Jeff Ferrell, Keith Hayward, Jock Young
Cultural Criminology: An Invitation
Sage, 2008
248 Pages
£22.99
ISBN 978-1412931274

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When ODB (Ol’ Dirty Bastard, né Russell Tyrone Jones) was tried for illegally wearing body armour, the prosecutor stood before the court and claimed that the late rapper ran “a street gang called the Wu Tang Clan”. Along with many Wu Tang fans, criminologists Jock Young, Keith Hayward, and Jeff Ferrell were incensed at the prosecutor’s blunt—and, for what it’s worth, inaccurate—conflation of race, criminality, and rap culture. So, motivated by a hundred iterations of that story, they penned Cultural Criminology.

From the Global War on Terror to Kate Moss’s penchant for cocaine, nothing is off limits in this sociological tour de force. And that is precisely the point: for Young, Hayward, and Ferrell, the defining problem of our morally panicked social order is its rigid boundaries, its desire to divide the world into crimes and norms, criminals and citizens, and perhaps, above all, legitimate and outlandish objects of academic enquiry. Cultural Criminology aims to erode each of these boundaries by asking why we talk and think about crime the way we do. The result is an impassioned, nostalgic, slightly sloppy, and ultimately compelling treatise on the (mis)representations of crime in contemporary culture.

Cultural Criminology takes shape around a series of unorthodox readings, each meant to underscore the contingent, socially constructed nature of crime. In their discussion of terrorism, for instance, the authors direct readers to videogames like Medal of Honor and America’s Army: Operations (the latter was launched, incidentally, as a “digital recruiting sergeant” by the US Army). A postmodernist jackpot, these virtual war zones blur the distinction between simulated and on-the-ground soldiering, foreshadowing—and if these authors are right, facilitating—the emergence of drone warfare. According to Young, Hayward, and Farrell, such virtual violence both feeds and flows from a culture of fear that creates, and then alienates, an enemy other.

This culture of fear provides the link between videogames and America’s staggering prison rates, which receive a similarly sharp review. True to their refrain, the authors contend that the penal trends which have earned the United States the highest incarceration rate in the world are as much a question of culture as one of economics or education, more traditional criminological terrain. For Young, Hayward, and Farrell, the American “penal archipelago” results from the way we discuss—and in doing so, define—criminality. In other words, prison is produced by the inhumanizing political rhetoric that frames criminals as monsters. It’s also the product of “codes of language, personal style, and self-presentation” that reinforce “a symbiotic relationship between prison and the ghetto”.  Within this frame, The Wire and the Wu Tang Clan become key sites for the study of crime and its control.

For these criminologists, then, many of the most troubling misconceptions about crime begin with method. This is the underlying, if not the most gripping, message of the book. Departing from a British academic tradition characterized by its focus on policy and close ties to government, these authors aim to put film, music, graffiti, tabloids, and—perhaps above all—the Internet onto the criminological agenda. They are, in their own words, the “janitors” of criminology, “sweeping up and sorting through social discards—skinheads, terrorists, abusers, corrupters—other criminologists don’t care much to encounter.”

The result of this “janitorial service”, they hope, is a distinct mode of sociological enquiry known as “cultural criminology”. Intended to capture both the complexity of criminal acts and their multiple, contextual social meanings, this “cultural” method is, in practice, a largely critical exercise. Though it’s never entirely clear what “cultural criminology” is, the authors make plain that it’s neither labelling theory, according to which social institutions create deviance (too over-determined), deconstruction, which aims to reveal the fundamentally unstable meaning of crime (too insular), nor, of course, positivism, the tried-and-true bad guy of cultural critique.

While this rhetorical structure can at times feel less productive than embittered, it makes for a stunning review of the past 30 years of criminology, and produces some of the strongest moments of the book. Readers will grin as Young, Hayward, and Ferrell tear into positivist scholarship, that “sanitized dross” produced by “colleagues [who] only recognize structural analysis when encased in multi-syllabic syntax or statistical analysis.” Given the positivist climate of much contemporary work on crime, this writing is downright brave.

And of course, this ambiguity is principled. Good cultural critics that they are, the authors resist defining their method throughout. The closest they come is a stirring passage on the purpose of their work:

From the view of cultural criminology, there is a politics to every bloody knuckle – to knuckles bloodied amidst domestic violence or ethnic hatred, to knuckles bloodied for war or profit or entertainment, to knuckles bloodied in newspaper photos and internet clips.

Here, the real motivation for Cultural Criminology comes into focus. If these criminologists are out to rupture disciplinary boundaries, they are doing it to reroute discussions of crime toward the implicitly political questions that lie beneath: what crimes get counted? who counts as criminal? and what does it mean to be someone, or somewhere, against whom violence counts?

The breadth of these questions produces a book that is at once impressive and overwhelming in scope—it’s difficult to paraphrase just how freely and widely these authors scan contemporary culture. This cherry-picking enterprise, which might otherwise feel haphazard, coheres around the book’s grand style, which brings everything from Abu Ghraib to Russian reality television together under an “invitation” to join in its “outsider intellectual critique”.

This invitation is marked by metaphor and gaudy rhetorical flourish, right down to a six-point “manifesto” at the conclusion of the book. Jock Young has long been an expert in this arena, and his most famous phrases—“bulemic world”, “late modernity”—are put to evocative, if repetitive, use throughout. At times this self-referential, bloated writing can be frustrating (“In late modernity the tectonic plates of gross inequality and widespread social stigmatization continue to grind below the social surface”), leaving the reader wishing for more answers and less alliteration. At others, particularly when the inclusive politics of this “cultural” critique shine through, it’s inspiring.

Above all, though, the style of Cultural Criminology is nostalgic. This is at first slightly sad and then sort of profound. As the pages pass, one begins to wonder why it should feel so passé to care—about race and gender, picket lines and subcultures, Marxism and modes of resistance. In their current “evidence-based” form, the social sciences appear to have left all that anger—and with it, most of the critique—to certain pockets of the humanities. In a field like criminology, which is so explicitly and simultaneously concerned with violence, vulnerability, fear, and systematic oppression, the flat affect of contemporary scholarship is a real, political problem.

In all its overblown glory, then, this book succeeds, for it begs a series of regularly suppressed questions about why writing outside disciplinary and stylistic comfort zones should feel so, well, criminal.

Emma Kaufman is reading for an MPhil in Criminology at New College, Oxford. She is the executive editor of the Oxonian Review.

Anastassia Tsoukala
Football Hooliganism in Europe:
Security and Civil Liberties in the Balance
Palgrave Macmillan, 2009
192 pages
£50.00
ISBN 978-0230201149

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To the horror of Western Europe’s liberal intelligentsia, the ancient alliance between popular attitudes and muscular executive force has excluded asylum seekers and radical Muslims from “normal” society. Yet the same intelligentsia that has campaigned against the unlawful treatment of these groups has turned a blind eye to the de-humanisation and denial of civil liberties affecting the young, male football supporter. Away from the headlines of asylum prisons and 42-day detention, suspected football hooligans have been demonised in a pan-European spiral of social construction, which implicates governments, the EU, police forces, and the media.

Football Hooliganism in Europe is Anastassia Tsoukala’s effort to expose this trend. Turning to the histories of European lawmaking and law enforcement, Tsoukala, a professor of criminology at Paris XI, traces the process by which the football hooligan became a modern folk devil. Despite its flaws, her book admirably attempts to redirect academic focus toward the less recognised—but no less oppressive—manifestations of the contemporary obsession with security.

As Tsoukala makes clear, the demonisation of football hooliganism is an outgrowth of a new security paradigm in which “non-traditional threats” justify disproportionate executive power. Within this frame, sub-groups like the asylum seeker, the radical Muslim, and the hooligan are violated due to pre-emptive assessments of “risk”. This process occurs independently of violence itself, facilitating the erosion of human rights across Europe.

For instance, in Britain, the Football (Disorder) Act 2000 allows authorities to ban suspected hooligans from stadiums and restrict them from traveling abroad to games through passport confiscation. Authorities can take these measures on the basis of police complaint alone. Violating the principle of proportionality and illustrating the punitive bite of civil orders, the law has allowed restriction of movement—and even detention—during “control periods” of suspected hooliganism. By the time of the 2006 World Cup, 3,286 of these banning orders were in force in England and Wales.

In February of that year, one case, Chief Constable of Greater Manchester v. Davies, deliberated on a man who received a football banning order based on a complaint, despite the failure of either policemen or CCTV footage to identify him. In another case, a man received a banning order after a bottle was thrown in a pub, even though authorities could not positively identify the man as the perpetrator. Such “guilt by membership in a disorderly group” is a common, if patchy, pattern that feeds on the arbitrary predilections of local constabularies and magistrates.

This pattern persists across Europe. In France, Law (2006)-64, ostensibly an anti-terrorism measure, bans people from stadiums who have been found guilty of certain offences. Germany, Belgium, and Italy have similar measures in place. Moreover, even after these bans have expired, offender backgrounders remain on shared databases across Europe, contrary to the stipulations of the European Convention on Human Rights. Apart from infringing on the right to freedom of movement, these civil laws circumvent the procedural guarantees of the criminal justice system, most notably the crucial tenet of “innocent until proven guilty”. In this way, bans on football hooliganism constitute a noteworthy shift from traditional criminal justice toward what criminologist David Garland has called “the culture of control”.

But do football hooligans really matter? After decades of critical work by academics, the problems and implications of persecuting asylum seekers and radical Muslims are relatively clear. But aren’t football hooligans simply a case of deviant—or, as New Labour would have it, “anti-social”—people getting the punishment they deserve? Aren’t the control orders simply a way to prevent destruction of life, property, and public order?

For Tsoukala, the answer is a resounding no. While she does not deny the realities of football violence, Tsoukala asserts that football bans reveal latent ideologies—and key contradictions—in contemporary crime-control practices. In a skillful historical survey, she explains how a concrete, continent-wide legal framework specific to sports-related violence first emerged after 39 Juventus supporters were killed during a fight at Belgium’s Heysel Stadium in 1985. She then explores how this framework exhibits overlaps with approaches to similarly imagined non-state threats, such as recent legislation designed to combat terrorism, drug networks, and riots. The genealogy provides a timely corrective to the praise heaped on the policing of the 2006 World Cup: Tsoukala demonstrates that the measures the media has lauded—police co-operation, database sharing, and cross-European passport revocation—are a triumph of self-reinforcing logic and pernicious social construction.

While her analysis of legal history is compelling, Tsoukala’s survey of academic research on the phenomenon of hooliganism displays a myopic commitment to her own arguments about the problem at hand. She hastily dismisses decades of economic, social, and psychological research on sports-related violence, most notably the work of sociologists Peter Marsh and Eric Dunning. A more thorough acknowledgment of this research would add depth and empirical force to Tsoukala’s analysis, and perhaps more importantly, would endear her to—rather than alienate her from—the academics she aims to convince.

In the end, the problem with Football Hooliganism in Europe is that Tsoukala only hints at what she might state more explicitly: that the construction of the anti-hooligan hyperbole is as much about economics as it is about a social construct. Who wins in this economic exchange? All involved: newspapers whip up a storm to sell more newspapers; police forces point to the newspaper reports and get more resources; and European institutions such as Interpol emphasise (or perhaps invent) the transnational aspect of the problem to justify their coercive measures. In this system of internal logic, actual events bear little relation to outcomes: either violence occurs, necessitating more punitive measures, or it does not, in which case the preventive apparatus is praised, extended, and replicated. To some extent, the War on Terror works the same way.

Tsoukala gives too little time to these sorts of motivations, which underlie the very social construction she indicts. But she does succeed in convincing the reader that football hooliganism matters. This contribution should not be overlooked, for the patterns Tsoukala highlights suggest the need for more critical assessment of European laws and institutions. They also speak to the continued presence of impetuous punitive measures in Europe, which discriminate against particular persons based on prejudices and assumptions.

The precedent set by banning and restricting alleged hooligans, a precedent of “punishment on the basis of suspicion”, is dangerous, and the prevalence of such bans illustrates the need to keep a sharp eye on European institutions—the Council of Europe, the European Commission, and increasingly the European Parliament—that have undermined their own “rights and freedoms” rhetoric in the treatment of sports-related violence. In short, the continued failure to critique football-hooligan bans permits an erosion of the very values Europeans claim to uphold. By highlighting this paradoxical process, Tsoukala has not merely provided a new slant on a single phenomenon; she has shown that the seemingly banal control machinery of European integration can and does infringe on hard-won rights.

Mark Baker is reading for an MPhil in Modern Chinese Studies at St. Antony’s College, Oxford.

David Garland
The Culture of Control
Oxford University Press, 2001
336 pages

How does one describe a book that combines an insufficient understanding of sociology, a tainted account of criminology, an even more appalling grasp of cause and effect, and a biased, politically-charged presentation of evidence that might leave a censor in Orwell’s Ministry of Truth blushing? Fortunately, the venerable Times Literary Supplement provides an answer to guide the intellectual lilliputians of the lay reading world: ‘Garland’s analysis of the profound social and cultural shifts of recent decades… is a tour de force.’

In his new book, The Culture of Control, David Garland describes changes in crime control and criminal justice in the United States and Britain during the past half century. Detailing the new politics of law and order, he argues that controlling less fortunate citizens has become the priority in these ‘so-called liberal, non-oppressive states.’ By vilifying the undeserving poor, increasing incarceration rates, imposing mandatory sentencing, and more frequently executing criminals (US), contemporary society contemporary society is more an ‘Iron Cage’ than an open democracy.

Two social forces, he argues, shaped contemporary crime control arrangements: the distinctive social arrangements of what he labels ‘late modernity,’ and the politics of free markets and social conservatism that gained prominence in the 1980s in the UK and the US. Garland compares present-day policies and practices to those before the 1970s to create what he calls ‘a history of the present.’ He describes his approach as holistic rather than piecemeal. This method attempts to create a single framework for viewing drastic changes in criminological theory, penal philosophy, penal politics, policing sentencing, punishment, private security, crime prevention, and the treatment of victims.

Not surprisingly, Garland claims Michael Foucault as his greatest inspiration and Discipline and Punish as the prototype for his argument. Garland, unfortunately, mimics Foucault’s propensity to provide tenuous evidence and his willingness to disregard competing facts at his own discretion, but he does not always share Foucault’s ability to generate original, provocative interpretations. While Garland’s thesis has promise, his overarching argument and evidence is more becoming of a political pundit’s op-ed in The Guardian than as the work of a disciple of the great French structuralist.

Garland describes the decades of crime policy immediately following World War II as the ‘Golden Age’ of penal-welfarism. This period consisted of two fundamental ideas: (1) ‘social reform together with affluence would eventually reduce the frequency of crime,’(2) ‘the state is responsible for the care of offenders as well as their punishment and control.’ It embodied a belief in the perfectibility of man and a faith in the ability and good intentions of professionals and public officials. Offenders were viewed as unfortunate rather than evil.

Why did the penal-welfare system of the pre-1970s period abdicate to the new culture of control? According to Garland, problems arose because of the prevalence of high crime rates and disorder and the recognition that criminal justice limited ability to control crime and ensure security. In response to this evolving environment, actors developed new strategies that appealed to political, popular and professional sectors.

The rise of the culture of control corresponded to a new economic style of decision-making, new criminology of control, and a new conception of penal-welfarism. This new system reinforced the emergence of anti-welfare politics and the conception of the poor as undeserving. The new culture was also created by images in the media, by political rhetoric, but most importantly by the collective experience of crime in everyday life. Private citizens adapted to this prevalent crime with their own adaptations of prevention and control.

Crime policy, Garland argues, currently operates in two distinct manners. The first includes community organizations and preventive measures such as auto theft deterrent devices. Garland calls these the ‘criminologies of everyday life.’ He also describes the ‘criminology of the other,’ which echoes the notion of moral panic. This includes high profile crimes that summon drastic, symbolic and pervasive action by policy makers.

This response, he asserts, represents a fundamental contradiction: ‘The odd fact that punitive “law and order” politics have co-existed, in both countries, with an entirely differently strategy — of preventative partnerships, community policing and generalized crime prevention — is explained by reference to the public’s ambivalence about crime and crime control: an ambivalence that gives rise to quite divergent forms of action’.

Garland struggles to clearly delineate cause and effect. In one instance, he argues that ‘social organization created political and cultural change that resulted in a change in the way that citizens, corporations and governments act.’ In the next, he asserts that his account adumbrates the influence of social and economic forces on public policy, criminological thought, and the cultural meaning of crime and criminals. He also states that his argument reveals the way in which ‘today’s crime control arrangements reproduce a new type of social order.’ He further states, “The most important changes [in crime control] have been in the cultural assumptions that animate them.” Far from perspicuous, Garland’s strategy of determining explanatory value consists of periodically creating sentences by jumbling social, political, culture and crime and then inserting the word causes
somewhere in the middle.

Garland’s argument suffers from methodological weaknesses. In his preface, Garland writes, ‘While these endnotes will be essential (and, I hope, enlightening) reading for the professional scholar, those readers who simply want to follow the book’s story and grasp its explanation need not be disturbed by their intrusion.’ As we will soon see, and as the book demonstrates repeatedly, the disturbing dearth of evidence in the main body of text should alarm the most casual readers, and the misleading and unconvincing citations in the endnotes vitiate support for some of his most crucial claims.

Garland provides insufficient evidence to establish the existence and significance of the key indicators of control. He cites an increase in incarceration rates, but does not compare incarceration rates as a percentage of population between periods. He refers to greater levels of community policing and activism, yet does not provide any quantifiable evidence of an increase in community groups. (I thought Robert Putnam, whom Garland cites, said that contemporary society bowls alone. Maybe society now bowls alone, but looks for bad guys together.) He also cites the increasing use of capital punishment, ignoring that even these increased number of executions represent a statistically infinitesimal aspect of modern crime policy.

Garland demonstrates additional weaknesses in his research methods. He states, ‘Tough crime policies are not without costs. The policies currently being pursued in the US and Britain entail unprecedented levels of correctional expenditures. Public spending on “law and order” either increases the tax burden or else reduces other heads of public expenditure, such as education, healthcare or job-creation programs.’ This comment embodies much of what is wrong with Garland’s approach.

First, Garland does not identify the specific costs and does not give any explanation of which level of government and by what means the policies are paid for. In the US, policing is often paid for by the local community, education is often paid for by a separate local levy and health-care is funded primarily through the federal government. Thus, it is difficult to claim that these goals compete with one another directly for funds.

Second, the empirical evidence (if Garland had bothered to consult any) suggests that investment in policing provides more benefit than costs. Research by Steve Levitt indicates that although the marginal cost of imprisoning a convicted felon is $30,000 a year, while the average benefit in terms of crime prevention is $50,000 a year for each additional convicted criminal. And while an additional officer costs about $80,000 a year, the average officer produces about $200,000 in annual crime prevention benefits. Looking at the elasticities, Levitt finds that a ten percent increase in the police force results in a ten percent decrease in violent crime and three percent reduction in property crimes.

Does Garland have evidence to refute these claims? In fact, Garland provides two footnotes to the above passage. Yet these citations leave much to be desired, referring to an obscure audit from Her Majesty’s Prison Service and a lengthy book on a seemingly unrelated topic (with no specific page number cited).

Garland provides an equally spurious account of the economic and social changes in the 1980s and 1990s: ‘The decline of public institutions through underfunding, the reduction of state benefits, the disinvestments in the inner cities, the social and economic marginalization of the poor — these are policies that engender insecurity. The neo-liberal choice has been a fateful one in emotional as well as economic terms. Every individual is more and more obliged to adopt the economic attitude of the responsibilized, competitive entrepreneur. The corresponding psychic posture is that of tensed-up, restless individuals, regarding each other with mutual suspicion and no great deal of trust.’

This statement reveals the fundamental flaw with The Culture of Control. Burdened by stale thinking, unsophisticated generalization, and inexcusable hyperbole, Garland undermines his potentially cogent hypothesis by failing to move beyond the political ideal-types of the 1980s. Public expenditure hasn’t declined significantly since 1980; it has merely failed to continue to increase as a percentage of GDP. State benefits have been reformulated, not necessarily reduced. Most major cities have experienced significant revivals associated with increasing tax bases in the past decade. Both financial and attitudinal studies do not confirm that contemporary social and economic marginalization differs in magnitude from previous periods in history, and empirical work does not suggest that ‘neo-liberal’ policies are the key variable in explaining contemporary marginalization.

Certainly, neo-liberalism has created its share of problems, just as the welfare state did. But one can’t sufficiently identify the relative importance of these problems by following Mr. Garland’s apparent research method (rereading Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society.)

Garland does raise several interesting questions. Despite the poor answers and spotty evidence he provides for these questions, he nonetheless encourages more productive ways of thinking about crime control in contemporary society. First, he takes an interest in the perception (no cited proof) that politicians play a more prominent role in crime control than in the period of high modernity. Second, he identifies an interesting dialectic between freedom and control, although he does not carefully define what makes this dialectic unique for a discussion of current crime policy.

Garland provides a provocative thesis that undoubtedly describes a portion of the current environment of crime control. This culture of control has serious implications for the development of a more inclusive, prosperous nation, be it the UK or the US. Unfortunately for the readers, The Culture of Control does not live up to the hype. Confounded by ideology and exiguous evidence, his inchoate argument promises to mislead politically charged readers and excitable literary critics.

His questions merit answers. Hopefully, a more objective researcher will explore them and provide more accurate and helpful responses.

Brad Henderson is a graduate student in Economic and Social History at Balliol College, Oxford. He did his undergraduate degree in Economics at the University of Chicago.