Comments on ‘Praxis Made Perfect’ by David Downes in Understanding Deviance

This piece under discussion, written in 1978, was an attempt at a critique of the Critical Criminology of Ian Taylor, Paul Walton and Jock Young as defined in their books The New Criminology and Critical Criminology. Given that they had described their criminology as Marxist and these texts were some of the most important of works emanating from the National Deviancy Symposium, it is well worth a look at this critique.
Downes’ central argument is that they (Taylor, Walton and Young) criticise capitalist society but fail to discuss what the alternative is, just naming it socialism and leaving it at that. Furthermore, Downes is quite right when he says that they don’t analyse crime in the Stalinist countries (he calls them socialist). Indeed I think we should agree with Downes on these two points that these are two things that a Marxist criminology should address.
But Downes’ own ideas are not ones we should adopt. He makes several fundamental errors in his critique, which I will now try and highlight – some are more than likely due to the ‘new left’ circles which Critical Criminology moved in counterpoising the earlier ‘humanistic’ Marx with the later Marx, and other such muddles.
Firstly after firstly correctly saying, of critical criminology “…the entire intellectual construction rests on the postulates that capitalist society is essentially criminogenic,” he goes on to add “…and that only by the total repudiation of the ethic of possessive individualism on which it rests can ‘true’ equality and ‘socialist diversity’ – the prerequisites for a ‘crime-free’ society – be attained” (pg 5-6) No, capitalist society rests on a particular stage of economic development, not individualism – and again it is a higher economic development that is the prerequisite for drastically reducing crime.
Later on he attacks, a rather loose phrase of Young’s about the working class having control over policing in their communities – and says that it means only members of one class should be able to police that class – leading to a caste type policing system where only the rich will get properly policed (because , of course, workers can’t do anything for themselves). Of course, Young’s depiction is rather vague, but it would cover the democratic control over local policing which socialists should argue for.
Although this isn’t it, a Marxist critique of the history, work and development of the National Deviancy Symposium would be incredibly useful for the development of a Marxist approach to criminology.

Jock Young and the Decline of Critical Criminology

This piece takes a look at the chapter ‘The failure of criminology: the need for radical realism’ by Jock Young from the 1988 publication Confronting Ctime edited by Young and Roger Matthews.

Young’s opening to this chapter serves as a good introduction to this piece (actually this is the second paragraph). ‘If there has been a measure of the lack of success of radical criminology it has been its failure to rescue mainstream criminology from the conceptual mess in which it has increasingly found itself. It is my contention that the core of this problem revolves around the causes of crime and that this aetiological crisis emerged most blatantly in the 1960s, engendering a period of intense creative development within the discipline including the emergence of radical criminology. However, by the eighties the Thermidor set in and a silent counter-revolution occurred within the mainstream with the emergence of what I will term the new administrative criminology involving a retreat from any discussion of causality…’ (pg4).

Young’s chapter is on the emergence of critical/radical criminology and administrative criminology. Both emerged as groups of ideas within criminology as a result of the collapse of support for positivism. How they emerged is significantly different though, with critical/radical criminology emanating from subcultural and other theories taken from US sociologists and worked up by those around the National Deviancy Conference (NDC). Indeed the story of the National Deviancy Conference could possibly have lessons for those interested in left unity, but that is for another post – the main point for this posting is that it eventually split of into many different groups. One of these was the ‘left realists’ which Young belonged to. Young counterposed himself and his co-thinkers to the ‘left-idealists’ who these are you never really know – but from my reading I take them to be thinkers influenced by the SWP (some of whose members were part of the NDC) and the communist party (which was influenced at this time by the cultural theorists around Stuart Hall).

Administrative criminology, on the other hand, emerged from within the criminological establishment. Two of it’s most prominent theorists were James Q Wilson in the US and Ron Clarke in the UK Home Office. Although as Young notes there were many differences between people who can be classified in this group of thinkers, their main thrust was towards a dropping of the search for the causes of crime (traditionally associated with positivism) and towards situational crime prevention (installation of locks, alarms etc.). Indeed as one of my lecturers has pointed out they were the middle part of the What Works – Nothing Works – Something Works cycle of criminology – this is to do with the role theory plays within trying to do something about crime.

As Young notes later on in the chapter – although outwardly very different “A convergence between left idealism and the new administrative criminology emerged. Bith thought that investigation was fruitless, both agreed that rehabilitation was impossible, both thought that crime control through implementation of programmes of economic and social justice would not succeed, both focussed on the reactions of the state, both were uninterested in past theory, both attempted to explain the effectiveness of crime control without explaining crime and both believed it was possible to generalise in a way which profoundly ignored the specificity of circumstances.”(pg.27)

Moreover, left ‘idealist’ criminology tended to create a functionalist theory that was top-down and explained everything in relation to capitalism’s need to preserve itself. As Young notes, “Central to a Marxist perspective is that capitalism creates the conditions and possibilities for it’s own demise: that is that functional equilibrium is not achieved. It is the assumption that the values and institutions of capitalism obviously aid its equilibrium which is a key weakness of left functionalism.”(pg.18)

So what about Young, self-styled as a left realist? For him, “Realism must navigate between these two poles, it must not succumb to hysteria or relapse into a critical denial of the severity of crime as a problem. It must be fiercely sceptical of official statistics and control institutions without taking the posture of blanket rejection of all figures or, indeed, the very possibility of reform.”(pg.23)

All very good, but for me the place realism found between the poles was the wrong one – they opted for the ‘so-called centre ground’, despite this I think left realist criminology attempted quite a number of useful things – not least local victimisation surveys. Indeed, if ‘left-idealism’ was attached to the ultra-left, and administrative criminology to the bourgeoisie, then rather than being attached to the genuine revolutionary elements, left realism was attached to the ‘soft left’ and the labour bureaucracy.