. This principle would direct law enforcement toward the crimes of the corporation and the state, reduce penalties for crimes commonly committed by the lower classes, and, in the case of "victimless" crimes and some of the lesser offenses against property and public order, lead to decriminalization. The second aspect of the proposed restructuring concerned the justification of punishment and the related question of the principles of sentencing. On technical, moral, and political grounds, the Working Party called for the exclusion of mandatory treatment programs and the termination of preventive confinement on a predictive basis. Deterrence of the general public to procure conformity to some minimal set of essential prohibitions was to constitute the sole ground for punishment, and the administration of this punishment was to be constrained by norms of distributive justice. Discretionary decision making, lacking any rationale under these principles, was to be reduced or eliminated wherever possible, and replaced by sentences of fixed length that were much shorter than those presently imposed. To the authors of Struggle for Justice, a nondiscretionary system of justice was expected to have implications not only for the elimination of discrimination in sentencing but also for the reform of the substantive law. In a discretionary system, Robert Kennedy's son can be given probation for possession of marijuana while a white hippie or black ghetto youth is sent to prison. In a nondiscretionary system, everyone-or no one-must go to prison. Faced with the prospect of sending Robert Kennedy's son to prison, it was argued, legislators would repeal the marijuana laws and other nonessential prohibitions. Thus, it was hoped that the adoption of formal rules of sentencing would help to bring about substantive reform of the criminal law.
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This analysis did not come out of the blue. The attention paid to the discriminatory aspects of criminal justice administration reflected the impact of a decade of civil rights activity and growing black militancy. One of the targets of the civil rights movement was the unequal and sometimes brutal treatment of blacks at the hands of law enforcement officials. The understanding that the criminal justice system is sometimes used for political repression came at the end of a decade in which Southern sheriffs clubbed, hosed, cattle-prodded, and jailed civil rights activists; demonstrators clashed with police on campuses and in the streets; and the FBI and local law enforcement agencies tapped telephones, burglarized apartments and offices, opened mail, and used infiltrators and provocateurs to disrupt and destroy radical organizations and programs. Liberal assumptions about the benevolence of the state could no longer be sustained. The Working Party itself was formed because traditional AFSC involvement in criminal justice reform no longer made sense in light of these events. The AFSC analysis was further shaped by the imprisonment of civil rights activists and war resisters, and by the dissemination of writings (such as The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice) by articulate black prisoners or exprisoners, many of them radicalized by developments occurring in and out of prison. The public image of the prisoner was humanized and politicized. Instead of being seen as public enemies or defectives in need of "correction," defendants and prisoners became victims of discrimination in the society at large, who were further victimized by the criminal justice system. The political delegitimation of the state in connection with the war in Vietnam further eroded the legitimacy of correction as a criminal justice goal. The concept of correction implies that those who administer it know what is "correct." Once that confidence is lost, correction comes to be seen as a means of procuring conformity to an oppressive social system rather than a way to help unfortunates. Finally, prisoners themselves began to reject important elements of the treatment model. In California, where indeterminate sentencing had been implemented more extensively than anywhere else in the country, prisoners placed the indeterminate sentence high on their list of grievances? The prisoners who seized D Yard in Attica considered themselves political prisoners and called not for rehabilitation but for release. It was in the context of these developments that brief published summaries of the as yet unpublished findings of Douglas Lipton, Robert Martinson, and Judith Wilks concerning the failure of rehabilitation were interpreted as demonstrating the bankruptcy of a system organized around treatment goals, rather than as the occasion for a call to redouble research efforts.s In contrast with most proposals for criminal justice reform, Struggle jor Justice was not addressed to official policymakers; as beneficiaries or representatives of the beneficiaries of the present system, they could hardly have been expected to take the initiative in changing it. Instead, those whom the system oppressed were to be the central actors:
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Central to our framework for action is the concept of empowerment. As a basis for social change, start with the people who suffer most grievously under the present system. Actions that shift power relationships, that place power in the hands of the heretofore powerless, hm'e the potential for creating basic change. Such actions place people in new relationships to institutions .... The concept of empowerment leads to the organization of oppressed peoples and abused groups for self-determination H The proposals were therefore addressed to the insurgent groups that were politically active at the end of the 1960s: prisoners, blacks, and Hispanics, as well as liberal whites who could ally with these groups. The substantive content of the AFSC proposals was based on this political perspective. Whereas previous proposals for penal reform had been premised on purely technical criticism, or were suffused by paternalism and in practice tended to heighten the powerlessness of prisoners, the AFSC proposals were intended to shift power to defendants and prisoners, enabling them to set their own priorities.lO The Working Party was politically diverse and consequently never achieved a full consensus concerning the precise nature of the relationship between its proposals and movements to achieve broader social change.l1 However, the report established a clear link between criminal justice reform and efforts to bring about a more egalitarian society: "The construction of a just system of criminal justice in an unjust society is a contradiction in terms." There must be "fundamental reallocations of power and resources ... a radical change in our values and a drastic restructuring of our social and economic institutions."12 Clearly, the proposals for criminal justice reform were to be part of a wider struggle to bring about change in a number of different areas of American life. These struggles were conceived as being grassroots in character, rather than as originating at the top governmental and organizational levels. For at least one of the members of the Working Party, the AFSC proposals fit logically into a program for building a socialist movement in the United States because of the difficulty of implementing the proposals within the existing institutional framework of American society.13 In a judicial system that manages to avoid paralysis by securing 90 to 95 percent of its convictions through guilty pleas often obtained through plea bargaining, the elimination of the prosecutOIial and judicial discretion that makes these bargains possible cannot be accomplished solely by freeing resources through the repeal of victimless crime laws. Given the volume of crime in the United States, it would be necessary to stop prosecuting crimes of medium seriousness (e.g., burglary) as welL and this is not politically possible. The proposed reforms, then, are in fact feasible only in the context of a society that generates less crime than occurs in the United States, or is willing to allocate far more resources to controlling crime. Although subject to flagrant violations in practice in low-visibility proceedings, concepts like "equal treatment under the law," "due process," and "right to trial by jury" are important elements of the American political
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system's legitimating ideology and enjoy extremely wide support. Even those who do not particularly value economic equality are nevertheless likely to believe that at least in court everyone should be treated equally. The contradiction between the norm of equality under law and the routine violation of the norm necessitated by the high crime rate generated by a deteriorating capitalist social system seemed to hold out the possibility for building a mass movement to reform the criminal justice system-a movement that would be likely to take a socialist direction as it encountered the limitations imposed on the implementation of these ideals by the exigencies of a capitalist economy.14 The structural basis for carrying out such a strategy had been created by the very social developments that led to the AFSC proposals. The civil rights movement and the war had partially destroyed the legitimacy of official authority for a substantial portion of the population and nurtured widespread skepticism about the benevolence of the state. Within the prisons, striking and rebellious prisoners posed new problems for management of the institutions. The publicity given to the brutal and sometimes lethal repression of prisoners' protests and to the grossly disproportionate representation of minorities and poor people in prisons was creating a legitimacy crisis for the criminal justice system. Opinion polls showed widespread sympathy for rebelling prisoners; and the judiciary responded to revelations of mistreatment and brutality in lawsuits brought by prisoners with intervention of unprecedented scope on behalf of prisoners' rights. Entire prisons were declared to be violating inmates' constitutional rights and were ordered closed. Some wondered whether the prison could function much longer as an institution: I am persuaded that the institution of prison probably must end. In many respects it is as intolerable within the United States as was the institution of slavelY, equally brutalizing to all involved, equally toxic to the social system, equally subversive of the brotherhood of man, even more costly by some standards, and probably less rational.'s
In addition, the system's seflming ineffectiveness in curbing rapidly rising crime rates evoked widespread attention and concern, at first primarily among conservative politicians and the white blue-collar workers, then more broadly across the political spectrum exclusive of the Left. These developments made it seem plausible that the restructuring of prosecution and sentencing was an issue that could potentially be placed on the political agenda through mass organizing.
TRANSFORMATION OF THE REFORM AGENDA Although the analysis presented in Struggle for Justice can be faulted on a number of counts,'6 we want to focus here not on its analytical weaknesses,
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but on the reception the book has received, the transformation of its proposals in the past few years, and the political implications of these changes. In many respects Struggle for Justice has been remarkably influential. Its criticism of mandatory treatment programs and preventive confinement on the basis of predictions of future criminality has been widely accepted by penologists. According to Edith Flynn, As early as 1971 the American Friends' Sel'1ce Committee called for the abolition of the indeterminate sentence and for return to short flat sentences for most offenders as the only way for achie\ing justice. They were quickly joined in their pmposal by such groups as prisoners' rights organizations, legislatOl'S, politicians, states' attorneys, as well as by many disillusioned liberal refonners. The uniting element for these ideologically disparate groups is the appalling state of today's sentencing practices.17
Virtually all recent commission reports and many books and articles concerned with criminal justice policy either accept or build on, elaborate or quali(y its ideas.1s Michael Serrill notes that "Today it is difficult to find a prominent member of the academic, prison reform or liberal political community who does not favor a drastic reduction in the amount of discretion exercised within the criminal justice system."19 According to Marvin Zalman, "Virtually all academic writing on sentencing since 1972 has favored a turn toward definite sentencing and recent legislation has also moved toward definite sentencing."2o This speedy adoption of a new conceptual framework for penological thought and criminal justice practice has by no means constituted a victory for the radical political perspective of Struggle for Justice; on the contrary, the proposals outlined in that book have been narrowed and modified so drastically that their adoption amounts to a serious political defeat. It is to these developments that we now turn. Conceptual elaboration of the justice model
Since the publication of Struggle for Justice, several philosophical treatments of punishment have given great emphasis to the place of the "just deserts" concept in a sentencing scheme. The kernel of this approach is that law violators should be punished according to what they deserve based on what they have done. Its advocates interpret this principle to mean that sentencing should be influenced by only a limited amount of information about an offender, primarily his or her past illegal behavior. This represents a more radical break with utilitarianism than is found in Struggle for Justice and arguably provides a logically more coherent rationale for the principles of distributive justice and proportionality of penalty to offense. The report of the Committee for the Study of Incarceration (CSI) [DOing Justice],21 represents the most significant contribution to this development. We will focus our comments on this work because it is more rigorous in its analysis than other works in the same vein.
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At least potentially, the principle that offenders should be punished according to what they deselVe has a critical edge. By any conceivable standard of deserts, most persons now in prison in the United States receive punishment that is grossly in excess of what they deselVe on the basis of the harm they have done or intended to do. At the same time, corporate and government executives responsible for actions that jeopardize the lives and health of thousands and damage the material interests of millions receive sanctions of unmerited leniency in the few cases in which they are puriished at all. The justice model provides a conceptual framework for criticizing these gross departures from the principle of proportionality. On the other hand, it is a direct consequence of the class distribution of power in a capitalist society that the state will not itself take the initiative in revising the distribution of legal sanctions it imposes to reflect the class distribution of culpability for socially injurious acts. Proposals to impose even modest penalties for corporate offenses are vigorously resisted by those who would be liable, as the history of recent environmental and occupational safety legislation illustrates. As Dean Clarke notes, the picture of "Presidents, Congressmen and corporate bosses on long-term prison sentences for tax frauds, illegal profiteering, and war-mongering, while petty thieves freely wander the streets attending occasional, and voluntary, therapy classes ... is as absurd as it is meaningless."32 Only rarely have changes in the direction required by a justice model been achieved, and then only as the result of organized working-class or populist campaigns, or when the state's legitimacy needs required the sacrifice of the interests of individual members of the capitalist class. It follows that the critical potential of the just deserts philosophy will be realized in practice only if politically organized opposition groups make an issue of the discrepancy between moral culpability and existing sentencing patterns and bring concerted pressure to bear on the state to revise its sentencing structure-or if they capture the state and create a new social order that does not require the judicial sacrifice of mass interests. In the absence of such efforts, the state will simply employ the vocabulary of just deserts to legitimate its traditional sentencing patterns. It will continue to ignore upper-class criminals and overpunish lower-class criminals. Instead of imprisoning the latter to cure them (and then ignoring the mandate to cure), as in the past, it will imprison them for the same long periods to deter crime or because severe punishment is reqUired by considerations of just deserts. In the early 1970s, when the rhetoric of rehabilitation had been exposed as an obfuscation covering up repressive social control, criminal justice functionaries found the jargon of the justice model especially appealing. It supplied exactly what they needed-a new ideology to use in placating critics. It is commonplace in textbook discussions of sentencing to refer to the four classic "functions" of punishment: retribution, deterrence, rehabilitation, and restraint of the dangerous. However, the social consequences of adopting a particular sentencing philosophy are not restricted to these
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functions. Viewed as ideology, a sentencing philosophy has profound implications for the society as a whole. In the case of the justice model, they can be extremely conservative. For one thing, a just deserts philosophy focuses attention on the individual perpetrator alone. If I lose my job because the economy is in a state of contraction and then steal to support myself and my family-or if I am a juvenile and steal because the state has passed child labor legislation-or if I strike out in rage because the color of my skin subjects me to discrimination that reduces my opportunities-the just deserts model simply indicates that I should be punished for my wrongful act, though perhaps not as severely as I would be at present. One need not deny individual responsibility altogether in such cases to see that, in placing my culpability and the punishment I should receive at the center of attention, other topics are pushed to the periphery: the dynamics of the capitalist economy; the manner in which it allocates benefits and injuries among classes, races, and sexes-and in so doing generates the structural conditions to which members of the society respond when they violate the law; and the way class interests are represented in or excluded from the law. All these are neglected in favor of an abstract moral preoccupation with the conduct of the individual offender. But it is on precisely these excluded issues that a movement for radical political change must focus. The just deserts model interferes with this task, not merely by giving unduly abstract answers to the questions it asks (answers that neglect the social situation of the criminal actor), but even more by choosing to ask the questions it does.2 3 To the extent that the reporting of state-imposed punishment in the mass media contributes to the shaping of popular conceptions of criminality and moral worth, the language of the justice modeL when employed in the context of a system that selects individuals for prosecution on a basis that is sharply class biased, continues to reinforce ideas about crime and morality favorable to the powerful. The text of Doing Justice, like other justice model literature, displays no awareness of these difficulties. In focusing almost entirely on a consideration of the classic "functions" of sentencing, their justification, and their implications for a sentencing scheme, and for the most part ignoring the question of the kind of society in which the punishment system is to function, it was not led to these issues. Since none of the members of the CSI appears to have shared the goal of abolishing capitalism and establishing a socialist society, or considered the question of sentencing in the light of this goal, this neglect is not surprising.24 The political distance between the CSI report and the report of the AFSC Working Party is maintained even in the final chapter of the former, "Just Deserts in an Unjust Society." Here, where the larger social setting is finally brought into the picture, the author notes that, in the preceding sixteen chapters, "We have scarcely mentioned poverty and social class."25 By contrast, poverty and class are kept in the forefront throughout the text of Struggle for Justice. In this final chapter, von Hirsch grapples with the
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difficulty raised for the justice model by the existence of pronounced social inequality and injustice. For many offense categories, social disadvantage would have to be regarded as grounds for reduced culpability. Yet under the system of formal equality which has been derived from the just deserts principle, those who are disadvantaged are to be punished as severely as those whose biography justifies no such mitigation. We are persuaded, as was the CSI, that the implementation of the justice model would represent a distinct gain for those who are now socially disadvantaged even though formally equal sentences might in particular cases be substantively unequal and therefore unjust. As both the AFSC and the CSI reports note, a socially disadvantaged background is more likely to constitute grounds for aggravation of sentence than for mitigation in a utilitarian, treatment-based discretionary system. Nevertheless, the contradiction remains. To a radical, the limitations to the implementation of a system of equal treatment under law posed by a stratified class system become grounds, along with many others, for attacking and abolishing the class system. For the CSI, this limitation is simply the occasion for feeling uneasy about a "morally flawed" system of punishment.26 It is revealing that two of the members of the CSI comment in an introduction to Doing Justice that we are not happy. Our solution is one of despair, not hope. We recognize that, in giving up the rehabilitative model, we abandon not just our innocence but perhaps more. The concept of deserts is intellectual and moralistic; in its devotion to principle, it turns back on such compromising considerations as generosity and chaIity, compassion and love. It emphasizes justice, not mercy, and while it need not rule out tempering justice with mercy, by shifting the emphasis li'om concern for the individual to devotion to the moral right, it could lead to an abandonment of the former altogether.... Perhaps it is not the most compelling advertisement for one's committee to conclude that the pIinciples we advocate here will do less mischief and perpetuate less inequity than the system with which we now live. But if we can deflate the rhetoIic and limit the reach of programs that now pretend to do good, then our time and energy has been well spent.27
This cri de coeur represents the anguish of the modem liberal intellectual faced with the contradiction between liberal ideals and a capitalist society that stands in the way of achieving liberal ideals-and that the liberal cannot conceive of replacing. In the three decades following 1940, the treatment model made a certain amount of sense. Unemployment remained fairly low, so that there seemed to be a place in the economy for those who wanted it-with the exception of blacks, whose exclusion was attributed to individual prejudice and was thus not regarded as systemic. Following the Second World War through the 1960s, treatment specialists of all kinds entered the prison in everincreasing numbers, with solid support from liberal intellectuals. The de-
Cooptation of Fixed Sentencing Reform
631
terioration of the economy in the 1970s, with its seemingly intractably high levels of inflation and unemployment, has destroyed the material base for the rehabilitative ideal (at the same time that prisoner politicization and rebellion destroyed its organizational basis). The hope that all who want a job can have one if they can be given appropriate training or resolve their psychological conflicts is no longer even remotely believable. With no plausible solution to the problem of crime or racial oppression (much of the liberal intellectual community has abandoned its earlier commitment to integration in the face of Northern white opposition to school busing, the white flight to the suburbs, and affirmative action programs), the most liberals can offer is a system of punishment that promises to do a little less damage. This intellectual collapse has been one factor in the legislative developments we discuss below.
Modification of programmatic goals A second line of development has been the modification of important features of the Struggle for Justice proposals to help enable implementation. Our concern with this lies not with the minor modifications that are inevitably required to realize abstract principles, but with those that are sufficiently drastic to jeopardize the initial goal of eliminating discrimination and unjustified disparities in sentencing. Thus, Richard McGee, Norval Morris, and David Fogel all advocate an end to indefinite sentences and propose sentencing to fixed terms (with allowance for good behavior),28 but none of them favors an end to plea bargaining even though it is widely conceded that this practice is a IT.ajor source of disparity in sentencing.29 If one is concerned with the immediate implementation of the proposals, this flexibility is understandable, even astute. As noted above, an end to plea bargaining would probably require decriminalization on a scale that is politically unachievable or a growth in the magnitude of resources allocated to enforcement that is fiscally inconceivable. Even if these apparently insurmountable obstacles could somehow be overcome, the elimination of plea bargaining would still pose grave problems of implementation. There may, of course, be some benefits for defendants or prisoners even in a highly restricted version of the justice model. The elimination of uncertainty concerning the date of release from prison is a positive step, and the small number of prisoners who serve unusually long sentences for reasons unrelated to their offense are likely to get out sooner. But these benefits will affect only a fairly limited number of prisoners and will at best make a modest contribution to the elimination of class-based and racial disparities in sentencing. Even less will they help to build a larger radical movement.
Legislative implementation "Vithin the past three years, several states have restructured their sentencing provisions, ostensibly along justice model lines and with the encour-
632
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agement and support of justice model advocates. Arizona, California, Illinois, Indiana, Maine, and Minnesota have all passed new sentencing bills, and legislation to restructure sentencing or eliminate parole is under consideration or has recently been considered in at least a dozen states. A bill to reform federal sentencing 30 was introduced into the United States Senate by Senators Kennedy and McClellan with the support of the Carter administration and was passed early in 1978. In one way or another all the bills seek to restrict the range of sentences for a given offense by proportioning the penalty to the severity of the offense, at least roughly, and by creating mechanisms for specifying the aggravating and mitigating circumstances that can increase or decrease the sentence within the permitted range.3 ! (This last feature is present in only some of the new legislation.) From the point of view articulated in Struggle for Justice, a number of features of the new sentencing bills are disappointing. First, the substantive features of the criminal codes remain unchanged. Neither substantial decriminalization of lesser offenses nor criminalization of serious capitalist offenses or of government repression has taken place. Indeed, the federal Criminal Code Reform Act of 1977 has drawn wide criticism for its expansion of government powers of political repression. Thus the substantive class, political, and cultural biases of existing law have not been reduced. Second, some of the bills retain rehabilitative and predictive criteria. In Maine, a prisoner given a fixed sentence can be resentenced at the request of the Department of Corrections on the basis of his or her progress toward a noncriminal way of life. California's S.B. 42 rewards participation in rehabilitation programs, though it limits the reduction in sentence to one month for every eight served. Where judicial discretion is comparatively unconstrained, as in Indiana or Maine, where aggravating and mitigating factors are not legislatively prescribed, nothing is to prevent judges from considering predictive criteria. Third, prosecutors and judges retain discretion under most of the new laws. No attempt has been made in any ofthe recent legislation to constrain the discretion of the prosecutor in charging the defendant, or to eliminate plea bargaining. In Maine, the elimination of the parole board enhanced judicial discretion in sentencing. Under S.B. 42 in California, the guidelines provided for the judge's decision to grant or withhold probation are extremely vague and are unlikely to reduce disparities in the granting of probation to a significant extent. The bill left judges with the option of imposing consecutive or concurrent sentences at their discretion, as well as to enhance or not to enhance the sentence because of other circumstances (prior prison terms, possession of a deadly weapon). Nevertheless, California prosecutors initiated a campaign to widen this discretion on the ground that when sentences are restricted too narrowly by law, prosecutors cannot offer defendants a sufficient incentive to coerce a guilty plea. Joined by criminal justice functionaries, they have succeeded in having S.B. 42 amended in ways that further enhance prosecutorial and judicial discretion.32 Addi-
Cooptat~ion
of Fixed Sentencing Reform
633
tional amending legislation, adopted in 1!l78 (S.B. 709), extends these discretionaI)' powers even farther. Fourth, the new legislation will increase rather than reduce sentence lengths. Although a definite prediction about how sentence lengths in California will change cannot yet be made because of uncertainty as to how prosecutors and judges will make use of their discretionaI)' powers, preliminaI)' projections based on S.B. 42 suggest that the average time spent in prison might increase somewhat.33 Sheldon Messinger and Phillip Johnson concluded that the first piece of amending legislation, A.B. 476, would substantially increase sentence lengths,34 while S.B. 709 raised the maximum penalties permitted in forty major crime categories and established provisions requiring multiple sentences to be served consecutively rather than concurrently. These amendments will increase average time spent in prison. Trends toward increased sentence lengths have not been restricted to California. Indiana has established extremely high maximum sentences (e.g., forty years for noncapital murder, plus twenty years for aggravation or less ten in mitigation; thirty years for a serious narcotics offense, plus twenty or minus ten), with an additional thirty years possible for multiple offenders. Time served is up in Maine, and legislation recently introduced in the Ohio legislature will increase sentence lengths. In Colorado, a new sentencing act was vetoed by the governor on the grounds that the sentences it provided were too short. Following a gubernatorial veto in Minnesota on similar grounds, new legislation was adopted in which sentencing guidelines are to be determined by an appointed commission. In Illinois, Governor Thompson successfully insisted that legislation to abolish parole release and reform sentencing incorporate high minimum sentences for specified offenses. In the federal system, parole guidelines adopted administratively have been advertised as based on existing sentencing practices. Janet Schmidt, however, finds that the guidelines actually set sentences higher than previous parole board practice.35 Then, in 1976, the Federal Parole Commission issued new guidelines extending the time to be served in prison in nine offense categories on the grounds that "the public welfare would best be protected by increased periods of incarceration for certain prisoners." It also increased the severity with which several offense types were to be regarded (though the severity classification of marijuana offenses was reduced).36 In New York City, sentence lengths have also increased in the absence of legislation. According to William Gallagher, director of administration for the city's court system, "The average time tiDr a person convicted of a felony in the city has doubled, if not tripled, in the last few years" in response to public pressure and administrative measures that enhance prosecutorial power.37 On a number of key issues, then, legislative and administrative reform has veered sharply away from the program outlined by justice model advocates. The substance of the criminal code has not been revised; coerced rehabilita-
634
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tion and sentencing on the basis of predictive criteria have not been eliminated; substantial discretion in sentencing remains; and sentence lengths have been increased, not reduced. The changes that have occurred bear only a superficial resemblance to the principles they purport to embody. While some of these changes may bring limited benefits to some defendants or prisoners, these benefits must be weighed against other provisions that are profoundly detrimental to the interests of prisoners.
EXPLAINING THE FAILURE To understand why a reform agenda whose aim was to advance the interests of prisoners has had the opposite effect, we must look more closely at the process by which the AFSC Working Party members had hoped their proposals would be implemented. As noted previously, two categories of social groups were expected to be instrumental. The first category consisted of those most seriously injured by discrimination and repression at the hands of the criminal justice system: prisoners; racial, cultural and political minorities; and the poor generally. The second category consisted of liberals, largely white and middle class or professional, who were concerned less with the pursuit of self-interest than with the elimination of unfairness on moral grounds. The civil rights movement between 1961 and 1964, and the anti - Vietnam War movement consisted of just such a coalition, linking moral and instrumental concerns. We have already pointed out that the preconditions for building a similar coalition around criminal issues all appeared to be present in 1970. After 1971, however, the basis for such a coalition rapidly disappeared. Black leaders had been assassinated, or were abandoning their earlier militancy to pursue careers in business or government opened up by the civil rights movement. Weakened by internal dissension and financial difficulties, black movement organizations folded. The white Left, which had given strong support to prisoners' demands, also foundered in this period. Thus, major constituents of the projected reform alliance no longer existed as organized entities in the early 1970s. At the same time, steady increases in urban crime rates generated high levels of fear of victimization from street crime and reduced sympathy for prisoners. During the 1960s, liberal reformers argued that decarceration, increased rights for defendants, improved prison conditions, and rehabilitation programs would reduce crime rates. By the early 1970s, this approach had failed the test of experience: Crime rates rose while the liberal program was being implemented. Squeezed by the deteriorating economy, the white middle and working classes grew to resent government programs that raised taxes but benefited only the lower classes and racial minorities. In a period of economic expansion, these groups could afford to be generous, but when their own position was under pressure, they began to move in a conservative direction, opposing affirmative action programs and favoring
Cooptat;ion of Fixed Sentencing Reform
635
reduced taxes. Increased public demand for more vigorous and punitive law enforcement also reflected this development. In ghettoized communities, the problem of increased crime meant that self-interest no longer dictated unqualified opposition to law enforcement measures; demands for increased police protection began to be voiced in communities that only a few years before had wanted the police removed. In middle-class communities the same developments weakened moral concern over the inequities of law enforcement. Unable to muster much public support in this climate, outside prisoner support groups formed in the late 1960s were disbanded. The assumption that a liberal middle class would not tolerate gross violations of American ideals of legal equality was an oversimplification. Normally, few members of this class concern themselves with the enforcement of the criminal law, for they are rarely the targets of this enforcement. As Morris has observed, "We have known about unjust disparity for a long time."38 Yet only in recent years did these disparities move to the center of debates about sentencing. They did, we have argued, because blacks and other insurgent groups had created a political and ideological crisis connected with the pervasive denial of equality throughout American society. Within the prisons, it was rebelling prisoners who spotlighted these inequities as they related to sentencing and parole. When those initiatives ceased, so did the possibility of a broadly based movement concerned with sentencing disparities. Indeed, the AFSC itself dropped the issue, even though it had announced at the time of the publication of Struggle for Justice that it would sponsor a nationwide program based on the analysis of the book. It is against this backdrop that recent developments in sentencing must be understood. Sentencing reform legislation has commonly been introduced by liberal legislators in response to the criticism of discretionary sentencing generated by justice model proponents. However, the constituencies expected on the basis of AFSC Working Party analysis to support these revisions either have not done so or have not been politically strong enough to carry through the legislation. Instead, politiCians have responded to pressure from voters who are more concerned with their safety than with doing justice, and from the law enforcement lobby seeking stiffer penalties for reasons relating to occupational ideolo~~ and interests.39 This sequence of events was played out in California, where the prisoners' movement was probably better organized and more widely supported than anywhere else in the country, and where prisoners developed some of the earliest criticisms of indeterminate sentencing-but where conservative forces were also sufficiently strong to eleclt Ronald Reagan governor. The provisions of S.B. 42, though not entirely advantageous to prisoner interests, were the best that could be obtained in delicate negotiations among, on the one hand, the Prisoners Union (which had made the abolition of indeterminate sentencing one of its highest priorities), the American Civil Liberties Uni0I;l, the Friends Committee on Legislation, and the Committee on Pris-
636
Greenberg and Humphries
oner Humanity and Justice (all pro-prisoner groups), and, on the other, the attorney general's office, the District Attorneys Association, and the California Peace Officers. Immediately after S.B. 42 was passed, a number of law enforcement groups not previously involved in these negotiations mobilized to revise the legislation in directions detrimental to the prisoners' interests. They were largely successful in these efforts; the groups representing the interests of prisoners were not politically strong enough to prevent this major defeat or to block additional legislation the following year extending sentence lengths. In short, the expansion of the United States economy during the 1960s permitted an alliance of middle-class liberals and radicals with lower-class insurgent minorities because an expanding pie allowed the demands of the latter groups to be satisfied without cutting into the share of the former groups. The contradiction between an ideology of formal equality and pervasive discrimination could be solved-or so it seemed-by an expanding economy and legal reforms. Structural changes in American capitalism have, at least for the moment, destroyed the possibility of succeeding with this strategy. The high rates of crime generated among lower-class groups by the deterioration of the economy and the absence of prospects for the future create objective conflicts of interest concerning strategies of crime control that preclude broad public support for true justice model reforms. The authors of Struggle for Justice, having failed to anticipate these developments, were overly optimistic about the capacity of insurgent groups to sustain a program of institutional reform. These structural difficulties might conceivably have been overcome had an organized and energetic Left been capable of building mass opposition to the corporate domination of the American economy. Such a movement might have been able to unity working-class and middle-class constituencies on economic issues. With regard to crime, a functioning political movement might have been able to offer unemployed youths an alternative to crime (in Southern cities, crime rates declined during civil rights drives) and to reduce the public's tendency to respond repressively to crime. At present, the American Left does not possess the ability to do this, and it is not likely to be able to do so in the immediate future. If there are any prospects for short-run change, they do not lie with popular social movements, nor with prisoners, whose power is very limited in the absence of outside support, but with the state's limited ability to cope with more stringent sentencing schemes, given current budgetary constraints. At this writing, prison populations have increased by roughly 50 percent in this decade from around 200,000 to around 300,000. The trend toward longer sentences is contributing to this increase.4o If sentencing reform continues along current lines, prison populations will increase even more. The costs of prison construction are high and rising. At a time when a middle-class tax revolt is spreading across the country, a large-scale program of prison construction is difficult to manage. Thus, in California a joint
Cooptat;ion of Fixed Sentencing Reform
637
legislative committee on the budget vetoed the administration's request for the construction of four new prisons with space for 2,400 inmates at a cost of $100 million shortly after a referendum reduced property taxes and necessitated major budget cuts. As long as most prisoners were released via parole, prison populations could be kept under control despite changes in commitment patterns through adjustments in the release rate: At times of overcrowding, more prisoners could be paroled.41 With discretion concerning releases from prison removed from the executive branch or eliminated altogether, and commitment rates and sentence lengths determined by the legislature and judiciary, there is no obvious institutional mechanism for adjusting the prison population to the existing bedspace. Within limits, of course, overcrowding is possible. But excessive overcrowding reduces the standard of living of inmates and poses the risk of riots. Moreover, judges have ordered some prison populations reduced following suits brought by inmates. Thus, there is an organizational contradiction between the new sentencing policies and the fiscal ability of state and local governments to handle the larger prison populations which the new policies are creating. At a time when the popular challenge to criminal justice has largely subsided, reducing legitimation problems, and management problems loom larger, correctional administrators are beginning 1to have doubts about fixed sentences, and some have publicly opposed them.42 As more states move toward fixed sentencing schemes, this opposition is likely to become stronger, and may well lead to shorter sentences or toward the restoration of increased discretion in releasing prisoners.
Notes Frances A. Allen, The Borderland of Criminal Justice IChicago: llni\"ersity of Chicago Press, 19641: No,,'al Morris and Colin Howard, Studies in Criminal Law IOxford, England: Clarendon Press, 19641; and C. S. Lewis, "The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment," in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, Walter Hooper, ed. IGrand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 19701. 2 Karl Menninger, The Crime
0.1' Punishment
INew York: Viking, 19681.
3 Ramsey Clark, Crime in America: Observations on lis Nalllre, Causes, Prevention and Control INew York: Simon &. Schuster, 19701. 4 President's Commission on Law Enforcement and P,dministration of Justice, The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society IWashington, D.C.: GO\'el'Oment Printing Office, 19671. 5 Richard A. Berk and Peter H. Rossi, Prison Rt
8 Douglas Upton, Robert Martinson, and Judith W',lks, The E.fJectiveness of Correctional Treatment: A Survey of Treatment Evaluation SlIldies Il\:ew York: Praeger, 19751.
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9 AFSC Working Party, Struggle Jor Justice, pp. 158-59. 10 The contrast between earlier penal reform efforts and the AFSC approach is exemplified by
the composition of the AFSC Working Party: Few if any official commissions on criminal justice include former prisoners; the AFSC Working Party contained se\'eral. 11 AFSC Working Party, StruggleJor Justice, pp. 157-58. 12 Ihid., pp. 9, 12-13, 16. 13 The first-named author of this paper. 14 One can see in this perspecti\,e the influence of Andre Gorz, Strategy Jor Labor: A Radical Proposal !Boston: Beacon, 19691, whose ideas ahout how to revitalize the European Left
were influential within the American New Left and among several members of the AFSC Working Pal1y. 15 Federal Judge James Doyle, Western District of Wisconsin, in Morales \'. Schmidt, 340 F. Supp. 544 IWD. Wis. 19721. 16 The analysis can he criticized for impl'ecision concerning the class nature of American soci-
ety, o\'ersimplification of histOlical matelials, vagueness as to the charactelistics of the more egalitarian and pluralistic society held out as an ideal. and possible overstatement of the extent to which racial and class differences in sentencing outcomes are the product of discrimination on the part of indi\'idual decision makers. These limitations in part reflect the intellectual limitations of the New Left during the period when the book was written, and in part the political diversity of the Working Party itself, which stood in the way of agreement on some of these questions. Thus, Dean Clarke, "Marxism, Justice and the Justice Model," Contemporary Crises, JanuaJY 1978, pp. 27-62, is quite accurate in characterizing the criticism in Struggle Jor Justice as moral and empirical rather than analytical. 17 Edith Flynn, "Turning Judges into Robots," Trial Magazine, March 1976. The influence of Struggle./ar Justice on more recent work in this field has also been noted by Tony Platt and Paul Takagi, "Intellectuals for Law and Order: A Critique of the New 'Realists,'" Crime and Social Justice, Fall- Winter, 1977, p. 7. 18 These include Mitfol'd, Kind and lisual Punishment; Richal'd A. McGee, "A New Look at Sentencing: l'al1 II ," Federal Probation, September 1974, p. 3; NONal Morris, The FulUre oJ Imprisonment IChicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974); Ramsey Clark and David Rudenstine, Prison without Walls: Report on New York Parole INew York: Praeger, 1975);
Da\'id Fogel. " ... We Are the Living ProoJ, . ,": The Justice Model oJCorreclions ICincinnati: Anderson, 19751; John P. Conrad, "We Should Never Have Promised a Hospital," Federal Probation, December 1975, pp. 3-8; David Stanley, Prisoners among Us: The Problem oJ Parole IWashington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1976); Twentieth Century Fund Task Force, Fair and Certain Punishment INew York: McGraw-Hili, 1976); and Andrew von Hirsch, Doing Justice: The Choice Q( Punishments, Report of the Committee for the Study of Incarceration INew York: Hill and Wang, 1976). 19 Michael S. Serrill, "Determinate Sentencing: History, Theory, Debate," Corrections Magazine, September 1977, p. 11. 20 Marvin Zalman, "The Rise and Fall of the Indeterminate Sentence, Part Ill," Wayne Law Review, March 1978, p. 857, These developments cannot be attributed to the influence of
Struggle Jor Justice alone. Judge MalVin Frankel, Criminal Sentences INew York: Hill and Wang, 19721, independently criticized unfettered discretion in sentencing; the Kafkaesque operation of an ostensibly therapeutic institution for defective delinquents operating under an indeterminate sentencing law was documented by E. Barrett Prettyman, Jr" "The Indeterminate Sentence and the Right to Treatment," American Criminal Law Review, 1972, p. 7; and, as noted by April Kestell Cas sou and Brian Taugher, "Determinate Sentencing in California: The New Numbers Game," Paclfic Law Journal, January 1978, p. 5, beginning in 1972 the California Supreme Court began to impose limited elements of procedural due process on parole decision making and to fashion a doc:rine of proportionality in sentencing.
Cooptation of Fixed Sentencing Reform
639
Within the last two year'S, however, a few dissenting voices from within the academy have been raised, among them Franklin Zimring, "Making the Punishment Fit the Crime," Hastings Center Report, December 1976, pp. 13-17: Benedict S. Alper and Joseph W. Weiss, "The MandatOlY Sentence: Recipe for RetJibution," Federal Probation, December 1977, pp. 15-20: Donald R. Cressey, "Criminological TheOlY, Social Science, and the Repression of Crime," Criminology, August 1978, pp. 171-92: and Daniel Glaser, "The Counterproductivity of Conservath'e Thinking about Crime," Criminology, August 1978, pp. 209-24. 21 \'on HiJ'Sch, Doing Justice. 22 Clarke, "Marxism, Justice and the Justice ModeL" p. 53. 23 The individualistic and moralistic focus of a "justice model" even has conservative implica-
tions when used to analyze the crimes of the capitalist class: It focuses on the failings of paI1icuiar individuals rather than on the dynamics of the social system. It seems to imply that the injuries caused by corporate action are to be remedied by replacing corrupt or greedy executives with othel'S who are honest. altruistic, 01' socially conscious, rathel' than by abolishing corporate capitalism. Its attention to legally defined crimes of the capitalist class seems to suggest that. if capitalists confOlmed to their own rules, if they were "good capitalists," all would be well: in other words, it is not the normal functioning of capitalism that causes trouble, but its abnormal functioning. 24 As a member of the staff of the Committee for the Study of Incarceration, the fil'St-named author was present at all of its meetings. The assertion in the text is based on fiI'St-hand observation. 25 von Hirsch, Doing Justice, p. 143. 26 Ibid., p. 149. This difference is revealed in the titles of the two books. The title of the AFSC
report indicates that justice is to be achieved through "struggle," while the title of the CSI report suggests that justice is simply something to be "done"-presumably by the prosecutors and judges who run the present system. It is conceived as a purely administrative matter, not involving social conflict. Implementation is not seen as the outcome of pressure from below that proponents help to organize, but is to be achieved by persuading legislators and other influential persons of the merits of the approach. Several of the CSI members and its executive director have been active in high-level lobbying and drafting of legislation to implement sentencing reform. 27 Willard Gaylin and David Rothman, in von Hirsch, Doing Justice, pp. xxxix-xl. 28 McGee, "A New Look at Sentencing"; Morris, The Future of Imprisonment; and Fogel. " ...
We Are the Living Proof . .. " 29 Current reform proposals are criticized on precisely these groUl1ds by Albert Alschuler,
30 31
32 33 34 35 36
"Sentencing Reform and Prosecutorial Power," in Pr'oceedings of the Special Conference on Determinate Sentencing, Determinate Sentencing: Reform or Regression? IWashington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 19781, pp. 59-88; and Caleb Foote, "Deceptive Determinate Sentencing," in Proceedings, Determinate Sentencing: Reform or Regression? The Criminal Code Reform Act of 1977, S. 1437. Useful reviews of the provisions of these acts and proposals can be found in Cassou and Taugher, "Determinate Sentencing in California"; Zalman, "The Rise and Fall of the Indeterminate Sentence"; and Stephen Gettinger, "Three States Adopt Flat Time: Othel'S Wary," Corrections Magazine, September 1977, pp. 16-42. Prisoner's Union, "Senate Bill 42, Where Are You?," The Outlaw, January- February 1977. Sheldon L. Messinger and Phillip D. Johnson, "California's Determinate Sentence Statute: History and Issues," in Proceedings, Determinate Stmtencing: Reform or Regression? Ibid. Janet Schmidt, Demysti.fj>mg Parole (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 19771, p. 52. Ibid., p. 142.
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37 Selwyn Raab. "New York City's Judges Give More Criminals More Prison Time," New York Times. July 17. 1978. pp. Bl. B4. 38 NOIval Morris. "Conceptual OvelView and Commentary on the Movement toward Determinacy." in Proceedings. Determinate Sentencing: Reform or Regression? 39 Zimring. in "Making the Punishment Fit the Crime." has cautioned that attempts to establish legislatively fixed sentences run the risk of escalated sentences as legislators respond to public pressure to "do something" about crime. It is noteworthy. however. that judges and parole boards also appear to have responded to this pressure with increased sentence lengths. Thus. the problem is not confined to a legislative strategy. Zimring argues that a latent function of parole as a method for releasing prisoners is to reduce sentences while allowing the public to think that sentences are long; it does this by releasing prisoners in low-visibility proceedings long before their maximum release dates. However. Zimring fails to consider that law enforcement agencies and politicians have publicized and criticized these early releases. helping to fuel the demand for longer sentences. 40 Mark Schwartz. "Prisons Begin Bursting at the Seams." In These Times. September 13-19. 1978. p. 19. 41 Caleb Foote. in "Deceptive Determinate Sentencing." reports that population projections for the California prisons were a major preoccupation of the California Adult AuthOlity. and it seems unlikely that the situation would have been dill'erent elsewhere. 42 Edgar May. "Prison Officials Fear Flat Time Is More Time." Corrections Magazine, September 1977. pp. 43-46. For a mOl'!! general discussion of the concept of organizational contradictions. see Wolf Heydebrand. "Organizational Contradictions in Public Bureaucracies: Toward a Marxian Theory of Organizations." Sociological Quarterly. Winter 1977. pp. 83-107.
&41
9
The Enforcement of Anti-Monopoly Legislation Harold Barnett Reprinted from "Wealth, Crime and Capital Accumulation," Contemporary Crises 3 (April 19791: 171-86.
MONOPOLY SECTOR ENFORCEMENT AND THE STATE Active antitrust enforcement is necessary for state promotion of social harmony. The state must appear ready to punish monopoly as well as competitive sector violators lest it be perceived as an administrative arm of the corporation. Enforcement is also necessary given the justification of a market economy in terms of benefits which derive from competition and the historic public reaction to the real and imagined effects of monopoly. At the same time, active antitrust may be perceived as in opposition to state support of capital accumulation. There is a symbiotic structural relationship between the state and the monopoly sector which involves, among other things, the dominant role of the monopoly sector in generating profits (or surplus) and in bringing about the transformation of profits into new capital creation. Such additions to the stock of capital are necessary for the implementation of new technology, the maintenance of economic growth, and for expansion in employment opportunities. Consequently, these activities must occur in the private sector in general, and in the monopoly sector in particular, if the sta.te is to maintain desirable levels of economic activity without totally socializing the process of savings and investment. Therefore, since antitrust violations may contribute to monopoly sector profits and expansion (or may be a means through which these results are achieved), non-enforcement is consistent with state promotion of capital accumulation in the monopoly sector. In the extreme, it has been argued that the speculative nature of the data upon which evidence of violations is based is a reason for weak laws, since strong laws would increase the damage to industrial efficiency resulting from a misapplication of enforcement powers.4 This implies that state support for accumulation in the monopoly sector may require not only limitations on the use of antitrust, but also limitations on the potential for these statutes to be applied to monopoly sector corporations.
642
Harold Barnett
To understand how monopoly sector enforcement is structured so as to yield resolution of these conflicting demands on state police power, we will consider actions of Congress, the Judiciary, and Federal law enforcement agencies as they affect the use of antitrust powers to prosecute monopoly sector violations. We will then consider some general implications for monopoly sector enforcement of the existing allocation of police powers over various state agencies, given the manner in which agency function relates to the promotion of capital accumulation and social harmony.
THE IMPACT OF ANTITRUST ENFORCEMENT The legislative basis for legal controls over the acquisition and abuse of market power are the Sherman Act, the Clayton Act, the Federal Trade Commission Act and their subsequent amendments. While the Sherman Act prohibits agreements related to restraint of trade and monopolization, the Clayton Act limits the dynamic process of concentration through merger and outlaws specific practices not covered by the Sherman Act. The Federal Trade Commission Act outlaws "unfair methods of competition."2 Given the common law basis for these statutes, they could be widely applied to the promotion of social harmony in the face of market and extra-market conflicts as well as to the elimination of structural constraints on the efficient allocation of social resources. Antitrust laws have been seen to have several inherent weaknesses. First, their orientation is toward conduct rather than structure. Conceived as a means to promote competition, they emphasize overt anti-competitive acts such as trade boycotts, price conspiracies, allocation of markets and exclusive buying arrangements. These actions are more likely to occur in relatively unconcentrated markets where such conduct is necessary to hinder competition. Consequently, they do not apply as directly to the situation in oligopolistic markets, where a recognition of interdependence allows tacit understandings to limit competitive behavior and the entry of new firms. Since economic efficiency is not emphasized, the law does not challenge the basic structural characteristics of monopoly sector production which allow monopoly profits to be gained at the expense of efficient resource allocations.3 Although restricting the use of antitrust sanctions to alter the structure of monopoly sector production, a conduct orientation does make the state an adjudicator of disputes among monopoly sector producers. However, these disputes generally relate to the distribution as opposed to the level of monopoly sector profits. Consequently, resolution yields little public benefit. Further, antitrust law prohibitions have generally lagged behind practice. For example, given restrictions on merger through the acquisition of a competitor's stock, corporations, until 1955, have merged through asset acquisi-
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tion. Given restrictions on horizontal and vertical mergers, market power has been augmented through conglomerate mergers.4 Congress has stipulated civil and criminal penalties for Sherman Act violations and civil penalties for Clayton Act violations. It has provided incentive for the instigation of civil suits by plaintiffs (in the form of treble damage awards) and has, at the same time, created several means whereby defendants may reduce the costs they would suffer as a result of successful suits in equity. The limited force of these laws is evident in court proceedings. As regards the costs of conviction to the defendant, over 70 percent of convictions have been via pleas of nolo contendere (no contest). Such pleas entered before any testimony has been taken are not prima facie evidence in later civil proceedings. The consequence is to increase the victim's private costs of subsequent civil litigation. In addition, judicial apathy in general and judicial leniency in response to nolo pleas result in minimal fines and compensation. By way of example, the much publicized Hea\y Electrical Equipment Case resulted in victim compensation which was less than 40 percent of the estimated illegal gain to the offenders. Finally, while plea options allow the defendants to force a privatization of the cost of civil litigation, the Internal Revenue Service will socialize 50 percent of the costs of civil settlement by generally allowing the offender to claim them as ordinary and necessary business expenses. In reviewing these outcomes, Mark Green has noted that "[w]hile some court imposed fines achieve compensation and others create deterrence, antitrust fines have the distinction of doing neither."5 Additional constraints on enforcement result from judicial interpretation and reticence. The judiciary has generally seen its function as enforcing a congressional mandate to protect competitors as opposed to consumers. In addition, the judiciary has been reticent to force divestiture, dissolution or divorcement upon firms utilizing complex technologies and exhibiting complex economies out of a fear that their rulings may impair industrial efficiency.6 This combination of law and judicial attitude places rather strong limits on the possible outcomes of antitrust enforcement. First, successful prosecution is likely to impose a loss on the offender which is less than the illegal gains experienced. Second, to the extent that nolo pleas privatize the cost of civil litigations, the likelihood of a small victim suing a large offender is reduced. Third, the likelihood that monopoly sector firms (acting as collective monopolists) will be successfully prosecuted for restraint of trade is reduced. Fourth, the likelihood that monopoly sector firms (when characterized by complex technologies and economies) will be deprived of market power is reduced. Given these objective characteristics of law and adjudication, the use of antitrust sanctions and public (socialized) resources against competitive and monopoly sector violators will depend on the actions of the state agencies which participate in enforcement. While prosecutorial powers are held
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by the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission, evidence, recommendations and demands for judicial review originate in other government regulatory agencies. Several studies have demonstrated that the prosecutorial agencies have tended to allocate disproportionate percentages of their enforcement resources to the prosecution of small versus large cases? In this context small and large define the size of the defendant, the magnitude of the offense, and the size of the agency's required expenditure. Such agency decisions are seen as a rational response to several objective factors. First among these is the historic fact (noted above) that the chance of successful prosecution is greater in small cases when the defendant's violations may be characterized in terms of simple economies and overt acts than in large cases when the defendant's violation must be characterized in terms of complex economies and structural presumptions. Second is the fact that defendants in small cases may have a limited ability (or desire) to purchase defense resources (e.g., lawyers) and, consequently, cannot significantly reduce the chance of agency success. On the other hand, defendants in large cases may have defense budgets which are large relative to agency budgets and, consequently, can significantly reduce the agency's chance of successful prosecution. And, finally, congressional evaluations of agency performance have placed emphasis on the total number of cases prosecuted and the rate of successful prosecution. Since small cases are more likely to involve violations by competitive sector firms while large cases are more likely to involve violations by monopoly sector firms, the actions of the prosecutorial agencies will tend to place a relatively greater burden of enforcement on competitive sector firms even when the expected social loss imposed through monopoly sector violations is greater. When we combine this result with the characteristics of law and judicial action, we find that the structural characteristics of monopoly sector firms which contribute to their potential for generating illegal incomes also contribute to their relative insulation from prosecution. At the same time, the structural characteristics of competitive sector firms (which contribute to their lesser potential for generating illegal incomes) combines with the state or agency's need for legitimacy through enforcement to yield a relatively greater burden of enforcement on competitive sector violators.
THE RELATION OF OTHER STATE AGENCIES TO MONOPOLY SECTOR ENFORCEMENT While the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission play prosecutorial roles in a wide range of business violations, other agencies share in the process of enforcement. The overall impact of state agency participation on the extent of enforcement depends in part on the manner in which Congress has allocated enforcement powers to the various agencies,
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given the agencies' primary responsibilities. A government agency is in many respects a microcosm of the state. It may use its congressionally granted enforcement powers and public resources to resolve contlicts between capital accumulation and social harmony. To the extent that its primary responsibility is defined in terms of promoting capital accumulation. it is less likely to apply enforcement powers which retard profits in the interest of promoting general social harmony. To the extent that its primary responsibility is defined in terms of protecting the collective interests of groups who bear the costs of capital accumulation. it is more likely to apply enforcement powers to retard profits in the interest of reducing particular sources of social disharmony. In many instances it would appear thalt the enforcement powers necessary to retard the acquisition and abuse of market power reside in state regulatory agencies whose primary responsibility is the promotion of monopoly sector accumulation. Some general consequences of such an allocation of enforcement powers are demonstrated by the role of the Comptroller of the Currency in promoting national bank expansion during the 1960s. a period of substantial merger activity. Early in that decade. federal legislation and Supreme Court rulings stated that bank mergers should not be approved (and could be subject to antitrust prosecution) if community convenience and needs could not be expected to substantially outweigh potential anti-competitive effects.H To determine the net impact of a merger. the bank regulator with primary jurisdiction was to solicit adviSOry opinions from the other bank regulators and the Justice Department. The three bank regulators were the Comptroller. the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). The regulator of the surviving bank would have primary jurisdiction. While all three regulators were concerned with maintaining conditions for profitable accumulation. the Comptroller had been placing great emphasis on the need for National banks (the Comptroller's constituency) to expand in powers and size in response to an increased competition from newer nonmonetary financial institutions. e.g .. thrift institutions. In reviewing merger advisory opinions. a subcommittee of the House Committee on Banking and Currency weighted the pro and con recommendations of each regulator and the Justice Departments by the dollar value of assets involved in the merger. They found that while the weighted percentage of promerger recommendations by the Fed and FDIC were close to those of the Justice Department. the weighted percentage of pro-merger recommendations by the Comptroller were more than double those of the Justice Department.9 Since all agencies viewed the same information. and were interpreting the same legal prmisions. it is reasonable to conclude that the Comptrollel"s relative emphasis on expansion through merger made it less vvilling to retard national bank acquisition of unlawful powers. While some of the Comptroller's merger recommendations were subsequt~ntly overturned (establishing that the powers granted were in fact unlawful). the consequence of its actions was to socialize the costs of pro-
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moting illegal acts and to require that additional private and public expenditure be made in the interest of enforcement. A seconda!)' consequence was thus to reduce the enforcement resources available for prosecution of other monopoly sector violations. There is ample reason to believe that the role of the Comptroller in promoting the acquisition of unlawful powers and in protecting the beneficiaries of such powers is reproduced in other situations involving regulated industries. As regards mergers, it has been noted that the Justice Department's concern for promoting competition far exceeds that of indust!)' regulators. At the same time, the Supreme Court has been unwilling to overrule regulators on findings of fact and probable effect since the regulator presumably has more competence than the courts in these matters.1O Since the majority of regulated industries define the domain of monopoly sector firms, this situation insulates them from legal strictures on the acquisition of market power. As regards the more general insulation which regulato!), commissions provide, Walter Adams has noted that, the histOlY of these commissions shows that what starts as regulation almost ine\1tably winds up as protection. The power to license becomes the power to exclude; the regulation of rates, a system of price supp0I1s; the surveillance of mergers, an instmment of concentration; and the supen1sion of business practices, a pretext for harassing the weak, unorganized and the politically underprivileged .11
To this point we have emphasized structural characteristics which constrain the use of enforcement powers vis-a.-vis monopoly sector violators and which, in the interest of legitimacy, often direct them against competitive sector violators. We may now consider the fate of a state agency which could use its enforcement powers to promote the interests of groups which bear the costs of illegal activity in the monopoly sector. A recent House bill proposed an Agency for Consumer Protection which would bring about several changes in the structure of monopoly sector enforcement. First, it would consolidate the enforcement powers which are currently held by the consumer affairs departments of some 26 state agencies. The prima!)' responsibility of these agencies has generally been the promotion of indust!)' interests. Second, the Agency for Consumer Protection would use these powers to intervene on behalf of consumers in federal agency proceedings and to seek judicial review of agency actions which involve substantial consumer interests. Third, the agency could obtain the information required to effectively promote consumer interests. This interrogato!), power could only be exercised relative to the 5 percent of firms with $5 million or more in assets, i.e., relative to the firms which define monopoly sector production.12 While the socialized costs of promoting consumer interests would not necessarily be increased through passage, the consolidation of powers held and the prima!)' responsibility of the new agency would certainly make the use of enforcement powers against monopoly sector violators more likely.
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Proponents note that passage would help remedy the lack of true adversary proceedings in the regulatory process; would promote compliance with, and enforcement of, existing laws; and would provide consumers with an access to courts and, thus, with the legal standing necessary to challenge state agency promotion of business interests.13 With these probable consequences before them, organized business interests successfully contributed to the death of this legislation.14 We note in passing that a bill to allow consumer class action suits to be brought after a company violated a Federal Trade Commission cease-and-desist order was defeated in the same congressional session.ls While these consumer interest defeats contribute to the capital accumulation bias in the overall structure of law and enforcement they also reveal that bias and consequently weaken the legitimacy of the state. In the presence of increased organized support for such legislation, it is not unreasonable to expect that a consumer protection agency will eventually be eMablished, but that its powe~s will be such as to limit its impact on monopoly sector profits and accumulation.
Notes 1 See Scherer, F. M. (19701. Industrial Market Structure and Economic Performance, Chicago: Rand McNally, pp. 471-73. 2 Ibid., pp. 424-25. 3 Mann, H. Michael (19731. "A 3tructul'alist Direction fOl" Antitrust: The View of a Policy Ad-
viSOl"," presented at the Midwest Conference of the Continuing Legal Education Progmm of the Minnesota State Bar Association and the Uniiversity of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota. See Blake, Harlan M. (19741. "Legislative Proposals for Industrial Concentmtion," in Goldschmid, Mann and Weston (eds.l, Industrial Concentration: The New Learning, Boston: Uttle, Brown, p. 360, for a discussion of proposals for a more structurally-oriented antitrust law. Note that there is no consensus as to whether the structuml characteristics of oligopolistic firms enhance efficiency more or less than they enhance market POWel". 4 See Scherer, op. cit., pp. 473-87. For a discussion of the dynamics of innovative circumvention, see Silber, William L. and Kenneth D. Garbade (19761. "Financial Innovation and EFTS:
Implications for Regulation," in Committee on Banking, Currency and Housing. Compendium of Papers Preparedfor the FINE Study, Washington, D.C.: Govemment Printing Ollice. Since conglomemtes are combinations of firms operating in dissimilar" product markets, the impact of conglomerate mergers on market power could be manifest for example, as increased leverage in money and capital markets. 5 Green, Mark J., et al. (19721. The Closed Enterprise System, New York: Grossman, pp. 162-64. Note that jail sentences for price fixing have become more common and that increased fines have been le\~ed on individuals and corporations for this oll"ense. Price fixing, howevel", is more likely to be practiced by competitive sector firms. 6 Scherer, op. cit., p. 467. 7 See, for example, Clabault, James M. and J. F. Burton (19661. Sherman Act Indictments 1955-1965: A Legal and Economic Analysis, New York: Federal Legal Publications, pp. 36-37, and (19681. Cumulative Statistical Supplement to Sherman Act Indictments 1955-1965, New York: [Federal Legal Publications]; Posner, Richard A. (19741. "The Beha\~or of Administrative Agencies," in Becker and Landes, (eds.l, Essays in the Economics of Crime and Punishment.
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New York: National Bureau of Economic Research and Columbia University Press; and Mann, op. cit. 8 See Stelzer, Irwin M.11976l.SelectedAntitrost Cases, Homewood, Illinois: Richard D. Irwin, pp.367-83. 9 Subcommittee on Domestic Finance, Committee on Banking and Currency 11973). Financial Institutions: Reform and the Public Interest, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, pp. 59-60. 10 Scherer, op. cit., pp. 488-89. 11 Adams, Walter 119741. "Corporate Power and Economic Apologetics: A Public Policy Perspective," in Goldschmid, Mann and Weston leds.l, Industrial Concentration: The New Learning, Boston: Uttle, Brown, p. 374. 12 See H. R. 6805, "A Bill to Establish an Agency for Consumer Protection .... " 95th Congress, 1st Session, Union Calendar No. 183. 13 From a letter to Members of Congress, Congress Watch, Washington, D.C., May 31, 1977.
14 Wall Street Journal, November 11, 1977, p. 1. 15 Ibid., "House Rejects Bid for Class-Action Suits Against Firms that Violate FTC Orders," October 14, 1977, p. 4.
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The Standards of Living in Penal Institutions Herman Schwendinger and Julia R. Schwendinger Copyright 1980 by Herman Schwcndingcl' and Julia Sch\\'cndinger
The surge of puniti\"{C) policies in the 1970s encouraged debate about the dimensions of fair punishment and" just deserts" for criminals. But rarely did we see an inquiry into the reasons why "just deserts," however it may be defined, becomes "crud and inhuman punishment" in practice. By conducting such an inquiry, this essay deepens the debate and OIients it into new directions l
SUBSTANDARD CONDITIONS
Across the United States, prisoners' actions have publicized their substandard living conditions. Militant protests against such conditions have occurred even in San Quentin, Soledad, and Folsom prisons in the wealthy state of California, which is well known fOJ' its innovative correctional programs. Since similar conditions are found in Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, and New York, Thomas Murton, a former prison superintendent, concludes (1976:51), "It really makes no difference whether one examines prisons in western, southern, mid-western, or eastern sections of the United States; regardless of the relative sophistication of the system, there seems no significant difference in the way prisoners are treated."
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Murton's obseJvations point to another notable aspect of American penal practices, namely, the intractability of substandard penal conditions. The courts, prison reformers, and prisoners' movements have been very active in the last ten years, but they have generally failed to institute major reforms within the prisons themselves. For instance, at the beginning of 1976, a federal court responded to social reformers by threatening to close every state prison in Alabama unless reforms were made. Judge Frank M. Johnson found prison conditions to be "barbaric and inhuman." He called the isolation and segregation cells "indescribable," the food unsanitary, and the prison "wholly unfit for human habitation." Racial conflicts repeatedly emerged between the guards, who are rural whites, and prisoners, who are mostly blacks. Idleness was found to be the rule within the prisons, because of the lack of "meaningful vocational, educational or work activities." The court concluded that these prison conditions not only made it impossible for prisoners to rehabilitate themselves, but that internment in the Alabama prisons also made "debilitation inevitable."2 Yet despite these findings, the governor of Alabama appealed to a higher court and thereby blocked Judge Johnson's threat to close the prisons. The U.S. Court of Appeals subsequently overturned Judge Johnson's decision, and dissolved the 39-member Human Rights Committee that Judge Johnson had appointed to oversee compliance with his order. Progressive prison administrators have also failed to make any important changes in prison conditions. In 1968, after following up rumors about a long-standing tradition of inmate executions in Arkansas State Prison, Thomas Murton, the prison's reform-minded superintendent, discovered the bodies of buried inmates allegedly killed by regular guards or inmate guards. Prior to the discovery, in that same year, 120 inmates had demonstrated against prison brutality, exploitation, and poor medical care. In 1970, poor clothing, inadequate eating utensils, and improper sanitation were causes of still another prisoners' protest. Prisoners who were used as guards were accused of indiscriminately shooting at men on field work details. Courts investigating the prisons had reported prisoners were being subjected to "cruel and inhuman punishment" which violated the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution. In fact, the court had ruled three times against such inhuman treatment as the use of isolation units, the chaining of inmates to fences for several days, and the shooting of unarmed, nonviolent prison protesters. Racial discrimination, homosexual assaults, and political corruption can also be added to the litany of complaints about the Arkansas prison system. Despite these complaints and findings, no fundamental changes in prison conditions have been made by authorities. Instead, shortly after his discovery of the inmate bodies, Thomas Murton's efforts to reform the prison were rewarded with his dismissal by the state's governor, Winthrop Rockefeller. Superintendents and commissioners of correctional systems in Ohio and Massachusetts have also been fired for their reform efforts.
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Furthermore, numerous prisoner protests and uprisings over brutal and substandard conditions have been suppressed by savage reactions from deputies, prison administrators, and political officials. In the state of Indiana, which contains one of the nation's largest prisons, twenty-five inmates protested the health and living conditions in 1968. One year later several hundred inmates protested again, but this time in support of four inmates who had been placed in solitary confinement. The protestors set fire to the prison factory, conducted a sit-down strike, refused to return to their cells and-the supreme act of defiance-·one black prisoner raised his fist in a black-power salute. The guards reacted with 1Z-gauge shotguns. The defiant inmate, who was only ZO years old, was shot five times and killed. Official investigators of the Pendleton Massacre, as it is called, further reported that "forty-six men were wounded, many critically, from shots in the head, in the back, through the chest, in the legs, feet, thighs, through the groin, in the side-in fact, some who tried to throw up their hands in a traditional gesture of surrender had their hands shattered and are minus fingers. Many of the injured had multiple wounds" (Murton, 1976:38-40). The 1971 rising in Attica, a New York State prison, is the most notable example of the unending prisoner protests about substandard conditions. Several prior Attica protests which preceded the major uprising pointed to the vicious treatment of prisoners by guards, racist brutality, poor food, inadequate medical care, overcrowding, one shower per week for each prisoner, twenty-five cents per day wages, and highly restricted visiting privileges. The 1971 rising voiced similar demands after the earlier smaller protests had failed to reform prison practices. Taking hostages as a desperate and defensive measure, the prisoners demanded negotiations for prison reforms; but the state's response to requests for a negotiated settlement was massive. The state troopers, ordered in by Governor Nelson Rockefeller, stormed the prison, killing and wounding hostages and inmates alike. Yet, despite this savage repression of their demands, almost four years later, in August 1976, Attica prisoners again expressed their hatred for prison conditions by engaging in a six-day demonstration during which 95 percent of the inmates refused to work or go to other prison programs. The systematic suppression of militant prisoners and prisoners' movements has taken its toll. Since the early 1970's, movements for prison reform have ebbed and traditional modes of prisoner existence, including brutality, gang wars, racial hostility, and economic exploitation have reasserted themselves.
CHANGING PENAL PRACTICES
The existence of substandard conditions, extraordinary brutality, and savage repression in most prisons requires an explanation. Some of these present-day conditions find their sources in the past. Prisons emerged throughout western Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-
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turies when legal systems were being transformed and penal practices were securing the social, economic, and political relationships accompanying the rise of capitalism. Generally, penal practices safeguarded the conditions for reproducing (1) the capitalist mode of production and (2) the social relations based on this mode, such as the family and the state. Moreover, in this early period, penal practices accelerated the primitive accumulation of capital by enforcing the violent appropriation of vast treasure, mineral wealth, and landed property. As the wholesale theft of material wealth was accomplished, the forcible acquisition of involuntary labor such as convict labor, impressed labor, and slave labor underwrote the expansion of worldwide economic systems. This widespread use of involuntary labor established one of the frameworks within which prison standards originally developed (Foucault, 1965; Rusche and Kirchheimer, 1968). However, the use of prisons to warehouse forced laborers in the seventeenth century-or to inculcate factory discipline in the nineteenth-does not explain why prisons were originally established or why they continue to be expanded in capitalist societies. Supplying convict labor and inculcating discipline are only two among numerous other functions. The evolution of prisons was related to transformations in the relations of production and all the attendant problems of marginalization, proletarianization, ordinary crime, and rebellion. These problems have always been massive and their expression in class struggles has established the necessity for borrowing or creating general methods of forcibly controlling an enormous variety of people. Such methods include the use of prisons, police, and military forces. Originally, torture, mutilation, and excruciating executions were maintained as regular punishment alongside imprisonment. But the massive entrance into political life of small farmers, urban petty bourgeisie, and proletarians established certain constraints on penal practices. If executions and mutilations were retained as the chief means of solving the domestic problems created by the evolution of capitalism, both town and city "peace" officials would never have found enough land to bury the dead or enough food to feed the mutilated, who had lost fingers, hands, eyes, or limbs. Nor would they have found enough military forces to safeguard their own miserable lives if innumerable artisans, farmers, and shopkeepers were maimed or executed simply for nonpayment of debts. Eventually, t0I1ure and mutilation and other equally hOI'rible punishments were excluded at least from public policy. Penal practices also reflected the new principles of equity and justice that the capitalist mode of production projected into stl'llggles over punishment. As Rusche and Kirschheimer (1968) remind us, capitalism is characterized by abstract labOI' and the standardization oflabor time, which establish the equivalence relations in commodity exchange. These relations have provided the material basis for new principles of "just deserts" that have replaced torture and mutilation. These principles focused on grada-
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tions of time and on living standards when they interpreted punishment as the deprivation of time and of the freedom to experience a standard of living equivalent with one's economic status. Imprisonment, after all, was not invented out of whole cloth by the bourgeoisie. It survived the medieval period because it could be accommodated to the ethos of commodity production and the constraints established by class struggles within bourgeois democratic states. It remained the only form of punishment that could handle the increasing numbers of people who could not be practically or justifiably tortured, mutilated, or killed, yet who still had to be punished to safeguard the new economic system. The functions fulfilled by prisons to keep capitalism alive have been numerous. The class functions, for example, are emphasized by Paul Takagi, a noted authority on prison history. In his pioneering study of Walnut Street Jail, the first state prison in the United States, Takagi (1975) criticizes the dominant historical school of thought in American penology that attributes the rise of prisons to eighteenth-centUilY rationalism and reform (e.g., Rothman, 1971:58-61). He points out that the Walnut Street Jail centralized state power in order to control paupers, debtors, and dissidents, who were being produced by economic crises and political repression after the American Revolution. The establishment of the state prison defied popular sentiment; it symbolized political oppression; and, even though it helped rationalize the judiciary, it was not humanitarian. In fact, by concentrating the powers of the state the prison indirectly stabilized a new ruling class. Concurrent with the establishment of prisons, numerous other legal relations were being transparently determined by class forces. For instance, juridical relations safeguarded rentiers, bankers, and merchant-capitalists who profited from the labor of others. Payments of interest and rent, and the exchange of goods that are bought cheap but sold dear, obviously secured exploitative conditions. Above all, prisons secured the increasing dependence of the labor force on commodity transactions, such as the wage bargain, by enforcing laws and practices that eliminated the customary rights of workers and farmers (Marx, 1975; Thompson, 1975; linebaugh, 1976), Another transparent function of penal practices in early capitalist societies was the direct reinforcement of labor diSCipline and the direct contribution to labor exploitation. To safeguard the repressive governmental policies and the commercial norms that were undermining self-earned property relations, seventeenth and eighteenth-century English prisoners were contracted out to manufacturers and landowners, impressed into naval service, transported to colonial territories, and forced to work at home and abroad on roads, harbors, sewers, fortifications, and other state projects, as payment for their alleged crimes. Finally, from the nineteenth century into the twentieth, penal practices systematically suppressed labor movements. In the United States, imprisonment was used to smash unions and to break strikes, which became de-
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fined as "criminal syndicalist conspiracies." Because of their antilabor bias, the class determination of penal sanctions was readily perceived by numerous working people. Penal practices have changed in certain crucial respects within modem bourgeois democracies. Exploitation still exists, and it is an important determinant of life within many prisons. Where it exists, prison labor is still generally forced labor but, when compared to earlier practices, this labor is more restricted and it is not visible to the public at large. Thus, in the United States, although prison work gangs can be observed laboring on southern roads or on southwestern factory farms, these forms of penal servitude have diminished nationally. Penal practices have changed in numerous other ways. Prisoners are not currently impressed into the armed forces nor do they function any longer as scab labor. In the face oflegislative changes that outdate the enforcement of "criminal syndicalist" labor codes, imprisonment oppresses organized labor in more disguised forms. Furthermore, because of changes in bankruptcy laws, state subsidies, and welfare programs, bankrupt farmers and other debtors no longer fill whole tiers of modem prisons. The use of the industrial organization of time and labor as one model for the "moral economy" of prison life has also diminished greatly. With the rise of the welfare state and the acceptance in society-at-Iarge of a permanently idle stratum of state dependents, there has been a departure both from severe labor regimentation of prisoners and from forced labor as a form of torture. Prison factories do operate and military prisons still remain dedicated to the use of "hard labor" as a form of punishment, but "factory discipline" as described by some authors3 can hardly have inculcated discipline successfully whenever it was used in the pasti certainly it is unimportant at present. Today, throughout the country, tens of thousands of men and women languish aimlessly, for years on end, in jails and prisons. The apparent function of imprisonment, since these classical penal practices have diminished, obscures the structural effect of imprisonment to the eyes of most observers. Thus, although prisons still maintain the class structure, they no longer do it transparently. Imprisonment in bourgeois democracies appears to be no more than the expression of universal legal norms solely dedicated to preserving the freedom, life, and property of every individual.
INVISIBLE CLASS JUSTICE
Clearly, then, the obvious legal functions cannot explain substandard conditions in prisons today. Such conditions can be clarified, however, by connecting them with capitalist relations that operate on different levels of reality. The first level demonstrates an implicit class organization of crime and punishment, while the second involves the effects of this organization on the invisible dialectic of exploitation. Let us briefly describe these aspects
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of class justice, and then we will note their connections with penal standards in our society. On the first level of reality, the unobvious class differentiations which influence penal practices have to do with the types of social harms that are actually defined and punished by the state, and the types of sanctions that are prescribed for these different harms. The following examples show how class factors generally differentiate social harms and punishments. First, because of their relation to state power and capital accumulation, many grave social harms such as the Indo-Chinese War and the forcible overthrow of the Chilean (Allende) government, are committed by bourgeois Americans and are not repressed by law at all. Second, bourgeois harms regulated by law are usually controlled by civil laws; hence, they are subject to mild restitutive sanctions rather than harsh penal sanctions. Third, the remaining bourgeois harms that are defined as crimes, receive relatively less punishment than is provided for the types of harms typically committed by proletarians. Here, then, class differentiations depend on factors that determine universal standards of bourgeois justice rather than just the obvious and familiar discriminatory deviations from such standards, such as racial bias in the treatment of the same crime. These differentiations are implicit in the classifications of crime and punishment. Capitalist forms of justice are identified as much by the grave social harms that are not defined or punished as serious crimes as by those that are. Economic crimes are a case in point. Consider that the vast majority of criminals who go to prison are sentenced for economic crimes. Even though the bourgeoisie commit economic crimes such as stock swindles, embezzlement, price fixing, professional and business malpractice, fraud, and corruption that outweigh the economic harms created by proletarians, they constitute a fraction of the prison population. Therefore, while it cannot be justifiably claimed that proletarians generally commit more economic crimes than the bourgeoisie, it can be maintained that certain types of economic activities are sanctioned more than others. The primary types of economic crimes receiving penal sanctions are those committed, in the main, by proletarians. Also, penal sanctions are applied universally but, for obvious reasons, they are applied especially to marginal proletarians. This privileged treatment was noted by Anatole France, whose sarcastic statement, "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread," tells it alL The realities of economic life involve the poor and not the rich in violations of these particular economic norms. As a result, since the earliest development of penal systems in emerging bourgeois societies, marginals have contributed disproportionately to penal popUlations. Today, prisons confine some bourgeois criminals who have been entrepreneurs, government officials, and corporate executives, but studies repeatedly show that they predominantly confine persons who have been marginal members of the labor force.4 There are as many as 340,000 incarcerated adults on any given day, many
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of them living under conditions similar to those described earlier. They are housed in Jails and prisons on local, state, and federal levels. Examining the jail population we find that during the summer of 1972, 40 percent of the inmates had been unemployed at the time of their arrest; and, of those with employment, 20 percent had only part-time jobs. For the years prior to their incarceration, almost half of the inmates in jails had incomes below that defined as poverty level income by the U.S. government.5 'fhe U.S. census in 1970 showed an economic pattern in prisons that duptcated the findings for the jail population. In the year before their arrest, 54 percent of the prison inmates had no earned income at all, and 32 percent had received less than $2,000 annual income. Thus, the vast majority of the prison population is drawn from the poorest stratum in society, the stratum that consists chiefly of marginal members of the labor force. Moreover, concentrated in urban slums and ghettos, marginals disproportionately come from racial and ethnic minority groups. Consequently, it is not surprising to find such groups overrepresented in prisons and jails. The 1970 census found that 40 percent of the inmates in prisons were blacks in a national popUlation where blacks were approximately 10 percent, a small fraction of the total. On the other hand, class and strata differentiations in the types of punishable harms and penal sanctions do not alone determine prevailing penal standards. While prison standards are affected by these differentiations, they are also affected by essential structural relations based on class exploitation. Thus, at the second and much deeper level of social reality, penal law in modern bourgeois democracies remains capitalist law because it safeguards the exploitation of free wage laborers. However, since this form of exploitation is veiled by an objective reality and an ideology based on the fetishism of the wage transaction, the essential structural foundations of bourgeois law are completely unobservable. On the level of observable reality, the wage transaction seems to be no different from countless other types of exchange. It is not an act that appears to initiate the exploitative relations which begin when labor power is placed at the disposal of capital in return for wages. The wage transaction seems to express the use values being exchanged, the money fulfilling the need of the individual worker and the concrete labor serving the capitalist's need for profits. Instead of class domination, inequality, and conflict, this transaction appears to express the qualities of individual freedom, equality, and mutual advantage. Consequently, when referring to the commodity exchange that takes the form of wages, Marx (1959:540) writes, "This phenomenal form, which makes the actual relations [of exploitation] invisible, and, indeed, shows the direct opposite of that relation, forms the basis of all the juridical notions of both laborer and capitalist, of all the mystifications of the capitalist mode of production, of all the apologetic shifts of the vulgar economists." Hence, as wage labor and capital become predominant, the relationship between penal practices and the reproduction of the class structure is
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blocked from visibility, by the wage fOITIl. Under these conditions, the state does not appear to reproduce class relations when it is protecting economic rights, including the rights of workers to earn wages. Yet, by safeguarding :hese rights, penal practices secure the economic relationships that operate behind the backs of individuals and that reproduce the basic structure of capitalist societies. FurtheITIlore, civil practices based on the wage transaction and penal practices stemming from class differentiations in crime and punishment are interrelated insofar as they both ensure the condition of exploitation. For example, civil laws that protect the wage transaction ensure the conditions that directly motivate wage earners to reproduce themselves through exploitation. Simultaneously, the laws that deter proletarians from living by illegal gain accomplish the same end indirectly. These particular laws force persons who have no other means of support to work for wages.6 Thus the effectiveness of penal practices in this regard is not measurable by the magnitude of imprisoned offenders. So long as proletarians who are outside of prison are generally deterred from economic crimes, penal practices accomplish these invisible goals. Such relationships also affect the rate of exploitation automatically. By generally deterring proletarians from reproducing themselves illegally, penal practices maximize the number of persons who are in the labor market regardless of the demand for their labor. This maximization constitutes one of the many juridical preconditions for the relative surplus labor force; therefore, it heightens rates of exploitation because the surplus labor force is used by capitalists to depress wage rates and to reinforce labor discipline and productivity. On the other hand, penal practices do not heighten exploitation because they are "functional," that is, because they function to serve a "system" that created them for exploitative purposes. The intent behind penal practices may not have been exploitation at all. Rather, such consequences are due to structural tendencies, to the socioeconomic relationships that spontaneously mediate the practical applications of criminal laws. These political and economic relationships constitute the structurally based dialectic of legal repression. Unique to capitalism, this dialectic juxtaposes (1) the bourgeois democratic juridical practices regulating observable relations among fOITIlally equal and independent commodity exchangers, and (2) the unobservable consequences of this regulation, namely, class exploitation. While the laws of property and the rule of law provide a measure of protection to most individuals, they are also at the center of this dialectic? In sum, it is granted that penal practices protect the entire system of legal relations in society; therefore, they secure the monopoly of violence for the state as well as the hegemony of bourgeois morality, politics, and property. Nevertheless, the penal sanctions that converge on the proletariat necessarily underwrite the exploitation of wage labor. Penal practices maximize the supply of living labor at the disposal of capital by deterring proletarians
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from reproducing themselves illegally. They ensure that labor power remains competitive regardless of the level of labor market demand; that it is available when wage rates are low; and that it renews itself through exploitation despite work alienation.
PRISON CONDITIONS VS. OUTSIDE STANDARDS OF LIVING
We have seen that penal practices operate within a socioeconomic framework that involves visible and invisible forces based on the exploitation of wage labor. Now we will show that the influence of these forces on state policy ties penal practices to standards of life in "free" society. But the standards of society at large are not fully reproduced in penal institutions. In fact, only the meanest conditions outside are refracted in most prisons. Penal practices traditionally take for granted that offenders will not be deterred from crime and hence will not be motivated to work for wages, if prison conditions are superior to the offenders' conditions on the outside. Since penal sanctions converge on marginals, the standards of living within prisons are generally set below the levels of these members of the labor force. Therefore, punishment corresponding to this principle tacitly ignores the distinction between (1) deterrence based on the deprivation of liberty by incarceration, and (2) deterrence based on punishing people by subjecting them to material, social, political, and cultural deprivations greater than those suffered by similar social groups outside of prison.8 Under these conditions, traditional bourgeois practices of punishment acquire their brutal parameters. Treatment which refracts the meanest outside conditions is not uniquely reserved for prison inmates. Its expression is found in the norms applied generally to dependents of the state and in the standards that justify degrees of eligibility for state-supported living standards. When applied to dependents outside the prison, such as subemployed and unemployed persons on welfare, these norms are expressed in the principle of less eligibility. According to this principle, welfare recipients are not eligible for a decent income. High welfare payments are considered a disincentive to gainful employment; therefore, payments are set below the prevailing wage rates. However, since traditional practices equate deprivation of living standards with punishment, persons inside prisons are tacitly subject to a principle of least eligibility; moreover, the kinds of deprivations justified by such a principle of "just deserts" are more comprehensive. Prisoners are subject to material deprivations such as the denial of the right to adequate food, housing, and medical care; social deprivations such as the relinquishment offamily and sexual relations; cultural deprivations such as the retraction of the right to education; and political deprivations such as the prohibition of the right to vote, assemble, and function actively in a political party. The political restrictions are especially important because they repress viable so-
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cial alternatives to the racism, exploitation, and criminal victimization of the traditional order. Victimization has always marked prisons as lawless institutions and it is an unavoidable by-product of prison conditions. Because these prison conditions are grounded structurally, the brutalization of social relations cannot be validly attributed to a single type of prison, for example, the fortress prison, as claimed by some criminologists. Progressive penal policies can support higher standards of living more easily in minimum security facilities and in modern smaller prisons. But this possibility suggests again the deeper causal relationships that associate greater punishment and security with greater deprivation, and with the warehousing of prisoners who can be stripped of their humanity. On the other hand, smaller prisons frequently have brutal and substandard conditions too, and the smallest facilities, which are usually county jails, are no exception. Every criminologist is familiar \-vith the poor food, the absence of recreational opportunities, and the outrageous medical care that exists in jails. Just as it is in prisons, victimization is rampant in jails. One study estimated that an astounding number, about 1880, forcible rapes had taken place in Philadelphia jails and prisons during a twenty-month period (David, 1968). In another part of the country, the JoAnne Little case, which involved rape and homicide in a southern county jail, revealed that sexual and racial discrimination are particularly acute. Thus, county jails also testify to the brutalization of social relationships. Hospital prisons are not less punitive, even though the modes of repression in these prisons may differ. A study by Speiglman (1976) indicates that in recent decades the massive introduction of drug therapy into these prisons bears little relation to the medical needs of prisoners. Hospitalized prisoners are continuously administered extremely high dosages of drugs even though the effects may take the form of intense anxiety attacks and mental deterioration; and, in some cases, those treated become mindless vegetables. It is often presumed by social scientists that this so-called drug therapy is given solely to maximize "social control" of prisoners. But its effects bear an even stronger relationship to the social deprivation and the contempt for marginals engendered by capitalist relationships outside of prison.
CONCLUSION Prison protests remind us that living standards are determined by class struggles as well as by modes of production and levels of economic development. Class struggles, for instance, oppose the laws of uneven development and profit which tend to reduce the price of labor power to a minimum. Hence, living standards are not necessarily fixed merely by the price of commodities that can be bought by an individual's labor. People, regardless of their ability to pay, are now demanding certain rights to medi-
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cal care, education, housing, food, and so on. Phrases such as "basic rights" and "human rights" are political categories arising especially from recent struggles for better standards of living. The ideological legacy contributed by such struggles in prisons, as well as in society at large, has affected legal contests in which explicit equations between substandard living conditions and punishment are under attack. This equation is seen in Judge Johnson's characterization of Alabama prison conditions as "cruel and inhuman punishment." Alternatively, the U.S. Appeals Court, in its reaction to Judge Johnson's threat to close down the prisons, revealed its belief in a normalized concept of punishment that implied restriction of prisoners' rights. This court decided that Judge Johnson had exceeded his authority; and, in a sarcastic reprimand, an appellate justice wrote, "The Constitution does not require that prisoners, as individuals or as a group, be provided with any and every amenity which some person may think is needed to avoid mental, physical, and emotional deterioration."9 Other legal trials reveal the ideological dimensions of struggle against prison conditions. In a civil suit against Texas prison conditions, prisoners detailed the agony, brutality, overcrowding, and inadequate medical care. A former prisoner told of losing both arms below the elbows after he was ordered by supervisors at the prison farm to feed silage into the threshing machine by hand, a violation of safety procedures. (Another prisoner testified that he was at the hospital when the mutilated man arrived and was raped by another inmate patient. "The man without arms was crying," the prisoner said.! Still other prisoners spoke about the slave conditions in the prison workshops and farms; the unclean hospitals and the unqualified medical personnel; and the brutal assaults by guards. The defense testimony, however, whitewashed these horrendous conditions. By contrast with the prisoner testimony, supporters of the Texas Correctional Department insisted that the prisons were models of modern penology. Prison inmates, they said, were provided with a broad variety of vocational "opportunities" in prison. Moreover, as the Assistant State Attorney General reportedly noted in his opening remarks at at the trial, not only were living conditions in the state's prisons better than in some impoverisheri areas of southern Texas, but inmates were safer inside than they might be outside in the Mexican-American barrios of Houston and San Antonio.1O By implication, Texas prisons are beneficient institutions. They accommodate offenders whose standards of life outside do not even make them eligible for the comparatively regal conditions of life inside. The logical force of the Assistant Attorney General's remarks takes the classical principle that the standard of living in prison should not exceed that of the poorest stratum of gainfully employed workers for granted. So, too, is this principle taken for granted by criminologists who favor "the new realism" in crime control.l l But the conditions in American prisons cry out against this principle and its taken-for-granted universe of discourse. These lawless prison conditions also mock the advocates of longer prison sen-
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tences and severe punishments, who claim that such "just measures of pain" are necessary for an orderly society. Social justice at a minimum calls for crime control strategies that improve the standards of life for marginal members of the labor force in prison as welll as in society at large. An inquiry into the nature of these strategies, howevelr, is the topic of another essayP
Not;es 1 This essay is concerned only with the main trends in plison conditions. and it does not deal with class-imposed differentials v.~thin plisons Ie.!';., socioeconomic and racial gmdations in job-tmining progmms, work furlough assignments, etc.1 01' between prisons le.g., concentmtions of "white-collar offenders" in such prisons as Lompoc, California fedeml prisonl. Such differentials im'oh'e extensions of the main theoretical argument in this article. 2 InfOlmation about penal conditions repOlied in this essay has been gleaned Ii'om Million 11976:29-541. Mitfon:l119711, State of New York, Special Commission 119721, and the Crimina/ Justice Bulletin IMarch 19761. Statements by Judge Johnson are repOlied by the Bulletin. 3 See, for instance, Melossi 119761, Foucault 119771, and Ignatieff 119781. 4 Schwendinger and Schwendinger 119761 describe the historical de"elopment and changes in the processes of marginalization. 5 Julia Schwendingm.'s 119791 study of women's jails in San Francisco sU/-lgests that the con\'ergence of sanctions on pOOl' offenders land especially pOOl', black oftimdersl has not heen ameliorated by di\'ersion progmms. These programs are intended to di,'e\'t oflcnders fl'Om jail or prison to community programs. 6 We are aware that a numher of laws prohibit conduct Isuch as rape and inccsll that is not related to this economic end. Neyeliheless, the most frequently sanctioned forms of conduct in\'olve \'iolent andlor economic acts that are related. 7 Thus, pivotal elements of this dialectic do not include Max Weber's idealistic contradiction between formal and substanti\'e law because mtional legal procedures and property laws are both elements of democratic bourgeois legal practices. Nor do they imuh'e the modern conflict theOlist's contradiction between democratic legal nOl1l1S and the obsel"ahle, legal expressions of class and racial justice. As F. Werkentin, M. Ilolferbm1, and 1\1. Baunmllln 11974:261 rightfully insist. "The fact that current law is class law is not rm'ealed by the lilct that celiain contents of the law directly indicate and insure the pridleges of the ruling classes. To the contmry, the fact that the form of I bOlll'geois) law is only a superstructural reflex of the predominance of the bourgeois class, which is dm'eloped in the economic hase, is already concealed within the concept of the constitutional li.e .. the liberal] state" lour emphasisl. 8 This conclusion expands on the analysis by Georg Rusche 119781 who deals only with economic standards of life. 9 The "amenities" ordered by Judge Johnson included such things as rehabilitath'e programs that provided educational and work OPPOlillllities, and lh'ing conditions that required 60 square feet of living space for each prisoner. See "Appellate COlll1 Modifies Alabama Prison Reforms," New YO/'k Times, Sept. 20, 1977 ISection C. p. 291. 10 A work stoppage suppOliing the legal action by hundreds of inmates in half a dozen Texas prisons was violently halted by the administration. See "Inmates Tell of Texas Prison Brutality," New York Times, Nm'. 11, 1978 ISection A, p. 81. 11 For examples of the "new realism," see Wilson 119761 and van den Haag 119751, For an excel-
lent critique of "the new realists," see Platt and Takagi 119781. The "new realists" represent a shift away from liberalism in crime control policy. They claim that punishment rather than
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social ref01111 or rehabilitation is the only effective or proper method for dealing with "street crime" Itheft and assaultive offensesl. Schwendinger and Schwendinger 119801. however. content that the" new realists'" justifications for punishment are based on social myths and idealistic judgements. The Schwendingers regard this so-called "realism" as an ideological reflex of the downward shifts in living standards generated by stagflation and crisis conditions outside of prisons. 12 See Schwelldinger and Schwendinger 119801.
References
Davis. Alan J. 1968 "Sexual Assaults in the Philadelphia Prison System and Sheriff's Vans." Transaction lDecemberl:8-16. Foucault. Michael 1965 Madness and Civilization. New York: New American library. 1977 Discipline and Punish: The Birth of a Prison. New York: Pantheon. Ignatieff. Michael 1978 A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution 1750-1850. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd. linebaugh. Peter 1976 "Kal'l Marx. the Theft of Wood. and Working Class Composition: A Contribution to the Current Debate." Crime and Social Justice 6 IFall-Winterl:5-16. Marx. Karl 1959 Capital. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. 1975 "Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood." In Collected Works. Vol. 1. New York: International Publishers. pp. 224-63. Melossi. Dario 1976 "The Penal Question in Capital." Crime and Social Justice 5 (Spring-Summer): 26-33. Mitford.Jessica 1974 Kind and Usual Punishment. New York: Vintage Books. Murton. Thomas 1976 The Dilemma of Prison Reform. New York: Holt. Rinehart and Winston. Platt. Anthony. and Paul Takagi 1977 "Intellectuals for Law and Order: A Critique of the New . Realists'." Crime and Social Justice 8 IFall-Winterl:I-6. Rothman. David 1971 The Discovery of the Asylum. Boston: little. Brown and Co. Rusche. Georg 1978 .. Labor Market and Penal Sanction: Thoughts on the Sociology of Criminal Justice." tr. Gerda Dinwiddie. Crime and Social Justice 10 {Fall-Winter):2-8. Rusche. Georg. and Otto Kirchheimer 1968 Punishment and Social Structure. New York: Russell and Russell. Schwendinger. Helman. and Julia R. Schwendingel' 1976 "Delinquency and the Collective Varieties of Youth." Crime and Social Justice 5 ISpling-Summer):7-25. 1980 "The New Idealism and Penal living Standards." Crime and Social Justice 13 (Spring-Summer):45-51.
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Schwendinger, Julia 1978 "Women's Resource Center-Jail Census Heport." Unemployment and Crime. Hearings before the SubCommittee on Crime of the Committee on the Judicial)', House of Representatives 95 Congress. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing office, pp. 644-674. Speiglman, Richard 1976 "Building the Walls Inside-Medicine, Corrections, and the State Apparatus for Repression."' PhD. dissel1ation, University Df California, Berkeley. State of New York, Special Commission 1972 Attica: The Official Report of the New York State Commission on Attica. New York: Bantam Books. Takagi, Paul 1975 "The Walnut Street Jail: A Penal Reform to Centralize the Powers of the State:· Federal Probation !Decemberl :18 - 26. Thompson, E. P. 1975 Whigs and Hunters: The Origins of the Black Act. New York: Pantheon Books. van den Haag, Ernest 1975 Punishing Criminals: Concerning a Very Old and Painful Question. New York: Basic Books. Werkentin, Falco, Michael Hofferbert, and Michael Baurmann 1974 "Criminology as Police Science or: 'How Old Is the New Criminology?··' Crime and Social Justice 2 (Fall-Winterl:2441. Wilson, James Q. 1976 Thinking about Crime. New York: Basic Books.
Part 4 Crime and Revolution: Is Crime Progressive?
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Criminologists and lay persons alike have usually regarded crime as something harmful, something to be prevented, but qualifications to this general condemCrime and Revolution: Is nation have often been made. Beccaria, an Italian economist and legal philosopher who wrote in the Crime late eighteenth century, argued that matters of reliProgressive? gious belief and private morality should not be subject to criminal prohibition. More recently, sociologists have argued that certain crimes are "victimless." 'JYpically, the people involved in these crimes do not regard them as harmful, do not with to be protected by the law, and do not complain to the police when a violation has taken place. Gambling, abortion, prostitution, consensual homosexual practices, and the sale and consumption of alcohol and narcotics have often been regarded as victimless in this sense (Schur, 1965; Geis, 1972). Present-day radical criminologists have generally agreed that the criminalization of these activities is undesirable! Marxists have often defended some politically motivated crimes as well, though with the understanding that socialist revolutions are not made by individual acts of terrorism, but rather through the mass revolutionary activity of the working class. These exceptions aside, Marxists have generally shared the largely negative popular view of individual acts of interpersonal violence and theft. Major non-Marxian sociologists, however, have called this common-sense view of of crime into question by pointing to frequently overlooked benefits of crime. Daniel Bell (1953), for example, has argued that the illegal business enterprises associated with organized crime provided routes for upward social mobility to members of minority groups who are discriminated against elsewhere in the economy. Such crime, he asserted, is simply the means to attain the American success promised to everyone but denied to many. In the late 1960s and in the 1970s, many on the Left also began to challenge the conventional conception of crime and criminals. The industrial working class seemed to have lost its militancy after the Second World War, and radicals tended to view it as having been co-opted by high wages. The radical challenges to American society in the 1960s thus came not from organized labor, but from the civil rights-black power movement, the white student-based antiwar movement, and then in the 1970s, from the women's liberation movement and the gay liberation movement. Groups of deviants? such as ex-mental patients, homosexuals, and ex-convicts, defined themselves as minorities subject to discrimination, and organized politically as pressure groups (Horowitz and Liebowitz, 1968; Schur, 1979:423-48). The social outlooks and political objectives of these groups varied greatly.
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Some acted as narrow self-interest groups, seeking only to be accepted as normal within the existing framework of society. Others adopted a broader stance of opposition to "the establishment" and to mainstream, middleclass values and morality. Similar developments took place in other parts of the world. For example, Thomas Mathiesen, a Norwegian criminologist active in the prisoner support movement, noted in the context of Scandinavian welfare state capitalism (1974:124): Organization from below is considered a rational answer to coercion from above. The labour movement has given this answer to coercion from factory owners and tactOlY administrators. University students have partly given the same answer. In our time the answer is also beginning to come Ii'om groups like prisoners, handicapped people, and others who am expelled.
These developments led some to the conclusion that rebellion comes from people situated "outside" the system. rather than from those who are integrated comfortably within it. The radicalization of prisoners seemed to confirm this. Behind the walls, prisoners were turning to radical political ideologies, and taking militant stands against the repressiveness of the prison system, The prison writings of radicalized prisoners like George Jackson circulated widely. Eldridge Cleaver, an ex-convict, assumed a leading role in the Black Panther Party. Given these developments, it is hardly surprising that some observers began to portray climinals and prisoners as incipient revolutionaries, or even as the "vanguard" of the revolution (Greenberg and Stender, 1972; Sternberg, 1973; Pallas and Barber, 1973). This perception was obviously grounded in reality, but at the same time it was easily distorted by wishful thinking. Ban)' Krisberg, who included selections written by prisoners Angela Davis, George Jackson, Eldridge Cleaver, and by the Panther 21 in his Crime and Privilege, may have been correct in writing that "For every prison writer who comes to public attention, there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, who feel the same oppression and develop the political consciousness that permits them to spiritually transcend their immediate confinement" (1975:86). But those who work extensively with prisoners do not encounter thousands who are like Angela Davis or George Jackson politically. They find wide variation in levels of political consciousness. Fay Stender, a California attorney active in prisoners' rights litigation, could write in 1972: "I certainly feel that, person for person, prisoners are better human beings than you find in any random group of people. They are more loving. They have more concern for each other. They have more creative human potential" (p, 13). In 1979 she narrowly survived an assassination attempt apparently perpetrated by a small group of ex-prisoners. As she and Karen Wald (1976) had both noted, prisoners often had limited information about what was happening outside, and exaggerated notions of what was politically possible. Many were politically inexperi-
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enced, and had had limited opportunities to develop leadership skills. The romanticizing of prisoners went hand in hand with the romanticizing of crime itself. If, as many radicals had come to believe, the function of the law was to preserve bourgeois society-a society whose essence was exploitation and repression-then, some concluded, the breaking of those laws was a revolutionary act! Others, while not going quite so far, nevertheless viewed crime as a creative act of protest against oppression, perhaps even a manifestation of the diversity a socialist society should encourage.3 Much of the more recent Marxist literature on crime has criticized this New Left romanticization of crime (Young, 1975; Crime and Social Justice Collective, 1976; Platt, 19781. Even when crime contains an element of rebellion and reflects a refusal to conform to the rules of "the system," it often injures other members of the working class, rather than the bourgeoisie. According to the special issue of Ebony devoted to "black on black crime" (August 19791, more blacks were killed by homicide in the United States in 1977-most of them by other blacks-than had been killed in Vietnam during nine years of war. The looting that accompanies urban riots primarily victimizes small retail stores, not large corporations. To seek personal gain at the expense of others of one's own class is hardly to challenge the dominant values and accepted behavior patterns of bourgeois society. On the contrary, the predation involved in common forms of property crime and some forms of assault (e.g., rape) is an obstacle to the development of the cooperation required by a successful social movement. It generates suspicion, not trust. It feeds the fear that permits the government to strengthen its repressive capacity with popular approval. The universality of this fear in America makes it easy for politicians to campaign on a platform of "cracking down on crime," thereby avoiding the more controversial issues connected with clashing economic interests. These arguments notwithstanding, some Marxian criminologists have argued that crime does serve progressive functions in a capitalist society. Some see it, as Engels did in The Condition of the Working Class in England, as the first stage in the development of a socialist consciousness. In the next chapter, Wenger and Bonomo review these arguments and criticize them as both inconsistent with Marx's scornful view of the lumpen proletariat, and implausible. They then go on to outline and reject another quite different argument linking crime and social revolution--one focusing on state financing. According to this argument, capitalism generates ever-increasing levels of crime, forcing the state to spend more and more revenue on crime control. Crime thus contributes to the fiscal crisis of the state. In evaluating Wenger and Bonomo's rejection of the position that crime advances the socialist revolution, we should keep two points in mind. First, they cite a number of passages in which Marx and Engels speak of the counter-revolutionary tendencies of the lumpen proletariat. Even assuming that Marx and Engels accurately characterized the lumpen of their own day (made up largely of ruined artisans and displaced farm laborers/, one may still wonder whether their characterization remains true of today's crimi-
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nals. Marx and Engels were assessing the revolutionary possibilities of classes and strata as they existed then; they were not necessarily formulating eternal verities that could be applied mechanically to other times and places. Second, Wenger and Bonomo imply that criminals are largely lumpen. This makes sense only if crime is committed largely by a distinct "criminal class." Many law violators do not fit this description. Half of those arrested for burglary in the United States are juveniles, and many will abandon crime as they reach adulthood (see Chapter 10 in Part 2 by Greenberg). To the best of our knowledge, substantial numbers of released prisoners do not return to serious involvement in crime after their release from prison (Greenbert, 1975). Anthropological studies of black and Chicano ghetto neighborhoods find that many residents get income from welfare, crime, and lawful occupations in varying proportions as opportunities open and close (Valentine, 1978; Moore, 1979). Clearly the boundary separating the "lumpen" from the working class is fuzzy. We must remember, too, that many criminals did become radicalized in the 1960s by the social movements of the time. That many did not become long-term participants in the movement may say as much about the movement's deficiencies as about those whose radicalism is dismissed by calling them lumpen. In classical Marxist theory, the socialist revolution was to be made by the working class. Socialists often interpreted the working class rather narrowly to mean "male industrial workers." The broader participation in radical social movements of recent years (from students, women, prisoners, and homosexuals) suggests a less restrictive notion of how revolutions are made. We should not forget that the February Revolution in Russia in 1917 was sparked by a strike of women textile workers and a demonstration for bread, held in connection with International Women's Day (Trotsky, 1959:97-98). According to one estimate (Christensen, 1967), roughly 90 percent of black American males will be arrested at some time in their lives. To exclude them from a socialist movement on the grounds that they are part of the lumpen proletariat would be absurd. Clearly, we must exercise great caution in using this category. In testing the "fiscal crisis" thesis, Wenger and Bonomo distinguish between state expenditures for social welfare and for crime control. Although they find social welfare expenditures to have increased substantially as a percentage of gross national product, they find that crime control expenditures have not. It may be worth considering whether the distinction between these types of expenditures can be sustained. Spending on social welfare accelerated in the mid-1960s in response to ghetto riots (Ritti and Hyman, 1977), and it is not unlikely that a continuing concern with preventing crime and riot underlies the continued growth in these budget items.~ Evan Stark's contribution (Chapter 2) approaches the question whether crime is progressive from a different angle, and arrives at a different conclusion. Stark's work must be seen in the context of developments in the writing of social history that have taken place over the past twenty years. Most
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histories focus on the activities of political leaders and the upper classes generally, neglecting such matters as how "ordinal}' people" live their lives and what they think about the events of their time. Beginning in the early 1960s, a small group of historians, including Staughton Lynd and Jesse Lemisch in the United States, and E. P. Thompson in England, began to look at the activities of workers, and even criminals. In subsequent years, many other historians have added to our knowledge of working-class histol}' and the histol}' of crime. Early radical criminology challenged mainstream criminology's depiction of reform movements as having been led by benign enlightened humanitarians, by showing that reforms were often the work of members of the upper class, whose interests influenced the content of the reforms they conceived and implemented. The work of Tony Platt (1969, 1973) on the origins of the Chicago juvenile court illustrates this theme. Platt acknowledges that the movement to create the court was not exclusively upper class in composition, but he documents upper-class leadership and argues that the court itself was established not to help children, but to channel them into a working class that expanding industries required. Despite this heterodox interpretation of the court's origins, Platt's work nevertheless continues to view the creation of the court or.ly in terms of the activities of upper-class leaders and their allies. The immigrant children brought into the court do not figure in this stol}' except as the objects of reformers' attention. It is not entirely clear from this account just why the reformers needed the juvenile court to accomplish their goal. Stark's reexamination of Progesssive Era delinquency legislation does not contradict Platt's interpretation, but complements it by addressing such questions. Consistent with the new social histories, Stark looks at nineteenthcentul}' crime and riots in the context of their place in nineteenth-centul}' working-class communities. What seemed like immorality or social pathology to middle- and upper-class observers, Stark argues, was to a large part of the working class a means of individual and community survival, and often had widespread community support. Crime could also be a form of play, a way of having fun. These activities, though, took place within structural constraints that were changing throughout the nineteenth centul}' as capitalism broke up working-class neighborhoods and transformed urban politics. Stark traces the impact of these structural changes on the character of gang delinquency. The working class fought some of these changes, though not with complete success; and, as Stark shows, it was creative in responding to developments it could not change. For example, new forms of sociability were developed to replace the traditional family, which was being destroyed by immigration and by the conditions of capitalist industrialization. Progressive Era reformers, Stark argues, did their best to shore up eroding family authority and shield young people from what they believed to be the corrupting influences of modern life. When the reformers' attempts to deal
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with youthful vagrancy, truancy, refusal to work, extra-familial sociality and precocious sexuality on an individual basis failed, they turned to collective strategies-those that dealt more uniformly with large numbers of students, delinquents, or young workers. The juvenile court was one of these strategies. Criminologists have paid it more attention than others, but as Stark shows, all were attempts to solve the same problem. In this respect, the juvenile court was not merely a response to crime. Its project, like its legal mandate, went much farther. What concerned the court reformers ultimately was the refusal of immigrant workers to adopt regular work habits and respectable life-styles. Although the goals of Progressive Era reformers may have been conservative, Stark argues that the consequences of these reforms were objectively progressive. They helped to break down particularistic divisions among workers, a necessary step in the creation of a unified working class. This unity helped to make possible the gains that labor won during the 1930s. To cope with high turnover resulting from workers' lack of commitment to their jobs, employers raised wages, offered social welfare plans, and redesigned work itself (Nelson, 1975). The result was production on an expanded scale and wider prosperity, at least for a time, but also a new and higher level of class struggle. Marxists are familiar with the idea that class struggle serves to develop the forces of production. Ifwages rise, employers have an incentive to introduce labor-saving or cost-cutting equipment. Stark's analysis suggests that we must not interpret class conflict too narrowly in considering processes of this kind. Working-class refusal to accept factory jobs on the prevailing terms was a response to class relations that had beneficial consequences for workers. Reforms initiated by the elite should not be considered only as part of a capitalist offensive against workers; some of them should perhaps be seen as reluctant concessions won by workers in a kind of tacit bargaining. This is not exactly an argument that crime itself is progressive, but crime was a necessary concomitant of the refusal to work.5
NOTES 1 This is not to say that they necessarily consider them to be harmless. JetTe I)' Reiman 119791, for example, argues that pl'Ostitution and drug addiction are forms of alienation. As such, it is desirable to eliminate them, even if the criminal law is not the way to do it. 2 The word "deviant" is used here in the sense given it by Schur 11971:241:" Human behmior is deviant to the extent that it comes to be viewed as involving a personally discreditable departure from a group's normative expectations, and it elicits interpersonal or collective reactions that serve to 'isolate: 'treat: 'correct: or punish indil'iduals engaged in such behavior [emphasis in original)." 3 This is a particularly pl'Ominent theme in the early work of the British National Deliancy Conference criminologists. 4 Andrew Scull 119771 has recently argued that rising crime rates would have created a budget crisis in the 1960s had it not been for "community corrections" pl'Ograms Iwhich are often much cheaper to run than the traditional prisonl. If Scull is right, crime may not have con-
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tributed to the fiscal crisis of capitalism during the last fifteen years, but it may well have helped to transform the criminal justice system. Scull's analysis reminds us that developments which would have caused a crisis if allowed to go unchecked may be met with countermeasures that prevent the crisis from developing. 5 Stark's argument is obviously historically specific and cannot be applied to other periods vvithout investigation.
REFERENCES Bell, Daniel 119531. "Crime as an Amel'ican Way of Life." Antioch Review 13:131-54. Chl'istensen, Ronald 119671. "Projected Percentage of U.S. Population vvith Criminal Arrest and Com~ction Records." In Task Force Report: Science and Technology. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office. Crime and Social Justice Collective 119761. "The Politics of Street Crime," Crime and Social Justice 5:1-4. Geis, Gilbert 119721. Not the Law's Business' Washington, D.C.: Government Pl'inting Office. Greenberg, David F. 119751. "The Incapacitative Effect of Impl'isonment: Some Estimates." Law and Society Review 9:541-80. - - - and Fay Stender 119721. "The Prison as a Lawless Agency," Buffalo Law Rel'iew 21 :799 - 838. Horo~tz,
Irving Louis, and Martin Liebowitz 119681. "Social De\~ance and Political Marginality: Toward a Redefinition of the Relation between Sociology and Politics," Social Problems 15: 280-96.
Krisberg, Barry 119751. Crime and Privilege: Toward a New Criminology. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. Mathiesen, Thomas 119741. The Politics of Abolition. New York: Halsted Press. Moore, Joan W 119791. Homeboys: Gangs, Drugs, and Prison in the Barrios of Los Angeles. Philadelphia: Temple Uni\'ersity Press. Nelson, Daniel 119751. Managers and Workers: Origins of the New Factory System in the United States, 1880-1920. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Pallas, John, and Robert Barber 119731, "From Riot to Re\'olution." In Erik Olin Wright led.l, The Politics ofPunishment: A Critical Analysis of Prisons in America. New York: Harper and Row. Platt, Tony 119691. The Child-Savers: The Invention of Delinquency. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. - - - 119731. "The Triumph of Benevolence: The Origins of the Juvenile Justice System in the
United States." In Richard Quinney led.l, Criminal Justice in America: A Critical Understanding. Boston: Little, Brown. - - - 119781. "'Street' Crime-A View from the Left." Crime and Social Justice 9:26-34.
Reiman, JetJery H. 119791. "Prostitution, Addiction and the Ideology of Liberalism." Contemporary Crisis 3:53-68. Ritti, R. Richard, and Drew W. Hyman 119771. 'The Administration of Poverty: Lessons from the Welfare Explosion 1967-1973." Social Problems 25:157-75. Schur, Edwin M. 119651. Crimes without Victims. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. - - - 119711 Labeling Deviant Behavior: Its Sociological Implications. New York: Harper and
Row.
- - - 119791./nlerpreting Deviance: A Sociological Introduction. New York: Harper and Row. Scull, Andrew 119771. Decarceration: Community Treatment and the Deviant-A Radical View. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.
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Stender, Fay 11972J. "Introduction." In Eve Pell led.l, Maximum Security: Letters from Prison. New York: E. P. Dutton. Sternberg, David 119731. "The New Radical-Criminal Trials: A Step Toward a Class-far-Itself in the American Proletariat?" In Richard Quinney led.l, Criminal Justice in America: A Critical Understanding. Boston: Little, Brown. Trotsky, Leon 11959J. The Russian Revolution. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday/Anchor. Tr. by Max Eastman, edited by F. W. Dupee. Valentine, Beltylou 119781. Hustling and Other Hard Work: Lifestyles in the Black Ghetto. ]'I;ew York: Free Press. Wald, Karen 119761. "The San Quentin Casf" Perspective and Analysis." Crime and Social Justice 6:58-68.
Young, Jock 119751. "Working-Class Criminology." In Ian Taylor, Paul Walton, and Jock Young leds.l, Critical Criminology. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
674
1
Crime, the Crisis of Capitalism, and Social Revolution Marton G. Wenger and Thomas A. Bonomo This work represents a synthesis of "A Critique of Radical Criminology on Surplus Population: An Examination of Quinney's Thesis" by Bonomo and Wenger, presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology in Dallas, 1978, and "Crime, Crisis and Social Revolution: An Examination of the Progressive Thesis in Marxist Criminology" by Wenger and Bonomo, presented at the third annual conference on the current state of Marxist theory in Red Feather, Colorado, 1978. The authors are named here in reverse alphabetical order.
Although it was never a major issue within the classical or orthodox Marxist tradition, the relationship between crime and the terminal crisis of capitalism has become the subject of considerable debate within modem American radical criminology. The debate does not concern the role of capitalism in producing crime-to all but the reactionary or the naive, such questions have long been settled. Rather, the debate concerns the contention on the part of some practitioners of the "new criminology" that crime is not merely a negative consequence of capitalism, but is also objectively progressive because it is one of the mechanisms by which capitalism is transformed and moved toward a socialist revolution. Here we briefly explore the theoretical pitfalls of such an argument when viewed from an orthodox Marxist perspective, and move on to a partial empirical test of the argument.
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CRIMINALS AS REVOLUTIONARIES
The radical criminology literature connected crime with revolution in sev~ eral ways? Some criminologists and political writers have argued that crim~ inals are in some sense rebels against bourgeois society, and thus constitute a potentially revolutionary class (Franklin, 1970; Horowitz, 1972; Taylor, Wal~ ton, and Young, 1973; Quinney, 1974; Krisberg, 1975). Richard Quinney's latest work (1977) affirms this point of view: "as long as the capitalist class attempts to dominate, using forms of legal repression, actions that threaten the established order will be defined by the capitalist state as criminal. In this sense, crime and political actions are inextricably linked" (Quinney, 1977:104). Marx and Engels took a very different view. Their earliest position is stated in the Communist Manifesto (1962:44). There they warn that the lum~ pen proletariat is "the 'dangerous class,' the social scum, that passively rot~ ting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society, [which] may here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution: its condition of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue." In the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx, casting a fine net wide, amalgamates a variety of social roles as lumpen, even though some of them perform necessary functions for society indepen~ dently of any criminal activity. In Marx's words, "Alongside decayed roues with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, moun~ tebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, (pimps), brothel keep~ ers, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars ... in short ... la boheme, the refuse of all classes" (1957:87). Engels agreed. In the preface to The Peasant War In Germany (1926:23), he considers possible allies of the proletariat and expresses the following opinion: The lumpenproletariat, this scum of the decaying elements of all classes, which establishes headquarters in all big cities, is the worst of all possible allies. It is an absolutely venal, an absolutely brazen crew. If the French workers, in the course of the Revolution, inscribed on the houses: Mort aux voleurs! (Death to the Thieves~) and even shot down many, they did it, not out of enthusiasm for property, but because they rightly considered it necessary to hold that band at arms length. Every leader of the workers who utilizes these gutter-proletarians as guards or supports, proves by this action alone a traitor to the movement. The rationale for the position Marx and Engels take is purely political: in their view the individual habituated to a criminal life-style is destructive to revolutionary progress. In the words of Paul Hirst (1972:43), "The criminal career and the delinquent's solution, however much enforced by the harsh
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necessities of capitalism, are not in effect forms of political rebellion against the existing order but a more or less reactionary accommodation to them." He lists, as exceptions, machine breaking, industrial sabotage, and the murder oflandlords and officials by peasants as "crimes having a more obvious political connotation to them" (1972:43). Quinney's hope is that the accommodating, reactionary form of criminality will give way to revolutionary forms when coupled to a progressive ideology. As we indicated earlier, this hope needs evidence but requires a leap of faith-the assumption that a transformation of lumpen consciousness is in the historical cards. Quinney (1977:97-98) cites Engels' Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 to illustrate the claim that criminality represents the typical working-class response to degrading conditions that plunge them into the ranks of the surplus population. What he does not say, however, is of utmost importance: workers who become unemployed or underemployed do not automatically drop into the lumpen stratum or class. In Capital (1967:621-44), Marx says that the surplus population consists of three sectors: floating, latent, and stagnant. If workers are partially, not fully employed, they "float" from one low-paying, precarious job to another; hence Marx coined the term "floating surplus population." Members of this sector are less likely to engage in widespread Criminality because of their tie to the labor market (Spitzer, 1975). They have a partial, though meager, stake in the "system." The stagnant sector of the surplus population is employed with great irregularity and in numerous instances is "locked out of the labor market." Marx devoted considerable attention to this sector, subdividing it into three parts: "exclusive of vagabonds, criminals, prostitutes, in a word, the 'dangerous classes,' this layer of society consists of three categories." They are the following: first, those able to work; second, orphans and pauper children; and third, "the demoralized and ragged, and those unable to work, chiefly people who succumb to their incapacity for adaptation due to the division oflabor." The lumpen proletariat constitutes yet a fourth fraction of the stagnant sector, although in his description of the surplus population just cited, Marx actually excluded them, undoubtedly due to their lack of desire to enter the labor market. What Quinney does not consider is that workers who are relegated to the ranks of the surplus population may drop into the floating sector or into any of the categories of the stagnant sector (excluding orphan and pauper children), only one of which is defined by a criminal life-style. To be sure, Engels displayed a noticeably different position when he described the English working class of 1844. He emphasized that the workers' (classical proletarians) "whole position and environment involves the strongest temptation to immorality ... what inducements has the proletarian not to steal!" (Engels, 1926a:115.) Their condition is described as one of poverty and generalized squalor which it is of no concern or advantage to the bourgeoisie to eliminate. (It is interesting that today this description pertains more to the surplus population, particularly its stagnant sector,
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677
than to "first world" proletarians.) Engels also states that "When the poverty of the proletariat is intensified to the point of actual lack of the barest necessities of life, to want and hunger, the temptation to disregard all social order does but gain power, and this power is derived from stealing" (1926a:130). These statements appear to point to a contradiction between the two founders of dialectical materialism. In appraising these somewhat divergent treatments of crime, however, one must attend to the following facts. First, Marx's analyses in Capital are far more precise than those of Engels. Where Engels treat the proletariat as a homogeneous entity, Marx recognizes its heterogeneity. Thus, Engels tends to generalize where Marx tends to specify. Second, Engels wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 from a pre-Marxist prespective, and it appeared more than twenty years before the first volume of Capital. It thus makes greater sense to look to the mature Marx and not the immature Engels when looking for "the" Marxist perspective on the issue at hand. Even if these Marxological issues are ignored, a central point remains: Engels is speaking of a proletariat that labors and for whom theft is incidental, whereas Quinney, and others, speaks of a sector of the proletariat for whom theft is labor. Even granting the new criminology the most favorable case, it must still be stated that nowhere does Engels see proletarian crime as revolutionary. For Engels-even in his early period-proletarian crime is of analytical interest only as a means of combatting bourgeois morality. It is an issue of counter-ideology, not of revolutionary politics. Of course, to grant all of the above is far too generous. What in fact happened is that Marx noted that the habitual criminals, the exploiters of fellow proletarians, etc., are concentrated in a particular segment of the proletariat: the stagnant surplus population. When Marx and/or Engels engaged in revolutionary theory and practice, they never assigned this subclass the role of the vanguard. Perhaps the most important question raised by the recasting of criminals into revolutionary leaders concerns the "road to socialism." Can criminality, even when coupled with a class consciousness ideology, lead to a more progressive, socialist society? The fulfillment of revolutionary hopes depends upon a new form of production taking form in the old society. Wood (1972:269) provides a penetrating analysis of the Marxist conception of how this revolutionary transition is to occur. He suggests that: Unless a fundamental change of this kind in the mode of man's productive activity is already taking place in society of its own accord, any attempt at a truly revolutionary politics would be irrational, futile, and to use Marx's own word mere "Donquickoterie." This is what Marx and Engels mean when they say in the German Ideology that "Communism is for us not a state of affairs to be brought about, an ideal to which reality must somehow adjust itself. We call communism the actual movement which is transcending the present state of affairs. The conditions of this movement result from presuppositions already existing."
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Thus, for revolutionary change to occur, members of the movement must be constructing the new society in their daily pursuits, Criminality of the accommodating and predatory variety obviously does not fit this bill. Accordingly, a number of authors, Spitzer (1975), Freedman (1973), and Oife (1972), all maintain that only individuals who perform some economically essential activity can contribute positively to progressive change. Spitzer is quite pessimistic about the revolutionary potential of the stagnant sector or the surplus population. The socialist society, he says, "can only be realized if the problematic group is located in a position of functional indispensability within the capitalist system" (1975:647). Freedman takes the same position: only those key or integral roles within capitalist production can bring the revolution to fruition. Oife explains why this is so by elaborating the conditions necessary for a group to attain political power. He notes that the group must be capable of exercising power by not fulfilling responsibilities endemic to the socioeconomic system. Hence, Freedman (1973:83-87) states that "groups consisting of housewives, secondary school pupils, college students, the unemployed, retired persons, criminals, the mentally ill and minorities may be cited as examples" of groups that are not capable of attaining power. Platt (Humphries, 1974:16) considers the reasons for considering the deviant to be revolutionary and concludes that it is the result of a paternalistic romanticization that disregards and discredits the world history of the communist movement. To turn Zapata into Villa is to make a mockery of revolutionary heroes. One might ask those enamored of the Romance of Deviance why such lumpen elements would not violate the rules and order of the new society? In fact, the destiny of such individuals in previous revolutions has been the wall.
CRIME AND THE FISCAL CRISIS OF THE STATE
In his most recent book, Class, State, and Crime, Quinney (1977) begins to back off from the claim that crime represents a revolutionary state of consciousness. Subjective and individualistic models of the progressive quality of crime are now a relic of the new criminology's "radical" period, replaced by a more "Marxist," objectivistic model based on forces of production. The shift of Quinney's position is based on the argument, presented by O'Connor (1973), that the current (and ultimately terminal) crisis of capitalism is connected with the fiscal crisis of the state.2 According to this view, the most critical problem of advanced capitalism is its dependence upon the state's performance of two contradictory functions: legitimating capitalism and assisting in the accumulation of capital. These functions are contradictory, because as the state assists in accumulation, it jeopardizes its legitimacy; on the other hand, if it legitimates itself by providing too many social services, it jeopardizes capital accumulation. In Quinney's words (1977:116):
Crime, Crisis, and Revolution
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State expenditures on criminal justice do not directly contribute to the accumulation of private capital and creation of surplus value. Rather, the criminal justice system secures the capitalist .order so that the capitalist class can continue to accumulate capital. The crisis, however, becomes a fiscal one: state expenditures on criminal justice grow faster than the revenues available to support an expanding criminal justice system. In Quinney's view, rising crime rates have their origin in the continual displacement of part of the work force, creating a surplus population. This surplus population grows, is pauperized, and engages in property crimes or reacts with personal pathology (e.g., crimes of interpersonal violence). The state must then spend more money for repressive actions (crime control) and pacification (social welfare) to control the under- or unemployed surplus population. But, to control this surplus population and make the control seem legitimate, money must be wiithdrawn from other uses that are at least indirectly and sometimes directly productive for capital: expenditures for social capital, such as military hardware and space programs, and for social investment, such as unemployment insurance and educational benefits. The eventual outcome is the bankruptcy of the state and the capitalist economic system. This outcome is said to be progressive in that the conditions for social revolution therefore exist. Partial confirmation of this overall thesis is provided by the current imbroglio over taxation, which ultimately reduces to competition between the state and private or "monopoly" capital over surplus value. This argument is logically impeccable-owe do not question its structural adequacy. What we do question is hinted at by the fact that at no point does O'Connor suggest that crime control makes a significant contribution to the fiscal crisis of the state; however, he does emphasize the role of social welfare programs_ We wish to test here a set of closely related propositions emerging from Quinney's application of O'Connor.
AN EMPIRICAL TEST If crime is objectively progressive-if it does indeed place intolerable stress on the capitalist system, it does so by maximizing the expenditure of state funds on crime control. This is the crux of O'Connor's thesis of social contradiction as Quinney applies it to crime control. In the case of social welfare expenditures, the data to be presented here confirm O'Connor's position. (This is not surprising, since we and O'Connor used the same information.) But when crime control expenditures are examined, Quinney's thesis fares much worse; in fact, far worse than we had anticipated. In terms of gross expenditures, in 1975 over 250 billion dollars more was spent for social welfare than for crime control (see Table 17.1 and Figure 17.1). This, it should be noted, refers to total expenditures by all levels of government. The significance of the totals is that national funding is the norm in social welfare expenditures, whereas local funding is common in
2.080 2.231 2.434 2.655 2.861 3.149 3.349 3.613 3.795 4.009 4.222 4.574 4.903 5.424 6.070 7.340 8.571 10.513 11.721 13.051 14.954 17.249
Crime Control
7.3% 9.1 9.1 7.8 10.1 6.4 7.9 5.0 5.6 5.3 8.3 7.2 10.6 11.9 20.9 16.8 22.3 15.4 11.3 14.6 15.3
29.547 32.640 35.131 39.350 45.457 49.821 52.293 58.236 62.659 66.766 71.491 77.175 88.000 99.710 113.840 127.149 145.893 171.983 191.414 214.390 239.303 286.547
Social Welfare 10.570 7.7 12.0 15.5 9.7 4.8 11.5 7.6 6.6 7.1 8.0 14.1 13.3 14.2 12.4 14.1 17.9 11.7 12.0 11.7 19.8
Percentage of Increase over Previous Year
Source: Statistical Abstract of the United States. GNP = Gross National Product
1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975
1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964
Year
Percentage of Increase over Previous Year
Expenditures on Crime Control and Social Welfare. All Levels of Government: 1954-75 (billions of U.S. dollars)
Table 17.1
364.8 398.0 419.2 441.1 447.3 483.7 503.7 520.1 560.3 590.5 632.4 684.9 749.9 793.9 864.2 930.3 977.1 1063.4 1173.4 1306.6 1413.2 1516.3
GNP
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Percentage of GNP for Crime Control 8.1% 8.2 8.4 8.8 8.8 10.3 10.4 11.2 11.2 11.3 11.3 11.3 11.7 12.6 13.2 13.7 14.9 16.2 16.3 16.4 16.9 18.9
Percentage of GNP for Social Welfare
.07 .07 .07 .07 .06 .06 .06 .06 .06 .06 .06 .06 .06 .05 .05 .06 .06 .06 .06 .06 .06 .06
Ratio of Crime Control to Social Welfare El(penditures
681
Crime, Crisis, and Revolution
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crime control. Although the sources of expenditures began to change in the mid·1960s, our data indicate that there was no relative change. The fiscal crisis thesis asserts that state expenditures for crime control and social welfare must become not merely a problem, but a continually exacerbating one, as Table 17.1 and Figure 17.2 indicate they do. (Notice the percent rise in gross expenditures in current dollars from 1954 through 1975). The relative significance of the steady increase, however, is partly obscured by the fact that a one percent increase in crime control above 1975
Wenger and Bonomo
682
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represents 170 million dollars in additional expenditures, while an equivalent increase in social welfare expenditures represents 2.9 billion dollars. Thus, the economic "inertia" that has to be overcome for social welfare funding to rise is much greater than that required for an equivalent proportional rise in crime control expenditures. Nevertheless, during the twentyone-year period covered by this study, in only nine years did the percent rise in crime control expenditures exceed that of social welfare. The relative magnitude of expenditures in the two areas is markedly consistent, almost to the point of indicating a sociological constant. As Table 1 shows, the ratio of crime control to social welfare expenditures varies between .05 and .07. Further, as to the argument for a rising significance for crime control expenditures, the ratio of crime control to social welfare actually diminishes from 1954 until 1968 when it begins to rise again. Perhaps the most telling arguments regarding crime and the fiscal crisis of the state emerge when expenditures are standardized against Gross National Product (see Table 17.1 and Figure 17.3). First, the relative insignificance of crime control emerges-it never rises much above 1 percent of GNP over the period examined, whereas social welfare expenditures range from 8 to nearly 19 percent. Further, in aggregate, crime control expendi-
Crime, Crisis, and Revolution
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Figure 17.3 Percentage of Gross National Product Expended on Crime Control and Social Welfare: 1954·1975 Source: Statistical Abstract of the United States.
tures rise a total of 0.6% of GNP from 1954 to 1975, whereas social welfare funding rises 10.8% of GNP-perhaps the most telling figure of all. In the face of these comparisons it is clear why O'Connor did not discuss crime in the context of fiscal crisis. It is less clear why Quinney justifies placing it on the agenda of Marxist analysis. In light of this analysis, we reject, unequivocally, the argument that crime has an objectively progressive role to play in the demise of the capitalist epoch. That is, it has no unmediated effect on the contradictions of capitalist economic organization.
684
Wenger and Bonomo
CRIME AND DE LEGITIMATION One final way that crime could contribute to the terminal CrISIS of capitalism has to do with the delegitimation of capitalism. Unlike the fiscal crisis thesis, which looks for the objective consequences of objective social realities, delegitimation models seek the subjective consequences of these same objective realities. As developed by Habermas (1975), the legitimacy crisis thesis argues that the helplessness of late capitalism to resolve its contradictions presents it with an ideological dilemma of vast proportions. The management of this crisis becomes more and more a major activity of the bourgeoisie. While this proposition can be tested within the general framework developed here, we do not do so. Instead, we wish to explore in brief certain theoretical issues that may suggest profitable paths for future exploration. Criminality and legitimation crises are potentially commensurable phenomena. If bourgeois sociology, political science, and survey research are to be believed, one of the major concerns of all sectors of the American proletariat is criminal predation. (Whether or to what extent this reflects an accurate view of the problems of capitalism is not at issue-the concerns are.) Associated with the fear of criminal victimization is a certain amount of dissatisfaction with the system euphemistically called "criminal justice." Given this dissatisfaction, the marriage of crime and delegitimation would seem to flow naturally from the increasing helplessness of the state in the face of crime. Further, as certain "radical" positions would have it, an increasingly desperate state would have to tum to increasingly draconian measures of crime control, thus calling into question the nature of bourgeois liberal democracy. Assuming that social mechanisms such as the increasing segregation of the surplus population fail to stem the exposure of better-off workers to victimization and also assuming that members of oppressed nationalities see crime as less inimical to their existence than its control (both empirically questionable postulates), it would seem that these possibilities are quite real.3 However, the question at hand is not merely whether crime does delegitimate the capitalist system, but also what are the sequelae of such delegitimation, if it occurs? In other words, does delegitimation by crime lead to progressive revolutionary consciousness on the part of the proletariat, or does it lead elsewhere, to less desirable outcomes? At the most general level, the question being developed here can be expressed as a question of form and essence. Is "delegitimation" basically the same regardless of its origin, or does it vary in nature according to the form it takes? Specifically, is delegitimation by crime equivalent to delegitimation by depression? By interminable and ultimately lost wars? By the abandonment of the aged? An affirmative response to such questions is at least premature and most likely incorrect. Horowitz, who is himself enamored of the thesis of the revolutionary lumpenproletariat, provides an ominous indica-
Crime, Crisis, and Revolution
685
tion of the response to be expected from "first world" proletariats and proletarians in the instance of a state impotent in the face of rising criminality: Certainly, the newest, and most dynamic factor in United States development during the Sixties was the sharp cleavage, indeed the class war situation which developed between the organized working classes and marginal lower classes. The combatants in this decade are not the historical enemies described by Marx but are more similar to enemies defined by fascist doctrines of the state. The working class has turned to the Leviathan with a vengeance. Not the liquidation of the state but its celebration, has become of crucial importance. The working class demands legitimacy, law, order, and a ruling class willing and capable of exercising full authority. Social mdicalism in American life has become the province of the reviled lumpenproletariat and their intellectual underwriters. This development, shocking 10 classical ideologists, must rank as the most significant political event within t he first world. I Horowitz, 1972xI,ii)
As Horowitz implies, the nonsurplus sectors of the proletariat tend towards intra- not inter-class warfare as the result of state impotence. The "solution" that grows out of such delegitimation cannot be stated v\lith certainty to be the progressive revolution of socialism; rather it shares kinship with the reactionary quasi-revolution of fascism. An argument can be made that any of the above-listed sources of delegitimation could produce either outcome; the problem is that in the instance of criminal delegitimation, the source of failure is seen to emerge from within the proletariat, not from without. Similarly, the state in its repressive mode appears as the savior of social order, rather than as the mechanism by which the inherent disorder of capitalist social relations is given institutional form. Thus, to reiIY "delegitimation" rather than to see it as a historically and politically situated phenomenon is theoretically naive and politically dangerous. The loss of confidence in the ability of a particular form of the capitalist state to handle its own social contradictions can as easily lead to a shift of allegiance by the socially insecure masses to a more proactive and brutal capitalist regime, as the historical instances of European and South American fascism indicate. As Rosa Luxemburg noted throughout her work, but particularly in Reform or Revolution (1971), the end of capitalism and the advent of socialism are discreet phenomena connected only by the revolutionary consciousness of the proletariat. Fractional enmity within the proletariat is unlikely to contribute to the class consciousness requisite for a social revolution. Luxemburg also understood that the conditional nature of such consciousness makes for a branch-point in world-historical development, one path leading to capitalist decadence and barbarism, the other to socialism. Only naive historicists and/or vulgar materialists deny this plurality of outcomes. Thus, we must regard the "delegitimation" of capitalism not as a general developmental feature but as a historically specific and open question. Thus, the revolutionary contribution of criminality must be viewed much more closely than it was when the "new criminology" was young. In a world
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where failing capitalist/imperialist (as opposed to colonial) societies have shown a marked tendency toward fascism, e.g., Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Argentina, the lack of a foreordained socialist end must be confronted. The social degeneracy of capitalism is a two-edged sword, with the edge of reaction perhaps the sharper. As to the revolutionary role of fiscal crisis, O'Connor's arguments cannot be faulted. However, the miniscule portion of state expenditures going to crime control would seem to allow for substantial growth in these outlays without critical consequences to the economic system. Indeed, this is the thrust of our argument. Furthermore, although the state ends up as an unproductive "cost" in the majestic balance sheet of Capital, the rising organic composition/capital-intensiveness of crime control may becloud this somewhat. That is, while the sale of air-conditioned patrol cars to police departments may not be as salubrious an exchange of value for capitalism as a whole as would be the sale of those autos in the "private" market, it isn't all a loss, either. It can be argued that given the ceiling on total expenditures toward which fiscal crisis forces the capitalist system, increasing expenditures for crime control strains other social welfare spending, which, in turn, heightens political tensions among the already pauperized. However, where the pauperized are a numerical minority, as they are in the imperialist homelands, such problems seem politically manageable and even serve to bolster the legitimacy of the capitalist state, which, by an increasingly militant stance, seems less dithering and out-of-control. Current (rightward) political developments in the "first world" seem to bear this out. Thus, legitimacy and fiscal crisis may be seen to be joined in their development and in their effects. As a last point, it should be noted that a one per cent shift of funds from social welfare expenditures would be systemically negligible, but if directed to crime control, it would represent an increase of 15 per cent. Consequently, crime control budgets could be doubled by a 5 to 6 percent diversion of social welfare funds. Although the intertwined intricacies of legitimacy, fiscal crisis, and crimes of accommodation have not been exhausted by the preceding discussion, it seems an eminently supportable argument that the search for the revolutionary in the criminal, or for terminal crisis in crime, is likely to be fruitless. It is the barren political landscape of the "first world," particularly the United States, resting as it does on sub-strata of a vanishing proletariat, a burgeoning professional/managerial class, and a vast surplus population, which leads the progressive intelligentsia to paint novel but equally barren portraits of the contemporary social world. However, the obviousness of the sources of this tendency do not mitigate the serious errors it contains.
Notes
1 For a more detailed account of this literature see Bonomo 11979). 2 The "fiscal crisis" thesis is readily linked with classical Marxian economics. As capitalists re-
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spond to wage pressures and competition by inveBting in new machinery, the "organic composition of capital" rises. That is, the value of labor power employed in production declines in relation to the \'alue of machinelY employed. This process results in the displacement of labor, contributing to the formation of the relatinl surplus population. 3 By segregation we refer to phenomena that are analytically separable but empirically related. First, there is the social isolation of the criminally" at-risk" sLIIVlus population. This isolation is a result of a number of cresche and intended social phenonlena, such as the physical deterioration of the aging urban emironment and the consequent concentration of the pauperized there, as well as the adoption of fiscal and government policies that lead the petty bourgeoisie to return to urban areas, displacing the poor again and I-econcentrating them in the least desirable places. Second. we refer to the as yet unresolved question of whether mandatOlY minimum sentencing of criminals will lead to increased physical segregation or incarceration of those members of the surplus population actively processed by the legal apparatus of the state. The long-range consequences for the class isolation of crime of these developments are, again, as yet unclear.
References Bonomo, Thomas A. 119791. "Social Expenses, the Reserve Army of Labor, and the Fiscal Crisis of the State: An Examination of the Relationship between Criminality and Social Change." Ph.D. thesis, Wayne State University. Ann Arbor: llnh'ersity Microfilms. - - - and M0I10n G. Wenger 119781. "A Critique of Radical Criminology on Surplus Population: An Examination of Quinney's Thesis." Paper presEnted at the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Criminology, Dallas, Texas. Engels, Fredelick 11926al, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. London: Allen and Unwin. Originally published 1845. - - - (1926bl. The Peasant War in Germany. New York: Intel1lational Publishers. Franklin, Bruce 119701. "Lumpenproletariat and Revolution;lIY Youth." Monthly Review 21:8. Freedman, Francesca 119751. "The International Strucl ure of the American Proletariat: A Marxist Analysis." Socialist Revolution 5(41 :41-83. Habermas, Jurgen 119751. Legitimation Crisis. Boston: Beacon. Hirst. Paul Q. 119721. "Marx and Engels on Law, Crime, and Morality." Economy and Society 1:28-56. Horowitz, Irving Louis 119721. Three Worlds oJOevelopment, 2d ed. New York: Oxford University Press. Humphries, Drew 119741. "Report on the Conference of the European Group for the Study of Social Control." Crime and Social Justice 1 :11-17. Krisberg, Barry 119751. Crime and Privilege. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. Luxemburg, Rosa 119711. "Social Reform or Revolution." In Dick Howard led.l, Selected Political Writings. New York: Monthly Review Press, pp. 52-134. Marx, Karl 119571. The Eighteenth Brumaire oJ Louis Bonaparte. New York: International Publishers. Originally published 1852.
Mar/<., Karl 11967). Capital, vol. 1. New York: International Publishers. Originally published 1867. Marx, Karl. and Frederick Engels 119621. "The Communist Manifesto." In Mar/<. and Engels: Selected Works, vol. 2. Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House. Originally published 1848. O'Connor, James (1973), The Fiscal Crisis of the State. New York: SI. Martin's Press. Offe, Claus 119721. "Political Authority and Class Structlll'e: An Analysis of Late Capitalist Societies." International Journal oJSociology 2:73--108.
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Quinney, Richard (1974). "The Social Reality of Crime." In Abraham S. Blumberg led.), Current Perspectives on Criminal Behavior. New York: Alfred Knopf, pp. 35-46. - - - (1977). Class, State and Crime. New York: David McKay. Spitzer, Steven (1975). "Toward a Marxian Theol)' of Deviance." Social Problems 22:638-51. Taylor, Ian, Paul Walton, and Jock Young (1973), The New Criminology. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Wenger, Morton G., and Thomas A. Bonomo (1978), "Crime, Crisis, and Social Revolution: An Examination of the Progressive Thesis in Marxist Criminology." Paper presented at the Third Annual Conference on the Current State of Marxist Theol)', Red Feather, Colorado. Wood, Allen W. 11972). "The Marxian Critique of Justice." Philosophy and Public -"!!fairs 2:244-82.
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2
Gangs and Progress: The Contribution of Delinquency to Progressive Reform Evan Stark
INTRODUCTION: THE PARADOX OF PROGRESSIVISM
The modem system of mass production and consumption was organized in the Progressive Era and during the most massive immigration in U.S. history. Nevertheless, the two events-the economic take-off and the influx of labor from Europe-have rarely been linked. The dominant myth is that enlightened industrialists took charge of the economy while new professional strata created a myriad of laws and institutions to distribute its benefits. Through the juvenile court, protective legislation for children and working women, the settlement house movement, the comprehensive high school, and other efforts to overcome the inequities of laissez faire liberalism, the progressives provided a social science suitable to the scientific management of production and markets. The immigrants, meanwhile, were the passive medium these elites shaped into the modem work force. Henry Ford epitomized the new class of enlightened leaders. Combining a living wage and the assembly line, he extracted from the immigrant mass what few others could-a full day's work! There is another picture of these events, however. \Nhen we meet the tramp in Modern Times, he is the classic schlemeil, one of the sheep being herded to the factory for slaughter. But inside the plant, Chaplin's '1 wish to thank Eric Holzman, Anne Flitcraft, Peter Linebaugh, and particularly Irwin Stark for their editorial suggestions. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the American Sociology Association, New York, 1976, and at the New York University summer lecture series in 1978.
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"helplessness" becomes a singular asset. "Failing to understand" the surrounding world, he is freed from its laws. His own mechanization becomes the basis for sexual and political rebellion. He returns to the line only to disrupt it. He helps steal the goods he is hired to guard. And he steals time and space as well and fills them with his own narcissistic projects. He forgets to resist only in the department store and in the world of romance. To the immigrant, says Chaplin, all responsibilities are "work" and therefore anathema. He refuses to be seduced by efficiency experts, do-gooders, or industrial princes. So he must be bought. And his price is a consumer paradise. I am interested in the impact these "tramps" had on progressive reform. Following Chaplin's lead, I argue that immigrant gangs made progress inevitable simply by refusing to have it any other way. Their sheer indifference to accepted mores forced authorities to police their every move. \iVhen this proved ineffective, traditional institutions were democratized. But as quickly as they were recruited, the immigrants imposed their own social character on mainstream institutions. In sum, it was they who demanded that work and culture be transformed. \iVhat of "the progressives?" Far from embracing the immigrant gang's social ethos, they held tight to nineteenth-century liberalism. Even the most enlightened insisted that private life, high culture, and capitalist growth were perfectly compatible. Welfare reform was not to replace personal life but to reconstitute it and to help insulate "culture" (the process of socialization) from industrial work. At their worst, the progressives made the capitalistic reorganization of work seem humane. At their best, they drew back in horror from "mass society" to obsolete moral paradigms.2 Despite their commitment to individualism, not because of it, the progressives found themselves managing a social discipline that served economic expansion. By the 1920s, far from being separate spheres, politics, economics, culture, and personal life joined in a complex unity that incorporated everyday life as surely as nineteenth-century industry incorporated nature. Family life, law, public recreation, education, and work were redefined in relation to market rhythms. From the bourgeois standpoint, they were social only insofar as they kept predetermined quantities of labor power circulating. Unlike his progressive contemporaries, Henry Ford understood these changes. For him, as for the immigrants, all activity was work. Work had once been a discrete act whose unique meaning and validity derived from mastering a particular process. Now it encompassed all institutional behavior and relations. And since work was ubiquitous in this social factory, so was the struggle against it. Luddism and early immigrant efforts in the U.S. to stop modernization and the wage system have often been characterized as "primitive." (see article 2 by Pearson in this volume). And the progressives saw turn-ofthe-century delinquency as an irrational, "primitive" reaction to modem industry that individual rehabilitation could overcome. In fact, however, immigrant resistance was anything but "primitive." After mid-century at
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least, the immigrant refusal to work was an indigenous response to material suffering organized by heterogeneous political gangs and youth gangs. And it was as politically relevant as trade unionism. Alongside its conseIvative dimensions, racism for instance, it expressed a new proletarian approach to work. To the gangs, as to Chaplin's tramp, crime was a basic fact of industrial life, not a deviant or individual choice. And the gangs anticipated Chaplin's image in another way as well. For while they stole goods and money as part of a broad refusal to work, their major effort was to reappropriate time and space for their own autonomous cultural projects. Crime emerged as an omnipresent social threat not only because of what it took away, but also because of what it promised to put there instead. And this threat, I argue, stirred the progressive imagination. The progressives devised a potpourri of institutions to overcome immigrant resistance. My argument is that the history of these institutions, their changing form and substance, and their relation to one another had less to do with a "reform mentality" or a homogeneous class interest than with specific demands made necessary by organized ganging. Mer sketching the history of gangs in U.S. cities, I look at concrete struggles over the definition of juvenile law, the settlement house, public education, mass culture, and mass production. In each instance, the pa1ttern is similar: an initial attempt to individuate and reconstitute the immigrant mass within obsolete divisions of labor is replaced, under pressure from immigrant youth, by efforts to socialize the form and substance of institutional life. The progressives reconceptualized traditionally distinct means of socialization-e.g., cultural rituals, legal procedures, and educational curricula-as parts of an evolving and comprehensive social diSCipline. But they did so largely without forethought. They were remnants of the Puritan elite, not harbingers of a "second industrial revolution," and they were as shocked by movies, popular music, and mass advertising as they were by the delinquents' quest for adventure. This fear of modernism made them willing collaborators in the effort to contain "invading barbarians." Even Frederick Lewis Taylor, the supposed architect of speedup in modern factories, opposed his schemes for individual incentives and job assignments to the "socialistic" tendencies of mass production. The progressives took final refuge in science because their other roles had been discredited. The social ethos of immigrant ganging imposed a new order on the social factory. But it was also constrained by this order. Even as the progressives' concern with individual children gave way to the construction of the standard "case," the immigrant thrust was rationalized into a truly proletarian perspective toward work. The proletarian perspective reached its political limits with the revolutionary initiatives of the Industrial Workers of the World. And, in Henry Ford's egalitarian approach to wages and production, comprehensive social discipline found its material basis. I conclude this study with the confrontation between the IWW and Ford. The gangs that young immigrants organized in nineteenth-century cities, at least so far as many of the working poor were concerned, made the re-
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fusal to be socialized a living alternative to schedules of factory production, individuated reproduction, and "valorization" (Le., giving all human activity a market price.) Reformers eventually acknowledged the social nature of gang resistance, but only a handful saw a need to confront it. To Jane Addams, this meant harnessing the gang's social ethos to "modify the ruthlessness of industry by humane enactment." To Ford, it meant approaching wages as a general investment in abstract labor without the slightest regard for person, dignity, or skill. To the I\t\-W, it meant treating all of society as a factory to be organized and disrupted. My argument will seem incredible if we picture gangs as instruments of lumpen vengence. Although the progressives took youth crime at face value, today the young immigrant workers are pictured as the "pathetic" products of grinding poverty, "dead-end" kids forced to choose a criminal's early grave (minus the spats Hollywood added) or a lifetime of obedience, represented in films of the 1930s by a priest or cop, not a factory worker. What we must now consider is the possibility that through their gangs immigrant youths could maximize the available opportunities for work, crime, and play and create a life-style so radically opposed to traditional habits of adjustment and toil that it revolutionized American life.
BACKGROUND: THE RISE AND FALL OF POLITICAL GANGS
The emergence of youth gangs as a dominant form of socializing among working-class immigrants reflected the unique demographic structure of the late nineteenth-century capitalist labor market. It also reflected the capacity of immigrant workers to reshape inherited ideals of community prowess to meet new and often class-specific needs. Under new circumstances, the youth gangs' social ethos elaborated the activities of its predecessor, the heterogeneous political gang that was based in "saloon democracy." When we compare the activity, composition, base, and belief systems of these two gang types, their sociological distinctiveness and importance for working-class history became clear. The early nineteenth-century political gang
Informal neighborhood paramilitary groups consisting of young apprentices, journeymen, jack-tars, and laborers were at the heart of "liberty riots" of the eighteenth century. The "political gang" only appears as a distinct social form much later, in the 1830s, during neighborhood resistance to the Whigs' pro-Bank attacks on New York City polls. During the depression of 1837, when New York was "filled with the homeless, hungry and unemployed," a demonstration called by the Workingmen's Party ended when breakaway groups sacked city warehouses holding flour and wheat. In New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, Irish laborers formed gangs to defend their communities against nativist mobs.
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And although the Irish apparently fought side-by-side with the nativists against militia and police during the Astor Place riots in New York, battles throughout the antebellum period typically involved struggles for local hegemony among rival political or ethnic factions and volunteer fire companies such as the "Roach Guards," "O'Connell Guards," "Shirt Tails," "Old Maid Boys," "Bloods," "Butt Enders," and "Kenyonians." Gustavus Myers notes "half a dozen riots" in New York between 1834 and 1840, and one newspaper records "a total of 19 riots and 150 fires" in the last months of 1839 alone.3 Delineating gang membership during this period is impossible. The hard core of firemen always appeared surrounded by several hundred followers of all ages. Moreover, even after two general gang alliances formed into the "Bowery B'hoys" and "Dead Rabbitts," local designations were retained. This tension over group loyalty defined the unique character of the political gang: in its composition and its strategy, the political gang alternately emphasized residential and ethnic identity and broader class affinities that demanded fraternization across neighborhood and ethnic lines. The composition of the two alliances and their contrasting styles reflected intraclass divisions between unskilled factory laborers and craft workers engaged in manufacturing. The Rabbitts were mainly casual laborers, petty thieves, and city workers, while the B'hoys also included workingmen, mechanics, shipbuilders, carpenters, and butcherboys. Both gangs had their share of ward heelers, plain loafers, and hangers-on. But while the Rabbitts drew together recent immigrants and families that had been proletarian for decades, the B'hoys were distinctly parvenu. The Rabbitt fought in his undershirt. The best dressed B'hoy was openly dandyish. With his barbered mustache and goatee, a silk tie, fur-trimmed coat and black broadcloth pantaloons, and wearing plenty of jewelry, he was contemptuous in his fashion of both the "Broadway s,well" (including his master) and the vulgar immigrants who worked for money and a "Boss."4 Race, ethnicity, and residence were never fully subordinated to economics. Irish nationalists ("O'Connell's Guards") frequently fought nativist bullyboys for leadership of the "B'hoys." But even here, tensions derived from employers' use of "bullyboys" to short-circuit craft apprenticeships and undercut wages. B'hoys were united by anti-British zeal at Astor Place. But when bullyboys became the strong arm of the Know Nothing Party in New York, they once again faced Irish workingmen in battle. Again, gang dynamics reflected the growing contradictJion between craft and home and the push toward universal proletarianization. The political gang's ambiguous boundaries allowed women and children, not just male adults, to find active support in its ranks. In part, this democratic character derived from the nature of gang sociability. After 1840, the gangs took politics from the counting-house, ale-house, and parvenu club into the saloon. Regular political conventions were held there through the 1890s; political officials, day laborers, police, school teachers, even judges, were recruited and "instructed" there; and new immigrants went there to
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find housing, jobs, and friends. Saloon democracy was a comprehensive defense of primary social relations in the midst of an anarchic labor market, an alternative to the purely impersonal "freedom" from the traditional bonds that capitalism imposed on isolated individuals. Through saloon politics, gangs were able to regulate local prices and credit, mediate family crises, negotiate labor disputes, politically socialize youth and, most important, give collective expression to the industrial experience. So, the "Baxter Street Dudes" led by "Baby Face" Willy opened the Grand Duke Theatre in the basement of a beer dive. There, for 10¢, street boys could see plays about their own lives written by their peers.s Typically, the gang's major battles involved saloon democracy. In 1857 in New York, for instance, the Rabbitts, a coalition of Five Points gangs loosely under the patronage of "Captain" Isaiah Rynders, set up barricades to defend the mayor and his municipal police. Opposing them were the state and Republican-backed "Metropolitans," whose prime goal, defended in this instance by reactionary factions of B'hoys, was to close the saloons.6 Although the saloon remained an important source of sociability, its political vitality waned as neighborhood and ethnic differences were overcome by political and economic homogeneities. The rationalization and centralization of power in state bureaucracies and large industries demanded a level of peer solidarity and an ability to move freely throughout the city that the political gangs could not muster. Were the political gangs radical? To a degree, the political gangs were remnants of traditional collectives dislocated by the capitalistic reorganization of rural, town, and craft life in Europe, and they behaved like other "primitive rebels," occasionally smashing machines, defending obsolete ethnic rituals, attacking prostitutes, and lynching Irish immigrants and black migrants. In addition, like the youth who stimulated the notorious Black Act in eighteenth-century England by defending once-public forests against enclosure, B'hoys and Rabbitts defended their turf against virtually every reform-prohibition, taxes, the draft, integration, and the secret ballot. Ironically, however, ganging in the United States was unique because traditional roots in land, tenancy, and craft had been so completely destroyed. The defining quality of the U.S. gang was its aggressive movement through social space with increasing disregard, as the nineteenth century wore on, for domestic, residential, or vocational ties. And this mobility is inconceivable apart from labor's emancipation from property relations. Thus, the gang transformed its dislocation into an asset used to negotiate anarchic housing and employment patterns. The gang's resistance to hard work and its demand for free time had traditional roots. But this behavior took new meaning from changed industrial conditions. As social cooperation became the basis of factory work, subversive forms of collective action developed in community gangs were extended to the shop. Rural migrants expected that social necessities would be provided automatically (without hard work) if they were loyal. This "primitive" expectation illuminated the
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major material fact of advanced capitalist society, the growing surplus of basic goods and the state's capacity for public investment. Gang demands for services from the municipality, regardless of aggregate productivity, became a formidable obstacle to the expanded private appropriation of social wealth, particularly during periodic crises . Frederick Thrasher identified intense loyalty, a strict observance of territorial boundaries, and an odd mixture of service and paramilitary violence among Chicago youth gangs in the 1920s. But he regarded these "folkways" as "natural outgrowths of immigrant uprootedness" without historical or political meaning. In fact, throughout the nineteenth century, the defense of turf on election day meant coal in winter, hundreds of jobs for neighborhood residents, and significant influence over local courts, schools, and markets. When the neighborhood was the main political unit in the machine and New York's machine controlled the flow of goods, money, and labor through the world's fastest growing market, neighborhood control was anything but a primitive demand. At mid-century, gangs were the media through which the grass roots and City Hall communicated. Politicians relied on the gangs for contact and stability, while residents used the gangs to acquire and distribute services and jobs. The gang imposed a social conscience on local businessmen by policing the neighborhood and periodically sacking the homes, hotels, stores, warehouses, and factories of the rich, instantly redistributing scarce goods to the needy. From the 1850s through the dismemberment of the Tweed Ring in the 1870s, New York's political machine was largely run from below, with the gang alliances serving alternately as a barrier to capital's self-realization and as the only medium through which business could regulate urban labor. Whatever its immediate motive, the nineteenth-century reform of health, education, housing, politics, and the professions penetrated the arenas from which neighborhood militants controlled a p0I1ion of the market and blocked capitalist expansion.7 French workingmen who set up barricades in 1848 demanded work and the chance to practice their crafts. But the demands American political gangs made for jobs and service were more subversive. The U.S. gangs shared neither the devotion of the French to skill and hard work nor the refusal to work later popularized by Progressive Era" delinquents." To them, political activity was part of the work required to secure a living wage. Said one-time Congressman Mike Walsh, the first professional ward heeler to organize a gang on a year-round basis, "no man devoid of all other means of support but that which his own labor affords him can be a freeman under the present state of society.s" To the Rabbitt and gradually to B'hoys as well, a "job" included anything one had to do for (or against) business to secure necessities. This moral ambiguity made it hard to distinguish corrupt from "honest" thieves. Reformers were more disturbed, however, that the gangs lacked respect for "the most basic principles of decency and order." To the gang members, work was a social relationship negotiated through collective action in the political arena. By showing that "what one did" was a social
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deteImination, the gangs demystified the notion of a "calling" and other attempts to trace work to personal qualities. Rioting and the decline of the political gangs
"Ole Mose" was the hero of the 1840s Bowery Theatre, "the greatest of the Bowery B'hoys." With his faithful immigrant friend and counselor "Syksey," Mose had united all the New York gangs, or so popular legend had it. The theatrical image of a single, city-wide gang haunted refoImers and was the romantic objective of gang politics and warring. The image was ideological. Tammany transcended ethnic antagonism at election time, only to reawaken it when political sects grew uppity. But, the vision also had its practical counterpart. During periodic "riots," tensions were worked out between the ideal of unity and the persistent divisions between working-class groups. The basis of working-class unity was the shared experience of proletarianization; its impossibility derived from the differential privileges that various working-class strata enjoyed due to their ethnicity, income, residence, race, or occupation. When epidemics, food shortages, economic crises, or the draft momentarily eliminated these privileges, riots occurred, radicalizing middle-class workers and subjecting them to socialization from below. Then, gang members joined their neighbors to re-establish their pre-crisis privileges with unified action, moving to accomplish what it was impossible to achieve in one neighborhood. Nevertheless unity was a temporary expedient amid a broader strategic commitment to intraclass competition. This explains the rioters' apparent "populism," their tolerance for diverse-even opposing-political thrusts. Rioting is an insurrectionary fOIm of protest lacking the organizational coherence needed to replace one fOIm of power with another. Still, as the privileges of working-class strata eroded, riots became increasingly revolutionary. From a sociologist's perspective, rioting is a relatively inefficient way to redistribute wealth, since it limits the rioters' acquisition to what they can physically move, usually without public transportation. Furthermore, when firemen, militia, and police were as likely as their neighbors to join in, the ratio of property destroyed to overall fixed assets was very high, far higher than today. Generations of police captains and social historians picture riots either as having a single mind (e.g., the draft riot) or as completely directionless. True, the absence ofunitying ideological and organizational features defines the complexity and the intermediate nature of rioting as a form of mass politics. Nineteenth-century rioters were well aware, however, that within the single riot there were a number of centers of frenzied activity, each forming out of pre-existing bonds and each contending with the others for general leadership. Throughout the industrial history of the United States, these centers have been organized primarily by such gangs. The movement of the rioters through the city and their political direction, targets, and slogans were all deteImined during the riot by the relative capacity of competing gangs to win nonmembers to their side. For instance,
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the Civil War riot in New York City shifted dramatically from struggles against the draft to struggles against the rich, then against blacks, then against property, then against the military. What appeared to conservatives as confusion actually reflected the competition for leadership between Irish political gangs and gangs of nativist thugs. This struggle, hence the ultimate racist direction of the New York riots, was finally determined when the more radical leaders were exterminated in a fire at the main armory set by the politicized police and their businessmen "volunteers."g Thus, "riot" is a catchword for the simultaneous insurrection of working-class sects or gangs. The rioters present a tactical unity that momentarily overcomes the fundamental divisions blocking sustained political action toward a common program. Nineteenth-century urban riots in the United States were forms of worker diplomacy for a general increase in the social wage. They put sectarian politics to the test of exemplary militancy by pressuring gangs and more conventional organizations to instantly democratize recruitment and to work out Iheir differences by fulfilling minimal items on a mass agenda. The mass character of the riot tended to overshadow internal divisions as proletarianization became widespread. The Civil War or draft riot was the most dramatic instance of class unity in mid-nineteenth-century America. For five days, thousands of the urban poor stopped all business activity. They drove both rich whites and poor blacks from their homes. They smashed machines, businesses, and factories. They burned hotels and telegraph lines. They seized the public arsenal and police stations. They raided s1tores and instantly transformed "private" institutions into public states for debate, adventure, and fun. This one event concentrated the nightmares of an entire generation of reformers. Who will ever forget the marvelous rapidity with which the better streets were filled with a ruffianly and desperate multitude, such as in ordinary times, we seldom see-creatures who seemed to have crept from their burrows and dens to join in the plunder of the city. [It was] evident ... that had another day of license been given the crowd the attack would have been directed at the apparent wealth of the city-the banks, jewelers' shops and Iich private houses 1o
This "volcano under the city" must be capped, cried reformers. Otherwise, the "dangerous classes" would erupt again. Rioting was exceptional for the working class. But riotous behavior-the wild, uncontrolled, unlawful, and destructive movement through space-was typical of youth, and therefore it might be expected to break out again and again. Rufus King termed the draft rioters "social rats" with a "ravenous appetite" for social goods. And the metaphor was gradually extended from riotous behavior to the overall movement of the poor. Lacking roots in family, vocation, and religion, they were thought to be driven by a wild hunger for things that they had not earned: "Thousands with no home flit from attic to attic, and cellar to cellar ... most depending for daily bread on the day's earnings, swarming in tenement houses, who behold the gilded rewards of
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the toil around them, but are not permitted to touch them:" l According to Loring Brace, it was the perpetual movement of the city's youth that set the pace for the poor as a whole. Further, the threat of class violence was identified with gangs and the political machine: "The class of a large city most dangerous to its property, its morals, and its political life are the ignorant, destitute, untrained and abandoned youth: the outcast street children grown up to be votel'S, to be the implements of demagogues, the "feedel'S" of the criminals and the source of domestic outbreaks and of violations of law."12 Brace claimed that this revolt led by youth gangs was conducted by an international underground that surfaced periodically as it had in the Paris Commune. But America's "children" were unique. Anticipating comparisons between the Industrial WoI"kel'S of the World (IWW) and more pacific European socialists or Bolsheviks, what Brace found most threatening was a total lack of respect for conventional boundaries. This distinguished u.s. gangs from "normal" (Le., English) thieves and paupel'S: Their crimes have the unrestrained ... character of a race accustomed to overcome all obstacles. They rifle a bank, where English thieves pick a pocket; they murder, where European proletarians cudgel or fight with fists; in a riot, they begin what seems about to be the sacking of a city, where English rioters would merely batter policemen and smash lamps.I3
American youth bypassed symbols of authority and went directly after money, property, and goods. These were not mere "waifs," "vagrants," or "sturdy beggars." They were a modem proletariat. The "riot" expressed the limits and disruptive potential of neighborhood ganging. Although riots and strikes were integrated during mass actions in the 1870s and 80s, urban rioting only assumed a similarly insurrectionary character a century later in the 1960s. In the meantime, two forms of working-class illegality evolved from the riot: the tightly knit adult criminal gang and the loosely structured gang of delinquents. The former commercialized the politics of rioting, making a mere business of theft and public assault. But the youth gang extended the riot in more complex ways, socializing its spontaneous camaraderie as an ethic for everyday survival. Between 1870 and 1890 the large political gangs disbanded. Their decline has been traced to the increasingly political use of police and the National Guard.14 Repression succeeded, however, only because the residential base of the political gang was already fragmented. The professionalization of police, fire, health, education and law, and the emergence of a nascent welfare state, delocalized politics and displaced the machine, putting the distribution of social goods on a rational basis that was unresponsive to neighborhood solidarity. Economic growth, meanwhile, required a mobile and malleable labor force. Finally, where the political gang subordinated factory struggles to the contest for community control, the new trade unions narrowed the focus of class strugglej in exchange for traditional
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privileges in the plant, they accepted corporate hegemony over social life and the reduction of the political category "job" to its economic kernel. "work." The objective pressures which destabilized the gangs were reflected in an internal tension between the old guard of visible leaders and the rootless strata of anonymous youth. The tension was reflected as well in a major split between tightly bureaucratic underground criminal gangs, and mass youth gangs. Young, unskilled and highly mobile gang members rejected the earlier goal of group privilege in favor of a general capacity to represent working class youth. Now, leading a homogeneous mass became essential, not leading working-class communities against one another to win scarce resources from City Hall. The new gang member sought to lead other boys, not to distinguish himself individually. And reformers acknowledged this. It was far better, observed one reporter, to treat alike" all children of the poor and of the erring ... to arrest the incorrigible in his incipient steps than be compelled to deal with him as a confirmed criminal." This helps explain the comprehensive jurisdiction of the Juvenile Court and its popular image as a "social" (or standardized) parent.I5 Youth gangs in the Progressive Era
The young people brought before the Juvenile Court, the child protection board, or other youth and family services during the Progressive Era were described as the "pathetic" and "powerless victims" of a "sick environment." Why then were they considered dangerous if left in their indigenous setting? The answer was ganging. Oddly, social behavior in gangs, presumably the most threatening aspect of juvenile conduct, was never dealt with explicitly by juvenile authorities. Delinquents were confronted on the streets in groups, but official records describe only individual delinquents. The exception is Frederick Thrasher's study of Chicago gangs published in 1927. Using informal and formal survey materials, Thrasher estimated that a tenth of Chicago's 350,000 boys age 10-24 were "subject to gang influence," primarily in those areas of the ciity known as "the poverty belt." After streetcorner play groups and social clubs were excluded, these Chicago gangs were almost as large as the groups of 2000 youths that Asbury described in late-nineteenth-century New York. Thrasher estimated that in one sample of 25,000 boys, 10,000 were in gangs with between 100 and 2000 members. Still, his description of these groups suggests that the mass gang was gradually being reconstituted into the smaller, functionally specific peer units of an emerging youth culture.I6 Immigrants were overrepresented among gang members and, in this popUlation, the more recent ones, such as Poles, Italians, and migrant Negroes, predominated. Almost half the gangs were ethnically heterogeneous, supporting the hypothesis that the ethnic village was more an ideology than a demographic reality. Racial homogeneity prevailed, however. Still, even
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the small percentage of racially mixed gangs in Thrasher's sample exceeded those composed exclusively of either Germans or Jews, two of Chicago's largest ethnic groups. New arrivals formed ethnic gangs, but second generation youths, including many southern blacks, found class and territorial factors more important than race, ethnicity, or nationalism. The ethnic diversity of these paramilitary gangs negated both the assimilationist propaganda of nativist educators and chauvinist demands for ethnic seggregation.17 Amid the diaspora and resettlement, immigrating bachelors stretched fraternal bonds across national boundaries, initially depending for their integration into neighborhood life on the sociability patterns of native political gangs. But the transformation of working-class culture and urban space suggested new forms of adaptation. Mid-century gangs headquartered in saloons and greengroceries, institutions at the center of the neighborhood. Turn-of-the-century gangs, however, survived on the margins of the city. They lived out of doors, in private club rooms, cellars, alleys, pool halls, and railroad yards. Or they lived in "no man's land," the gullies in Cleveland, and the wharves in New York. Thrasher called these regions the gang's frontier, borrowing Turner's image. Only thirty of the gangs Thrasher studied operated from barber shops or candy stores. This spatial segregation reflected and helped determine the gang's homogeneous age and sex structure and its unambiguous hostility toward normal routines!S When immigrant gangs invaded the traditional haunts of their native predecessors, e.g. the ice-cream parlor, the saloon, or the pool hall, the morals police were sure to follow. Undisguised agents of middle-class hegemony, the social investigators from Chicago's settlements, Vice Commission, and Society for Social Hygiene scrutinized the public activity of immigrant youth for signs of depravity. Every street, every hangout was coded; every indiscretion was recorded in a "Great Protestant Account Book." Even trivial acts were thought to conceal fundamental crimes: October 10th. (XI234) (X1235) street. Ice cream soda and confectionary. Several boys and girls were seen in this place at 10:35 P.M .. Two of the girls appeared to be 16, and 3, 18 years of age: the boys 14 to 20. One of the young boys asked a girl to hurry up, and they would go to the hallway where they could talk by themselves 19
The rising bourgeoisie had once admired urban-bred sophistication. Now, what they called precociousness was threatening. Observations were aggregated to produce a sociological picture of licentiousness. in 19 halls immoral or disorderly conduct was noted. On the West Side, actions of perversion were suggested to the investigator by a young boy. On the South Side, overt immoral conduct by the proprietor and a woman were witnessed. In scores of places, indecent verses appeared on the walls and show cases. The language of the patrons was frequently obscene and profane ... 25 percent permitted gambling.2o
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What distinguished the progressive puritans from their predecessors was their acquiring almost unlimited institutional mandate to impose behavioral comformity. The saloon offered mid-centul)' gangs a relatively stable basis in sociability from which to exercise power over machine politics and neighborhood life. The fraternization between neighborhoods evident during riots was sporadic and largely a function of the sudden socialization of misel)' imposed by economic downturns. Not surprisingly, the large heterogeneous gangs typically fought to defend their turf from outside encroachment. But once "youth" had been identified as a dependent status, the sites young people chose for autonomous socialization became off-limits or, what amounted to the same thing, subject to "search or seizure." This forced the youth gangs to move continuously, normalizing "riotous" behavior and rationalizing survival in the interstices of neighborhood life, where the street urchins of eighteenth-centul)' London had lived. Mobility characterized both the part-time occupations of most gang members-they were messenger boys, "runners," newsboys, boot-blacks, junk dealers, and teamsters-and their vagrancy. They were most often cited for sleeping under bridges, stealing coal from the railroads and food markets, leaving work when wages fell, and drinking or garnbling.21 Mid-centul)' gangs had protested against their impending marginality. These youth gangs transformed their marginality into an asset. Through public politics, the Bowel)' B'hoys and Rabbitts had turned ordinary wage work into "jobs" and had overcome an indifferent market. Immigrant juveniles cultivated anonymity as part of their broader effort to avoid school, party politics, apprenticeships, and factory work. Whereas mid-century gangs only used massive direct appropriation occasionally to raise the general standard of everyday life, immigrant youth socialized theft, integrating it into their normal living standard and practicing it for fun, not simply to profit or survive. Thrasher stood in awe of the gang member: "He lives on his own resources for weeks at a time and learns to feel dependent on nobody."22
THE JUVENILE COURT: THE DEMAND FOFI SOCIAL JUSTICE The Juvenile Court, which opened in Illinois in 1899, incorporated few new ideas or procedures. By then, dime novels were portraying delinquency as the consequence of poverty and familial neglect, not sin or maliciousness, and the popular press urged restraint, not severe punishment, fine, or incarceration. But probation, preventive detention, segregated courtrooms for juveniles, the indeterminate sentence, and the suspension of due process for youngsters had all been tried before.23 The profound change was the broad scope of the new court's authority. Chicago'S population had increased by more than 1.5 million between 1860 and 1900; immigrants and migrating white natives each made up over a
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third of this total. This huge influx of unskilled labor would eventually be accommodated by revolutionizing existing social institutions; but immediately, by weaving disparate ideological and procedural strands into a blend of social service and controL reformers gained statutory access to virtually all working-class youth. If the socialization of delinquents could be rationalized and made effective, they hoped, those who required punitive institutionalization might be separated from those whose "treatment" required only reconstituted families and schools, or their surrogates. As it was, youths were brought before the law for "knowingly associating with thieves, vicious or immoral persons"; being absent from home; "growing up in idleness or crime"; visiting 01' entering houses of ill repute, gambling houses, saloons, or bucketshops; wandering the streets at night or about railroad yards or tracks; jumping on and off trains; or cursing and being immoral or indecent. The legal focus on juveniles reflected the juveniles' political initiatives, not merely demographic change. Operating outside traditional familyapprentice structures, young independent workers posed a formidable obstacle to the growth of a system rooted in the Protestant virtues of skill, industry, thrift, and loyalty. Each "crime" concealed a struggle over the appropriate definition of work and its wage. For instance, "precocious" children who became the human media of commerce through brothels and saloons angered those for whom compulsOlY education and child labor laws were complementalY eff0l1s to turn youth into a skilled land family bound) "reserve arnlY." Most common was the fear of youth's resistance, even refusal, to work, its passi\'ity, and its movement from job to job. Young immigrants seemed less interested in what they did than its adventure, and used this cliterion, not mmi!, wages, or loyalty, to evaluate jobs. In 1900, over a third of the tenement children with working papers averaged six or more jobs each in their first year of employment. A decade later the supposed pathological shiftlessness of casual laborers would be blamed for IWW-type militance.23 To social worker Jane Addams, the idleness, shiftlessness, and monotony that were the cornerstones of youth's "revolt" derived from the lack of emotional incentive in factOlY work. To less sensitive eyes, the symptoms were the cause of the disease. When Gerald Muldower, a Wisconsin boy, refused to work alier losing a finger in a factOlY job, he was brought to court. Since he retumed to work and did not have to be sent to reform schooL the disposition was called a "success." Half of the boys and 80 percent of the girls were brought before the court for status offenses-acts that would not have been considered criminal if committed by adults. For boys, these consisted primarily of incorrigibility, vagrancy, truancy, and refusing to work. For girls, it was primalily immorality. In addition to the behavior for which boys were punished, this included such signs of independence as the refusing to do housework, necking, and masturbating. Quite commonly too, girls were punished for withholding wages from their parents.25
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Shiftlessness and disinterest made it hard to integrate immigrant youth politically through the machine, The new probation ofllcers served as surrogate ward heelers, mediating family conflicts and securing resources that a family needed in exchange for cooperation with the court or municipality, Often neighbors of alleged of lenders, they were directed by a concel'll with "delinquency-producing conditions," not jllst actual delinquency, and they intruded in f~lI11i1y aflairs as readily as the court exerciscd its formal power to reprimand, confine, or pardon, Tile extent of intervention in neighborhood life is suggested by Ste\'en Schlossman's summ,IIY of :~5G Wisconsin cases settled out of court between ID14 and IDIG, Little Illore than neglect was alleged in a third of tile cases, In the res!, intc]'\cntion was justified simply because f~lIllily members disagreed o\'er issues such as refusal to work, turning wages O\'er to parents, or sexual matters, That these practices were not I'estricted to l\lilwaukee is illustl'alcdby the oiJscnation in the New YorklHallual'/or Probatioll Q/licers that "Inlllan,\' cases the dclinqucncy is so incipient or the family circumstances am such thatunlcss the case could be dealt with unofliciallv thev \-vould nmcl come to the allcntioll of the court."2(; .. Before 1870, penal reformers had tried to institutionally replicatc eroding family and craft structures, Less idealist,c than their predecessors, the child-savers-the self-styled rescuers of youth from delinquency-saw little to be gained from massi\'l~ institutionalization, Instead, they treated each youngster's specific situation, providing acl i\'e support for families wracked by po\'erty, death, disease, or descrtion, Sa,ld Chicago Ju\'cnilc Judge Julian v\', Mack: "The Ju\'enile Court deals with each child as a distinct indi\'idua!, examining into its entire past and then determining, not what is the best thing to do for children, but simply and solely, wllat is the best thing to do for little John Brown,"27 Theoretically, once the cllild was remO\'ed fl'Om the categorical gaze of formal administration, the COllrt could sllspend its abstract punitive function (along with the child's right to due ]Jl'Ocessl and proceed informally as if the judge were a surl'Ogate father, the halhvay house a home, and the probation officer a Dutch uncle, In fact, almost half of the girls and a third of the boys judged delinquent in Chicago had lost one or both of their parents, and the disintegration of the traditional working-class family was an objective reality, as well as a subjective one, The court and other state officials acted on the conviction that living outside the bonds of home and work place was a serious social crime?X The court's practice reveals that, at best, the reformel's' notions about what was best for these children and youths provided the ideological context for expanding the state's punitive power over young workers, Benevolent medical and social psychological imagery justilled a legal response to preeminently social crimes, i.e" collective acts that were indispensable to community survival, widely accepted and encouraged by immigrant laborers, yet that transgressed capital's necessaJ~y monopoly over propel1y, labo!' power, and means of production?9
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The acts that drew the court's attention usually took place far from the home, amid some type of organized ganging. I reviewed 100 case reports from the Illinois juvenile court. Almost half the male offenses are gang related, and many others involve acts of resistance supported by ganging, such as refusing to attend school or work. In a larger sample from the same popUlation, 51 percent of the boys were punished for stealing, primarily to support themselves or their families; half these thefts, for example, involved stealing coal from the railroads or junk for resale. The rest were charged with various status offenses, the most common of which, "incorrigibility," included gang activities such as loitering on the streets, roaming the streets at night, breaking into vacant bUildings, using vulgar language, refusing to go to work or to school, and withholding or absconding with wages "rightfully due to parents."30 Youngsters were "saved" far less often than they were detained and institutionalized, particularly when they resisted conventional mores. Childsavers and penal authorities complained that before the court reform, juveniles whose cases did not warrant leniency were nevertheless released, owing to family or peer pressure on the local machine. Now, however, even among first offenders, 21 percent of the boys and over half of the girls were institutionalized, while only a third of the entire group were returned home. And the length of confinement increased dramatically, particularly for social crimes. A year before the court's opening, incarceration averaged between 2.4 and 3.4 months. After the reform, according to my review of 100 cases, the average jumped 300 percent, to 9.1 months. For theft, a boy went to the John Worthy Reform School for 1.7 years; for incorrigibility or other gang-related acts, he could expect to be detained for 2.2 years. A decade after the reform, the number of new cases had risen five times. While the odds of being committed had begun to drop, detention before, during, and after trial was becoming the norm. Schlossman reports that in 1905, only a third were detained; by 1916, three-quarters were. And in the next year, 1,405 of the 1,724 new cases were held in detention. This was only a fraction of those whose lives were touched by the court.31 At first, many parents asked the court for help, sending boys for "training," for instance, to mitigate economic or family problems. Schlossman reports that two-thirds of his Wisconsin cases were referred by neighbors and parents and only one-fifth by agencies, including police. This scene was apparently common: "when he met her on the street, she did not scold him but simply said he was such a bad boy that he would have to be put in a reform school."32 But if immigrant parents initially used the power of the state to reinforce their personal authority, this was quickly offset by deeper affinities of need, attitude, and class situation. Both the objective misery of industrial existence (e.g., a chronic housing shortage and periodic unemployment) and the importance to neighborhood sunival of the "mass illegality" in which gangs engaged made all but the worst troublemakers appear almost heroic. Gang offenses were supported, charged reformers, by particular families, entil'e neighborhoods, even ethnic groups. Such support
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was so noticeable that by 1905, eighteen states had passed laws to fine, publicly reprimand, or jail adults for "contributing to the delinquency and vagrancy of minors." After 1914, reformers identified delinquency less with particular acts than with youthful behavior as such, and many states subsumed juvenile problems under the broad category of " domestic relations."33 Few acts excited the court's charitable ire as much as a young girl's resistance to marriage, housework, conventional sexual mores, and factory life. In less than a decade, the Juvenile Court tripled the number of females over 15 it sent to institutions. Girls were institutionalized far more often than boys and typically for longer periods. Equally significant, 82 percent of the girls were committed for incorrigibility, disorderly conduct, and immorality, a far higher percentage than the boys. Many of these were found living with a group of girls in "low rooming houses." They were taken, not so much because of a specific offense, as because "their future is in peril if not already lost." "Gang" may be an inappropriate description of the loose social collectivities these young women forged to overcome workaday alienation in department stores and tenement factories. Still, these women were labeled "morally insane" only when they collectively resisted economic and sexual dependence, not when they acted out individually.34 Where early institutions for delinquents-in Jacksonian America-the refuge and workhouse were often used as a military academy for unruly middle-class boys, the victims of the Juvenile Court were poor immigrant youngsters with neither the motivation nor the connections to acquire skill or property. Typically, they or their parents had been uprooted from the rural margins of European life by the international expansion of capital. Seventy percent of the girls and almost 40 percent of the boys that the court dealt with came from "the poorest families." In my sample of a hundred case reports only four fathers were "businessmen." In the Wisconsin group studied by Schlossman, three-quarters of the fathers worked as laborers, teamsters, and clerks. Forty percent of the Illinois fathers had farmed in Europe, but none did here. Almost half of the migrants to Chicago during this period were native whites, but only 13 percent of the delinquents' fathers were. Eighty-two percent were immigrants, the rest black,35 Child-savers saw no consistent source of stability in immigrant families. Yet they thought that only the family could provide the moral strength to resist the callousness urban life made possible and the boredom of facto!), life. Hence, they viewed the court as an essential supplement to but not a replacement for the family. The immigrant conception was more complex. When land ownership and skill had permitted a modicum of autonomy outside the marketplace, faith in the nuclear family had been appropriate ideological baggage. But it was patently absurd to the landless, skilless, and homeless mass for whom all previous freedoms had been reduced to the single capitalist universal-the freedom to work for wages. The immigrants demanded state support for the social family they were forging. The mass migration in pursuit of the dollar shattered indigenous networks based on residence, religion, and ethnicity. The decomposition of
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the traditional family as such (not simply particular families wrecked by poverty and disease) was reflected in the large number of highly mobile and single immigrants, women, "tramps/' orphans, and juveniles on the labor market; the increased reluctance of women to bear children or marry; escalating desertion and divorce rates; and in the extension of family ties across international and regional space. To compensate, previously heterogeneous groups of workers spontaneously created extended kin-like bonds. These "families" had first appeared as political centers during the mass strikes and "riots" of the 1870s. Few immigrants shared the Yankee's faith in self-reliance. Instead, many felt that having been victimized entitled them to municipal service, that their very self-presentation as a mass of available laborers gave them the right to state services regardless of their employment status.36 Hence, the court's conception of a traditional family was confronted by the growing reality of a "family" formed within the international pool of mass labor. As we have seen, the court's practice directly negated its rhetorical commitment to the personal principles of family life. But its operational conception of the family as social space managed by a benign patriarchal state also reflected the immigrant view. As the President of the Illinois Conference on Charities put it, "the State" had become "the coordinated parentage of childhood, yielding to the inexorable logic of civilization that will compel copartnership, cooperation, corporate life, and conscience." 37 This was the social logic that the immigrant assault imposed. Other factors also constrained the state to act like a social patriarch. Firms remained committed to rigid distinctions between highly regimented production and free marketing. But the expanded scale of production required more rapid turnover of goods, the replacement of traditional skills and life-styles, and a work force that could withstand the impersonality and intensity of new means of production. The alternative to leaving the reproduction of labor power to "the laborers' instincts" was to organize everyday life according to economic imperatives, to "socialize the means of socialization." In sum, the court's interest in a social family was, at one and the same time, an objective requirement of capital's expansion, a demand of the newly reconstituted international work force, and the best way to provide a secure social space within which labor's reproduction might be planned. The court's notion of individuality, like its conception of the family, contained both a radical social element and an element of bourgeois liberal ideology. References to "little John Brown" suggest a genuine concern for his person. But as medical jargon replaced patriarchal imagery in the language of rehabilitation, the individual was reconceptualized as a unit of a larger mass. The individual was now a "case," "interesting" because he shed light on the social category he was assumed to reflect. The reasoning was circular. The individual identified as "representative" allegedly reflected a group that was simply an aggregation of similar cases. This approach was nevertheless grounded in the social science professions by the rapid circulation of stereotypes. One problem remained. Even as the case method
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obliterated the uniqueness of each individual, it affinned individuality as an ideological bastion against the unfolding logic of social cooperation. The case method illuminated the individual's social detennination only to leave him with final responsibility for his fate. Progressives designed the Juvenile Court to bolster the family. But, faced with the more immediate problem of overcoming political resistance, the authorities socialized their conception of discipline and their notions of family and individual. When it treated all immigrant behavior as potentially criminal, the court adapted an approach immigrants themselves took to crime. And in constructing a social family which depended for its survival on state resources, the court also responded to an immigrant demand. Although the approach met the needs of an expanding capitalist economy, this was not the intention of the child-savers.
GANGING AS PLAY: THE DEMAND FOR MASS CULTURE
Antebellum gangs began as secret patriotic societies, political clubs, and volunteer fire companies, groups that offset riotous behavior with regular displays of patriotic zeal. At the turn of the century, however, youth gangs typically started as neighborhood play groups, evolved into teams and clubs with numerous followers, and generated a hierarchy of leadership based on loyalty and physical and mental skills. And they remained politically apathetic despite frequent immigrant assemblies designed to stir their latent civic pride. Their demand for adventure and their indifference to cultural self-improvement helped redesign public space in the United States and shape the basic imagery of mass culture and recreation.3H Refonners found the gang's resistance to work and school most threatening. Still, from the gang member's standpoint, the positive basis of ganging was its most salient feature: its persistent appeal to camaraderie for its own sake. The gang's play ethic and the progressives' response reflected a multiplicity of contradictions. The social latitude for play was provided by capital's sudden capacity to produce a surplus of basic goods, hence to reduce the time required for work. And the elevation of play to a cultural demand reflected youth's new status as labor free from the fetters of family and apprenticeship. "They demand pleasure," Addams wrote, "as the right of one who earns a living."39 This demand was accompanied by the defense of primary friendship bonds long after childhood had undermined the identification with trade, job, and community upon which nineteenth-century manufacturing was based. Play was incompatible with modern production, for it prevented the fonnal reduction of gang members to the predetermined quantities of abstract labor power required by modern finns. Having "fun" outside the sphere of commodity circulation was "unproductive." Capital's need to rapidly turn over investments now changed sex, play, and drink from moral concerns into political pmblems, and justified state inter-
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vention to manage labor's reproduction. Finally, the peaceful competition suggested by play subverted efforts to reconstitute obsolete divisions of labor based on skill, ethnicity, or income. Robert Park astutely summarized the problem posed by juvenile camaraderie: "Not only politics, but all our formal and conventional relations are undermined by those elemental loyalties that have their roots in personal attachments. There is no way to preselVe existing social barriers except by preseIVing the existing animosities that buttress them."4o "Tramping" was the most noxious outgrowth of play. As the British miners who "traveled" during early-nineteenth-centulY strikes understood, tramping meant more than simply moving on. Refusing to stay on a job affirmed some control over one's price. By practicing suIVival between jobs, the "tramp" resisted the hegemony of wages. After 1870, the railroad facilitated what industrialization in the West, rapid urbanization, and mechanization required-the reproduction of an ever larger pool of mobile unskilled labor able to live at bare subsistence and willing to assume the financial costs of its own migration. During the 1893 depression, however, workers were able to tum enforced mobility into a means of circumventing cutbacks. Within a decade, the IWW was using such "tramps" to organize labor without regard for job, skill or residence. To many reformers, "shiftlessness" (their view of workers' mobility) was "industrial psychosis." Tramping alternated with the gang's inertia, its tendency to loaf. EvelY effort was made to keep "The Dirty Dozen," a Chicago boys' gang (age 16 to 21), from hanging out. Thrasher quotes one of the gang: Most of the boys spent their time swimming, playing baseball and football, shooting craps and sitting around and talking ... police tried to break up the gang whenever it congregated on the corner although we had committed no particular offense. This led to ... our virtual war with the police.41
If they were driven from the streets, gang members forcefully negotiated
space in local entertainment centers: ice-cream parlors, movie theatres, dance halls, pool halls, and bowling alleys, where "children went in packs." Operating on slim margins and dependent on local loyalty, the first theatre owners compromised with the gang's demand for recognition. Addams complained: "The young people attend the 5-cent theatres in groups, with something of the 'gang' instinct, boasting of the films and stunts in 'our theatre.' ,,42 Some theatre names, the "Jewel" or the "Paradise," evoked the bygone fantasies of rural migrants and immigrants. But other names-"The Community," the "Neighborhood," or the "Home"-touched the real soul of urban immigrant longing. And early slide shows dealt sympathetically with the workaday problems that social injustice created. They could make a class analysis accessible to sentiment by presenting a young gang member as the sole support for a disease- and poverty-stricken immigrant family.43 Movies were most subversive when they reinforced images of autonomy that were already developed by the gang. Again Addams caught the sig-
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nificance of a cultural event:" 'Going to a show' ... is the only possible road to the realism of mystery and romance .... The theatre becomes a 'veritable house of dreams,' infinitely more real than the noisy streets and the crowded factories." The first simple demand upon the theatre for romance is closely allied to one more complex, which might be described as a search for solace and distraction in those moments of first awakening from the glamor of a youth's interpretation of life to the sterner realities which are thrust upon his consciousness.44 The movies conveyed the" 'primitive' illusion that cause and effect, power and action are related," giving the youth "the thrilling conviction that he may yet be master of his fate." Thus movies were not an escape, but were part of the moral discourse and social praxis youngsters created in response to noisy streets and crowded factories; they were part of an emerging social factory where "sentiment, character ... honor and conduct," in Addams's words, were produced alongside material goods. In the gang's collective life, film images structured its opposition to the real models of conduct presented by patriotic educators.45 Popular music also embodied the play culture of mobile youngsters with little commitment to so-called higher civilization. Addams reported that There is nothing in the environment to which youth so keenly responds as to music, and yet the streets, the vaudeville shows, the 5-cent theatres are full of the most blatant and vulgar songs. The trivial and obscene words, the meaningless and flippant airs run through the heads of hundreds of young people for hours at a time while they are engaged in monotonous factol)' work.46 Reformers who feared that young workers would turn to the temptations offered by popular culture if they found their work too boring developed a critique of monotonous factory labor. Within the highly sexualized culture of play, the most trivial act posed a threat. Addams dramatically portrayed the vulnerability of turn-of-the-century youth: The newly awakened senses are appealed to by all that is gaudy and sensual, by the flippant street music, the highly colored theatre posters, the trashy love stories, the feathered hats, the cheap heroics of the revolvers displayed in the pawn-shop windows. This fundamental susceptibility is thus evoked without a corresponding stir of the higher imagination, and the result is as dangerous as possible.47 In the nineteenth century, craftsmen had demanded access to libraries and "legitimate" theatres; eight hours' "enjoyment" for eight hours' work. But this demand was far different from the popular culture in which turnof-the-century youth gangs were immersed. Movies, vulgar songs, popular books, and "eight papers" (pornographic pamphlets) replaced higher aesthetics with simple formulae, posited lived experience as the test of
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workaday ethics, and emphasized immediate pleasure, mocking the craft ideal of delayed gratification.48 To the puritanical suspicion that the energy needed for work would be "burnt out by the fires of lust," the child-savers added two concerns: that unrelieved energy would be spent protesting workaday hardships, and that the free, undirected play supported by the popular media and embedded in gang praxis would generate a cultural logic incompatible with the economic rationality of factories. By prematurely crushing the play impulse, they argued, the puritan work ethic had transformed that impulse into the chronic fault of gangs-"refusal to work." Citing a confirmed tramp who, as a youth, had been compelled to repeat a single operation in a textile mill, Robert Hunter argued, you cannot rob children of their play, any more than you can forget and neglect the children at their play, as we now do in the tenement districts, without.· . paying the penalty. When children are robbed of playtime, they too often reassert their right to it in manhood, as vagabonds, criminals, or prostitutes.49
Children needed play, the argument continued, but their play was selfcentered, disorganized, even "bad." The solution proposed by the settlement movement was to combine the youngster's overdeveloped instinct for self-preservation with a social instinct, and to cultivate the resulting synthesis in settings removed from the commercial pleasures in the street. These settings would encourage serious fun both to compete with commercial alternatives to routine work and to organize, instruct and uplift the immigrant mass with the ideals of Americanism. The settlement movement included a complex of institutions established primarily by upper middle-class reformers which both cushioned and interpreted the harsh realities of proletarian life. Through kindergartens, playgrounds, settlement houses, athletic leagues, clubs, and gyms, child-savers formalized play to teach immigrant children self-sacrifice and order. These programs were "the earliest opportunity to catch the little German, Pole, Syrian and the rest and begin to make good American citizens of them." And they afforded access to homes that were "potential breeders of crime." Joseph Lee supported widespread playground construction as the antidote to apartment living, the elimination of homes as productive units, and the decline of "domestic arts."50 The reformers' goal of organizing children's play extended to adults as sports spectators. Each noon, factory workers went to the nearest vacant lot to cheer their favorite team. Addams thought that "well-considered" (Le., planned) public games were a better means than theatre to organize men "in a common mood and to afford them a mutual topic of conversation." Anticipating a current distinction between "mass" culture and a "popular" culture rooted in collective self-activity, Addams argued that the anonymous links uniting "spectators" at a sports contest were less subversive than the fraternity among gang members or unionists. The spectator "does not call the stranger who sits next to him 'brother,' but he unconsciously
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embraces him in an overwhelming outburst of kindly feeling when their favorite player makes a home run."5! To reformers, culture and play were ways to avoid the invidious priorities of industrialism, not to adapt to them. Managed play would replace the hedonism immigrant youngsters tried to buy with the wage. Playgrounds and kindergartens would be stages for enacting archaic rituals from rural Europe. In this dramaturgical conception of immigrant life, ethnic culture was less a collective invention than an innocent performance for the patrician elite. Immigrant culture was to be externally controlled, yet selfenclosed; emotionally uplifting, yet devoidl of sex or pleasure. Here was the ideal: Many Chicago citizens who attended the fil'st annual meeting of the National Playground Association of America, will n€\'er forget the long summer day in the large playing field filled during the morning with hundreds of little children romping through the kindergarten games, in the afternoon with the young men and girls contending in athletic sP0l1S; and the e\'ening light made gay by the bright colored garments of Italians. Lithuanians. Norwegians. and a dozen other nationalities, reproducing theil' old dances and festi\'als for the pleasure of the more stolid Amfwicans,
Addams wondered whether this was" a forecast of what we may yet see accomplished through a dozen agencies promoting public recreation which are springing up in every city of America."52 But the gangs found popular culture both more immediate and more realistic than this staged parody of bygone days. And so, although the lectures, music, and theatre the settlements offered were calculated to approximate "the fascinations of the S-cent theatre," they generally failed in their aim. But the location and layout of public space associated \-vith the settlement idea of "healthy recreation" had more serious consequences. Over one-third of the 90 new parks and 100 municipal playgrounds established in Chicago between 1900 and 1917 were located in tenement districts, then, as now, creating new hardships for some. Riis pointed to the mass evictions that the parks and playgrounds required and quipped, "those who would fight for the poor must fight the poor to dlo it. " 5.3 The settlements, by supplementing the diminishing functions of traditional institutions, reconstituted patriarchal control over the neighborhood. Although Addams complained that bosses continued to give gang members nickels to see a show or shoot a game of pool and bailed them out if the cops caught them playing craps, "junking," ditching schooL or brawling, although gangs that participated in Chicago's 1919 race riot were immune to punishment because they were the "palace guard" for officials of the political machine, still the dislocation of the machine made settlements an important intermediary between City Hall and the urban poor.54 Reform, rapid immigration, and the concentration of political and economic power jeopardized the gang's capacity to defend its spatial autonomy. Thrasher reported that the gangs were only part of the machine-under the pressures he notes, the claim is that the machines weakened.
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the Valley gang on 15th Street, Chicago, ... had an active life of over 30 years. In the earlier period, the' district was controlled politically and socially by the gang. But the population began to change, the members of the gang no longer had parents on the police force and they came into conflict with the police (as a result of which two policemen were killed).55 The child-savers wanted a world where loyalty and hard work earned society's rewards. Like their contemporaries in the Socialist Party, they thought vagrancy, ganging, and play were frivolous pursuits and dangerous if extended beyond childhood. More hardheaded-or more worriedindustrialists saw the gang ethos itself as criminal. Still, a compelling argument can be made that the gang ethos reflected impending economic changes more faithfully than the ideology of the industrial elite or the reformers. The progressives and industrialists thought the war against scarcity required that increasing amounts of labor power be congealed in industrial production. Some analysts now think that the material basis for this presumption had been overcome by 1900 and that the capacity to produce basic goods had reached a level beyond which any substantial increase owing to mechanization required a reduction in manual labor.56 From this vantage, the extension of work is irrational, less a reflection of economic necessity than of capital's political need to sustain profits against the social implications of new technologies. The gang's refusal to work more accurately comprehended this situation than the socialists' and trade unionists' plea for full employment, the recognition of skill, and worker control based on knowledge; so did its demand that play occupy time previously allotted to work rather than provide an uplifting experience to make work seem more interesting. The immigrant gangs were not alone in their sense that neither law, nor school, nor work should obstruct access to social and cultural goods. Park called this their "sentimentality," Thomas their "wish for new experience," and Thrasher "the romantic ideaL" A host of young intellectuals in the 1920s also believed that industrial progress had made the right to social goods and free time unconditional. The gang ethos had to do with what Walter Weyl called "the disequilibrium between social surplus and social misery." The young Walter Lippmann ably expressed the gang's romantic vision when he wrote, "But in the midst of plenty, the imagination becomes ambitious, rebellion against misery is at last justified and dreams have a basis in fact."57
GANGS AND SCHOOL: THE DEMAND FOR A COMPREHENSIVE EDUCATION By the mid-nineteenth-century, formal education had already supplanted kin, community, and workshop-based training, but the public schools barely affected most girls, blacks, immigrants, rural migrants, and children of the urban poor. Throughout the 1830s and 40s, almost half of New York
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City's school-age youngsters stayed home or worked instead of attending classes, and nonattendance was greatest in the immigrant, black, and proletarian wards. In the early 1850s attendance actually fell 10 percent. As late as 1883, of the 36,000 school-age youngsters living in Albany, New York, only about 35 percent registered in public schools. On the average day, about 9000 125 percent) attended classes.58 After mid-century, however, truancy laws became common. Police could typically arrest boys "8-16, who habitually wander or loiter about the streets or public places or anywhere beyond the proper control of their parents ... during school." And, after his third truancy, a boy could be committed to a reformatory with the selectman's approval. While these vague statutes were directed at a range of youthful activities, including ganging, before the 1880s their main object was boys who had broken completely with formal authority, i.e., with the school and their parents. Until then, a craftsman was recognized to have the right to his children's labor, and officials even acknowledged that subsistence wages made universal education impossible. One New York Superintendent commented: Until the State is prepared to enforce compulsory education and at the same time assure the parent, as a condition of surrendering the time of his child, certain employment for himself, at wages sufficient for family support, there seems to be no way by which the parent can Iightfully be deprived of the servitude and earnings of the child:;9
But changes in industrial culture in the late nineteenth century demanded a new relation between formal schooling and the law. The universal, cooperative character of factory work (and neighborhood resistance to it) suggested that education be reconceptualized as a "mass" project to instill collective, not individual discipline. Until the late nineteenth century, the poor were largely trained outside the public schools. They attended a variety of privalte special, corporate, night, mill, charity, and parochial institutions that sought to overcome precociousness with "good work habits." Authorities in these schools had unique power to confine and punish, presumably because their unruly charges threatened the social order. Now, previous distinctions between low-income troublemakers and respectable youth and between skill-oriented education and training designed to impose conformity gave way before the frontal assault of gangs and unions. After 1850, the organization and curriculum of public, special, and reform schools gradually converged,60 and gangs confronted the authorities most directly in school. Reform school procedures were rationalized in response to inmate resistance as well as the changing diSCiplinary needs of industry. After Daniel Credan and friends burned the Massachus.etts Reform School in 1859, cruel punishment was abolished there and a modified cottage plan was introduced. In Wisconsin and New York, stabbings and burnings were commonplace throughout the 1860s and 70s, and in the 90s, escape rates from Wisconsin reformatories were four times higher than a decade earlier. The
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manual labor schools of the antebellum South, established to teach the sons of white artisans trades and farming, were often disrupted when students broke agricultural implements and abused livestock. Recidivism, running away, incorrigibility, the refusal to do detail work, fires, riots, assaults on guards, even inmate strikes-all made the reformatory unmanageable. A populist fever dominated reformatories. This was the George Jr. Republic reformatory yell: Cess! Boom! Hear ye this! Down with the boss; down with the tramp! Down with the pauper; down with the scamp.61
Traditional reformatories emphasized individual contrition revealed through self-denial, submission to authority, isolation, and elaborate work routines often tied to contract labor. But after 1870, the emphasis shifted to group programs in vocational and physical education and to military drill and organization. And managers of the refuges wanted their special authority extended to public schools since, they believed, the state's provision of education to the poor was simply another exercise of its police power. Reformatory procedures did become an important basis for public school reform. During the depression of the early 1870s, mill owners throughout New England, hoping to get a full day's work from local children and overcome growing truancy and absenteeism, combined mill and delinquent children in a single school and applied among poor, immigrant youngsters methods that were previously accepted only for schooling social deviants. At first this change reflected local shifts in the costs and availability of labor. But widespread and official adaptation of this arrangement dramatized the failure of traditional schools to adequately manage the volatile immigrant character. Reformatories were now taken more often as models for schools and factories, less often as alternatives. David Snedden of Columbia's Teacher's College argued that reformatories not only offered better education than public schools, they recognized that education might become a means of disciplining children to the standards of social efficiency. Gymnastics, swimming, music, manual and then vocational education were all tried first in reformatories. Then they were used in public schools in place of efforts to "transmit cultural heritage." Wisconsin reformatory superintendent Henrickson saw his school as a model of control for parents and teachers. It would manage idleness "during the long vacations of the year, during Saturday and Sunday of each week, during the morning and before school each day and particularly the long late evenings after school each day." The control of time and space was crucial. "Uncontrolled space," Henrickson felt, was" alone sufficient to corrupt any child." An article in the Journal of Education was more explicit: "If we were to define the public school as an instrument for diSintegrating mobs," it said, "we would indicate one of its most important purposes."62 Educators John Dewey and Jane Addams hoped that "learning by doing" and similar innovations would sustain workshop values against the mas-
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sification associated with factory life. But, instead, training originally designed to support the crafts was transformed into training that used craft work instrumentally, as a means of instilling the discipline required by modern factories and markets. For instance, by the turn of the century, industrial drawing was metamorphosized into drawing for mental and moral discipline (coincident with the displacement of the mechanic in the production process) and was extended to all children. Simultaneously, kindergartens were transformed from part of a grand project to Americanize immigrants into a way of adapting working-class children to the routines of school life. This narrowing of educational goals reflected the more general retreat behind institutional walls, where the power to impose socialization seemed secure.63 To Ralph Waldo Emerson and his cohort, Nature had symbolized a transcendent context for democratic ideals and a place for backyard intelligence. Now this tradition was reinterpreted by progressive educators, combined with ritual exercises in national chauvinism, and promoted as an alternative source of imagery to mass culture and urban industrial life. As Addams observed: The experiments which are being made in public schools to celebrate the national holidays, the changing seasons, the birthdays of heroes, the planting of trees, are slowly developing little ceremonials which may in time work out into pageants of genuine beauty and significance .... [this] natural ability to express their emotions through symbols gi\'es the securest possible foundation [to culture].64
The progressives' first impulse was to impose traditional and individualistic values, using harsh disciplinary measures. The immigrants, however, were thought to be "unable to understand that work was ennobling, a matter of pride, not economics."65 This refusal to understand forced native educators to approach their own ideals less as means of individual uplift than as instruments of collective discipline. There seemed to be little contradiction between Thomas Eliot's desire to populalize the Great Books and his proposal that schools assume the administrative functions of the Juvenile Court. The extension of corporal punishment, overcrowded classrooms, the extension of the school day and year, the reintroduction of rote learning, the use of manual and vocational education and compulsory attendance laws-all reflect the transformation of diSCipline from a personal act directed at particular individuals into a deliberate social act, a "social discipline." vVhen educators developed this new approach to administration and curriculum, they were largely responding to their most immediate problems of discipline and training. But this approach converged with other attempts to replace individual control by collective control and with the needs of expanding commmodity production for comprehensive obedience.B6 By 1900, truancy laws were used systematically to disrupt ganging and to jail children who resisted school. And school attendance had risen. But at-
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tendance figures may conceal the most important aspect of the gang's resistance. For while gangs surely organized the refusal to attend school, they were less opposed to education than to the individuated and competitive emulation that the traditional school bureaucracy enforced. One gang member complained to Addams about their principal: "He never asks what we are going to be; we can't get a word out of him, excepting lessons and keeping quiet in the halls." When learning was mediated through the social network of the gang, however, it was accepted and positively valued, even demanded. One juvenile put it perceptively: "The greatest incentive to pass in school was to keep in the class with the gang:'67 The Chicago Tri-Street Athletic Club's struggle shows how far gangs went to sustain authentic collectivity against and within changing institutional boundaries The TAC existed for about 3 years. When most of the gang entered high school, a change in the organization soon took place. The principal tried to shut out all activities and make high school a routine. The opposition of the gang was intense, but they dared not openly defy him. The result was a new organization composed of 13 boys, all but three of whom had been members of the TAC. It was called the "Hoodlums," and its fundamental purpose was to oust the new principal .... Of necessity it was a genuine secret society ... and opposed the high school fraternities.
Here, as elsewhere, the idea that school was a legitimate site for social activity was presented by the gang, not by school administrators or even by"enlightened" reformers attempting to coopt unruly youngsters. The principal stigmatized the gang, but they turned his label "hoodlum" into a symbol of heroic resistance. And they distinguished the genuine secrecy required for their political struggle against routine from the presumably superficial and ritual secrecy promoted by fraternities. 'the gang eventually succeeded in ousting the principal, and thereafter maintained its political presence as a wire-pulling group, transferring to the school a function previously performed at the base of the political machine to secure services. Ultimately, to counter the gang's growing control over the school's inner life, the newofficials enforced a decree that recognized "clubs," but only if they abandoned their general social character-implicitly accepting the school itself as the prime social entity-and identified with a specialized activity such as journalism, poetry, debating, or art. The TAC considered the new rule "bunk" and resumed its secret status. The gang was willing to learn only so long as it controlled the time and space in which curriculm was presented. From the standpoint of educators interested in cultural hegemony, not simply in teaching immigrants to read and write, the gang's distinction between the institution's curriculum and their own freely chosen social activity was unacceptable. The curriculum was changed, but the TAC had to be expelled. The TAC story illustrates that the demand for mass education of a comprehensive sort was implicit in the gang's refusal to have it any other way.
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The schools successfully confined a cohort of immigrant youngsters and broke links between marginal work, theft, and play. Nonetheless, immigrant gangs taught school authorities to socialize their conceptions of education, abandon individual uplift, and assume the burdens of adapting youth, as a social mass, to urban factory life. Meanwhile, gang members turned competitive disobedience into a popular basis for peer emulation, forcing reformers to reconceptualize delinquency first as a general trait of immigrant youth, then as a stage through which all adolescents passed regardless of class or ethnicity. Eventually, institutional tracking replaced early expulsion or incarceration, and industry made room even for the slowest youngsters. Then too, keeping youngsters in school meant that their families, not the state, assumed the costs of nurturing each "little John Brown."
MODELS OF WORK AND FAMILY LIFE Nineteenth-century reformers viewed the prison and the family as worlds apart from industry, as public and private laboratories for deconstructing the collective activity of labor and protecting individuals from the barbarism of the market. Fot' immigrant sons, however, factory and prison, like reformatory and school, were contrasting metaphors for the single reality of extended work. And immigrant daughters saw fewer differences between the family and the factory than between work under patriarchal direction and the relative autonomy achieved in concer1t with other working women. Before long, the practice as well as the logic of these institutions converged. The prison-factory embodied new means of controlling male laborers; and the extended patriarchy linked control over unpaid housework to patriarchal domination of female wage labor in industry and the services.69 Although antebellum reformers at first opposed turning prisons into factories, preferring to extend individualized outdoor rehabilitation, the prison-factory developed gradually from parallel political pressures on prison authorities and industrialists. In highly competitive industries like boot and shoe manufacture, state offers to subsidize plant and equipment inside the prisons made unskilled convicts an attractive reserve work force, and the collective discipline of the factory· offered prison authorities an alternative to the failing Auburn system of prison control. By mid-century, convicts ran many prisons and reformatories (and as a consequence of organizing for their rights, had significantly raised the costs of imprisonment). Although the factory system embodied the sociability convicts demanded, it simultaneously reduced sociability from an expression of collective autonomy to an apparently automatic process. By rejecting individual rehabilitation, the factory system could rationally subordinate time, movement, and social behavior to a depersonalized discipline and return hegemony over convict life to the state?O After 1870, the comprehensive social discipline used in prisons made it seem as if the inherent logic of collective work and technology controlled
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the convicts, not prison guards. Individual uplift was forgotten. Defending himself against the charge that his convicts might compete with skilled shoemakers, the Superintendent of Auburn Prison replied, "I will only say that while the shops connected with this institution turn out a million pair of shoes annually, I have never discharged a man who had been taught in this institution how to make a pair of shoes."71 If the factory provided a social framework for discipline in prisons, prison discipline became a basis for reorganizing detail factory work. As in the school and the prison, talking was commonly prohibited in the latenineteenth-century factory. Factory boys were frequently flogged, their pay was docked for minor infractions, and, as in reformatories, each misbehavior had its designated punishment. The boys were kept in sharply ruled boarding houses like the girls in antebellum textile towns. Plants were fortresses: they were locked to the outside once work began, contact with friends or family was strictly forbidden, and passes were needed to leave during the workday.72 If boys were systematically separated from their families and farms, female workers were controlled through reconstituted patriarchal relations. Women suffered the same petty regulation as child labor. Silk weavers were fined as much as $2 for having a paper in their hands, for washing, eating bread at their loom, being late, and doing imperfect work. At Alexander Smith & Sons' carpet factory in Yonkers, New York, native females were punished if they looked out the windows and were forbidden to talk during working hours. Another dimension to the authority over women became clear when 2000 workers, mainly women, struck the Yonkers plant in 1885. A Mr. Sullivan said ... he had been offered directly from the Smith Carpet Company the promise of constant and lucrative employment if he would coerce his four daughters who are strikers into going back to work. When he told the agent ... he did not see how he could do it, the agent told him that as to the two eldest who are of age, he could give them the alternative of going to work or leaving his house, and that if the two minors refused to work he could call an officer and have them arrested. The company would take care of the rest and would recompense him whether he succeeded or not?3 For these young women, family, factory, and church were not competing spheres as they were for men. They were points on a continuum dominated by a patriarchal trinity, Father-Boss-Priest, and backed up by the police. The comprehensiveness of patriarchal authority explains why young immigrant women saw leaving home, withholding wages, refusing to enter factories, and promiscuity as a single rebellion. After 1920, women would be urged to escape home for the land of corporate opportunity governed by "experts, entrepreneurs and bureaucrats," the new patriarchal trinity. In the l890s, however, factory and family were still cut from similar cloth, and women sought autonomy by creating a social life between work and home. Their efforts to express their new status collectively (described below) taught the
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corporate elite to extend and socialize patriarchal relations. Marriage and unpaid housework were expected to "cure" the "moral insanity" that drove young women to the streets. In the New York Refuge, girls' work unlike boys' work, was unpaid. But without the discipline of money, the girls were far harder to train than the boys. They were furious when the Ladies' Committee of the Refuge offered advice on proper conduct in place of pay. Throughout the nineteenth century, girls disrupted, burned, and escaped from the refuges. One Philadelphia official thought that reforming females was" a chimera which it is useless to pursue." But Charles Loring Brace's Children's Aid Society established boardinghouses in the 1870s to teach the rudiments of mopping, cooking, and sewing to "the wild ragged little girls ... who flitted through lanes" gathering rags, stealing, and doing errands for "pin-money." Brace admitted, however, that even girls who appeared to conform outwardly to the imposed regimen of household chores continued to inwardly resist. He thought this was due to the "superficiality" and "lack of depth" of low-income families and to a "constitutional objection to work."74 The social life of immigrant women was sharply limited. Thrasher could find no female gangs in Chicago and only one athletic team composed of women. Nevertheless, the large number of young women institutionalized for "immorality" typically had avoided family and factory by living together in a boarding house, working in a department store, and going dancing (and soliciting) all with the same group of girls. Numerous petitions to the Juvenile Court cite the "refusal to do housework," "young girls who grow impatient with hard work," and the use of theft and prostitution to avoid housework, marriage, and the factory. These young women created a community that paralleled the communities of single, immigrant men, and used part-time prostitution and low-paid service work to root their social lives materially. These acts mark a rebellion that is something more than the byproduct of "grinding poverty." The alternative to constructing an independent world was what Addams termed "factory madness"-a life of isolation, an impoverished marriage, and intolerable boredom. She reports the hospitalization of an Italian girl for batting her head against the wall. "So nearly as 'dull grownups' could understand, it had been an hysterical revolt against factory work by day and 'no fun in the evening.'" Prostitution is classically viewed as petit bourgeois self-degradation imposed on an itinerant female popUlation by economic necessity. This description may portray "professionals," but not the vast majority of immigrant women who solicited as part of a broader class culture. Perhaps 15 women were deserted in turn-of-the-century Chicago for every one who was officially divorced. Still, the Chicago Vice Commission's conclusion that sexual vice was caused by abandonment, divorce, abuse of the marriage relation, and "bad home conditions" was hardly justified. Instead, many part-time prostitutes were fleeing the "normal" families that the Commission proposed to strengthen for jobs that paid bare subsistence?6
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Alvin Johnson was close when he traced urban vice to the meeting between "the army ofunmanied [male] workers" and the women who made a "quasi-voluntary choice of prostitution as a means of livelihood." Prostitution was the only means by which thousands of single women could supplement their wage. The professionals became prostitutes as soon as they left their families or came to the city, possibly because they remained isolated from other women. But, the part-timers also worked in department stores, factories, offices, restaurants, or as domestics. Of 51 delinquents aged 15 who were institutionalized for "immorality," 30 had already worked for wages. "Marcella," for instance, made $6 a week in a department store. She paid $3 weekly for meals, $2 for rent, and 69¢ for carfare. The department store also demanded that she have 24 shirtwaists at 98¢ apiece. For every mistake she made, for every moment she was late to her place, there was a registered system of fines. Hustling three nights a week met her costs and mitigated the punitive consequences of client-contact work. In addition, the seasonal nature of much female employment, e.g., in sales and the garment industry, made quasi-prostitution ("sleeping with one or two men when out of work") an attractive alternative to debt or returning home.77 Prostitution was "quasi-voluntary" in another sense. Occasional prostitution was seen as part of the refusal to be domesticated, Americanized, and proletarianized. It was a socially organized activity deeply embedded in working-class immigrant culture. As such, it alienated craftsmen or socialists whose claims to recognition depended on "respectability." Still, for the mass of single male and female immigrant laborers with no permanent ties to family and community, regularized heterosexual sociability was essential. Mass solicitation overcame inequities between male and female wages, and in its self-constituted world of money, sex, and sociability combined rebellion against the family (housework), the church (narrow morality), and the factory (wages). Reformers found the popularity of prostitution unintelligible. "The average girl does not enjoy work outside her home," claimed the head of Chicago's Refuge, proposing a curriculum of "housework, dressmaking, and some arts and crafts." But young prostitutes had another assessment: They said they had run away from home so that they would not have to go to school. They met a fellow who got them a job in a department store, where they each make $5.50 a week. They can't live on this so they "hustle" on the side. They think this is better than going to school, and not having any spending money. Besides, they were their own boss?8
After 1900, women entered the labor market in disproportionately higher numbers than men. Industrialization socialized some means of household production; for instance, women could buy much of what they had formerly made. Still, the reconstitution offamily income into wages isolated housework and reduced it to mechanical routine. As Heidi Hartmann suggests, the housewife's dependence on outside income intensified her exploitation, making the ability
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of her working kin to extract her labor a measure of family surplus. Men's wages that were high enough to support a family permitted middle-class women to stay home and participate in "a woman's sphere." But working immigrant daughters lacked any incentive to stay. According to one report, only 6 percent of 200 "respectable working girls" living at home controlled their wages. Working-class females got the support they needed from "a group of girls," not at home?9 Thus part-time prostitution resulted from low wages and women's status as "free" domestic labor, but it was used to resist wage discipline. Prostitutes averaged from $50 to $70 a week, compared to Marcella's $6 in the department store, making hustling a way to eventually open a shop or a boarding house. And, soliciting part-time permitted immigrant females to avoid domestic service and factory work. As one former domestic turned prostitute put it, "I don't want to work at that hard graft anymore ... the ladies when they got money to hire seIVants imagine they had some kind of dog to kick around, and I don't want to be kicked around."so British prostitutes had been seIVants or factory operatives. In the United States, part-time prostitutes worked primarily in the new mass-culture consumer and service sectors, as nurses, teachers, salesgirls, stenographers, and clerks; but their hours and working conditions resembled those of factory jobs. Department store women worked in unventilated basements 9lj2 to 11 hours a day during the week and 13 hours on Saturday, and they were frequently laid off. Sales and clerical work made possible sexual aggressiveness outside the patriarchal realm. Before the character armor of the receptionist had been rationally fitted to suit the calculus of the quick turnover, young women looked to sales and service for the egalitarian sociability that had been driven from the modern factory, family and neighborhood.s1 Although the personality this work required reinforced the anti-puritanical motif in prostitution, hustling was used to subordinate the command of industrial marketing-"sell yourself"-to the subversive goal of female solidarity. Child-savers saw prostitutes as tragic products of broken homes and thought the choice of "immorality" over domesticity a fundamental flaw in the immigrant character. And bourgeois feminists could not recognize a woman's community whose independence was established against wage work and the family, not within these spheres. For the part-timers who were institutionalized in large numbers, prostitution was also a way to reappropriate sociability. It was less an extension of patriarchal bondage than the collective procurement of money, sex, and even family in direct opposition to all patriarchal structures, including the law. Professionals lived and worked as individual dependents, serving pimps or madams and soliciting competitively in brothels and bars. But part-timers moved through public space together, like the male gangs, meeting men in public groups, in department store waiting rooms, dance halls and pool halls, ice-cream parlors, and the settlement houses. Also, like the males, waitresses, salesgirls, seIVants, and factory operatives who solicited
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were constantly on the move. They drifted in and out of work. They too were "tramps." Omnipresent patriarchal control constrained the women's rebellion, whatever its parallels to male-bonded crime. Boys, like girls, were physically abused, their wages were appropriated, and they were commonly cited for running away on payday and refusing to work. But unlike prostitution, theft, the major crime the male gangs committed, was widely viewed as a "mass crime" (to borrow Foucault's term), an illegality whose substantial product provided indispensable support for working class family life. The sense that stealing basic necessities such as coal was a public right softened familial censure of male gang members.82 The progressive model had work, family life and the community experience created by the settlement movement in harmonious juxtaposition, each reinforcing the other while simultaneously cushioning its most harmful effects. Part-time prostitution, however, offered women a means to reappropriate their time and resist familial dependence and entry into the factory. For boys, theft was the great loophole in a system that made the exchange of labor power for a wage essential for survival. Both crimes were practiced within the context of alternative families, the male gang and the community network of single-women. Still, prostitution and the theft of goods were less threatening to the Progressive model than the broader tendency they symbolized for working class youth to "steal time and space." Whatever their differences, working-class males and females united in opposition to the progressives' agonized efforts to demarcate and control the sites for work, play and family life. To these turn-of-the-century youngsters, employment and unemployment, like theft and consumption or hard work and play, were less discrete activities than moments on a continuum of struggle in what was to them, a social factory.
THE IWW. FORD. AND THE PROLETARIAN PERSPECTIVE As is clear from the foregoing discussion, immigrant workers in the Progres-
sive Era were socialized in urban gangs. The move from street to factory accompanied the evolution of the gang ethos into a truly proletarian perspective toward work. The IWW turned this perspective into a revolutionary strategy, and Henry Ford adapted it in his egalitarian approach to wages (equal pay for all workers) and production. Mass syndicalism and mass production took immigrant ganging to its limits. The gang ethos evolved gradually. Gang members approached work as a mass project that included everything needed to survive-not simply manual toil, but theft, consumption, mobility, rioting, even sex. The "factory" was neither a place apart nor a permanent residence. It was a complex of authoritarian relations in which the broadened notion of work was embedded. Wages, finally, were the aggregate quantity of goods and services the mass accumulated-not, as the progressives had it, individual monetary
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rewards for predetermined quantities of physical labor. Indeed, wages were detached from productivity altogether. And the gangs' uprootedness and mobility were key. With anarchic precision, gangs disrupted the orchestrations reformers arranged to harmonize capitalist dissonance. Having subsumed all the functions of traditional institutions to a singular interest in discipline, reformers nevertheless defended the institutions. But the gangs irreverently transgressed their boundaries as well, struggling against the playground director, the probation officer, the social worker, the movie proprietor and the school principal as if each ran a factory. So, progressives combined their parallel efforts at restraint. Only industrialists failed to do so. Although immigrant youth approached all required activity as collective work and demanded the maximum reward, regardless of individual performance, industrialists had not adopted the reorganizational strategies being implemented in other institutions. In 1900, most still equated the mass worker with the detail laborer of the nineteenth century, and depended for discipline on task divisions defined by obsolete job categories administered by foremen, and on monetary incentives for individual effort and loyalty. Taylorism (a method for reorganizing work to enhance the efficiency of individual workers) exacerbated these tendencies by reaffirming that "more work" meant harder and more closely supervised work. The marginality and impoverishment of unskilled labor was embodied in a working-class type-rare in the early nineteenth-century-the casual, migratory laborer or "tramp." Tramps extended the gang ethos to work and transformed the hardships that industry imposed on them into social liabilities for capital. In 1910, 3.5 million of the lOA million unskilled male workers in the United States moved regularly, by discharge or quits, from one work site to another. In one sample of Chicago migratories, 67 percent" admitted their intention of 'floating' with no idea of looking for steady work." Half of these men had left their last job voluntarily. In the railroad and lumber camps, in the fruit plants and in general construction, men worked an average of only 8 to 14 days, and a 50 percent weekly turnover was common. This "strike in detail," or organized "drifting off a job," was read by capitalists as a demand for money and better conditions. Managerial handbooks urged industrialists to clean up their plants, advertise superior working conditions, and give bonuses to employees for recruiting friends. Competitive wage incentives were used to lure seasonal labor in construction and fruit processing. But better pay had an unexpected consequence; "when a laborer has earned a sum which road tradition has fixed as affluence," reported Carlton Parker, "he quits." The problem the British faced in India was replicated in Western labor camps. The tramp fixed his "endurance" on a job "by the sum usage describes as a 'jungle stake' taken in relation to the wage in the district." The higher the monetary incentive, the shorter his stay! This autonomous constitution of a collective living standard, albeit around con-
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ditions of near misery, transformed the individual subsistence wage into the material basis for social vagrancy, a life-style that parodied the concept of a "standard of living," which contemporary advertisers and credit merchants were popularizing in working-class suburbs.83 Social vagrancy developed from a myriad of private decisions to leave family, community, and work place behind. But enforced migration had also made conventional family life impossible, deprived the laborer of such basic rights as the residentially based franchise, and accustomed him to a daily life so bereft of traditional comforts that little but immediate gratification was appealing. In addition to being unskilled, the typical tramp was young-half of the Chicago sample were under 30. He was "womanless"in a California sample, 76 percent were unmarried and another 7 percent had deserted their wives; in a Chicago sample, 90 percent were single: in Detroit, by 1920, there were 85,000 more men than women. And he was alone-almost half of the Chicago group had broken all ties to relatives. The young hoodlums of the 1890s, it seemed, had yet to be civilized.84 These casual laborers were responding to conditions shared by virtually all unskilled laborers. Outside the migratory stream, fewer than half of all working-class fathers approached the minimum standard of decent living. In 1912, the typical Chicago slaughter house paid 80 percent of its employees less than twenty cents an hour. Even with steady employment, this was not a subsistence wage. A Federal Immigration Commission reported in 1910 that not one of the twelve basic American industries paid the average head of a family within $100 a year of minimum family subsistence. So, a life-style that lacked the urgent minimums of nutrition, shelter, clothing, and physical health was usua1.85 These impoverished unskilled laborers understood the line of the IWW, though it was anathema to official labor. Parker calls the IWW "the revolt organization of the migratories." The IWW organizers followed the gang's lead, treating industry's need for a marginal and mobile proletariat as a revolutionary tactic. They modeled their style of agitation on the rhythms of tramping, cutting wood today, stealing fruit tomorrow, picking the fruit the next day. They recognized the l~adership potential of hierarchies based on personal charisma which formed naturally in the gang-like collectivities tramps moved in. Employers saw the labor market as a directionless, leaderless, and diffuse mass; the IWW approached the same phenomenon, from within, as a loose egalitarian network of groups led by the most strategically advanced "gang." This explains the influence a camp local of IWW cadre could quickly exercise over a large mass of relative strangers. Of a Chicago sample of factory workers only 8 percent admitted actual membership in the IWW. But over a third shared its view that "the present political system should be completely destroyed." 86 Parker cited the IWW's role in the Wheatland hop fields "riot" in California: in this camp a loosely caught together camp local of the I\t\IW, with about 30 active members ... through a spasmodic action and with the aid of deplorable camp conditions, dominated a heterogeneous mass of 2800 unskilled laborers
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for 3 days ... 7-800 were from the hobo class ... about 400 knew the philosophy of the M-W and could also sing some of its songs. Of the 100 odd "card men" of the IWW some had been through (he San Diego affair, some had been soap-boxers in Fresno, a dozen had been in the Free Speech fight in Spokane ... every one of the 5000 laborers in California [with any ties to the IWW] considered himself a "camp delegate."87 According to Hany Braverman and others, "deskilling" was the corporate initiative that overcame the obstacle craft labor posed to turn-of-the-century expansion; but this picture is inverted when we understand the threat the mass of unskilled casual laborers posed so long as industry had no means to integrate them into economic growth. Further, the goods and seIVices appropriated by this underutilized mass of unskilled labor power made "unproductive consumption" a pressing political problem. Social vagrancy represented the political organization of destitution. From capital's standpoint, it turned de-skilling into a demand.88 The solution, argued Warner in his treatise on charity, was to rationalize industrial production. He claimed that "two-thirds of the real or simulated destitution (in the U.S.) could be wiped out by a more perfect adjustment of the supply and demand for labor, and a more enlightened police administration."89 Ford accomplished this under the frontal assault ofIWW tramps. The assembly line developed between 1910 and 1920. Detroit's auto industry combined highly developed technology and an abundance of skilled machinists with an "open shop" town where immigrant labor was widely recruited. But these factors were only catallyzed by social vagrancy. In 1912, the turnover rate in auto workers was 48 percent. In June 1913, after an informal leader at Studebaker's No.3 plant was dismissed, the IWW led most of the 3500 day-shift hands out on strike. A prolonged labor crisis followed, as IWW-type militancy spread through the plants. To maintain a work force approaching 14,000 men in 1913, Ford hired over 52,000. As elsewhere, quits outnumbered discharges, in this case six to one. Jack Russell cites the turnover figures as a measure of the peculiar alienation of assembly line production. \lVhat was unique to this situation, however, was not the problem that workers posed for Ford, but his solution.9o Ford responded to organized drifting on three levels simultaneously. Hoping to stabilize the labor market, he introduced the $5 a day wage. Gramsci has emphasized the extent to which the wage was an instance of Ford's moralism, particularly when combined with the army of social workers (his "sociology department") he set loose on his men. But, while the new wage certainly curtailed labor turnover in Dearborn-after 1914, it was less than 5 percent-it had a more fundamental importance. As an average payment for a fixed quantity oflabor input-regardless of who actually did the work-it subsumed all previous means of control in monetary form and sharply reduced the strategic significance of turnover as a potential initiative by labor. And it managed moral behavior only indirectly, as pre-
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Keynesian incentive to proper consumer behavior. Indeed, while other industrialists intensified discipline in futile efforts to impose detail work on casual laborers, Ford fired supervisors and social workers who were too rough. Ford recognized that the workers' labor power was collective, a generalized function of their existence as a "mass," and he adapted their perspective. He therefore simplified jobs to suit all comers and minimized the cost of breaking new men in. So that, by 1926, half of his work force could be trained in less than a day. Taylorism and time-study made workers work faster and depended on line-foremen to regiment individuals in small groups. "Fordism," as it came to be called, transferred control over the rate of work to its technological means, and regulated the speed of production according to average rates of productivity and demand. Individual capacities had no place in its calculations. Finally, since handling the work force rather than "controlling men," now presented the major problem, Ford transferred the power over the line from foremen to general management. And he used profit sharing to cultivate managerial interest in productivity and socialize the responsibility for capital's expansion.91 The IWW turned tramping into a political asset by elaborating the ethos of immigrant ganging as social vagrancy. The gang had shattered the traditional boundaries that shielded native laborers from a barbaric marketplace, and the IWW extended this assault to traditional work, demanding to be recognized by the factory but refusing to be assimilated by obsolete modes of production. It socialized the tramp's ability to withstand misery: gains won through the strike-in detail were not hoarded but shared, by organized drifting. The "jungle stake" detached wages from individual productivity and destroyed any connection between job, skill, and payment. The entire strategy depended on the anonymity of the individual and his ability to move freely from job to job. Ford effectively reappropriated the time tramps had" stolen" by mechanizing the speed of work and organizing its control managerially. And "Ford" appropriated space as well, "putting every square foot of factory floor to productive use." Ford replaced the collective worker of nineteenth-century industry with the "mass worker." And he replaced the individual wage. For Ford, wages were not individual incentives but "the general rate of income to be used in conjunction with the dynamics of the system ... the general rate of capital to be injected within a framework of planned development." Ford had less interest in crystallizing job categories in the work force than the IWW had in organizing them, and it was Ford, not the Wobblies, who actively recruited blacks. The immigrants continued to withhold their loyalty. But Ford demanded none.
CONCLUSION Radical scholars have resolved the paradox of progressivism in two ways. The older view traces reform to craft unionism, popUlism, and urban
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radicalism. "Revisionists" are more cynical and argue that, like the "enlightened" elite that thought them up, the reforms are entirely bourgeois. This view culminates in Braverman's argum.ent that growth since 1900 depends on capital's misuse of managerial technology to deskill and alienate labor. "Progress" is thus its opposite, that is, a defeat.92 Both approaches treat the immigrants as objects, neglect working-class activity outside the factory, and treat modernization either as wholly subjective (e.g., an elite "plan") or else as revealing the so-called logic of capital. And the revisionists in particular adopt the socialist and craft view of class power: namely that workers are defeated when their skills are incorporated in technology and when consumer ideology reduces their historic demand for justice to the single cry, "More money, less work!" Platt interprets juvenile reform primarily from this revisionist perspective, arguing that the child-savers were a traditional elite defending business. This may be so. But by treating policy simply as the institutional practice of elite ideology, Platt's work converges with recent work on education, advertising, medicine, city manager government, and settlement work, which accepts neither the progressive character of reform nor the obvious importance of struggle in determining this outcome.93 Even as outsiders, immigrants extracted so great a cost from the elite that erstwhile conservatives went to almost revolutionary lengths to bring them "in." And the elite revolution was patterned after the gang ethos. Since immigrant indifference could not be overcome, even by criminalizing juvenile behavior per se, the mass worker had to be exploited on his own terms, as abstract labor power, regardless of age, sex, ethnicity, or training. After 1900, social services, consumer goods, and educational, recreational, and cultural opportunities, once only available to the elite, became mass activities. But the gangs accomplished more than this. Through struggles to appropriate time and space, they broadened the meaning and structure of work and play. This achievement derived from pre-existing objective factors. American capitalism had the technical and political tools needed to incorporate the influx of more than ten million productive workers. And what Sergio Bologna describes as "an inexhaustible ability to tum conflict into rationalization and development" was rooted in a drastic reduction of the political space within which workers functioned (e.g., the destruction of "saloon democracy") and in control over skilled labor in plants. The gangs could strategically outflank their adversaries because they controlled the main material force that would be the basis of progress, their own underutilized labor power. The gangs taught the elite that to expand, capital had to socialize its benefits, albeit within the framework of extended exploitation provided by the progressives. The reformers wanted to sustain traditional settings of individualism. Thus the "family wage" would keep the home together; the juvenile court would resurrect the family; the playground would sustain the innocence of play; and the settlement would create an insulated and managed culture. Ford's sociology department would protect family and religious solidarity in
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Dearborn despite the subversive indifference to community bred on the assembly line. "Domestic science" would teach women that they could continue to perlorm domestic chores efficiently, even if they worked outside the home. And manual education would employ traditional crafts to impose social discipline. The conservative bias is clear. Despite this, legal reform and parallel reforms in education, cultural activity, and work were progressive. The Juvenile Court acknowledged in its practice what it denied in theory: crime was a social phenomenon, not an individual act. This was true of its causes (poverty, family breakdown, and industrialism), its practitioners (the gangs), and its objectives (social justice and "fun"). To Addams and Thrasher, crime was "development by other means." Faced with the so-called incorrigibility of juvenile resistance, Thrasher argued, reformers either could socially quarantine the delinquents, i.e., institutionalize them, or they could coopt the gang in its entirety and make its social ethos the basis for wholesale community reconstruction. Despite its individualist bias, Taylorism laid the technical basis for Fordism by abstracting the principles of work from particular jobs. And the Progressive reforms laid the social groundwork for incorporating the productive power of immigrant laborers in new technologies (e.g., mass production), new modes of distribution (mass consumption), and socialization (mass culture). In the end, more work came to mean not harder work but what appeared to be its opposite, the displacement of physical labor with machines and social planning. Class rule was extended during the Progressive Era, and through the very reforms the gangs helped impose. In 1920, basic industry remained nonunion and mass production in the auto industry had simultaneously helped reduce Europe to a heavily indebted junior partner and made obsolete the demand raised by skilled workers and socialists for "workers control" at the point of production. In the 1930s, Fordism took hold of the industrial imagination and mass production techniques became virtually identical with the manufacturing of goods, e.g., refrigerators, canned goods, typewriters, etc. From this vantage, the relegation of immigrant resistance to the nether world of "culture" becomes intelligible. But the fact that policies aided the expansion of capital explains neither the origin nor the substance of modernization. To Marx, capital was progressive because it could only accumulate amid class struggle. Its centrality in production depended on its incorporating the initiatives of its opposition into the dynamics of its expansion. The "life" of bourgeois society requires that labor's growing autonomy be displaced, not repressed, and brought into the process of economic development. In short, the extraordinary success of capital after the war reflects the intensity of class struggle in the United States, not its absence. Policymakers went to incredible lengths to avoid the economic take-off for which they are now given credit. First, they tried to instill traditional values through individual discipline. Next, they turned to more comprehensive forms of institutionalized repression, still hoping to build a cultural bulwark
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against the encroaching commercialism. Then, they were forced to reinterpret their own tradition, this time as a vehicle for collective discipline. These efforts converged and a new culture of comprehensive control was posed against the gang's attempt to universalize vagrancy. Institutional life increasingly lost its distinctiveness. Individualism was reduced to individuation, a purely ideological process with no material basis, and policymakers were forced to self-consciously confront the truth the immigrants had asserted all along: bourgeois social life was work. Immigrant laborers rejected the individualized ethos in every form. Their very numbers and interchangeability led them to despise invidious identifications of individual worth with status, job, skill, or personal wealth. They posed the internationalism and egalitarianism of their new communities against the sectoral divisions on which nineteenth-century work rested, including divisions between skilled and unskilled, productive and unproductive, employed and unemployed, and "factory" and "community." Unimpressed when the wage was used as all. incentive to hard work, they did the minimum needed to get money or goods. This refusal to be integrated into all. obsolete mode of production helped all. unwitting elite muster the courage to assume progress as the "tragic but necessary" burden of its continued power. The gangs were radical, but hardly revolutionary. The politics of ganging during the Progressive Era was limited by the objective role immigrant laborers played, within the overall development of capitalism, as the historical buffer between social capital and the masses of still unwaged women and land-owning blacks. During the Chicago race riots of 1919, the "superior organization, solidarity and morale" of the gangs helped direct the racist mobs to greater destruction. White ethnic gangs of "Dukies," "Hamburgs," "Shielders," "Sparklers," and "Colts" led the attacks on adjacent black neighborhoods, bombing black homes, burning property, and attacking and murdering black men.93 The enthusiasm with which white working-class gangs assaulted black neighborhoods put them squarely on the side of the machine and the settlements.94 The full political potential of ganging as a form of working-class selfactivity appeared only momentarily, in the work of the I\\;W. With its sense of workers all. or off the job as "one big union," its refusal to be bound to job or factory by contract, its use of ongoing sabotage to bargain for money and to make work, and its employment of organizers who could float in and out of the class struggle, the I\J\;W translated the social ethos of latenineteenth-century youth gang into a revolutionary strategy. Not surprisingly, Samuel Gompers's men used the same epithets for the Wobblies the reformers had used with delinquents and prostitutes. They were "vagrants," "bums," and "tramps." Social work casebooks from the 1890s are filled with stories of "miracle" children, wayward youngsters changed from potential criminals into strong-willed craftsmen or housewives. Period textbooks picture the street urchin alongside the same boy as a "proper lad." But the individual delin-
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quent disappears after 1900. In his place was only the group, "young rascals" juxtaposed to Boy Scouts. Economic expansion during the 1920s integrated millions of previously marginal immigrant laborers and severed the link between the youth gang and adult IWW-type vagrancy. To postwar reformers, Al Capone's criminal gang symbolized the greatest immigrant threat. But in just a decade, another group image appeared to haunt reformers. And this image haunted those who rushed to imitate Henry Ford as well. It was the young Reuthers and their immigrant cohort, arms linked, with the cocky look of Bowery B'hoys, standing three deep on the auto assembly line.
N.otes 1 The most comprehensive account of these gains, written by the progressives, is Robert LaFollette (ed.), The Making of America, 10 vols. (Chicago, 1907). For 1900-30, see Recent Social Trends in the United States, textbook ed. (New York, 1933). Also helpful are Allen F. Davis, Spearheads of Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement, 1890-1914 (New York, 1967); Foster Rhea Dulles, America Learns to Play (New York, 1959); Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture (New York, 1976): Kenneth Fox, Better City Government: Innovation in American Urban Politics, 1850-1937 (Philadelphia, 1977); Edward Krug, The Shaping of the American High School, vol. 1, 1880-1900 (Madison, Wis., 1964), David Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York, 1977); Edwin P. Norwood, Ford Men and Methods (Garden City, N.Y., 1931); Ellen Ryerson, Best Laid Plans: America's Juvenile Court ElCPeriment (New York, 1978); and Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York, 1967). 2 These progressives included John Dewey, Edward A. Ross, Thorstein Veblen, John R. Commons, Jane Addams, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and James Beard. 3 Tom Rose (ed') "Violence in America, A Historical and Contemporary Reader" (New York, 1969), Gustavus Myers, The History of Tammany Hall (New York, 1917), pp. 97-109:126-35. 4 Portraits are composites from Alvin F. Harlow, Old Bowery Days (New York, 1931), pp. 167-216. 5 Based on Myers; Harlow; and William V. Shannon, The American Irish. "Willy" was described by Frank F. Donovan, Wild Kids, p. 179. 6 Paul Weinbaum, "Social Control and Reaction in N.Y.C.: Temperance Politics and the Riots of 1857," unpublished paper. For a first-hand account, see George Walling, Recollections ofa N.Y. Police Chief (New York, 1887). 7 Frederick Thrasher, The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago (Chicago, 1927.) Shannon; Seymour Mandelbaum, Boss Tweed's New York (New York, 1965) remains the best discussion of the machine as a communications system. See also Samuel Orth, The Boss and the Machine (New Haven, 1919); Denis Tilden Lynch, "Boss" Tweed-The Story ofa Grim Generation (New York, 1927); Talcott Williams, Tammany Hall (New York, 1898), and Rufus Tugwell, "The Tweed Ring" in American Commonwealth ed. James Bryce, 2d ed. (New York, 1908). David Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston, 1971); Robert Bremner, From the Depths, The Discovery ofPoverty in the U.S., (New York, 1966); Samuel P. Hays, "The Politics of Refonn in Municipal Government in the Progressive Era," Pacific Northwest Oparterly (Oct. 1964) 8 Shannon, p.52.
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9 See E. J. Hobsbawn, "Cities and Insurrections," in Revolutionaries, (New York, 1973), and George Rude, The Crowd in the French Revolution {New York, 1959). The best accounts of the draft riots are A Volunteer Special, The Volcano Under the City (New York, 1887); Ellen D. Leonard, "Three Days Reign of Terror, or the July Riots in 1863 in New York," Harpers Magazine (July 1867); and "Report of the Committee of Merchants for the Relief of Colored People Suffering from the Late Riots in the City of New York," (New York, 1863). The best recent account is Adrian Cook, The Armies of the Street (Lexington, Mass., 1974). Also helpful were David Barnes, The Draft Riots in New York (New York, 1963), and James McCague, The Second Rebellion (New York, 1968). 10 Charles Loring Brace, The Dangerous Classes of New York and Twenty Years Work Among Them (New York, 1872), p. 30. 11 Brace, p. 29. 12 Brace, p. 11. 13 Brace, p. 27. 14 Herbert Asbury, The Gangs of New York (New Yorik, 1927). The best popular account oftbe "mass strikes" 1860-1900 and the political response in Jeremy Brecher, Strike (Greenwich, Conn., 1974). 15 John R. Gillis, Youth and History: Tradition and Change in European Age Relations, 1770-present (Princeton, NJ., 1978). Sophonisba P. Breckinridge and Edith Abbot, The Delinquent Child and the Home (N.Y., 1912) p. 13. 16 Thrasher, The Gang, p. 283; p. 222. 17 Immigrant representation in gangs, Thrasher, p. 130. On segregation, see Thomas Lee Philpott, The Slum and the Ghetto: Neighborhood Deterioration and Middle-class Rtiform, Chicago, 1880-1930 (New York, 1978), p. 144. Philpott uses the maps of the area surrounding HuH House settlement in Chicago prepared by resident Florence Kelley to illustrate both the ethnic heterogeneity of the area and the ideological character of the reformer response, see also Robert Ernst, Immigrant Life in New York City, 1825-1863 (New York, 1949): and Philpott, pp. 35-45. 18 According to Thrasher, 726 ofthe gangs had hangouts "out of doors." Thrasher, p. 92, p. 102. 19 The Vice Commission of Chicago, The Social Evil in Chicago, A Study of E}dsting Conditions (Chicago, 1911), p.250. 20 Cited in Thrasher, p. 8. From Juvenile Protective' Association, "BuHetin," (Chicago, Sept., 1919). 21 For gang boy occupations, see Edward Clopper, Child Labor in City Streets (New York, 1912); p. 6. Breckinridge and Abbott p. 75, and Thrasher, pp. 15-16. 22 Thrasher, p. 271. 23 Background on the court is from Ellen Ryerson, "Between Justice and Compassion: The Rise and Fall of the Juvenile Court" (Ph.D. dissertation Yale University, 1970). The Massachussetts Board of Charities used probation in 1869. The early "refuges" arrested youngsters who had committed no crime, and held them indefinitely. For earlier methods, see Robert M. Mennel, Thoms and Thistles: Juvenile Delinquency in the U.S., 1825-1940 (Hanover, New Hamshire, 1973); Robert S. Pickett, House of Rtifuge: Origins of Juvenile Reform in New York State, 1815-1857, (Syracuse, N.Y., 1969) and Steven L. Schlossman, Love and the American Delinquent: The Theory and Practice of "Progressive" Juvenile Justice, 1825-1900 (Chicago, 1977). A popular novelist who traces crime to poverty and neglect is Ned Buntline [E.Z.C. Judson], The G'Hals of New York (New York, n.d.). 24 For the law, see Breckinridge and Abbott, pp. 251-252. Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost (1976), cites census figures for 1895 and 1821 and estimates that, for these years, more than a quarter of the population of England and Wales were under nine years of age and
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just less than half were under 20. Reformers' attitudes toward child labor and compulsory education are in Clopper. For changing conceptions of working and middle-class youth, see Gillis. Carleton Parker The Casual Laborer and Other Essays (New York, 1920) proposed excluding children from formal disciplinary life (factory work and most schools) until age 18. On job shifting, see Jane Addams, The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (New York, 1923), p. 116. 25 Addams, p. 114. Schlossman, p. 149. According to Schlossman (p. 197), between 1866 and 1899,40 to 53 percent of the juveniles committed to the Wisconsin State Reform School were sent there for "vagrancy and incomgibility." On sexual offenses and home confinement, see Schlossman, pp. 153 and 159. 26 Schlossman, pp. 147-52. The Wisconsin court even mediated such issues as "filthy homes." Breckinridge and Abbott (p. 199) write, "the probation officers have become arbiters of the petty disputes and quarrels that in former years brought not only the children but their parents into conflict and into court." Manual for Probation Qfficers (Albany, 1911), p. 58, cited by Ryerson, "Between Justice and Compassion," p. 104. On the importance of the pardon, see Mark Kennedy's excellent piece, "Beyond Incrimination: Some Neglected Facets of the Theory of Punishment," Catalyst (Summer 1970), and Douglas Hay, "Property, Authority and the Criminal Law," in Hay et aI., eds., Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. (New York, 1975). 27 Joseph Dawes, Children in Urban Society, Juvenile Delinquency in 19th Century America (New York, 1971) p. 183. 28 According to Mennel, p. 135, Judge Tutill, the first judge in the Juvenile Court, reported, "I talk with the boy ... just as I would my own boy." See also Schlossman, p. 3. The ideological character of the label "orphan" is suggested by another table indicating that only one percent of the delinquent boys were actually "homeless." Breckinridge and Abbott, p. 92. 29 For a discussion of "social crime," see Michele Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York, 1979), pp. 82-90, and E. P. Thompson's "Introduction" in Albion's Fatal Tree, p. 14. 30 I read 100 cases summarized in Breckinridge and Abbott, manually divided the reported crimes into gang and nongang related, tabulated average sentences for each group, and recorded the father's occupation. The larger group is reported by Breckinridge and Abbott, p. 29. Were these crimes gang related? Thrasher (p. 259) cites only one case among a group of committed truants which was not gang related. 31 Schlossman, p. 204. 32 Schlossman, p. 148. On parents' use of the refuge, see Pickett, p. 76. Breckinridge and Abbott cite a judge's estimate that warrants were used in only two or three of every 100 cases brought before the court. The warning is reported in August Aichhorn, Wayward Youth (New York, 1925), p. 23. 33 State laws are recorded by Breckinridge and Abbott, p. 263. See also Menne!, p. 149. 34 Female institutionalization, see Breckinridge and Abbott, p. 24, and Schlossman, p. 203 ("female" refers to women over 15 years of age; "girl" to those under 15). Compare rates of female institutionalization to a 25 percent decline in commitments for 15-year-old boys and a 33 percent decline for 14-year-old boys. Where 32 percent of all boys brought to court were over 15, 65 percent of all females were. On length of, see Breckinridge and Abbott, p. 27; on commitments for "incorrigibility," p. 38. They pointed out that "while 59 percent of the boys who come to court for the first time are put on probation and 21 percent are sent to institutions, with girls 51 percent are removed to institutions and only 37 percent are returned," p.41. 35 On poverty and immigrant status see Breckinridge and Abbott, p. 59; Schlossman estimates that immigrants were five times more common among the delinquent population than in the population of Wisconsin as a whole, p. 198. Adult criminals, however, far more nearly reflected the distribution of the population. See Hubert S. Nelli. "Italians and Crime in
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Chicago; The Fonnative Years, 1890-1920." For fathers' occupational status and race see Breckinridge and Abbott, pp. 65 and 75. The fathers of children brought to the New York Refuge were middle-class; see Pickett, p. 116. Ofthe deliquents' parents, Schlossman reports "the vast majority are low status immigrants," p. 146. See also U.S., Bureau of Labor, Report on Women and Child Wage Earners in the U.S., vol. 7, 61st Cong., 2d sess., Senate doc. 645. 36 The founder of George Jr. Republic complained that children brought to his country fann were "claiming charity as a right." He decided to "make them work for it." 37 Conference of Charities quote from Mennel, p. 130. 38 Thrasher, p. 24, p. 59, p. 196, and p. 281. Thrasher writes, for example, "the crowd became a rudimentary gang by fonning a team against another block .... Boxers became gang leaders," p. 48. 39 Addams, p.54. 40 Quoted in Thrasher, p. 321. 41 Thrasher, p. 37 42 Addams, p. 87. 43 Names of theatres cited in Philpott, p. 28. The film Porter's Kleptomaniac (1905) compared justice for rich and poor; others dealt with economic and legal inequities and showed that tragedy might strike despite virtue; in The Needj'or Gold (1907) and Desperate Encounter (1907), violence is shown to be the only way out of a hopeless situation. 44 Addams, pp. 75-78. 45 p.83. 46 Addams, pp. 18-19. 47 p. 27. 48 For the general comparison between craft and juvenile culture see Addams, pp. 75-103. Addams, p. 19. 49 Robert Hunter, Poverty, quoted by Robert H. Bremner, p. 215. 50 Davis, Spearheads for Reform, pp. 60-84. Joseph Lee, "The Integrity of the Family." Survey 23 (Dec. 1909) cited by Schlossman, p. 71. 51 Addams, pp. 95-96. 52 Addams, p. 102. 53 Addams, p. 91. Davis, pp. 60-84. Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives (New York: 1902). 54 Whatever motivated individual refonners, the timing and focus of benevolence still depended on the midwest's largest corporations, particularly those jeopardized by immigrant militancy. Mary McDowell moved into Packingtown immediately after riots there supporting the Pullman strikers "by the city's most fearsome gangs" were smashed. Wisconsin Steel founded Gads Hill; Swift endowed Methodist Parish House; and so forth. Conversely, Ford and other social capitalists tried to manage worker unrest by applying settlement techniques, including spying and support for ethnically homogeneous but racially segregated institutions. 55 Thrasher, p. 299. 56 Martin J. Sklar, "On the Proletarian Revolution and the End of Political-Economic Society," Radical America 3 (May-June, 1969). 57 Thomas quoted by Thrasher, p. 18; Lippman and Weyl are quoted by Bremmer, p. 129. 58 Pickett, p. 16, p. 110; Marvin Lazerson, Origins of the Urban School: Public Education in Massachusetts, 1870-1915 (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), pp. 15-16, and2ndAnnuai Report ofStatistics of Labor for the State of New York (Albany, 18851. 59 Superintendent's testimony, 2nd Annual Report (Albany, 1885). 60 See Menne!. e.g., p. 114. Lazerson, pp. 67, 70, and pp. 90-93. On changing attitudes toward
734 "precociousness" see Gillis and Bernard Wishy, The Child and the Republic 1968).
Evan Stark (P~iladelphia,
61 Mennel, pp. 61-62; Schlossman, p. 129, p. 106; Mennel, p. 75 and p. 62, and Mennel, p. 116. In 1872, boys working in one of the contractor's shoe shops at the House of Refuge in New York revolted. Two companies of police were called in, there was a full-scale investigation of the Refuge and the pattern of withholding wages from the boys was exposed and ended. The yell is from Dawes, p. 136. 62 A system of mutual instruction (the Lancaster System) was employed in both public and reform schools. Lazerson, pp. 92-93, p. 67, and p. 70; Mennel, p. 106; Mennel, p. 53. Henrickson is quoted in Schlossman, pp. 108-9. Lazerson, p. 252. In "Delinquency and Spare Time," Henry Thruston argued that the gang usurped time usually given to school and work and subverted the family (in Thrasher, pp. 65-66). 63 Lazerson, p. 78. On manual training, see Lazerson, pp. 82-95, and Charles A. Bennett, History of Manual and Industrial Education to 1870. On kindergarten, Lazerson, p. 66. 64 Addams, p. 98. 65 Joseph Lee, Constructive and Preventive Philanthropy (New York, 1907) p. 204. 66 Eliot's proposal is cited by Mennel, p. 156. 67 From 1870 to the mid, 1890s, the proportion of regularly attending school jumped from 75 percent to 90 percent. Addams, p. 160; Thrasher, p. 127. 68 Thrasher, pp. 57-58. 69 See D. Rothman, and Mennel, p. 12. The Ford plant at Dearborn was termed the "house of corrections" by its immigrant work force. 70 The superintendent of the girls cottage reformatory at Lancaster, Massachusetts, resigned rather than accept the introduction of workshops (Menne!, p. 59). Mennel, p. 60 and Dawes, p. 49. On convict control, see Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum, p. 100. 71 1st Report ofStatistics of the Bureau ofLabor for the State ofNew York (Albany, 1883), p. 68. 72 See 3rd Annual Report of the Bureau of Labor for New York State (Albany, 1886), p. 146. On locking of plants, etc., see 1st Annual Report of the Massachusetts Bureau ofLabor Statistics (Boston, 1870), p. 107. 73 3rd Annual Report, p. 149, pp. 273-75. 74 Pickett, p. 129; Brace, p. 135, pp. 307-10, p. 120, and p. 302. 75 Breckrinridge and Abbott, p. 77; Brace, p. 307. For an account of girl gangs, see Pickett, p. 73; Addams, p. 131. 76 Of 8,000 cases seeking charity in New York, Boston, Baltimore, and New Haven in 1890, Warner estimates .4 percent were divorced and 9.4 percent had been deserted. For Boston, 1899-1905, the rates were .7 percent and 6.9 percent respectively. Warner, American Charities (New York, 1904) p. 63. Chicago Vice Commission, p. 41. 77 Alvin Johnson's report to the New York Tenement House Commission is cited in the Chicago Vice Commission report, p. 85. Vice Commission, p. 173, p. 187, p. 205. On seasonal labor, see 3rd Annual Report, p. 189. 78 Chicago Vice Commission, p. 276, p. 261. 79 Heidi Hartmann, "Capitalism and Women's Work in the Home, 1900-1930" (Ph. D. dissertation, Yale University, 1975), p. 53. Chicago Vice Commission, p. 269. 80 Chicago Vice Commission, p. 110, also p. 133. 81 E. M. Sigsworth and T. J. Wyke, "Prostitution and Venereal Disease," in Suffer and Be Still, Women in the Victorian Age, ed. Martha Vicinus (Bloomington, Indiana, 1973), p. 79. Of one group of 49 prostitutes, 6 also worked in department stores, 4 were waitresses, 2 were dress makers, 1 was a aomestic, 1 a stenographer, etc. Department store conditions, See 31-d Annual Report, p. 146.
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82 Breckinridge and Abbott, p. 141, Schlossman, p. 148, Breckinridge and Abbott, p. 87 and Thrasher, p. 112-114, Foucault, p. 83. Carleton Parker, The Casual Laborer, p. 15, p. 71, p .. 77. Parker, p. 71. Parker, p. 17, p. 116. Parker, p. 72. Parker describes the hops strike in detail, pp. 171-99; p. 189. Hany Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York, 1974): David Noble, America by Design; Kathy Stone, "The Origin of Job Structures in the Steel Industry," Review of Radical Political Economics 6 (1974), No.2. 89 Warner, p. 48. 90 Jack Russell, "The Coming of the Line: The Ford Highland Plant, 1910-1914," in Radical America pp. 40-41. Sergio Bologna, "Class Composition and the Theory of the Party at the Origins of the Workers-Council Movement," in Operai e stato, trans. Bruno Ramirez (Milan, 1972). 91 Russell, pp. 40-41. Bologna, p. 18; Antonio Gramsci, "Americanism and Fordism," inSelectionsfrom Prison Notebooks, eds. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Smith (New York, 1973); Russell, p. 41. Also Norwood, Ford Men and Methods, pp. 1-19. 92 Traditional approaches include John Buenker, Urban Liberalism and Progressive Reform (New York, 1973); Harold Faulkner, The Questfor Social Justice, 1898-1914 (New York, 1931); Russel Nye, Midwest Progressive Politics, (New York, 1959); and J. Joseph Huthmacher, "Urban Liberalism and the Age of Reform," Mississippi Valley Historical Review 49 (1962). Significant revisionist texts are Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital; David Noble,America by Design; Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America (New York, 1974); Anthony Platt, The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency (Chicago, 1969); and James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900-1918 (New York, 1968). 93 Braverman, Stone, Noble, Weinstein, Bowles and Gintis and others have described social innovation as the largely malicious work of a seemingly omniscient ruling strata. In their view, modem production, management, and acculturation techniques rob workers of their knowledge and skill and reconstitute them as an obedient mass, thus depriving the demand for workers' control of its legitimacy and appeal. This contemporary view echoes the opposition to modem production techniques of turn-of-the-century craft unionists and socialists. These authors emphasize labor's "apathy" and "alienation" and contrast the initiative and cohesion of the bourgeoisie to the segmentalization and conformity of workers. Marx, on the other hand, stressed labor's capacity for collective initiative in the service of a universal social principle. For Marx, labor's political struggles (e.g., to limit the hours of work) forced capital to mechanize in order to increase productivity, but the problems that mechanization created for profit realization would ultimately require a revolutionary transformation of the relations of production. For Marx, mechanization was alienating primarily because it left possibilities unrealized, not because it "degraded" previous forms of labor power. Since these unrealized possibilities were embedded in the fabric of everyday life, they were a basis for the struggle against the capitalistic extension of work and for labor's demand to control society not just the work place. The revisionists, by contrast, have worried about the determination of technological progress by capitalistic criteria. In fact, precisely this coincidence between the laws of production and overall development transforms society from a world of competing spheres into a social unity. And this coincidence sets the stage for revolutionary politics, i.e. for politically aftirming the unitary character of social life against its particular and irrational determination as a society based on private ownership, invidious competition, and the extension of work. 94 Philpott.
83 84 85 86 87 88
Part 5 Praxis and Marxian Criminology
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Part 5
Marx's preoccupation with revolutionary political movements grew out of his attempts to grapple with the philosophical legacy of Hegel. In the 1830s and Praxis and 1840s, the Young Hegelians-a circle of philosophers Marxian who extended and modified Hegel's ideas-had come Criminology to regard philosophy as a form of social criticism. They compared the world as it was with a philosophical ideal of how the world should be. The youthful Karl Marx was one of these Young Hegelians, and his early social criticism is of this type. For example, he attacked the wood-gathering laws in Germany on the grounds that a "true" state upheld the rights of all citizens, whereas the wood-gathering laws defended only the rights of forestowners (see Chapter I, by Linebaugh, in Part 2). Albert von Cieszkowski, a Polish count who was part of this group, published his Prolegomena to a Science of History in German in 1838. In this book, Cieszkowski argued that philosophy should be applied to practical problems. This idea was met with enthusiasm by a number of Young Hegelians, including Marx (McLellan, 1970:64-65). Soon after, Marx was writing in the same vein, pointing out the limits implied by the traditional conception of philosophy: that is, that criticism remained contemplative. It could point to what was wrong in the existing order, but did nothing to change it.l He made this point succinctly in the often-quoted Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach, "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it" (Marx, 1959:245; emphasis in original). Marx was by no means repudiating philosophy in this passage. Rather, he saw action as a way of realizing philosophical thought. This type of action he called "praxis," using a term originally introduced by Cieszkowski. More broadly, the word "praxis" is used by Marxists to refer to action that is guided by theory and that has social change as its goal. A particular conception of human nature and its possibilities is implied by the concept of praxis. Marx views human beings as both determining and determined. As objects, people are shaped by historical process, much of it beyond their control. They are born into particular societies, with particular economic arrangements, political institu.tions, languages, modes of raising children, ideologies, and so forth. But at the same time, they are not wholly objects. They can imagine what does not exist, conceive projects, and intervene in the world in order to realize those projects; in short, they can create history as well as be created by it.2 It is this potential for creating history that makes social change possible. This conception of action implies a particular role for social theory. Theory offers visions of possible futures and indicates how they might be attained. At the same time, theory tells how objective conditions constrain
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and shape human action. It can thus tell us what are the limits to possible change, and what we might do to direct change in desired directions. Praxis in turn changes conditions and so reveals new information to the theorist (Mathiesen, 1974), permits theory to be modified or extended, and makes new phenomena accessible to theorizing. Theory, then, is not dogma. It does not descend to earth from on high, or from the brow of Karl Marx. Marx himself always insisted that his ideas were not fully worked out, and that they were not to be taken as unchangeable doctrine. That some of his followers have transformed Marx's writings into "Articles of Faith" is a drastic departure from his own intentions. For Marx, theory is not an unquestioned doctrine, but something that develops dialectically, in interaction with empirical knowledge (Greenberg, 1980).
MARXISM AND CRIMINOLOGICAL PRAXIS
The development of a criminological praxis based on Marxist theory has been a matter of great concern to Marxist criminologists. To be sure, Marxists are by no means the only criminologists who are concerned with social change. Late-nineteenth-century positivists self-consciously saw themselves as doing work that would help governments prevent or control crime.3 Modern-day criminologists who are liberals or conservatives often propose or criticize policies on the basis of their work. It seems likely that few criminologists study crime for the sake of intellectual stimulation alone. There are great differences, though, in the sorts of change criminologists have advocated. Some have hoped that their research would make the criminal justice system more effective. Others have hoped that their knowledge would lead to more humane treatment of prisoners and to the elimination of conditions that tend to cause crime, such as poverty and discrimination. Some have sought both kinds of change. Marxists generally reject the assumptions about change that underpin these endeavors. Notions of effectiveness and efficiency are ideological; they mask what are essentially value-laden, political criteria in a vocabulary of scientific neutrality. The notion that more court convictions or less delay before trial is desirable is itself subject to debate. Marxists have argued that in many ways the criminal justice system contributes to the containment or repression of the kind of social change Marxists seek.4 It does this directly, by prosecuting those who seek radical political change for real or invented crimes, and indirectly by destabilizing working-class families and communities. It disseminates ideologies regarding the causes of crime and ways of reducing it that reinforce bourgeois domination.5 This being so, Marxists will hardly want to make the system more effective in achieving these goals. Since the criminal justice system is part of a set of social arrangements that Marxists consider to be fundamentally irrational, they set their sights on broader goals than mere criminal justice reform. Although they will cer-
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tainly agree that it is desirable to eliminate poverty and racial discrimination, and to treat prisoners humanely, they will usually be aware of how hard that is to achieve in present-day capitalist society. As has been pointed out several times, serious questions can be raised about how humanitarian the reforms of self-proclaimed humanitarians have actually been. Suppose, though, we set aside such doubts and take the reformers' claims at face value. If the legacy of two hundred years of reform is what we have now, doesn't that raise questions about what can be accomplished by way of humanitarian reform? Marxists approach reform, then, with somewhat different goals than conservatives or liberals. They do not necessarily reject reforms, since reforms play an important role in building a revolutionmy movement, but they set their sights on different targets than other people do. Marxists have also viewed the process of change somewhat differently from those who hold other political perspectives. Marx and Engels were not the first socialists, but they were the first socialists to insist that socialism is to be created by the proletariat. Allies from other classes it might certainly have, but emancipation was not something that others could achievefor the working class.6 Working on issues relating to criminal justice, Marxists have generally avoided working with administrators to plan change from the top down. Instead, they have worked with prisoners and defendants, or residents of poor and working-class communities who seek to change criminal justice agencies from below. Those whom most reformers see as passive objects, to be manipulated or to receive benefits from change conceived by others, are seen by Marxists as potentially capable of deciding for themselves what changes are needed-even though, given the realities of power, they are often incapable of implementing the changes they consider desirable.
MARXIAN CRIMINOLOGY IN THE CREATION OF SOCIALISM Marxists have generally taken the central goal of their own political practice in capitalist societies to be the creation of a socialist society. What is not immediately obvious is how Marxian criminology aids in the attainment of this goal, and what the role of the Marxian criminologist is to be. Richard Quinney begins to analyze this issue by considering the class position of criminologists. This position, he argues, is contradictory. Objectively speaking, he maintains, criminologists are part of the working class; but their work serves the bourgeoisie. Even when it does not involve direct participation in maintaining public order, it aids in reproducing capitalist social relations culturally. "The objective task of the criminologist," he says, "is to transmit bourgeois ideology to the working class as a whole, to ensure harmonious relations between the working class and the capitalist class according to the interests of the latter" (Quinney, 1979:450)7
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According to Quinney this contradiction means that the class position of criminologists is ultimately a matter of consciousness, or subjectivity. Since Quinney is a Marxist, he calls on criminologists to side with the working class by producing a socialist criminology, i.e., a criminology that "supports socialist development rather than capitalist development" (Quinney, 1979:455).
Quinney's analysis poses several problems. The notion that class membership is basically a matter of subjective self-identification is an obvious trouble point. And the call to join the class struggle by working for socialism is essentially moralistic. Since, however, some criminologists are socialists, the last problem may be set aside while we consider what these criminologists can do as socialists. No doubt there is much they might do as socialists that has no relevance to criminology, but our inquiry concerns whether and how criminological work can further a socialist movement. To that question Quinney provides one possible answer: the production of criminological theory that advances the transition to socialism. In calling for a new, action-oriented theory, Quinney implicitly concedes that he himself has not yet solved the problem of praxis. This is no criticism; the problem of figuring out what do is not easy. But we may question whether theories that tell us what sort of political practice would be useful in building a socialist movement will have much to do with criminology. It seems doubtful. Perhaps Marxist criminology can contribute to the development of a socialist movement in another way. Marxists have argued that incomplete and erroneous beliefs about crime and criminal justice are elements of bourgeois ideology and make it harder for a socialist consciousness to develop. Assuming this to be so, it would surely be worthwhile for Marxist criminologists to help change these beliefs. This might call for empirical research that refutes elements of mainstream criminology, exposes its limitations, or discredits the claims about crime and criminal justice made by politicians and administrators for political purposes. These public figures gain a good deal of attention for saying that crime can and should be dealt with by unshackling the police, sending criminals to the electric chair, and so on. Their statements often have no sound basis, and sometimes are even inconsistent with the best evidence available. Here, then, is one role for the Marxist criminologist. The usefulness of attempting to change public beliefs is suggested by Marx's observation that "theory ... becomes a material force once it has gripped the masses." However useful it may be to discredit false and perhaps reactionary ideas about crime, it is far more valuable to develop and disseminate superior ways of understanding crime. Providing conceptual tools for analyzing oppressive social conditions is one way to help develop socialist consciousness. It is itself a form of praxis. Although this may not solve the problem of devising a revolutionary strategy, it can help to make socialist praxis possible for the working class.
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But who is listening? The United States lacks a vigorous socialist movement with large working-class participation or following. Radical periodicals reach only a very restricted audience. Thus the Marxist criminologist must rely on the existing mass media (which are not necessarily eager to present Marxist analyses), or must devise new methods of communicating. The large social and ideological distance that separates most criminologists from much of the working class in the United States and some other Western capitalist countries makes this an especially difficult problem. However valuable their cultural production, radical criminologists have by no means restricted themselves to intellectual work. For more than a decade, many have been deeply involved in political activities, many having to do with crime and law enforcement.8 Campaigns against abusive police practices have been waged in a number of cities. A great deal of activity in the early 1970s focused on prison-related issues. On the outside, committees were formed to defend prisoners who were persecuted by authorities for their political beliefs or actionsi groups of ex-convicts demanded prison reforms and gave assistance to released prisoners. In several parts of the country, prisoners and ex-prisoners formed unions. Partly concerned with such traditional labor issues as wages paid for prison labor, and partly with broader questions of inmate welfare, these unions attempted to organize prisoners, ex-prisoners, and members of a wider public on behalf of a program of reform. Other efforts have grown out of the women's liberation movement. Some projects have centered on rape, providing social support for victims, selfdefense instruction, and changes in the treatment of victims by police, courts, and hospital emergency rooms. Campaigns to stop the distribution of pornography have been undertaken in the belief that it encourages violence against women. More recently, projects to aid women battered by spouses or lovers have been started. The Grand Jury Project of the National Lawyers Guild, including some criminologists, has worked to exclude biased jurors from politically sensitive trials. Opposition to provisions of a proposed new federal criminal code that give the government an enlarged capacity to repress opposition has been another focus of activity. In Detroit, radicals succeeded in electing a Marxist as Judge of the Recorders Court. Most of these projects have been started and run primarily by radicals who are not criminologists. But radical criminologists have participated in these and others as organizers, strategists, and publicists. Broadly speaking, efforts of this sort try to achieve several different kinds of goals. First, radical Criminologists try to defend insurgent political movements against repression. Many of these movements have goals that are not socialist but that are nevertheless compatible with socialist principles, and their victories aid in the building of a socialist movement. Movements against racism or sexism are examples. Socialists have considered it important to defend such movements. Where they are repressed by means of the criminal justice system, criminologists' specialized occupational knowledge may prove usefu1.9
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Second, radical criminologists have aimed to make the criminal justice system more responsive to the needs of those it ostensibly tries to serve. Campaigns to achieve community control ofthe police are an example. This sort of work makes sense even if the state is regarded as basically oppressive. The notion that the state in a capitalist society acts on behalf of a ruling capitalist class to reproduce capitalist sodal relations should not obscure the fact that the state is also an arena for class struggle. Its policies may be constrained by the capitalist nature of the economy, but they are not entirely determined by it. Within limits, state policy can be influenced by popular pressure. As classes organize politically, they make demands on the state on behalf of class interests. This is no less true of the working class than of the capitalist class. The process of making such demands and responding to the state's response is part of the process by which a class becomes a "class for itself," i.e., a class that is conscious of its interests and that acts cohesively to attain them. Some Marxists have also seen in efforts of this kind the opportunity to create the embryo of the new society "within the womb of the old," as Marx put it. Marx's early writings on the state characterized the state as an alienated relationship. It exists because citizens make themselves powerless by conceding authority to the state. Marxists have conceived of an alternative society in which people collectively participate in running public affairs themselves. Community-controlled police forces and local mediation and arbitration services that have been proposed in recent years can thus be viewed as anticipations of the more extensive participatory democracy that will characterize the future socialist society. Even in the present, such agencies can be seen as less alienating because they are decentralized and informal, hence more responsive to the particular values and concerns of local communities than more highly bureaucratized agencies are.I° Some radicals have feared that successful campaigns to achieve shortrun goals might make a socialist revolution harder to achieve. Such achievements, or reforms, might help to legitimate the state by encouraging the belief that it is capable of serving popular needs and willing to do so. If some concessions are won, this argument goes, militant opposition to the state will dry up. Behind this concern lies an implicit "big bang" model of how revolutions are made: conditions get worse and worse until the oppressed can't stand it anymore and one day explode. In the industrialized capitalist world such a model seems farfetched. In fact, it is a pernicious model, since it encourages socialists to sit back and do nothing while social conditions deteriorate. In an alternative view, a socialist movement is built through socialists' participation in concrete struggles, struggles that win real, though necessarily partial victories. After all, people join movements that show some possibility of improving their lives. What would be the point of joining a movement that only loses? If Marxists are wrong in thinking that capitalism itself is oppressive, then small-scale victories on particular issues might well eliminate or mitigate
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discontent. But if Marxists are right, this will not happen. On the contrary, as the working class gains solidarity through participation in concrete struggles, it can be expected to insist on more. The question, then, is not reform or revolution, but what kind of reforms should socialists seek? Do the reforms shift power to the working class or at least part of it, or to capitalists and the state? Who will benefit from them? What effect will they have on class consciousness? Will work on a particular issue generate a momentum that carries forward to other, larger issues, or will it run into a dead end, and perhaps cease once the immediate goal is attained?ll The strategic perspective that underlies organizing on behalf of goals that fall short of socialism has a long history in socialist movements. On the other hand, the specific causes and movements that figured prominently in Left politics in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s had less precedent. In particular, criminal justice issues had never before been given such great prominence. To be sure, radicals had previously spoken out on behalf of prison reform, often after they themselves had been imprisoned. Marxists had prophesied the disappearance of prisons as part of the "withering away" of the state under socialism; but "tearing down the walls" was thought to be an item for an agenda in the far-off future. There had not previously been a "prison movement." Ordinary prisoners-those who had not been active in Left politics before their incarceration-had never before been regarded as "political prisoners" or elevated to the status of movement leaders. As Wenger and Bonomo point out (Chapter 1 in Part 4), Marx and Engels did not have very high political expectations of conventional criminals. Most 1960s New Leftists were not Marxists, but probably held the conventionally middle-class derogatory stereotypes of the "lumpen proletariat." For a variety of reasons, many were to change their minds. Many white middle-class college students came to see the police, the courts, and the prisons as their enemy for enforcing drug laws, harassing them because of their dress, and attacking antiwar demonstrators. They began to sympathize with others who were also the target of law enforcement-e.g., criminals. They admired the courage and militancy prisoners displayed in standing up to the repressive might of the state. Within some prisons, a high degree of interracial unity was achieved, despite long-standing traditions of racism among prisoners were radicalized when demands they considered moderate and reasonable were refused, or when they were exposed to radical movements on the outside. Other reasons were less healthy. Students who had become radicalized and who felt that their radicalism lacked legitimacy because they were not oppressed in any conventional sense welcomed those with more respectable claims to leadership in a revolutionary movement. As was pointed out in the Introduction to Part 4, the resulting tendency to romanticize militant prisoners led to serious tactical errors. Prisoners who learned the appropriate slogans and struck the right posture of militancy found themselves
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celebrated as revolutionary leaders, a role they were not always equipped to play. Prison inmates and their radical supporters outside were both hurt by expectations of each other that neither side could fulfill (Wald, 1976). These experiences should make us more cautious than some 1960s radicals were about people with extensive criminal backgrounds, but should not necessarily lead us to reject them as active participants in a socialist movement altogether. Nor should we dismiss work on issues having the criminal justice system as its focus. It became clear during the 1960s that people find themselves oppressed by capitalism in many different ways, not just as workers whose products are appropriated by capitalists. Women, racial and ethnic minorities, medical patients, consumers, homosexuals, and many other groups have found themselves affected by capitalism in ways that have led them to seek radical change. To dismiss these groups as politically insignificant because they do not conform to nineteenth-century Marxist expectations about "who will make the revolution" would be preposterous. And to insist that criminal justice issues are unimportant because the "primary contradiction" of capitalism lies in the exploitation of wage labor at the work place is to acquiesce in the separation between work and community that capitalism fosters. At the same time, it would be absurd to think that socialism could be achieved without massive working-class support and leadership 1 2 - and probably extensive middle-class support as well. It became clear in the early 1970s that the constituencies who were politically active on the Left in the 1960s (e.g., blacks and students) were not strong enough to carry through a sustained program ofleft-liberal reform. Without wider support, a more radical change would be inconceivable. This poses a problem for the kinds of crime-related projects in which criminologists and other radicals have been active. It is not enough to ask whether the aims of such projects are consistent with socialist principles. Trying to stop political repression and make criminal justice agencies more responsive to the working class or other oppressed groups may be laudable, but do they help to build a socialist movement? Do campaigns to achieve these goals recruit new participants, especially from the working class, to a socialist movement? Can they help to overcome divisions within the working class (e.g., racial, sexual, occupational)? Can they radicalize major segments of the population? A campaign that did these things would be judged successful even if it failed to achieve any of its stated, short-run goals. The potential for contributing to the growth of a socialist movement no doubt varies greatly from one program or issue to another. The Grand Jury Project, for example, is probably limited in its capacity to mobilize substantial numbers of people because its work is technical and does not require large-scale participation. In other cases, such as opposition to the death penalty, the potential for mobilization may be larger, but restricted to certain fractions of the working class. Organized opposition to the death penalty, for instance, has come mainly from black groups and from the predominantly middle-class civil liberties lobby. The majority of the white
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population in the United States currently favors the death penalty, and is not necessarily troubled that it is imposed disproportionately on black defendants. Historical differences that persist between segments of the working class-both in patterns of crime and in exposure to offensive law enforcement practices-have made black Americans and members of other minority groups more receptive than whites to the abolition of capital punishment and programs to end abusive police practices. Police departments have capitalized successfully on these differences in mobilizing white working-class and middle-class constituencies to block the establishment of civilian review boards. It is even possible, though we do not yet have enough information to be at all confident, that Left-initiated campaigns focusing on crime and criminal justice issues do more to sharpen racial antagonism on the part of white workers than to overcome it. By making crime more salient, such campaigns may intensifY anxiety and indirectly contribute to demands for more repressive enforcement. Objectively, the immediate interests of the working class do not unequivocally lie in curbing law enforcement. Although arrestees are drawn disproportionately from the lower strata of the working class, the working class is also heavily victimized by property crime and interpersonal violence. And it is least able to bear the costs of victimization. Loss of property, the expense of medical bills, and steps to protect oneself and one's family inevitably weigh heavier on those who have low incomes. To the extent that restrictions on enforcement agencies result in higher crime rates, the working class has an interest in opposing them. Little is known about the effect of different kinds of enforcement practices on crime rates, but it is plausible that they do have some effect, perhaps appreciable. If this is so, it is not false consciousness 13 for workers who live in high crime areas to support measures that shock civil libertarians who are not exposed to the same risks. (It is likely, on the other hand, that much of the public exaggerates the extent to which crime can be reduced through purely repressive measures.) The substantial increases in crime of the 1960s and 1970s have made this an especially salient matter for much of the population. The result has been a rapid shift in public attitudes toward crime control. A majority opposed to the death penalty in 1966 has become at this writing a 2 to 1 majority in favor of it. Around 1970, public opinion polls showed considerable sympathy for rebelling prisoners, but over the next few years this sympathy dissipated. Most prisoner support organizations dissolved, unable to raise money or mobilize any significant section of the population on behalf of bettel' treatment for prisoners.14 The more recent campaign against prison construction organized by the National Moratorium Committee has been able to attract funding from the executive bodies of some church organizations, but has been largely unsuccessful at mobilizing the members of these churches. Public calls to restore control of the police and other agencies to the community do acknowledge the legitimacy of working-class interests in
Praxis and Marxian Criminology
747
being protected from crime. In fact, they argue that decentralized, popular control of the police, courts, and penal system would make these institutions more effective in dealing with crime. 15 Thus far, however, these efforts have not proved terribly successful. In 1970, a referendum to establish community control of the Berkeley, California, police force lost 2 to 1; it was defeated even in black neighborhoods. Perhaps voters feared that community control would weaken the police; perhaps some identified too strongly with the existing force to vote against it; perhaps funding from real estate interests for opposition advertising was decisive. Even though the Berkeley referendum lost, the fact that as many as a third of all voters supported community control could be considered a victory of sorts. At the same time, this figure demarcates the limits of support that could be mustered on behalf of this issue even in a city where radical strength was especially high. Given the political shifts of the last ten years, it seems likely that a referendum on the same issue would fail by an even larger margin if it were repeated today. A campaign to achieve community control might still have educational value, and help to build a movement. But if existing popular consciousness of the crime issue limits the proportion of the population that can be won over, then the possibihties of making large gains for a socialist movement by raising this issue seem small. Just as socialists cannot simply will a mass socialist movement into existence because they would like to see one, criminologists cannot simply decide that issues relating to crime will be Ithe most useful ones in building that movement. Objective circumstances, including popular consciousness and ideology, constrain the kinds of issues that will in fact build a movement, assuming one can be built.16 To the extent that socialists can influence the course of political events at all in the United States just now, it is likely to be in connection with other issues than those having to do with crime. This implies that the role of Marxist criminologists as criminologists will be small in socialist movements in this country in the near future. A socialist movement that failed to speak to a subject of such great personal concern to many as crime now is would be abandoning the terrain to conservative forces, but objective conditions dictate that other issues will be more central. NOTES 1 Dick Howard
119721
traces this development in Marx's thinking in detail.
2 Louis Althusser and his disciples have argued that the concept of praxis as it appears in Marx's early writings has no place in scientific Marxism. and should be discarded. This critique has in turn been criticized by Applebaum and Chotiner 119791, Burris 119791, and Thompson 119791. 3 In aspiring to this role, the positivists displayed their philosophical inconsistency. In writing of criminals, they denied all forms of voluntarism, viewing the actions of criminals as entirely determined. Yet in urging government otticials to adopt PaJ1icular policies, they assumed that the otticials were free to do so. And slIrely the posith'ists did not view themselves as being determined in the same way the criminal was. In the Theses on Feuerbach,
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Marx criticized the industrialist Robert Owen on the same grounds. OW'ln, a thorough-going em1ronmentalist. established a model "company tO~ll" surrounding his factory in order to improve workers' lives. But he did not realize that his o~ initiative in making changes implied that others could do the same-in short, that workers did not have to be the objects of social engineering. Marx points out that Owen's doctrine land, we can add, that of the criminological positi\1sts) implicitly divides humanity into two classes: those who can change things, and those who are affected by change but cannot cause it. 4 This statement assumes the context of a capitalist society. Problems of criminological practice and refOlID are also relevant within socialist societies, but they will not be taken up here. They are unlikely to be practically relevant in the near future in any Western European or Nor1h American society. 5 The claim need not be made that these are the only things the criminal justice system does; ob\10usly its social impact is multidimensional. 6 Insofar as Leninist practice has substituted the Community Party for the working class in the making of a socialist revolution, it has deviated from this prinCiple. 7 It is worth noting in passing that this claim does not necessarily rest on criminologists' understanding of what it is they do when they write or teach. It has to do with the content of their writing and teaching. The relationship between the bourgeoisie and bourgeois criminologists may be like the relationship between a class and its political representati\'es that Marx describes in The Eighteenth Brumaire oJ Louis Bonaparte. He points out that it is foolish to imagine that the democratic representatives [of the petty bourgeoisie] are all "shopkeepers or enthusiastic champions of shopkeepers." According to their education and their indi\idual position they may be as far apart as heaven from earth. What makes them representatives of the petty bourgeoisie is the fact that in their minds they do not get beyond the limits which the latter do not get beyond in life, that they are consequently driven, theoretically, to the same problems and solutions to which the material interest and social position drive the latter practically. 8 The journal Crime and Social Justice has presented useful descriptions of many of these efl0l1s. 9 The main barrier here is likely to be the irrelevance of most criminological knowledge for this purpose. Most research in criminology is undertaken for other purposes and will not necessarily be helpful in defending political movements when they come under attack. 10 Problems arise when the attempt is made to establish such institutions \\1thin the existing capitalist society. For discussion of some of them, see Greenberg 119751, Klein 119791, and Spitzer (1982). 11 Booth et al. 119721 outline a similar strategic perspective for the women's movement. An attempt to apply these criteria to a \'ariety of criminal justice reform issues can be found in the final chapter of AFSC Working Par1y 119711. 12 I do not mean to imply that blacks, women, homosexuals, etc., are outside the working class; clearly, many of the members of these groups are workers. But large portions of the working class are not part of these groups. 13 By "Iirlse consciousness" Marxists mean a mistaken understanding of society, one's position in it, and one's interests. 14 The more substantial efforts at prisoner support were often hea\ily subsidized by foundations, For example, the first National Prisoners Conference, held in Portland, Oregon, in June 1972, was funded in part from a $100,000 Ford Foundation grant. Prisoners' rights litigation was also fimded by major foundations, As the deterioration of the economy caused financial problems, and as the prisoners' cause became less fashionable, foundation fimds for this type of work disappeared. The New England Prisoners Association dissolved in the early 1970s after its eff0l1s to organize community sUpp0l1 for prisoners failed.
Praxis and Marxian Criminology
749
15 Radicals involved in such efforts have not always shown much awareness of how problem-
atic the concept of "community" is from the point of view of Marxist theolY. Many neighborhoods are divided along class, racial. and ethnic lines, and these divisions can be of great significance for proposals to reorganize policing. Moreover, the social forces that give rise to such community problems as crime le.g., unemployment and alienation I ma.v be too powerful for such efforts to be dealt with at the community level. Besides this, some "community control" experiments have led to conflict between neighborhoods over the division of scarce resources, weakening the working class politically at the metropolitan level. 16 Failure to take this principle into account can lead to absurdities. One collective Inone of whose members are criminologists I has published a "handbook" for prison abolitionists IKnopp et aL 19761 without any analysis of who will undertake the abolition of prisons as political work and what the prospects for succe~,s in such work might be.
REFERENCES AFSC Working Party 119711. Struggle .for Justice. New York: Hill and Wang. Appelbaum, Richard P., and Hafl}' Chotiner 119791. "Science, Critique, and Praxis in Marxist Method." Socialist Review 9141 :71-108. Booth, Heather, et al. 119721. Socialist Feminism: A Strategy.for the Women's Movement. Chicago: Hyde Park Chapter, Chicago Women's Liberation Movement. Burris, Val 119791. "Introduction: The StI1.lcturalist Intluence in Marxist TheOlY and Research." The Insurgent Sociologist 9111:4-17. Greenberg, David F. 119751. "Problems in Community Con·ections." Issues in Criminology 10:1-33. - - - 119801. "A Critique of the Immaculate Conceplion: A Comment on BeilTIe:' Social Problems 27:476-77.
Howard, Dick 119721. The Development of'the Marl'ian Dialectic. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Klein, Dorie 119791. "Can This Marriage Be Saved? Battery and Sheltering:' Crime and Social Justice 12:19-33. Knopp, Honey 119761. Instead qf' Prisons: A Handbook .for Abolitionists. Syracuse, N.Y.: Prison Research Education Action Project. Mankoff, Milton 119781. "On the Responsibility of Marxist Criminologists: A Reply to Quinney:' Contemporary Crises 2:293-301. Marx, Karl 119591. "Theses on Feuer'bach:' In Lewi:; S. Feuer led.l, Marl' and Engels' Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy. New York: Anchor. Mathiesen, Thomas 11974 The Politics qf'Abolition. New York: Halsted Press. McLellan, Da\1d 119701. Marl< Before Marl'ism. New York: Harper and Row. Spitzer, Steven (1982). "The Dialectics of Formal and Informal Control." In Richard L. Abel (ed.), The Politics oflnfonnal Justice. New York: Academic Press. Thompson, E. P. 119791. "The Poverty of TheolY or an On'eIY of Errors." In E. P. Thompson led.1, The Poverty qfTheory and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review Press. Wald, Karen 119761. "The San Quentin Case: Perspective and Analysis." Crime and Social Justice 6:58-68.
Editor's Notes The continued importance of crime to right-wing political campaigns makes the relationship between political praxis and Marxist criminology just as salient an issue today as it
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was ten years ago, when this essay was written. Several American criminologists have outlined proposals for dealing with crime in a "progressive" political agenda (Raymond J. Michalowski, "Crime Control in the 1980s: A Progressive Agenda," Crime and Social Justice 19 (Summer 1983): 13-23; Peter Iadicola, "Community Crime Control Strategies, Crime and Social Justice 25 (1986): 14-65). The most serious difficulty with these proposals is that left-wing American criminologists are, for the most part, not members of political organizations that could implement them. Their authors are like generals who plan militruy campaigns without having any troops. It may be their hope that in publishing their suggestions in radical criminology journals, readers will be inspired to undertake initiatives of their own. For the most part, though, this has not happened. In the United Kingdom, radical criminologists have developed a controversial "left realist" approach to crime and politics. Its name is intended to contrast with the notion that crime is a mere label that should not be taken seriously. Although this has not been the dominant view of radical criminologists in the United States for two decades, one occasionally encounters it among naive students. The British figures who developed the left-realist perspective have carried out victimization surveys and argued for communitybased strategies to combat crime. Some of the most important expositions of this perspective are the following: Contemporary Crises 11, no. 4 (1987). Special issue devoted to criminological realism. Kinsey, Richard, John Lea, and Jock Young (1986). Losing the Fight Against Crime. Oxford: Blackwell. Lea, John (1984), What Is to Be Done about Law and Order? London: Penguin. Matthews, Roger, and Jock Young, eds. (1986). Confronting Crime. London: Sage. Taylor, Ian (1981). Law and Order: Arguments for Socialism. London: Macmillan. Commentruy and criticism ofleft realism can be found in several of the articles included in Philip Scraton's edited collection, Law, Order and the Authoritarian State (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1987), as well as in the following: de Haan, Willem (1987). "Fuzzy Morals and Flakey Politics: The Coming Out of Critical Criminology." Journal ofLaw and Society 14:321-34. Steinert, Heinz 11985). "The Amazing New Left and Order Campaign: Some Thoughts on Anti-Utopianism and Possible Futures." Contemporary Crises 9:327-34. A complete bibliography, including critiques of left realism, can be obtained from the Centre for Criminology at Middlesex Polytechnic.
751
Glossary
The process by which capital increases over time. See also primitive accumulation. alienation When something one has produced becomes a hostile, alien object, the relationship between producer and object is alienated. This is an objective relationship, not a matter of subjective feelings (though it can certainly have subjective manifestations). In capitalism, the relationship between workers and their products is alienated because the products are used to enrich capitalists, not workers. For similar reasons, workers and capitalists are alienated from one another. anomie As used by Durkheim, anomie is ,a state of normlessness in a society. For Merton, anomie is a social condition that prevails when legitimate aspirations cannot be achieved through legitimate means because opportunities for doing so are blocked. base The material foundations of society, its technological and economic spheres. Base is contrasted with superstructure. Beccaria. Cesare 11738-17941 A Milanese aristocrat, social reformer, and author of On Crimes and Punishments. He was a central figure in the classical school of criminology. bourgeoisie Capitalists; those who own capital, employ workers, and keep the profits. In a capitalist social formation, they are the ruling class. capital Wealth, such as raw materials, instruments of production, and money that can be used to produce further wealth. In Marxist theory the term also embodies a social relationship. capitalism A mode of production in which all means of production are purchased as commodities, including labor. Direct producers are separated from the means of production and work for wages, employed by capitalists who own the means of production and appropriate the product. capitalist See bourgeoisie. class A category of people defined by a common relationship to the means of production. Marx's attempt to clarity this definition at the end of Capital, volume 3, was never completed. accumulation
752
Glossary
A school of criminology that saw human behavior, including crime, as based on rational weighing of gains and losses. Its view of punishment was utilitarian. communism Asocialformation in which the means of production are held in common and used for collective benefit. Marx regarded communism as the final stage of social evolution, preceded by socialism. Because classes and class antagonisms do not exist in communist social formations by definition, such social formations will be stateless. The development of the forces of production will have eliminated scarcity, so that distribution will be on the basis of the principle "to each according to their need." contradiction Those features of an existing relationship that tend to transform the relationship. crime A violation of the criminal law. dialectical Having to do with contradictions and their resolution through a transcendence or overcoming. differential association A social-psychological theory of crime causation which posits that normal learning of criminal techniques, values, and attitudes through face-to-face interaction is the process through which criminality is transmitted. The theory was devised by Edwin H. Sutherland. Durkheim, Emile (1858-19171 A French sociologist, known for his functionalist analyses. Engels, Friedrich (1820-18951 A German socialist, lifetime collaborator of Marx, and contributor to the development of Marxist theory. floating surplus population A form of the relative surplus population. Workers whose irregular employment is contingent on businesses' moment3JY need for labor. forces of production The tools, technical knowledge, human labor, and raw materials used to carry on production, together with the way these elements are all combined. functionalism A social theory that analyzes social arrangements in terms of how they selVe to maintain those arrangements. Hegel, George Wilhelm Friedrich (1770-18311 German philosopher who interpreted world history as the dialectical movement of a World Spirit. Marx "stood Hegel on his head," keeping the dialectic but eliminating the mysticism from Hegel's ideas. ideology Widely held ideas that have unrecognized roots in social experience. More naITowly the term refers to ideas that mask political aims or class interests. infrastructure The economic structure of a society, particularly its forces and relations of production. classical school
Glossary
753
A conception of the state as totally controlled by a ruling class, which uses the state governing apparatus as a tool to achieve its ends. Kant, Immanuel 11724-1804) German philosopher and advocate of retributive philosophy of punishment. labeling theory A perspective in deviance theory and criminology that studies the creation, application, and consequences of labeling a person or group as deviant, with particular atltention to the consequences that tend to amplifY or increase deviance. latent surplus population Agricultural laborers who are not needed in agriculture, and who therefore move into urban or rural manufacturing jobs when they open up. legitimation The process by which social arrangements are made to seem right, or appropriate. Legitimation is regarded as more effective than force in maintaining dominant and exploitative relationships. Lenin, Vladimir lIyich 11870-1924) Strategist of the Russian Revolution, and Marxist theorist known especially for developing the theory of imperialism. His ideas about the structure of revolutionary organizations have had a great effect on twentieth-century communist movements. Leninism The doctrine that socialist revolutions are led by hierarchically structured, rigorously disciplined party organizations. Lombroso, Cesare 11836-1909) Founder of the Italian positivist school of criminology, he held that many criminals are biological throwbacks to an earlier stage of human evolution. lumpen proletariat A diverse collection of beggars, prostitutes, pimps, and criminals found in capitalist societies. marginalization The process by which a group of people is made superfluous to the production process. Those made superfluous are sometimes called "marginals." Marx, Karl 11818-1883) German socialist who gave his name to Marxism. Marxism A theoretical framework for analyzing social relations based on the writings of Marx and Engels. mode of production The articulated combination of forces and relations of production, e.g., feudalism, capitalism, socialism. monopoly capitalism Stage in the development of capitalism in which major sectors of the economy are dominated by a few large firms (strictly speaking, oligopoly). New Left The nonsectarian Leftist social movements that sprang up in a number of Western countries in the 1960s (earlier in Great Britain). The New Left attempted to break with Old Left political theory and style. In the United States, participatory democracy, personal liberation, and opposition to racism, militarism, and bureaucratic organizational forms
instrumental theory of the state
754
Glossary
were among its most salient features. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) were its central organizations, joined by feminist unions and consciousnessraising groups in the late 1960s. Old Left Socialist and Communist parties, characterized (fairly or unfairly) as intellectually moribund and morally corrupt by New Leftists. partial autonomy This refers to the claim that in capitalist societies, the state is not controlled completely by any single capitalist (and some would add, not completely by the capitalist class as a whole). petty bourgeoisie Self-employed producers. Although they produce commodities for sale on a market, they are not significant exploiters of labor. Shopkeepers, artisans, and some professionals (doctors and lawyers in private practice) would be examples. Some also use the term to refer to well-paid employees, particularly those who exercise supervisory or managerial responsibilities. phenomenology A school of philosophy and sociology that studies the structure of people's perceptions of reality, suspending the question of what, if any, "objective reality" gives rise to those perceptions. positivism Broadly, a social science epistemology and methodology which asserts the existence of an objective reality that can be apprehended in experience because the categories of consciousness correspond to those of reality. As applied in criminology and other social sciences it is the study of social phenomena through the methods employed in the natural sciencesi the assumption that human behavior can be understood without reference to consciousness or intent. praxis Theoretically guided action to transform the worldi political action. primitive accumulation The earliest stages of capitalist accumulation, marked by the use of violence. proletariat The working class, that is, those who are employed by capitalists for wages. relations of production Social relations having to do with the distribution of the means of production (Le., the possession or non-possession of them) and the forms in which surplus labor are appropriated. The relationship between capitalist and worker is a social relation of productioni ditto for master and slave, lord and serf, and so on. relative surplus population That part of the working class that is made surplus, or unnecessary to production, by the development of capitalism. It exists in latent,jloating, and stagnant forms, as well as paupers and criminals. retributive philosophy of punishment A philosophy that justifies punishment on the basis of what the offender morally deserves, irrespective of the consequences of imposing punishment.
Glossary
755
A conceptualization of society in terms of its mode of production together with its political and ideological elements. Contemporary United States is a social formation whose dominant mode of production is capitalism. socialism A social formation in which the major means of production are owned and controlled by the direct producers. This may entail centralized administration of the economy through a democratically controlled apparatus, or direct control at the level of the decentralized firm. social wage Remuneration based on social membership rather than labor market criteria. A legally prescribed minimum wage exemplifies the concept. stagnant surplus population Poorly paid and irregularly employed workers in sectors of the economy where the forces of production are outmoded. Stalin. Joseph (1879-19531 Russian revolutionary, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR from 1922. He is known for developing the doctrine of "socialism in one country," for emphasizing the development of hea\)' 'industry, and for purging his real and imaginary political opponents. state In Marxian theory an organ of coercion that stands above civil society, to manage class conflict in ways that do not threaten the fundamental interests of the ruling class. It is usually used as synonymous with the government, especially in its repressive functions. Althusser, following Gramsci, has proposed extending the term to include non-governmental institutions like the church and family, which function ideologically to reproduce, or maintain, capitalist social relations. This proposal has not met with wide acceptance from Marxists. structuralism A theory that explains the behavior of individuals or institutions as the consequence of social structures. Structuralism comes in two varieties, structural-functionalism, and Marxist structuralism. superstructure Those features of a socielty that are distinct from, but rest on, its foundation, or base, e.g., politics and ideology. surplus labor Labor (and equivalently, the products of labor) beyond what is needed to reproduce the laborer from day to day and from generation to generation. surplus value When surplus labor takes a monetary form, as it does when products are sold as commodities, it is called surplus value. utilitarianism A doctrine that justifies practices on the basis of their usefulness. value The amount of labor time that is socially necessary to produce something. Value is a key concept in Marxian economics (as it was for the pre-Marxian classical economists). working class See proletariat.
social formation
757
Index
AFSC Working Party, 5-8, 59, 492, 622-27, 634 Akers, Ronald, 23 Alcohol, attitudes toward, 475-76, 487-88, 497-98n Althusser, Louis, 15, 118n, 446, 747n Amir, Menachem, 394 Anomie and crime, 88, 335, 337-40 Antitrust enforcement, 456-57, 641-48 Arson for profit, 76-79,211-57 Auto theft, 81,265-78,318
Blumstein, Alfred, 210n Bonger, Wilhelm A., 11 Bonomo, Thomas, 668-69, 674-88 Brace, Charles Loring, 698, 719 Brady, James, 76-79,211-57 Braverman, H~, 725 Briar, Scott, 348 Brill. Ha~, 81, 265-78 Brownmiller, Susan, 390 Bush, George, 66
Baganda, 359-62,377-79 Balkan, Sheila, 30n Banfield, Edward, 218-19, 225
Capital, definition of, 29n Capital punishment, 42, 55-56, 510-11; abolition of, 483-84, 499n, 513-15, 517-23 Capone, AI, 169-73 Carter, Timothy, 453 Causality, 58-60 Chambliss, William J., 29n, 74, 91n, 465, 496n, 499n Chapman, Dennis, 58 Chartism, 127 China, social control in, xii, 89 Chiriicos, Theodore, 445 Chodorow, Nancy, 408, 420 Ciesllkowski, Albert von, 738 Clark, John, 335
Barak,Grego~,448
Barnett, Harold, 79-81,258-64,641-48 Beccaria, Cesare, 478,509,666 Becker, Howard, 19, 41, 465-66 Beirne, Piers, 30, 355n, 446, 453 Bell, Daniel, 91n, 162-63, 170-71, 173,666 Bentham, Jeremy, 509-13, 521-23, 524n, 525n, 526n, 527n, 528n Black Act, 131-33, 140n Blacks, involvement in crime, 219, 279-333. See also Repression, of blacks Bloch, Herbert, 336
758 Class, 16-17, 106; consciousness, 471, 515-21, 527n; and social control, 142-68,467-70; subjective, 471 Classical school, 477-78, 523-24n Clelland, Donald, 453 Clinard, Marshall, 72 Cloward, Richard, 84, 335-38, 340 Cohen, Albert, 84, 335, 337, 340-43, 408 Cohen, Lawrence, 81, 210n Cohen, Stanley, 59, 71,489-90 Conflict perspective, 444-45, 453, 460n Contradictions, in Marxist theory, 16-17 Control theory, 348 Com~ct lease system, 612-20 Corporate crime, 70-71, 88, 92, 258-64; prosecution of, 456-67, 460n, 641-48 Crime: and capitalism, 38-40, 45-52, 54-99, 194-210,258-64; causes of, 11, 54-57, 5899,111-17,129,136-67,194-210; and class struggle, 63-64, 67, 107, 111-21, 122-41, 142-68; and empathy, 86-89; and politics, 8-9; black involvement in, 82-83, 279-333, 404n; corporate, 63, 258-64, 641-48; female, 405-42; in communist society, 40-41, 5152; definitions of, 5-6, 27n; in Eastern Europe, xii, 23-25, 30n, 72n, 91-92n, 351; ideologies of, 9,26; seriousness of, 457; and social integration, 85-86; and socio-economic status, 58, 344, 356n, 391-96, 404n Crime control, 463-508; in China, 30n, 454 Crime rates, regional differences in, 75-76, 194-210 Criminal law: and power, 7-8, 142-68,444-45; reform, 509-32 Currie, Eliot, 65 Dalkon shield, 88 Da\~s, Alan J., 387 Death penalty. See Capital punishment Defoe, Daniel, 424-25 Degeneracy, 479, 489 Delinquency: causes of, 83-85, 334-56; female, 340,705; and male status anxiety, 346-48; racial differences, 349; self-reported, 2-3; and the school, 340-47, 349, 351; and socioeconomic status, 2-3,84-85,341-43,34547,350; and unemployment, 337-40, 35052 Dialectics, 16, 571 Differential association, 29n Dinnerstein, Dorothy, 409 Discrimination: in employment, 283-87; in
Index housing, 286; in law enforcement, 445-47, 453 Douglas, Jack, 465 Downes, Da~d, 345 Draper, Susan, 383-85 Dual systems theory, 410, 430n Durkheim, Emile, 29n, 41,58,464 Education, compulsory, 342, 712-17 Enclosures, 38-39, 45-48, 68-69, 127, 145-68, 524n Engels, Friedrich, 16, 22, 39-40, 89-90, 359, 361, 406-7,410,431n,446,468-72,497n, 542, 675-77; ~ews on crime, 38-43, 48-52, 668 Evangelicalism, 522, 527-28n Exploitation, 656-57 Feeley, Malcolm, 414-18, 431n, 456 Fencing laws, 72, 142-68 Fetishism, 385; sexual, 386-88 Fiscal crisis, 454-56, 669, 678-83, 686 Fogelson, Robert, 547, 563n Forces of production, defined, 14 Ford, Henry, 725-30 Ford Motor Company, 88 Foucault, Michel, 516, 544n Freud, Sigmund, 217 Functionalism, 368, 464 Gangs, youth, 310-22, 340, 690-701, 704, 707, 717 Gender: and crime, 89-90, 322n, 357,404, 40542; in Marxism, 406, 410-12, 430n Goffman,E~ng,345
Gold, Da~d, 569 Goldberg, Steven, 409 Goldsmith, Oliver, 528n Gordon, Da~d, 60 Gotha Programme, 43 Gottfredson, Michael, 355 Gouldner, Al~n, 19, 342 Greenberg, David, 87, 90, 334-56, 453-54, 460n, 463-508,495,621-40,669 Grose, George, 85, 92 Groves, W. Byron, 85, 92 GUIT, Ted, 194 Gusfield, Joseph, 497-98n Habermas, Jilrgen, 67, 684 Hagan, John, 356, 408 Hahn, Steven, 68, 72, 142--68 Hall, Stuart, 570
759
Index Hanawalt, Barbara, 415, 431n Hannerz, Vlf, 347 Harring, Sidney, 450-51, 546-67 Harris, MalVin, 370 Hartwell, R. M., 91n Hay, Douglas, 526n, 527n Hays, Samuel, 563-64n Hegel, G. W. F., 14, 19,42,55 Heydebrand, Wolf, 454-55 Hindess, Barry, 13 Hirschi, Travis, 348 Hirst, Paul, 13,20, 90n, 675-76 Hopkins, Andrew, 445-46 Horowitz, lIVing Louis, 666, 684-85 Horowitz, Ruth, 344 Humanitarianism, 93n, 448-49, 522 Humphries, Drew, 75-76, 194-210, 463-508, 621-40 Hunter, Monica, 375-77, 398n Iatmul, 357-58 Ideology, 87-88, 470-71,497n Ik,88 Indeterminate sentencing, 490-92, 621-40 Industrial revolution: and crime, 100-121, 122-41; effect on women, 423-24; in agriculture, 282-83; in Germany, 107-17; and social control, 472-85; and standards of living, 70-71, 123-28 Inequality: and crime, 64; in income, 65, 77, 322n, 325n; sexual, 357-404; 405-42 INSLAW,455 Instrumentalism, 444; critique of, 445-46 Insurance industry: and arson, 230-33; and auto theft, 271-77 IWW,722,724-26 Jacksonians, radical, 1 Jasinski, Jerzy, 24 Johnson, Bruce, 589n Justice model, 627-34 Juvenile court, origins of, 8, 492-94, 500n, 701 Juvenile delinquency, 83-85, 91n, 279-333, 334-56,689-735 Kant, Immanuel, 19,42,55 Kirchheimer, Otto, 27, 452, 483, 516, 543, 612 Klockars, Carl, 21-23, 29n Krige, E.J., 363-64 Krige, J. D., 363-64, 374-75 Krisberg, Barry, 7,20, 27n, 667 !Kung, 383-85, 403n
Labeling theory, 4-5, 27n, 41-42, 54, 59-60, 444 Labor theory of value, 67 Laibman, David, 30n Laing, R. D., 58-59 Laissezfaire policy, 477-78; end of, 486-89 Le Jeune, Paul, 380-82 LEAA, 455-56 Leacock, Eleanor, 357, 366, 369-71, 380, 399n Least eligibility priniciple, 458-59, 658-59, 676 Lee, Annie, 355n Left realism, 750 Legitimacy crisis, 684-86 Lemisch, Jesse, 670 Lenin, Vladimir, 107 Lernell, Leszek, 24 Lindsay, Ben, 500 Linebaugh, Peter, 44n, 68-70 Lovedu, 359-64,374-75 Luddism, 123-30, 139n, 140n, 141n Lukacs, George, 589n Lumpen proletariat, 11, 70, 101, 668-69, 675-78 Lynd, Staughton, 670
Mala: prohibita, 593-94n; in se, 593-94n Mandeville, Bernard, 53 Mankoff, Milton, 60 Mannheim, Hermann, 405, 509 Marl(, Karl, 14-19, 21-24, 27n, 28n, 61--62, 79, 446,468-70, 497n,528n,568,674-76,728, 738-39; views on crime and punishment, 38-43,102-3; writings on theft-of-wood laws, 103-5 Manism, 13-17, 102-3, 428-29, 444-48; and human nature, 85-86, 92n; future of, xi-xiii; implications for criminology, 17-25 Manist criminology: criticisms of, 20-25, 29n; fi.lture of, 25-26; origins of, 10-13 Manist economics, 61-62, 66-67 Mathiesen, Thomas, 667 Matza, David, 3, 58, 86, 335-36, 345, 349, 408 Mayhew, Henry, 65, 425-26 Mbuti, 359, 361--62, 365, 372-74, 399n Meier, Robert, 27n, 30n Melton, Robert K., 29n, 335-37 Messerschmidt, James, 93n, 355n, 403-4n, 412, 430n Miller, Walter B., 84, 335, 340 Milton, John, 424 Mode of production, definition of, 14-16, 362 Monkonnen, Eric, 563n Montagnais, Indians, 380-82, 384 Mpondo, 359-62, 375
760 Multiple regression, 209n Mundugamor, 357-77 Mundurucu, 357-58, 366-70 Murphy, Robert, 368 Murton, Thomas, 649-50 Narcotics legislation, 476-77, 495-96, 487-88, 498n Narcotics sales, 31G-14, 324-25n NettleI', G"YTl, 21 Neutralization, techniques of, 86, 408-9 New Left,S, 10, 668 Niederhoffer, Arthur, 336 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 528n Nixon, Richard, 91n Nove, Alec, 30n O'Connor, James, 67, 198, 262, 263n, 454, 456, 678-79,683,686 Oilman, Bertel!, 589n O'Malley, Patrick, 90 Opium trade, 495-96 Organized crime, 72-74, 169-93 Palmer, Jeremy, 593-94n Parsons, Talcott, 29n, 346, 408 Pashukanis, Evgeny, 87, 484, 492 Pearce,Frank,72-74,91n,169-93 Pearson,Geoffrey,26,68,7G-71 Peel, Robert, 128, 519-20 Penal reform, 448-49, 509-32, 533-45 Perkins, H., 382-83 Petchesky, Rosalind, 451-52, 595--611 Phenomenology, 3,5--6,59 Piliavin, lIVing, 348 Platt, Tony, 7-8, 28n, 448, SOOn, 570, 668, 670, 727 Plumb, J. H., 125-27 Police: as deterrent, 21On; corruption, 554, 560, 561-62, 564n; history of, 449-51, 479-83, 498n, 499n, 519, 546--67, 568-94: private, 575-77,584,586-88 Political crime, 8-9, 48-50 Positivism, 2, 6-7, 11,42,68,84,106,116-17, 447n Poulantzas, Nicos, 446, 464 Pound, Roscoe, 523 Praxis, 689-750 Prison: conditions, 458-90; history of, 484-85, 499n, 533-45,651-54; labor, 43, 451-52, 595-611,612-20,652-53,717-18;standards of living in, 649-63
Index Progressivism, 486-88, 689-735 Prohibition, of alcohol, 169-73, 487, 495, 497n, 499 Proportionality, principle of, 483-84 Prosecution, 453, 455 Prostitution, 718-22 Proudhon, Pierre, 27n Quakers, role in penal reform, 536 Quetelet, Lambert A. M., 43, 56 Quinney, Richard, 6-7, 10, 12, 25, 30n, 41, 59, 465--66,568,570,678-79,740-41 Racketeering, 73-78, 182-90, 193n, 228-30 Radical criminology: critique of liberal reform, 8-9; critique of positivism in, 6-7; major tenets of, 5-9, 444-45; origins of, 1-5; weaknesses of, 12-13, 19,59 Rape, 93n, 357-404,430n Rationalization, as social process, 572-82 Redo, Slawomir M., 26 Reformatories, juvenile, 493,713-14 Regulatory agencies, 490, 499n, 646-47 Reich, Wilhelm, 571 Reimann, Jeffrey, 9, 12, 91n, 459n Relations of production, definition of, 14 Relative surplus population, 60, 69-70, 106-7, 110,118 Repression: of blacks, 142--68, 612-20, 624, 729: in socialist societies, 23, 30n Retributivism, 43, 55-56 Riots, 13G-36, 139n, 140n, 141n, 479-81, 498n, 684-87,729 Robinson, Cyril, 82-83, 279-333 Rockefeller Foundation, 497n Romilly, Samuel, 513-15 Roscoe, John, 377-78, 400 Rubin, Gayle, 357 Rusche, Georg,27,452,483,516,543,612 Russell, Diana, 404 Rustigan, Michael, 448, 509-32 Sacks, Karen, 358--62 Scheler, Max, 528n Schur, Edwin M., 3, 91n, 348, 666 Schwendinger, Herman,S, 27n, 89-90, 93n, 323n, 357-404,460n,489,649-63, 671n Schwendinger, Julia,S, 27n, 89-90, 93n, 323n, 357-404,460n,489,649-63,671n Scientism, 478-79, 489 Scull, Andrew, 671-72n Sellin, Thorsten, 533-34, 543
7&1
Index Sentencing, 453; refonn of, 453-56, 490-92, 621--40 Shelden, Randall, 452, 612-20 Short, James, Jr., 344 Slaves, 151-52,380 Social fonnation, definition of, 16 Socialist societies: crime in, 25; repression in, 30n. See also Crime, in Eastern Europe Soviet Union. See USSR Spitzer, Steven, 29n, 60, 84, 450-51, 480-81, 568-94 Stark, Evan, 333n, 669-71 State, theo!}' ofthe, 471-72, 288 Steinert, Heinz, 570 Stender, Fay, 667 Structuralism, 446, 450-51, 457, 464 Subculture of violence, 199-202 Sullivan, Mercer, 316-18 Sumner, Colin, 497n Surplus labor, 82, 90n; definition of, 14 Surplus value, definition of, 62 Sutherland, Edwin H., 29n, 405, 528n Sykes, Gresham, 86, 408 Systems theo!}', 463-65 Takagi, Paul, 448--49, 533--45 Taylor, Ian, 6, 10, 11, 19, 60, 64, 83 Techniques of neutralization. See Neutralization, techniques of Thomas, William 1., 92n Thompson, E. P., 63, 67, 70, 91n, 125-34, 138n, 139,140n,141n,420,454,479-80,670 Thrashe~Frederick,316,699-701,711-12
Tobias, J. J., 522-23 Toby, Jackson, 30n Treatment model, 8, 621-22; criticism of, 62226 Trespass laws, 72, 142-68 Turk, Austin, 4 Turnbull, Colin, 88, 372-73, 399
Tyler, Gus, 39 Utilitarianism, 512-14 USSR, xi-xii, 25, 89 Vagrancy, 142, 149, 561--62, 708, 723-26 Vandalism, 136-38 Vice, 308-10 Vice law, enforcement of, 562-63 Victimless crime, 83, 91n Vietnam, 668 Violence: 87, 92-93n, 312, 314-15, 335-36, 358; against blacks, 285-86; against women, 357--404 Vogel, Lise, 411 Volstead Act, 169,495 Wald, Karen, 667 Waldo, Gordon, 445 Walker, Samuel, 205n, 563n Wallace, Don, 66--67, 75, 194-210 Walnut Street Jail, 533--45 Walsh, Marilyn, 80 Ward, Lester, 488 Weber, Max, 29n Wenger, Morton, 668--69, 674-88 Werthman, Carl, 339--40, 342 Wiebe, Robert, 487 Wilmsen, Edwin M., 403 WoiJgang, Marvin, 27n, 457 Women, status of. See Inequality, sexual Women workers, 405--42 Wood, Allen, 677 Wood-gathering laws, 100-121 Yanoama, 369-70 Young, Jock, 19, 669 ZehI·, Howard, 69, 121
