CHAPTER EIGHT SOCIAL POWER AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF CRIME CONFLICT THEORY
William J. Chambliss
1933–2014
George Washington University
Author of Conflict Theory
Courtesy of William J. Chambliss
As Chapter 7 showed, theories purporting to explain crime by locating its sources in biological, psychological, or social factors associated with the offender have tended to ignore the way in which “crime” is produced and aggravated by the reaction to the real or imagined attributes or behavior of those who are being labeled offenders. Labeling theory tried to correct this oversight, going into great detail in an effort to explain the labeling process and its consequences. But as the previous chapter also indicated, some criminological theorists did not believe that labeling theory went far enough. The labeling theorists showed some appreciation for the way in which political interests and political power affected social reaction, but they did little to explore these deeper issues.
What determines whether a label will stick? What determines the extent to which those labeled are punished? The nature of the labeling may depend on differences between those labeled and those doing the labeling. Whether labels can be made to stick and the extent to which those labeled can be punished may essentially depend on who has power. Theories that focus attention on struggles between individuals and/or groups in terms of power differentials fall into the general category of conflict theory.
Some conflict theories try to search for the sources of the apparent conflicts. Some seek to elucidate the basic principles by which conflict evolves. Others try to develop a theoretical foundation for eliminating the conflict. Still others try to do all of this and more.
In this chapter, we examine some of the leading criminological conflict theories, beginning with conflict theory in general as found in the pioneering work of Marx and Engels and in the later work of Simmel. Then we examine Bonger’s attempt to develop a Marxist theory of crime, Sutherland’s and Sellin’s focus on the relationship between culture conflict and crime, and Vold’s effort to build a criminological conflict theory on the tradition exemplified by Simmel. Because contemporary American criminological conflict theory, like other criminological control theories, drew much of its inspiration from the turmoil of the 1960s, it is necessary to reexamine the 1960s from another point of view before proceeding to a consideration of influential conflict theories such as those of Austin Turk, William Chambliss, and Richard Quinney. Finally, we consider some of the consequences within criminology as well as the policy implications of conflict theory.
We would be remiss if we did not note at this point the deaths in 2014 of Austin Turk and William Chambliss. By bringing concepts such as conflict, power, and criminalization into criminology, they had a transformative effect on the field. Their passing signals, in a sense, that the generation of scholars who redefined criminology in the 1960s and thereafter is nearing its conclusion. This generation’s work will have an enduring effect, but the personal contributions of its members either have already ended or will be increasingly limited. We all have seen farther because, as the saying goes, they are the intellectual giants upon whose shoulders we have been fortunate to stand. They are missed but hopefully not soon forgotten.
FORERUNNERS OF CONFLICT THEORY
Marx and Engels: Capitalism and Crime
As indicated in Chapter 5, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels already were expressing concern over the apparent decline in social solidarity by the middle of the 1800s, preceding Durkheim by several decades. For Marx and Engels, as well as for Durkheim, crime was to some extent a symptom of this decline and would diminish (although Durkheim made it clear that it never would disappear) if social solidarity could be regained. They differed in their analyses of the source of the erosion of solidarity and their prescription for its restoration.
Durkheim saw the situation as a moral problem and argued that the social solidarity of the future would depend on an effective combination of controls through modes of social integration and social regulation that could operate in tune with the new division of labor that had been created by industrialization. Marx and Engels saw the problem in economic terms, denounced the new division of labor as the unjust exploitation of one social class by another, and insisted that social solidarity could be regained only with the overthrow of capitalism itself. They advocated undertaking a revolution followed by a period of socialism. Because in their view the political state existed essentially as a mechanism for the perpetuation of capitalism, it was deemed historically inevitable that the state would then “wither away,” leaving a society based on the true brotherhood and sisterhood of communism (Marx & Engels, 1848/1992).
Marx himself had very little to say about crime. Those criminological theorists who cite him as a major forerunner tend to extrapolate from his general approach, to cite his collaborator Engels’s more directly relevant writings on the assumption that Marx agreed, or to do both by citing Marx in general with specific quotations from Engels to nail down the point. Certainly, Marx and Engels stressed differences in interests and in power much more than did Durkheim. For them, conflict was inherent in the nature of social arrangements under capitalism, for it was capitalism that generated the vast differences in interests and capitalism that gave the few at the top so much power over the many at the bottom. Above all, their theoretical approach was action oriented; they were less concerned with the pure understanding of social problems than with changing things for what they considered the better.
Although the work of Marx and Engels was extremely complex, certain basic propositions stand out (Turner, 1978). First there was the proposition that conflict of interests between different groups will be increased by inequality in the distribution of scarce resources (e.g., food, clothing, shelter). A second proposition was that those receiving less of the needed resources would question the legitimacy of the arrangement as they became aware of the nature of the “raw deal” they were getting. The third proposition was that these groups then would be more likely to organize and to bring the conflict out into the open, after which there would be polarization and violence leading to the redistribution of the scarce resources in such a way that they would be shared by everyone. Capitalism was considered to be at the root of the conflict because it was taken to be the source of the unjust inequality. In this view, greater integration and regulation simply would tend to perpetuate an unjust economic system. The way in which to solve the problem of collapsing social solidarity was not to find some new sources of faith in the social order or some more effective means of regulating its members but rather to destroy capitalism and build toward the one just form of social solidarity—communism.
Simmel: Forms of Conflict
Like Marx, Georg Simmel was a German intellectual with a deep interest in social theory. On the other hand, Simmel was a contemporary of Durkheim, doing his theoretical work a few decades later than Marx and concerning himself with a search for precise intellectual understanding of abstract laws governing human interaction rather than with changing the world. Simmel was an exponent of “sociological formalism” (Martindale, 1960, p. 233). He was concerned not so much with the changing content of social life as with its recurring forms or patterns. Speaking of Simmel, Wolff (1964) remarked that his approach represented a “preponderance of the logical over the normative” (p. xviii). Simmel’s interest was not in particular conflicts but rather in conflict in general, and he was less concerned with normative questions such as the justice of a particular outcome than with the abstract logic of conflict itself.
Although Simmel was deeply interested in conflict as a form common in social life, he was not as preoccupied with it as was Marx, seeing it as a normal part of life and as one form of interaction among others, some of which were operating in different and even opposite directions in an integrated social system (Turner, 1978). Conflict was regarded not as a problem necessarily calling for solutions or even leading to change but rather as a typical aspect of social order that often actually contributed to that order. Of equal importance is that whereas Marx focused on the causes of conflict and sought to find means for their elimination, Simmel focused on the consequences of conflict, with little interest in its sources and great interest in the complex formal patterns through which it developed.
Bonger: Capitalism and Crime
Early during the 20th century, the conflict perspective of Marx and Engels was applied specifically to criminological theory by the Dutch criminologist Willem Bonger. As we will see later, the turbulence of the 1960s brought renewed interest in Marxist theory and in the work of Bonger (1916/1969). In the introduction to an abridged edition of Bonger’s major work published near the end of the 1960s, the American criminologist and conflict theorist Austin T. Turk spoke of him appreciatively as a man who “combined a passion to alleviate human misery with an equal passion for scientific research” (Turk, 1969b, p. 3). Like Marx and Engels, and unlike Freud and Durkheim, Bonger believed that the human was innately social. If so, then crime would have to be traced to an unfavorable environment that distorted human nature. Bonger held that just such an unfavorable environment had been generated by the rise of capitalism.
Under capitalism, according to Bonger, there had arisen a sharp division between the rulers and the ruled that originated not in innate differences between them but rather in the economic system itself. In such an unfavorable environment in which people were pitted against each other in the economic struggle, in which the individual was encouraged to seek pleasure by any means possible without regard for others, and in which the search required money, human nature was distorted into an intense “egoism” that made people more capable of committing crimes against one another. Thus, like the control theorists as far back as Durkheim, Bonger traced crime in part to individual egoism. Unlike them, however, Bonger took the Marxist position that the decline of social integration and the rise of extremely disruptive individualism could be traced to capitalism. Such egoism never could be reduced by social controls that bound the individual more closely to society, for society under capitalism was itself the very source of the egoism.
Bonger traced much crime to the poverty generated by capitalism, both directly because crime among the subordinate class sometimes was necessary for survival and indirectly because the sense of injustice in a world where many had next to nothing while a few had nearly everything was held to demoralize the individual and to stifle social instincts. At the same time, however, he recognized that the more powerful bourgeoisie also committed crimes. He traced this to the opportunities that came with power and the decline of morality that came with capitalism. Crime was seen as a product of an economic system that fostered a greedy, egoistic, “look out for number one” mentality while at the same time making the rich richer and the poor poorer.
Long before the labeling theorists, Bonger stressed that although it certainly was true that crime fell into the category of immoral actions, definitions of morality varied. Indeed, he went further, insisting that the source of the prevailing definitions and of their variations could be found in the interests of the powerful. In Bonger’s view, behaviors were defined as crimes when they significantly threatened the interests of the powerful, and “hardly any act is punished if it does not injure the interests of the dominant class” (Turk, 1969b, p. 9). Thus, Bonger took note of the statistics showing a lower crime rate among the bourgeoisie and traced this to the fact that the legal system “tends to legalize the egoistic actions of the bourgeoisie and to penalize those of the proletariat” (p. 10). Given Bonger’s theory of the causes of crime, his conclusion that the abolition of capitalism and the redistribution of wealth and power would restore a favorable environment and eliminate crime followed almost entirely as a matter of political logic.
Sutherland and Sellin: Culture Conflict and Crime
In criminological theory, Edwin H. Sutherland is best known for his differential association theory discussed in Chapter 3. As indicated in that chapter, the concept of differential association was built on the concept of differential social organization, which was itself an attempt to move away from the value judgments entailed in describing situations organized differently as representing social disorganization. The concept of differential social organization represented one type of conflict perspective. Inherent in the notion was the assumption that society did not rest on complete consensus but rather was made up of different segments with conflicting cultural patterns. Individual criminal activity could be explained by assuming that a person whose associations were dominated by relationships with those in a less law-abiding segment of society would tend to learn criminal techniques and develop criminal orientations.
Sutherland already had begun systematic research into the crimes of the wealthy and powerful by the mid-1920s. During the 1930s, he pioneered the study of white-collar criminality, publishing a groundbreaking article at the beginning of the 1940s (Sutherland, 1940) and a widely cited book on the subject by the end of the decade (Sutherland, 1949). In these works, he called attention to the fact that powerful economic interests such as the huge corporations that had arisen during the 20th century represented a segment of society whose organization and policy made them “habitual criminals,” although their wealth and political power protected them from prosecution in the criminal courts. As was pointed out in Chapter 3, he explained the participation of individuals in the white-collar crimes of these corporations in terms of their differential association by way of immersion in the criminal patterns of the business.
During the depression of the 1930s, another criminologist, Thorsten Sellin, best known today for his studies of capital punishment and his efforts at developing crime indexes, argued for a broader definition of crime and a less conventional approach to criminological theory. Sellin (1938) stressed the problem of “culture conflict” as a source of crime, maintaining that different groups learn different “conduct norms” and that the conduct norms of one group might clash with those of another. As for which conduct norms would become a part of the criminal law, Sellin held that
the conduct which the state denotes as criminal is, of course, that deemed injurious to society or, in the last analysis, to those who wield the political power within that society and therefore control the legislative, judicial, and executive functions which are the external manifestations of authority. (p. 3)
Vold: Conflict and Crime
Near the close of the 1950s, George B. Vold set forth the most extensive and detailed treatment of criminological theory from a conflict perspective yet seen in criminology. Citing Simmel, Vold (1958) agreed that conflict should be regarded not as abnormal but rather as a fundamental social form characteristic of social life in general. He argued, “As social interaction processes grind their way through varying kinds of uneasy adjustment to a more or less stable equilibrium of balanced forces in opposition, the resulting condition of relative stability is what is usually called social order or social organization” (p. 204, emphasis added). In this perspective, social order was not presumed to rest entirely on consensus; rather, it was presumed to rest in part on the stability resulting from a balance of power among the various conflicting forces that compose society. The conflict between groups was analyzed in Simmelian terms as potentially making a positive contribution to the strengthening of the different groups because participation in the struggle resulted in group esprit de corps and in-group solidarity. According to this analysis, it was perfectly normal for groups in a complex society to come into conflict as their interests clashed, and “politics, as it flourishes in a democracy, is primarily a matter of finding practical compromises between antagonistic groups in the community at large” (p. 208).
As to the nature of legal compromises, Vold (1958) cited Sutherland’s work from the 1920s, noting that “those who produce legislative majorities win control over the police power and dominate the policies that decide who is likely to be involved in violation of the law” (p. 209). Vold considered politics to be the art of compromise and insisted that “the principle of compromise from positions of strength operates at every stage of this conflict process” (p. 209). His own theoretical interest in the forms rather than the content of such conflict may be seen in his comparison of the delinquent gangs’ patterns to those formed by conscientious objectors during time of war. Both were analyzed as identical patterns or social forms in which group ideology existed in conflict with established authority. Like Simmel, Vold was concerned with the similarity of the forms of conflict rather than with normative distinctions such as the nature of the morality involved.
Vold (1958) pointed out that much crime was of an obviously political nature. He included crimes resulting from protest movements aimed at political reform, noting that “a successful revolution makes criminals out of the government officials previously in power, and an unsuccessful revolution makes its leaders into traitors subject to immediate execution” (p. 214). His formal analysis avoided the normative and stuck to the logical. Regardless of who was “right” and who was “wrong,” those who lost were the “criminals.” In this sense, their (formal) “crime” consisted of losing.
Vold (1958) also gave attention to crimes involving conflicts between unions and management and between different unions themselves. In a statement portending what was to come in the civil rights movement in the United States during the 1960s and elsewhere in the world during the 1980s, he pointed out that “numerous kinds of crimes result from the clashes incidental to attempts to change or to upset the caste system of racial segregation in various parts of the world, notably in the United States and in the Union of South Africa” (p. 217). Vold undertook an intensive analysis of organized crime and white-collar crime as examples of groups organizing themselves in the pursuit of their interests, examining the strategies and tactics employed in the conflict.
THEORY IN CONTEXT: THE TURMOIL OF THE 1960S
Although the various forerunners of conflict theory discussed previously had anticipated much of what was to follow, it was not until the social upheavals of the 1960s that criminological conflict theory came into its own. The 1960s represented a major turning point for criminology. As we have seen already, it was within the context of those times that both control theory and labeling theory developed from theoretical seeds planted earlier. The same was true for conflict theory. Although control theory reacted by stressing the tenuous nature of complex society under conditions of rapid social change and insisted that crime and delinquency tended to spread with any significant weakening of forces containing the individual, conflict theory highlighted the newly revealed patterns of social division and questioned the legitimacy of the motives, strategies, and tactics of those in power. Although labeling theory exposed the way in which crime was a social construction of moral entrepreneurs and others in a position to influence the definitions developed by the political state and sometimes pointed to class bias in the labeling process, conflict theory was much more explicit about the connection between the criminal justice system and the underlying economic order, sometimes condemning the state itself.
Seeking to explain the rise of criminological conflict theory (which he termed critical theory) during the 1960s, Sykes (1974) pointed to three factors of special importance. First, there was the impact of the war in Vietnam on American society. Second, there was the growth of the counterculture. Third, there was the rising political protest over discrimination, particularly racial discrimination, and the use of the police power of the state to suppress political dissent—associated issues that had been smoldering and threatening to break into the open since World War II.
As the war in Vietnam escalated, doubts deepened not only about the wisdom of governmental policy but also about the fundamental motives and credibility of those in power. Reasons given for the escalating involvement seemed to many to be rather far-fetched, and doubts were increased by discoveries of disinformation—a bureaucratic term for governmental lies. Protest marches spread. Armed troops fired on and killed apparently peaceful protesters on college campuses. The conscientious objectors about whom Vold had written so coolly were everywhere, voluntarily choosing to become “criminals” by leaving for Canada or burning their draft cards in heated public protests.
As indicated in Chapter 5, the developing counterculture represented in large part a repudiation of middle-class standards. Countercultural behavior dramatized a fundamental conflict in values. Millions were engaging in a variety of activities that they considered harmless but that the legal system regarded as criminal offenses—so-called victimless crimes such as fornication, vagrancy, and illegal drug use. The latter had in fact become not only a way of “getting high” but also a symbolic political protest.
As Chapter 5 emphasized, along with the impact of the war in Vietnam and the growth of the counterculture came the rise of social movements aimed at eliminating discrimination and demanding an end to the suppression of political dissent. The feminist movement spoke more and more radically in terms of the political, economic, and sexual oppression of women. The gay community became more politicized, organizing to resist labeling and discrimination. Underlying social conflict came more and more into the open as the civil rights movement seemed to make it clear that African Americans were not going to gain social equality without civil disobedience and that the only way of dealing with the unjust laws enforcing segregation was to violate them en masse—for the protesters to become “criminals” and spend some time in jail as the price for their beliefs.
At the same time, a society that had tolerated the McCarthyism of the 1950s was upset to learn that some of its most revered symbols of law and order, such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had become involved in the dissemination of internal disinformation aimed at destroying political opposition and had fallen into the use of illegal tactics in dealing with citizens seeking to express legitimate grievances. It often appeared that the agents of the political state, whether southern sheriffs threatening African American schoolchildren with police dogs or members of Congress harassing as radicals or Communists those who seriously questioned the political order, really were moral criminals disguised as legally constituted authorities. The impression of society as composed of groups in conflict, with the legal system tending to brand as criminal significant threats to the interests of the powerful, became more and more prevalent, providing fertile ground for the development of conflict theory.
ADVANCING CONFLICT THEORY: TURK, CHAMBLISS, AND QUINNEY
The new criminological conflict theory went much further than criminologists had taken it before, appealing to Marx and Bonger as well as to Simmel. As Gibbons and Garabedian (1974) pointed out in their own examination of the conflict theory movement (there termed radical criminology), “Sutherland certainly did not characterize the seventy corporations that he studied as ‘exploiters of the people’; instead, he stopped far short of that sort of condemnation” (p. 51). Similarly, Sellin may have noted that the law is defined and applied in the interests of dominant groups, but he did not denounce them in the manner of Marx. As for Vold’s analysis of the state of affairs, what had seemed like a bold outline of the conflict perspective during the late 1950s now struck some as in need of much more elaboration and others as far too abstract, academic, and aloof from the injustices that so angered them.
Sykes (1974) listed four major factors behind the shift. First, there was now a profound skepticism toward any theory that traced crime to something about the individual, including not only the biological and psychological theories but also sociological theories referring to inadequate socialization and the like. Second, there was a marked shift from the assumption that the inadequacies of the criminal justice system were to be traced to incompetent or corrupt individuals or minor organizational flaws to the conclusion that these problems were inherent in the system, either because it was fundamentally out of control or because it had been so designed by powerful interests. Third, the older assumptions that criminal law represented the collective will of the people and that the job of the criminologist was to do theoretical analysis and empirical research and not to deal in normative issues of right and wrong increasingly were rejected as fallacies that made it impossible to ask the basic questions. Finally, as discussed in Chapter 7, it had become clear not only that official crime rate figures did not reflect the amount of criminal behavior actually present in society but also that what they did reflect more often was the labeling behavior of the authorities.
During the 1960s, several scholars, influenced by a blending of labeling theory with political theory, began to develop their own brand of criminological conflict theory. It is fair to characterize their work as part of a theoretical movement that further advanced the conflict perspective and contributed to its growing influence among criminologists at that time. Here we concentrate on the efforts of three of the leading conflict theorists: Austin Turk, William Chambliss, and Richard Quinney. As we will see, they were not working in isolation but rather working in close contact within a particular sociohistorical context. All of them presented the outlines of their own approaches in articles written during the 1960s, and all published book-length volumes in 1969. Their differences were to depend, to a considerable extent, on influences from the various theoretical forerunners discussed previously.
Turk: The Criminalization Process
Completing his graduate work at the beginning of the 1960s, Austin T. Turk had come to be increasingly interested in the culture conflict perspective of criminologists such as Sellin and in the emerging labeling theory. As with any theorist, his perspective was influenced by his life experiences. Turk (1987) himself put it this way:
Growing up as a working class boy in a small segregated Georgia town, I learned early that life is neither easy nor just for most folks; that irrationality and contradiction are very much part (maybe the biggest part) of social reality; that access to resources and opportunities [has] no necessary association with ability or character; that the meaning of justice in theory is debatable and of justice in practice [is] manipulable; and that whatever degree[s] of freedom, equality, brotherhood, or security exist in a society are hard-won and tenuous. (p. 3)
By the end of the 1960s, Turk (1969a) had presented a complete statement of his own brand of conflict theory in Criminality and Legal Order, quoting at length from Sutherland in the introduction and citing the more recent efforts of Vold and Dahrendorf. It was this effort to build on Dahrendorf’s perspective, along with his Simmelian-Voldian approach that treated conflict not as some abnormality but rather as a fundamental social form, that distinguished Turk’s theoretical contribution. For Turk, recognition of social conflict as a basic fact of life represented simple realism rather than any particular tendency toward cynicism.
Although also a conflict theorist, Dahrendorf (1958, 1968) disagreed with Marx on the question of inequality. Instead of tracing inequality back to an unjust economic system, Dahrendorf located the source in power differences, more specifically in differences in authority or power that had been accepted as legitimate. Unlike Marx, who had argued for the abolition of inequality, Dahrendorf took the position that because cultural norms always exist and have to depend on sanctions for their enforcement, some people must have more power than others to make the sanctions stick. In Dahrendorf’s view, it was not the economic inequality resulting from capitalism that produced social inequality; rather, inequality was an inescapable fact because the basic units of society necessarily involved dominance-subjection relationships. Thus, the idea of eliminating inequality was treated as a utopian dream.
Turk (1969a) seemed to have been persuaded of the essential relativity of crime in much the same way as the labeling theorists. For him, the theoretical problem of explaining crime lay not in explaining varieties of behavior, for these may or may not be crimes depending on time and place. Instead, the problem lay in explaining “criminalization,” the process of “assignment of criminal status to individuals” (p. xi), which results in the production of “criminality” (p. 1). Dahrendorf’s influence was clear in Turk’s definition of the study of “criminality” as “the study of relations between the statuses and roles of legal authorities . . . and those subjects—acceptors or resisters but not makers of such law creating, interpreting, and enforcing decisions” (p. 1, emphasis in original).
Such an approach was deemed necessary if the criminologist was to explain “facts” such as variations in crime rates or to develop better methods of dealing with “criminals.” Turk (1969a) stressed that assignment of criminal status to an individual may have less connection with the behavior of that person than with his or her relationship to the authorities. “Indeed, criminal status may be ascribed to persons because of real or fancied attributes, because of what they are rather than what they do, and justified by reference to real or imagined or fabricated behavior” (pp. 9–10, emphasis in original). From this point of view, even if the criminologist eventually could succeed in explaining the behavior of criminals, such an achievement would not help in accounting for their criminality, which had more to do with the behavior of the authorities in control of the criminalization process.
Central to the concept of authority is its accepted legitimacy; authority differs from raw power because it is regarded as legitimate power, the use of which is accepted by those subject to it. Any theorist concerned with the relationship between subjects and authorities must investigate the basis for such acceptance. Like some of the control theorists, Turk (1969a) rejected the argument that acceptance of authority must be the result of internalization. He maintained that acceptance could be explained as a consequence of people learning the roles assigned to the statuses they occupied and simply acquiescing and going along as a matter of routine. Some have the status of authorities; others play the part of subjects. “The legality of norms is defined solely by the words and behavior of authorities” to which subjects will tend to defer (p. 51).
Like Simmel and Vold, Turk (1969a) was concerned with the logical consequences of the fact that some people had authority over others, not with the sources of this authority or whether it was just or unjust according to some normative conception of justice. In fact, logical consistency might be expected to force anyone who was convinced that concepts such as crime were a matter of labeling relative to time and place to a similar position with respect to concepts such as justice. In any case, Turk focused on the logical consequences of authority relationships, holding that “how authorities come to be authorities is irrelevant” to such an analysis (p. 51).
Because of Turk’s (1969a) argument that the assignment of a criminal status would have to be justified by the authorities “by reference to real or imagined or fabricated behavior” (pp. 9–10) that was held to represent a violation of legal norms, he found it important to make a formal distinction between two types of legal norms: cultural norms and social norms. The first he defined as those set forth in symbolic terms such as words—as norms dealing with what is expected. The second he identified as those found in patterns of actual behavior—in terms of what is being done rather than what is being said. Turk pointed out that the cultural norms and social norms in a given situation may or may not correspond.
According to Turk (1969a), a satisfactory theory accounting for the assignment of criminal status would include
a statement of the conditions under which cultural and social differences between authorities and subjects will probably result in conflict, the conditions under which criminalization will probably occur in the course of conflict, and the conditions under which the degree of deprivation associated with becoming a criminal will probably be greater or lesser. (p. 53)
Like Simmel, he proceeded to examine the nature of these conditions through a series of formal logical propositions.
Thus, Turk argued that, given that cultural and social norms might not agree, the existence of a difference between authorities and subjects in their evaluation of a particular attribute (e.g., past membership in a radical political organization) or a particular act (e.g., marijuana use) logically implies four situational possibilities. Each logical possibility carries a different conflict potential. The conflict probability would be highest, for example, in the “high-high” situation where there was (1) high congruence between the cultural norms preached by the authorities and their actual behavior patterns and (2) similarly high congruence between the cultural evaluation of a particular attribute or act and the actual possession of that attribute or commission of that act on the part of the subjects. If both sides not only hold different standards but also act in accordance with them, then there is no room for compromise. For example, in a situation where the authorities not only say “smoking marijuana is wrong” but also act to stop it, and marijuana users not only say “pot is okay” but also insist on using it in spite of the normative clash, the conflict potential would be logically greatest.
On the other hand, Turk’s logic suggested that the conflict potential would be lowest in situations where there was neither agreement between authorities’ stated cultural norms and their actual behavioral norms nor agreement between the cultural norms and the social norms of subjects. In such situations, the preachments would clash, but because neither side practices what it preaches in any case, the probability of conflict would be low. Why should they fight over words when neither side lives by them anyhow?
A third logical possibility was described as one in which authorities’ talk and behavior were highly congruent, although there was little, if any, agreement between the words and actions of subjects. Such a situation would fall somewhere in the middle in terms of Turk’s formal logic of conflict potential, but with a somewhat higher conflict potential than that logically inherent in the fourth and final possibility. The latter situation was described as one in which the attribute or act, as described in the announced cultural norm, happened to be in close agreement among subjects, whereas the cultural norm preached by the authorities actually had little relationship to their behavior. According to Turk, the third possibility would entail somewhat more conflict potential than would the fourth because the authorities would be less likely to tolerate norms different from their own when their cultural norms were reinforced by their social norms.
According to Turk’s analysis, the logic of the relationships between cultural and social norms is complicated by additional formal propositions. Under the assumption that an individual who has group support is going to be more resistant to efforts to change him or her, Turk concluded that the probability of conflict with authorities grows with the extent to which those having the illegal attributes or engaging in the illegal activities are organized. Under the assumption that the more sophisticated norm resisters would be better at avoiding open conflict through clever tactical maneuvers (e.g., pretending to submit while secretly continuing as before), he concluded that the probability of conflict increases as the authorities confront norm resisters who are less sophisticated. The logical possibilities resulting from the combination of the two variables of organization and sophistication were set forth as follows: (1) organized and unsophisticated, (2) unorganized and unsophisticated, (3) organized and sophisticated, and (4) unorganized and sophisticated. Conflict odds were attached to each combination.
Proceeding through formal analysis of the four formally distinct possibilities, Turk reached certain conclusions. First, he concluded that conflict between authorities and subjects is most probable where the latter are highly organized and relatively unsophisticated (e.g., delinquent gangs). He then concluded that the odds of such conflict declined to the extent that the subjects involved are unorganized and unsophisticated (e.g., skid row transients) and still further to the extent that they are organized and sophisticated (e.g., syndicate criminals). It followed logically that the lowest probability of conflict would be associated with a situation in which the norm-resisting subjects are unorganized and sophisticated (e.g., professional con artists). These formal deductions may or may not match empirical reality, but they have a certain logical consistency, and Turk encouraged research designed to assess their actual empirical validity.
As for the authorities themselves, Turk pointed out that they must be organized or, by definition, they would not be the authorities; instead, they would be some sort of illegitimate mob. He concluded that the probability of conflict between these authorities and subjects resisting their norms would be greatest where the authorities were least sophisticated in the use of power. Interestingly enough, Turk’s (1969a) logic carried him to the same conclusion as that reached by the control theorist Hirschi at the same time—that the probability of conflict was affected by the “nature of the bonds between authorities and subjects” (p. 61). He concluded that “where subjects are strongly identified with the authorities and generally agree in moral evaluations, an announced norm may be accepted in a ‘father knows best’ spirit” (p. 61). But where Hirschi stressed these bonds as central, Turk devoted much less attention to them, considering society to be less a matter of Durkheimian bonds and more a matter of constant Simmelian conflict working itself out over time. We must remember, of course, that Hirschi was focusing theoretical attention on juvenile delinquency, whereas Turk was devoting considerable attention to organized crime, political crime, and white-collar crime in general. Accordingly, the relative stress on bonds as compared to conflict potentials is hardly surprising.
For Turk (1969a), an analysis of conflict probabilities was only a first step. The key question was as follows: “Once conflict has begun, what are the conditions affecting the probability that members of the opposition will become criminals . . . , that they will be subjected to less or more severe deprivation?” (p. 64). Part of the answer was traced to the same factors outlined previously that would continue to affect probabilities throughout the criminalization process. Turk concluded, however, that additional variables tended to come into play with actual criminalization.
First, Turk admitted that although the crucial norms defining the conflict were those of the higher authorities, the major factor in the probability of criminalization was likely to be the extent to which the official legal norms agreed with both the cultural norms and the social norms of those specifically charged with enforcing the legal norms, especially the police but also prosecutors, judges, and the like. Because of the importance of police discretion and decisions on the spot, he concluded that the extent to which the police agreed with the legal norms they were expected to enforce would have a major effect on the odds of arrest and criminalization. Prosecutors, judges, juries, and others were expected to affect the probabilities somewhat, but ultimately it would be the police as the frontline enforcers who would determine the extent to which norm resisters actually would be defined as criminal.
In Turk’s analysis, the relative power of enforcers and resisters became still another variable affecting the odds of criminalization. He proposed that the greater the power difference in favor of norm enforcers over resisters, the greater would be the probability of criminalization. He asserted that the reluctance of the enforcers to move against very powerful resisters would keep the criminality of the very powerful low regardless of their behavior. He added the qualification, however, that some of the disapproved behavior of the least powerful also might be ignored if these individuals seemed to pose no threat and “weren’t worth the bother.”
The final set of variables to which Turk assigned special significance in determining the odds of criminalization had to do with the realism of conflict moves. Although in part a matter of the sophistication mentioned previously, success in avoiding or producing criminalization also was regarded as dependent on factors beyond the use of knowledge of others’ behavior patterns in manipulating them. Any move by resisters was considered to be unrealistic if it (1) increased the visibility of the offensive attribute or behavior, thereby increasing the risk that the authorities would be forced to act; (2) increased the offensiveness of the attribute or behavior (e.g., emphasizing it, calling attention to additional offensive attributes, violating an even more significant norm of the authorities); (3) increased consensus among the various levels of enforcers (e.g., moving from simple opposition to a particular norm or set of norms to a wholesale attack on the system with emphasis on stereotyping enforcers as being brutal, ignorant, and corrupt); or (4) increased the power difference in favor of the enforcers (e.g., upsetting the public in such a way that enforcers would be able to get significantly increased resources such as budget increases).
In Turk’s analysis, any move by the authorities was likely to be unrealistic if it (1) shifted the basis of their legitimacy away from consensus toward the “norm of deference” or obligation to obey despite disagreement, which would be likely in the case of power plays; (2) represented a departure from standard legal procedures, especially if the shifts were unofficial, sudden, or sharp; (3) generalized from a particular offensive attribute so that additional attributes of the opposition also became grounds for criminalization (e.g., if roundups of similar types were used in lieu of a systematic search for a particular offender); (4) increased the size and power of the opposition (e.g., by creating martyrs among them so that they gained sympathy and other resources from other segments of society); or (5) decreased consensus among the various levels of enforcers.
Turk went much further than this in pointing out additional factors that may be expected to alter the nature and outcome of social conflict. He attempted to provide a logical integration of his propositions to demonstrate how various combinations affect conflict probabilities differently and went into great detail in describing possible indicators that might be used to operationalize his propositions to facilitate research. Thus, he dealt with the means by which legal norms could be classified in practice; with the question of the best measures of key concepts such as normative-legal conflict, the significance of legal norms, relative power, and realism in conflict moves; and with other issues that would have to be solved if his theory were to be tested by data.
Chambliss: Crime, Power, and Legal Process
Finishing his own graduate work in the same year (1962) as did Turk, William J. Chambliss had become interested in the development of criminal law, specifically in “sociologically relevant analyses of the relationship between particular laws and the social setting in which these laws emerge, are interpreted, and take form” (Chambliss, 1964, p. 67). Chambliss (1987) also has been candid about the relationship between his theoretical perspective and his life experiences:
After I graduated from UCLA [University of California, Los Angeles], I hitchhiked across the country again to see my father. It was 1955, and in short order I was drafted into the army and sent to Korea with the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC). I learned a lot about crime during that period. American and Korean soldiers raped, stole, assaulted, intimidated, and generally terrorized the Koreans. Because they had the power, nothing was done about it. . . . How could crime be understood from the paradigms I learned in psychology and sociology? (pp. 5–6)
While at UCLA, Chambliss developed a mentoring relationship with Donald Cressey. After military service, he followed Cressey’s advice to pursue his doctorate in sociology at his alma mater, Indiana University, where Chambliss could study with Edwin Sutherland and Albert Cohen (Inderbitzen & Boyd, 2010). He went on to teach at the University of Washington and then to undertake postdoctoral studies at the University of Wisconsin. It is worth noting that (1) both Turk and Quinney, the third of the contemporary criminological conflict theorists to be examined in this chapter, completed their graduate work at the University of Wisconsin in the same year that Chambliss was completing his at Indiana and that (2) Turk himself joined the faculty at Indiana after completion of his graduate work at Wisconsin. The ties between these institutions were very close, and there was considerable mutual influence:
Our lives are far more dependent on chance occurrences than we ever want to acknowledge. A year after I arrived at Washington, the university hired Pierre van den Berghe, who was extremely knowledgeable about Marxism. I organized a faculty seminar on the sociology of law with Pierre, a philosopher, and two anthropologists. . . . About this time, the Russell Sage Foundation decided to support the resurrection of the sociology of law. I was awarded a fellowship to study law at the University of Wisconsin. (Chambliss, 1987, pp. 3, 7)
Like Turk, Chambliss was impressed by the relativity of crime and the way in which the criminal label seemed to be the product of social conflict. But whereas Turk’s work was influenced by a formal Simmelian approach, Chambliss was at first inspired less by the older European tradition of conflict theory than by the American tradition of legal realism, the pioneering work of the American legal scholar Jerome Hall, and the results of his own empirical research. Chambliss (1964) had undertaken a study of the development of vagrancy laws in England, concluding that these laws could be traced to vested interests: “There is little question that these statutes were designed for one express purpose: to force laborers . . . to accept employment at a low wage in order to insure the landowner an adequate supply of labor at a price he could afford to pay” (p. 69). Recall from Chapter 7 that Chambliss (1973) also went on to conduct a study of the impact of differential labeling and legal response to two sets of delinquent youths, the upper-middle-class “Saints” and the lower-class “Roughnecks.” Again, he showed how law in action diminished the life chances of poor kids by defining and policing them as troublemakers while failing to intervene with the precollege kids because they were “good boys” only “sowing their oats.”
Law in Action.
In the same year that Turk (1969a) published Criminality and the Legal Order, Chambliss (1969) published Crime and the Legal Process, an edited volume consisting of actual empirical research studies of the legal system, tying them together with his own theoretical framework. This soon was followed by a more elaborate presentation, Law, Order, and Power, in collaboration with Robert T. Seidman, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin (Chambliss & Seidman, 1971). In the earlier statement, Chambliss (1969) simply identified his position as representing an “interest group” perspective rather than a “value expression” perspective, a distinction that he compared with that seen in “the debate in social science theory between the ‘conflict’ and ‘functional’ theorists” (p. 8). His approach was influenced greatly by the American school of legal realism, which concerned itself with the distinction between the “law in the books” and the “law in action.” It insisted that the study of abstract legal theory must be complemented by the study of the law as it works itself out in actual practice. It is interesting to note that although the first of these had been the focus of the classical school discussed in Chapter 2, the new attention to the law in action represented the influence of positivism in legal studies. Chambliss hoped to develop a theory of the law in action—a theory based on empirical research.
Early in the second volume, Chambliss and Seidman (1971) sounded an almost Durkheimian theme, asserting that the “first variable in our theoretical model is the relative complexity of the society” (p. 31). They went on, however, to insist that (1) the complexity, which comes with technological development and necessitates more complicated, differentiated, and sophisticated social roles, actually operates to (2) put people at odds with one another, thereby (3) requiring formal institutions designed to sanction what some consider to be norm violations. This argument was reminiscent of Dahrendorf’s, with the major difference being that formal sanctioning institutions were regarded not as inherently necessary to society but rather as a contemporary necessity resulting from increasing social complexity. Their conflict perspective led them to a theory of legal development almost exactly opposite to that expounded in Durkheim’s (1893/1933) control theory approach, which maintained that increased societal complexity tended to lead society from an emphasis on “repressive” law to an emphasis on “restitutive” law. Instead, Chambliss and Seidman (1971) argued, “We may formulate, therefore, the following proposition: The lower the level of complexity of a society, the more emphasis will be placed in the dispute-settling process upon reconciliation; the more complex the society, the more emphasis will be placed on rule enforcement” (p. 32).
Chambliss and Seidman (1971) began by arguing that increasing social complexity itself tended to call for sanctioning institutions designed to keep order among the conflicting interests. Going further, they maintained that this sanctioning process would become even more pronounced to the degree that the social complexity became a matter of social stratification, with some groups having more wealth and power than others: “The more economically stratified a society becomes, the more it becomes necessary for the dominant groups in the society to enforce through coercion the norms of conduct which guarantee their supremacy” (p. 33). Here was something of a Marxian theme, although Chambliss and Seidman stopped short of a clear-cut Marxian position that traced the most serious problems of social stratification to polarization produced by capitalism.
Chambliss and Seidman (1971) also stressed the significance of the fact that the developing sanctions tended to be enforced through bureaucratic organizations. In their view, the basis of the sanctioning would be organized in the interests of the dominant groups, but the actual application of the sanctions tended to come through bureaucracies that had their own interests. In this sense, the law in action might be expected to reflect a combination of the interests of the powerful and the interests of the bureaucratic organizations created to enforce the rules.
Because the essence of Chambliss’s theory was aimed at explaining the law in action in contemporary, complex, industrial societies, we can concentrate on the second and third variables in the theory of the law in action—social stratification and bureaucracy. In Crime and the Legal Process, Chambliss (1969) stressed that “the single most important characteristic of contemporary Anglo-American society influential in shaping the legal order has been the emerging domination of the middle classes” along with “the attempt by [members of] the middle class to impose their own standards and their own view of proper behavior on people whose values differ” (pp. 10–11). In this view, the middle class was coming to represent the conventional morality, but Chambliss emphasized that behind the values lay self-interest.
In Law, Order, and Power, Chambliss and Seidman (1971) set forth five fundamental propositions with respect to the relationship between social stratification and the law, beginning with the proposition that (1) the conditions of one’s life affect one’s values and norms. They then asserted that (2) complex societies are composed of groups with widely different life conditions and that (3) complex societies, therefore, are composed of highly disparate and conflicting sets of norms. As for the relationship between these conflicting norms and the law itself, they maintained that (4) the probability of a given group’s having its particular normative system embodied in law is not distributed equally but rather is closely related to the political and economic position of that group. These propositions, taken together, led the authors to the final proposition that (5) the higher a group’s political or economic position, the greater is the probability that its views will be reflected in the laws (pp. 473–474).
Most of Chambliss and Seidman’s theoretical explanation for the law in action focused on the argument that although the law represents the values and interests of the more powerful elements in the stratification system of complex societies, it is specifically created and enforced by bureaucratic organizations with their own agendas. In Crime and the Legal Process, Chambliss (1969) insisted that “the most salient characteristic of organizational behavior is that the ongoing policies and activities are those designed to maximize rewards and minimize strains for the organization” (p. 84). Furthermore,
this general principle is reflected in the fact that in the administration of the criminal law, those persons are arrested, tried, and sentenced who can offer the fewest rewards for nonenforcement of the laws and who can be processed without creating any undue strain for the organizations which comprise the legal system. (pp. 84–85, emphasis in original)
In Chambliss’s view, the criminal justice bureaucracies tended to treat those of lower social class position more harshly for the same offenses committed by middle-class and upper-class people because lower social class people had little to offer in return for lenience and were in no position to fight the system. In addition, he insisted, these bureaucracies tended to ignore or deal leniently with the same offenses when committed by those higher in the stratification hierarchy.
The process by which the goals of bureaucratic efficiency and avoidance of trouble displace the official goal of impartial law enforcement has been termed goal displacement or goal substitution. According to Chambliss, a bureaucratic organization might be expected to take the easy way out—the path of least resistance—especially in contexts where (1) the members have little motivation to resist the easy way out, (2) they have a great deal of discretion in how they actually will behave, and (3) adherence to the official goals is not enforced. “It will maximize rewards and minimize strains for the organization to process those who are politically weak and powerless and to refrain from processing those who are politically powerful” (Chambliss & Seidman, 1971, p. 269). Thus,
the failure of the legal system to exploit the potential source of offenses that is offered by middle- and upper-class violators . . . derives instead from the very rational choice on the part of the legal system to pursue those violators who the community will reward them for pursuing and to ignore those violators who have the capability of causing trouble for the agencies. (Chambliss, 1969, p. 88)
Speaking of the police, Chambliss and Seidman (1971) presented evidence leading to the conclusion that the police, as a bureaucracy, “act illegally, breaching the norms of due process at every point: in committing brutality, in their searches and seizures, in arrests and interrogation” (p. 391). This illegality takes place not because the police are evil but rather because they are not committed to due process in the first place, they have enormous discretion, and there is little enforcement of due process norms by the public or other agencies of the criminal justice system. As for prosecution following an arrest, Chambliss and Seidman concluded that “how favorable a ‘bargain’ one can strike with the prosecutor in the pretrial confrontations is a direct function of how politically and economically powerful the defendant is” (p. 412). The alleged safeguards provided by the right to trial by jury were taken to be largely a matter of myth because of the “built-in hazards of the jury trial . . . which exert the greatest pressure on accused persons to plead guilty,” leading the powerless to surrender this so-called right in 9 out of 10 cases (p. 444). Finally, Chambliss and Seidman attempted to establish the validity of the proposition that “the tendency and necessity to bureaucratize is far and away the single most important variable in determining the actual day-to-day functioning of the legal system” by demonstrating how, even in sentencing, “institutionalized patterns of discrimination against the poor are inevitable” (pp. 468–469).
For several years prior to his original presentation of his theoretical framework, Chambliss had been involved in a study of the relationship between professional crime and the legal system in a large American city. His experiences while conducting this study clearly influenced his thinking, especially with respect to the impact of bureaucracy on the legal system. Pointing out that although at first glance “it would appear that the professional criminal (be he a thief, gambler, prostitute, or hustler) would have little to offer the law enforcement agencies,” he noted that there appeared in practice to be a situation of “symbiosis” or mutual dependence there (Chambliss, 1969, p. 89). He argued that because law enforcement agencies in fact depend on professional criminals for inside information that makes their jobs easier, they tend to cooperate with these offenders rather than enforcing the law against them. In the later elaboration, Chambliss and Seidman (1971) went into much more detail with respect to the symbiosis involving organized crime, presenting evidence in support of the proposition that “from the standpoint of the sociology of legal systems, the most important aspect of the widespread presence of organized crime . . . is that such organizations are impossible without the cooperation of the legal system” (p. 489).
Chambliss (1969) used this argument to explain some characteristics of the Anglo-American legal system that seem somewhat illogical. As he pointed out, “Ironically, most of the criminal-legal effort is devoted to processing and sanctioning those persons least likely to be deterred by legal sanctions” (p. 370, emphasis in original). He cited the use of harsh punishments against drug addicts and capital punishment against murderers as examples of severe sanctioning in exactly those cases where it has little deterrent effect. By contrast, he cited the reluctance to impose stiff sanctions against white-collar criminals and professional criminals as examples of allowing precisely those criminals who do tend to be deterred by sanctions to escape them. According to his argument, such a policy goes directly against the formal logic of deterrence but fits perfectly the bureaucratic logic of demonstrating “effectiveness” by harsh treatment of the powerless while avoiding the organizational strains that would follow from taking on the powerful.
As for Durkheim’s control theory argument that law contributed to social solidarity, Chambliss (1969) concluded that “the imposition of legal sanctions is likely to increase community solidarity only when the emergent morality also serves other interests of persons in positions of power in the community” (p. 373). Although admitting that law might occasionally contribute to social solidarity, he instead stressed the manner in which the law in action splintered the community by labeling and excluding certain of its (powerless) members and the way in which policies such as the death penalty “may play an extremely important role in the general attitude toward the legitimacy of the use of extreme violence to settle disputes” (p. 376). In Chambliss’s view, the creation and enforcement of law grew out of social conflict and then tended to add to and reinforce that conflict.
Shift Toward Marx.
By the mid-1970s, however, political events in general and developments in social theory in particular seemed to have combined to produce a significant shift in Chambliss’s perspective. The social changes of the 1960s, which had influenced both Turk and Chambliss, had at the same time led a number of important social theorists to return to the Marxist tradition that had lain dormant during the war years of the 1940s and the McCarthyism of the 1950s. These Marxist theorists traced the problem of racial discrimination and the war in Vietnam directly to the economic interests of capitalists. They argued that the countercultural response to the American dream was politically naïve and would be crushed unless its adherents developed a revolutionary socialist mentality. As we will see in greater detail later, the end of the 1960s saw the emergence of a political backlash that threatened not only to block the prospects for reform implicit in Chambliss’s critique of the law in action but also to “turn the clock back” to restore the social and political climate of the 1950s. Chambliss apparently concluded that the problems lay deeper than he had suspected, that the Marxists had come closer to the truth, and that his own analysis must be turned in a Marxist direction.
Chambliss’s (1975) shift was reflected in nine specific propositions. With respect to the content and operation of criminal law, he now asserted that (1) “acts are defined as criminal because it is in the interests of the ruling class to so define them”; that (2) “members of the ruling class will be able to violate the laws with impunity while members of the subject class will be punished”; and that (3) “as capitalist societies industrialize and the gap between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat widens, penal law will expand in an effort to coerce the proletariat into submission” (p. 152). As for the consequences of crime for society, he maintained that (1) “crime reduces surplus labor by creating employment not only for the criminals but for law enforcers, welfare workers, professors of criminology, and a horde of people who live off the fact that crime exists”; that (2) “crime diverts the lower classes’ attention from the exploitation they experience and directs it toward other members of their own class rather than toward the capitalist class or the economic system”; and that (3) “crime is a reality which exists only as it is created by those in the society whose interests are served by its presence” (pp. 152–153).
Summarizing his position and its implications, Chambliss (1975) argued that (1) “criminal and noncriminal behavior stem from people acting rationally in ways that are compatible with their class position . . . , a reaction to the life conditions of a person’s social class”; that (2) “crime varies from society to society depending on the political and economic structures of society”; and that (3) “socialist countries should have much lower rates of crime because the less intense class struggle should reduce the forces leading to and the functions of crime” (p. 153). The similarity to Bonger’s position was clear, and the use of terms such as bourgeoisie, proletariat, exploitation, and class struggle stressed the shift to a more Marxist formulation focusing on capitalism as the problem and socialism as a way of dealing with it.
Quinney: Social Reality, Capitalism, and Crime
As pointed out earlier, the third of the criminological conflict theorists to be examined in this chapter, Richard Quinney, also completed graduate work in 1962, entering criminology along with Turk and Chambliss at a time when the ferment of the 1960s already was producing a markedly different social atmosphere. Quinney was to become not only the most prolific of the criminological conflict theorists but also the most controversial, revising his theoretical perspective time after time. Beginning with a position similar in many ways to that of Turk and Chambliss, he was to alter it almost immediately, only to develop a Marxist perspective at about the same time as did Chambliss and then to move in still another direction (Wozniak, 2011; see also Wozniak, Braswell, Vogel, & Blevins, 2008). Quinney explained these theoretical turns as follows:
I have moved through the various epistemologies and ontologies in the social sciences. After applying one, I have found that another is necessary for incorporating what was excluded from the former, and so on. Also, I have tried to keep my work informed by the latest developments in the philosophy of science. In addition, I have always been a part of the progressive movements of the time. My work is thus an integral part of the social and intellectual changes that are taking place in the larger society, outside of criminology and sociology. One other fact has affected my work in recent years: the search for meaning in my life and in the world. (quoted in Bartollas, 1985, p. 230)
The section to follow thus traces the evolution of Quinney’s thinking about crime. Later in the chapter, we revisit Quinney and his role in founding peacemaking criminology.
Constructing the Reality of Crime.
In the same year that saw publication of Turk’s (1969a) Criminality and Legal Order and Chambliss’s (1969) Crime and the Legal Process, Quinney (1969) set forth his own position in the introduction to an edited volume on the sociology of law called Crime and Justice in Society. At this point, Quinney’s perspective was similar to that of Turk in some ways and similar to that of Chambliss in others. Like Chambliss, Quinney focused on the sociology of conflicting interests. But he preferred to begin with the sociological jurisprudence of Pound (1942) rather than with the “so-called legal realists,” arguing that it was Pound who had first made the “call for the study of ‘law in action’ as distinguished from the study of ‘law in the books’” (Quinney, 1969, pp. 22–23). But unlike Pound, who had seen law as operating for the good of society as a whole, Quinney, like Turk (and also citing Dahrendorf), took a position “based on the coercion model of society as opposed to the integrative” (p. 29).
Quinney (1969) defined law as “the creation and interpretation of specialized rules in a politically organized society” (p. 26). He then asserted that “politically organized society is based on an interest structure,” that this structure “is characterized by unequal distribution of power and by conflict,” and that “law is formulated and administered within the interest structure” (pp. 27–29). Referring to the “politicality of law,” Quinney argued that “whenever a law is created or interpreted, the values of some are necessarily assured and the values of others are either ignored or negated” (p. 27). In this view, law was seen as part of the interest structure of society, with changes in the law reflecting changes in the interest structure, and as changing with changes in that structure.
One year later, Quinney (1970a, 1970b) published The Problem of Crime and The Social Reality of Crime, two volumes in which he presented somewhat different versions of criminological conflict theory. Like both Turk and Chambliss, Quinney was impressed by the relativity of crime. In The Problem of Crime, Quinney (1970a) began by taking the position, like Turk, that crime must be considered in relative terms as a “legal status that is assigned to behaviors and persons by authorized others in society,” with the criminal defined as “a person who is assigned the status of criminal on the basis of the official judgment that his conduct constitutes a crime” (pp. 6–7). Like both Turk and Chambliss, Quinney also argued that social differentiation and social change tended to produce complex societies with different and often conflicting conduct norms prevailing in different segments. His critique of criminal justice statistics was quite similar to those of Turk and Chambliss. He asserted that “the crucial question is why societies and their agencies report, manufacture, or produce the volume of crime they do” (p. 16), and his analysis of American society as a criminogenic social system drew from the traditions described in earlier chapters—except for the accent on the “politicality of crime” (p. 180). By the politicality of crime, Quinney meant that
the actions of the criminally defined are not so much the result of inadequate socialization and personality problems as they are conscientious actions taken against something . . . , the only appropriate means for expressing certain thoughts and feelings—and the only possibilities for bringing about social changes. (p. 180)
In his discussion of philosophical principles underlying his approach, however, Quinney diverged considerably from Turk and Chambliss. This distinct difference was to set him apart. Quinney (1970a) pointed out that a number of criminologists had expressed concern over the positivistic conception of “cause,” outlined deeper issues beneath this philosophical debate, and concluded that “under the impact of the philosophical implications of modern physics, most physical scientists have abandoned the idea that science is a copy of reality” (p. 134, emphasis in original). This amounted to a total rejection of positivism. Drawing on the European tradition of philosophical idealism, he took the position that “accordingly, to state the extreme, there is no reality beyond man’s conception of it: reality is a state of mind,” and he argued that “there is no reason to believe in the objective existence of anything” (pp. 136–138, emphasis in original). As Quinney saw it, the problem was not to understand some reality that stood apart from the observer but rather to formulate ideas that were helpful in terms of one’s purposes.
To criminologists untrained in philosophy, this might sound highly implausible or even ridiculous. Nevertheless, philosophical idealism (the theory that the world is a product of mind) has a long and distinguished history, going back to Plato and beyond. It holds that what we take to be the objective world outside us is an image produced by our senses and the thoughts that interpret what they seem to reflect. For example, the world would be different for another creature with different senses and with a different mind, and no creature’s world is any more real than that of another. Labeling theory itself had represented a modest move in this direction, throwing light on crime as a matter of perception and definition. Quinney went a step further, following the lead of the social constructionists in pointing out that social reality in general, as well as deviance or crime in particular, is a matter of changing perceptions and interpretations.
Many variations on some form of philosophical idealism were “blowing in the wind” during the 1960s, from the political commitment to achieving major social change through moral persuasion and nonviolence that Martin Luther King, Jr., had learned from Gandhi to the “far out” activities of the so-called countercultural yippies, who may be taken as an example of the extremes to which this approach can be taken. In some ways, the 1960s seemed to be a time when it appeared possible to change things by redefining them through the development of a new consciousness. The more extreme version of such “consciousness politics” aimed at “blowing people’s minds” is captured in the following summary:
To blow people’s minds was to confront them with a situation that could shatter their cultural assumptions and, perhaps, liberate them from ruling-class images. . . . Without question, the master mindblowers in the New Left were a scruffy band of self-described “anti-intellectual action freaks” who called themselves the Youth International Party (YIP).
Lacking any theory or organization and with a narrow social base, the Yippies concentrated on tactics. They used dramatic irony to reveal absurd contradictions in a social order whose legitimacy depended on the appearance of rationality.
The Yippies’ first major prank was to shower dollar bills from the visitors gallery onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.
The Yippies appeared naked in church; invaded university classrooms, where they stripped to the waist and French kissed; dressed as Keystone Kops and staged a mock raid on the State University of New York Stony Brook campus to arrest all the whiskey drinkers; planted trees in the center of city streets; dumped soot and smoke bombs in Con Edison’s lobby; and called a press conference to demonstrate a drug called “lace,” which when squirted at the police made them take their clothes off and make love. (Starr, 1985, pp. 267–270)
Quinney was no yippie, but he clearly was influenced by the pervasive sense of the way in which the taken-for-granted aspects of social life really were a matter of collective definitions with which people went along largely without thinking. His position was laid out in greater detail in The Social Reality of Crime. In that work, Quinney (1970b) developed an analysis of the social reality of crime, drawing from Berger and Luckmann (1966), Schutz (1962), and others. Whatever physical reality may be, these theorists had argued that social reality consisted of the “meaningful world of everyday life” that was tied together by the fact that “human behavior is intentional, has meaning for the actors, is goal oriented, and takes place with an awareness of the consequences” in such a way that the individuals share a collective reality made up of shared meanings and understandings (p. 14, emphasis in original). For Quinney, the theoretical problem lay in the exploration and explanation of the phenomenological processes by which this collective meaning is developed and sustained.
The theory set forth in The Social Reality of Crime consists of six propositions. Quinney’s theory began with a general definition of crime in which it was to be regarded as “a definition of human conduct that is created by authorized agents in a politically organized society.” This was followed by the second proposition that “criminal definitions describe behaviors that conflict with the interests of segments of society that have the power to shape public policy” (Quinney, 1970b, pp. 15–16). Here Quinney indicated his indebtedness to both Vold and Turk; thus, he observed that the probability of powerful segments of society formulating criminal definitions becomes greater with an increase in the conflict of interests between the segments of a society, and he insisted that the history of law reflected changes in the interest structure of society.
Quinney’s (1970b) third proposition focused on the “law in action,” asserting that “criminal definitions are applied by the segments of society that have the power to shape the enforcement and administration of criminal law” (p. 18, emphasis added). He argued:
The probability that criminal definitions will be applied is influenced by such community and organizational factors as (1) community expectations of law enforcement and administration, (2) the visibility and public reporting of offenses, and (3) the occupational organization, ideology, and actions of the legal agents to whom authority to enforce criminal law is delegated. (1970b, pp. 19–20)
In a fourth proposition dealing with the sources of the behavior resulting in the criminal label, he asserted that “behavior patterns are structured in segmentally organized society in relation to criminal definitions, and within this context persons engage in actions that have relative probabilities of being defined as criminal” (p. 20). Taking the position that it is not the quality of the behavior but rather the action taken against it that makes it criminal, Quinney went on to say that “persons in the segments of society whose behavior patterns are not represented in formulating and applying criminal definitions are more likely to act in ways that will be defined as criminal than those in the segments that formulate and apply criminal definitions” (p. 21).
Fifth, Quinney (1970b) argued further that the definitions of crime developed by certain social segments had to be successfully diffused within the overall society before the generally accepted social reality could be altered: “Conceptions of crime are constructed and diffused in the segments of society by various means of communication” (p. 22). His final proposition summarized the entire theoretical framework: “The social reality of crime is constructed by the formulation and application of criminal definitions, the development of behavior patterns related to criminal definitions, and the construction of criminal conceptions” (p. 23).
The Influence of Marx.
Four years later, however, Quinney (1974a, 1974b) published Criminal Justice in America and Critique of the Legal Order, two volumes that reflected a significant shift to a Marxist approach. He now criticized not only positivism but also the sort of social constructionism and phenomenology that he had used so effectively four years earlier, charging that “positivists have regarded law as a natural phenomenon; social constructionists have regarded it relativistically, as one of man’s conveniences; and even the phenomenologists, though examining underlying assumptions, have done little to provide or promote an alternative existence” (Quinney, 1974b, p. 15). Like Marx, Quinney seemed to have concluded that the point was not simply to understand social life as a collective construction but also to change it, going on to say that “with a sense of the more authentic life than may be possible for us, I am suggesting that a critical philosophy for understanding the social order should be based on a development of Marxist thought for our age” (p. 15).
This shift in thinking was influenced by his reading of the work of the Frankfurt school of German social theorists including Habermas (1970, 1971) and Marcuse (1960, 1964, 1972), recent American work in the revived Marxist tradition mentioned previously (Baran & Sweezy, 1966; Edwards, Reich, & Weisskopf, 1972; Milibrand, 1969), and his own interpretation of the backlash, particularly the “war on crime” as it had developed during the Johnson and Nixon administrations. Just when Chambliss and Quinney were calling for further change, the backlash appeared, exemplified initially by the crackdown on crime in the Johnson administration and then by the election of Nixon, a political figure who had been rejected twice by the voters during the early 1960s only to be elected president by the end of the decade. While criminologists such as Chambliss and Quinney were crying for more reform, the voters were electing a president who promised just the opposite.
It also is apparent that Quinney himself believed, as did many people around him, that the foundations of American life had to be changed if people were to regain a more “authentic existence.” Quinney’s (1974b) six Marxist propositions read as follows:
(1) American society is based on an advanced capitalist economy; (2) the state is organized to serve the interests of the dominant economic class, the capitalist ruling class; (3) criminal law is an instrument of the state and ruling class to maintain and perpetuate the existing social and economic order; (4) crime control in capitalist society is accomplished through a variety of institutions and agencies established and administered by a governmental elite, representing ruling class interests, for the purpose of establishing domestic order; (5) the contradictions of advanced capitalism—the disjunction between existence and essence—require that the subordinate classes remain oppressed by whatever means necessary, especially through the coercion and violence of the legal system; and (6) only with the collapse of capitalist society and the creation of a new society, based on socialist principles, will there be a solution to the crime problem. (p. 16, emphasis added)
This line of argument followed Engels in asserting that the institution of the political state arises only at a point in the development of society when private property appears and then becomes concentrated in the hands of a few and that the law is “the ultimate means by which the state secures the interests of the ruling class” (Quinney, 1974b, p. 98). Developing the argument contained in The Social Reality of Crime in a Marxist direction, Quinney (1974b) maintained that the clever manipulations of the ruling class were obscured by an ideology serving to justify the system and that “manipulating the minds of the people is capitalism’s most subtle means of control” (p. 137). He stressed that the sort of socialism advocated was not that of a centralized state bureaucracy such as existed in the (then) Soviet Union and some Eastern European societies but rather a “democratic socialism” based on equality and giving everyone a chance to participate in control over his or her own life (p. 188).
Quinney’s thought continued to evolve in reaction to criticisms leveled at Marxist criminology and newer contributions to Marxist theory. Three years later, he published Class, State, and Crime (1977), a volume in which he criticized recent theories of justice, arguing that they all were rooted in an implicit acceptance of the current economic order. He now laid great stress on the Marxist argument that capitalism generates a surplus population made up of unemployed laborers. The general problem of the capitalist state was seen as providing support for the growth of capitalism while trying to manage the resulting problems by mechanisms such as the welfare state and the criminal justice system. According to Quinney, some members of the surplus population are not co-opted by mechanisms such as the welfare system, especially in view of the fact that capitalism finds it difficult to fund this mechanism adequately. They may adapt to their plight by turning to crime. Quinney observed, “Nearly all crimes among the working class in capitalist society are actually a means of survival, an attempt to exist in a society where survival is not assured by other, collective means” (p. 58).
At the same time, Quinney moved from a position that seemed to suggest that the state was in the hands of a powerful and all-seeing elite to one emphasizing a dialectical concept of social class. Quinney (1977) asserted that “a theory which posits an opposition between an elite (or a ‘ruling class’) and the ‘masses’ (or the ‘people’) fails to provide an adequate understanding of the forces of capitalist society” (p. 64). His new emphasis was closer to a structural Marxism that saw political outcomes as natural results of the dynamics of the economic system than to an instrumental Marxism that saw political strings being pulled by members of a small elite looking out for themselves. Crime was considered in Engels’s terms as a “primitive form of insurrection, a response to deprivation and oppression,” but one that “in itself is not a satisfactory form of politics” (pp. 98–99). Although there still were signs of the older conception of the politicality of crime, crime was now clearly considered an unsatisfactory form of politics. It was not a sufficiently rational response to oppression unless it succeeded in developing a revolutionary consciousness so that it represented an informed rebellion against capitalist conditions.
Class, State, and Crime also presented a typology of crime including crimes of domination and crimes of accommodation and resistance. Crimes of domination were said to include crimes of control (e.g., police brutality), crimes of the government (e.g., Watergate-style offenses), and crimes of economic domination (e.g., white-collar crime, organized crime). Crimes of accommodation and resistance were said to include predatory crimes (e.g., theft) and personal crimes (e.g., homicide), which were provoked by the conditions of capitalism, and crimes of resistance (e.g., terrorism), which involved the political struggle against the state.
Transcendence and the Search for Transformative Justice.
Throughout Quinney’s theoretical turns, there was a constant tension between the realms of the subjective and the objective. Whereas The Social Reality of Crime had taken a subjectively oriented, phenomenological, or constructionist view of the world, Critique of the Legal Order had thrown Quinney into a Marxist tradition of strict materialism, a tradition that not only explicitly rejected philosophical idealism but even regarded it as the enemy.
This tension broke through in the second edition of Class, State, and Crime (Quinney, 1980), which is heavily theological in content. Indeed, it is interesting that current textbooks tend to remain content with an examination of Quinney’s social reality period and his later Marxism without mention of this later development, almost as if it is either embarrassing or irrelevant. It certainly was not irrelevant to Quinney, whose thought tended thereafter to deal less with criminology per se and more with existential philosophy and theology.
In the preface to the second edition of Class, State, and Crime, Quinney (1980) argued that “ultimately, the answer to the human predicament is a salvation achieved through the overcoming and healing of the disparity between existence and essence” (p. ix). Although continuing to advocate a socialist solution to the crime problem, he increasingly emphasized the religious nature of the goal, going so far as to reject Marxist materialism in favor of the theology of Tillich: “The contemporary capitalist world is caught in what Tillich, going beyond Marx’s materialistic analysis of capitalism, calls a sacred void, the human predicament on both a spiritual and a socio-political level” (p. 3, emphasis in original). Quinney described the deeper problem as follows:
Among the vacuous characteristics of present civilization are a mode of production that enslaves workers, an analytic rationalism that saps the vital forces of life and transforms all things (including human beings) into objects of calculation and control, a loss of feeling for the translucence of nature and the sense of history, a demotion of our world to a mere environment, a secularized humanism that cuts us off from our creative sources, a demonic quality to our political state, and a hopelessness about the future. (p. 3)
Returning to the theme of justice and citing the biblical prophets, Quinney asserted that “justice is more than a normative idea; it is charged with the transcendent power of the infinite and the eternal, with the essence of divine revelation” (pp. 30–31). What was necessary, he now argued, was a “prophetic understanding” of reality (p. 40).
Much of the second edition of Class, State, and Crime was devoted to discussions of the religious implications of socialism. Quinney (1980) asserted, “The rise of political consciousness in the late stage of capitalism is increasingly accompanied by a consciousness about matters of ultimate concern” (p. 112). He held that Marx had erred in considering religion merely the “opium of the people” and that “a social criticism that does not consider the sacred meaning of our existence systematically excludes the full potential and essence of our being” (p. 199). He held that “prophetic criticism takes place with an awareness of divine involvement in history” (p. 204). Quinney drew heavily from theological writings such as Tillich’s work on religious socialism, seeing the effort in this direction as one in which “we hope to recover our wholeness, to heal our estrangement from the source of our being.” He concluded, “The socialist struggle in our age is a search for God at the same time that it is a struggle for justice in human society” (p. 204).
Notably, as will be seen later in this chapter, these themes would continue to inform Quinney’s writings as he embraced peacemaking criminology. Quinney’s life is best understood as an academic and personal journey marked by extensive reading and careful study, self-examination and actualization, and engagement with the world (Wozniak, 2011). As he traveled across time, his concerns involved transcending repressive mind-sets that constrain our thinking and lead to harm in the world. By thinking in new ways—by deconstructing ideologies justifying structures of power, by envisioning fresh ways of reducing suffering among the poor and defenseless—Quinney believed that it becomes possible to transform oneself and the social order in the pursuit of greater justice (Wozniak, 2011; Wozniak et al., 2008). His work thus represents both a self-exploration as he endeavored to grow individually and, through his publications, an attempt to inspire criminologists and others to create a more humane society.
CONFLICT THEORY AND THE CAUSES OF CRIME
During the 1960s, many criminologists had turned away from the search for the causes of crime. As we have seen, control theory focused on the sources of conformity, under the assumption that crime and delinquency should be expected when there was a decline in the holding power of the conformity influences. Labeling theory treated crime as a matter of definition, with the source of the definition being the labelers. The early work of the conflict theorists Turk, Chambliss, and Quinney explored the criminalization process with a focus on factors that might explain the behavior of the authorities rather than that of the offenders.
Still, criminological conflict theory did have something to say about the causes of offenders’ behavior. We already have seen some examples. Turk had referred to cultural and social norms, Chambliss had considered crime as a rational reaction to exploitation, and Quinney had discussed the politicality of crime as involving the use of the only available and appropriate means to express certain thoughts and bring about certain changes. The question of causality, however, became more important in the criminological conflict theory that began to appear with the shift in the social climate at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s. Although they mentioned possible sources of offenders’ behavior from time to time, the earlier conflict theorists had concentrated on the way in which the traditional search for causes of criminal and delinquent behavior had deflected attention away from the fact that crime was the result of the criminalization of certain behavior by the powerful. Having made the point so powerfully, criminological conflict theory then turned more attention to the sources of the behavior that was being criminalized.
Early during the 1970s, for example, Gordon (1971) offered a Marxist economic analysis that traced a great deal of crime to the underlying economic structure of American society. He attempted to show how many crimes represented a rational response to the fact that the economic position of many people was kept in constant danger by the very nature of capitalism. By the middle of the decade, Spitzer (1976) had set forth the argument that capitalism generated both a surplus population that consisted essentially of economic outcasts and a series of internal contradictions in the institutions developed to maintain capitalist domination. He maintained that members of the surplus population were chronically unemployed outsiders who sometimes turned to deviant behavior including crime and that additional deviance resulted from the tensions in institutions such as schools, which are said to serve youth but really serve the ruling class.
Focusing on the sources of delinquency, Greenberg (1977), for example, argued that theft was one response to a situation in which adolescents in capitalist society were put under heavy pressure to spend considerable money in a consumption-oriented youth culture even as the economic system was eliminating the employment opportunities. This lack of employment opportunities was said to produce considerable anxiety about prospects for achieving secure adult status during a time when institutions such as schools were taking away any sense of independence and subjecting the young people warehoused there to a variety of humiliating experiences. Greenberg maintained that such circumstances tended to produce a deep resentment and a fear of failure that precipitated violent behavior, itself a reflection of a demand for respect.
Early during the 1980s, Colvin and Pauly (1983) attempted to combine control theory with a Marxist approach to social class issues. In their view, capitalist society tended to exert a pattern of “coercive control” over the lower classes, threatening those at or near the bottom with loss of jobs or of any economic assistance unless they completely conformed to the expectations of the powerful. Colvin and Pauly maintained that this pressure produced an “alienative involvement” on the part of those under such oppression, breaking what Hirschi might term their “bonds to society” and increasing the likelihood of criminal activity (see also Colvin, 2000).
Over time, a number of other scholars in the conflict theory tradition also have attempted to say something about the causes of criminal and delinquent behavior. Among others, these include Elliott Currie (1997) in his analysis of the market economy and crime (discussed in Chapter 4 in this volume) as well as John Hagan (1989) in his power-control theory and Mark Colvin (2000) in his coercion theory (both discussed in Chapter 6). Still, much focus has remained on the notion of crime as an outcome of definitions imposed as part of the consequences of conflict among various segments of society. Seen in this way, the central theoretical problem still is to understand the nature of social conflict. Some of the more recent developments in criminological conflict theory are examined in Chapter 9.
CONSEQUENCES OF CONFLICT THEORY
Criminological conflict theory has had notable consequences in terms of subsequent theorizing and rethinking within mainstream criminology but has had relatively little direct impact on social policy except perhaps for its metamorphosis in the form of “peacemaking criminology” (Pepinsky & Quinney, 1991). As indicated earlier, and as we will see in greater detail in Chapter 9, the period of social turmoil that gave rise to contemporary criminological conflict theory was followed by a period of exhaustion and a social backlash of conservatism—as if people were trying to pretend that the 1960s had not happened and were determined to recapture the sense of tranquility of the complacent 1950s. Some of the conflict perspective could be integrated into contemporary criminological theory and applied to social policy, but much was rejected. What was accepted and what was rejected depended primarily on whether the formulations called for further social reform in the tradition of some of the earlier theories or demanded social revolution.
Turk’s conflict approach had been highly formalized and had treated conflict patterns as essentially inevitable, so it was not to be expected that his theoretical perspective would lead to specific alterations in social policy. It did, however, have considerable impact not only within criminology but also within the more general field of “deviant behavior” studies. The concept of “criminal” as a status assigned by the authorities as a result of a process working itself out through conflict probabilities was especially appealing to those with a formal sociological orientation who were interested in the conflict perspective but were put off by the ideological fervor of many Marxists.
As for the conflict perspective presented by Chambliss (1969) in Crime and the Legal Process and elaborated in the later work with Seidman, it is worth noting that a number of the policy implications inherent in that approach already had been addressed by the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren. Indeed, the “Warren Court” was in its own way as much a part of the turbulent 1960s as was the civil rights movement, the counterculture, and the Vietnam War protests. Years before Chambliss began his work, the Warren Court had shown considerable appreciation for the legal realists’ distinction between the law in the books and the law in action. It had extended the legal rights of convicted offenders as well as suspects and private citizens to provide them with additional protections in their struggles with the bureaucratic agendas of the police, courts, and corrections. Chambliss himself was well aware of this, and he actually dedicated his first book to Warren. It is ironic that it appeared at the time of President Nixon’s appointment of the conservative Warren Burger to replace the retiring Warren, which took the Court back into a posture that gave much less attention to the way in which the law in action might differ from the law in the books.
Chambliss’s use of the tradition of legal realism has been of considerable influence within criminology and, like Turk’s work, also has been influential within the field of deviant behavior studies. Quinney’s early work had essentially the same theoretical implications as Turk’s, but any interpretation of its policy implications depends on one’s interpretation of philosophical idealism. As noted previously, Quinney later decided that his earlier phenomenological constructionist approach tended to impede efforts to change things. Nevertheless, the earlier position seems to have had more impact on both criminological thought and deviant behavior studies than his later Marxist and theological approaches. The concept of crime as a result of the “social construction of reality” is broader than labeling theory, and the general perspective has become extremely influential in the larger field of “social problems” theory (Ball & Lilly, 1982) as well as in the newer “postmodern criminologies” to be discussed in Chapter 9.
So long as the conflict theories went only one step further than the theories tracing crime to criminogenic elements in society (as discussed in Chapters 3 and 4) or the labeling theories pointing to the relativity of crime (as discussed in Chapter 7), they tended to strengthen the case for policies of social reform suggested by those perspectives. In fact, they gave the appearance of greater political realism. They recognized that the inequalities stressed by the opportunity theories and the stigmatizing processes emphasized by the labeling theories had a great deal to do with the perceived interests of the powerful, and they suggested how the powerful and the bureaucracies representing them might be held more accountable. For example, some of the radicals took an active part in community campaigns to curb police brutality, raise bail for poor defendants, abolish the death penalty, stop the repression of political dissidents, and provide support for prisoners (Greenberg, 1981). Some pushed for policies allowing for greater social diversity without criminalization of those who were different and for more informal community-based policies of conflict accommodation such as arbitration, informal dispute settlement, and conflict resolution through negotiation outside the mechanisms of the political state (Mathiesen, 1974; Pepinsky, 1976; Quinney, 1974b). These efforts were to crystallize into what came to be called “peacemaking criminology” (Pepinsky & Quinney, 1991).
But when they called for the abolition of capitalism, the radical criminologists produced mostly charges of either misunderstanding Marxism (which indicated that they were not to be taken seriously) or understanding it too well (which indicated that they were dangerous revolutionaries of the sort that Senator McCarthy had warned America about during the 1950s). This was generally the fate of the later conflict theorizing of both Chambliss and Quinney. Here it is useful to contrast the Marxist approach with the “peacemaking” approach.
Marxist Approach
Even if society had been ready for further dramatic social change during the late 1970s, the problem of policy impact probably would have remained simply because of the inability or unwillingness of Marxist conflict theorists to provide blueprints for policy. The tendency of Marxists was to condemn capitalism and insist that individuals equipped with a revolutionary consciousness would be able to work their way through policy changes as they arose. They generally held that it was too early to try to spell out exactly what law and criminal justice (if such continued to exist) would look like under democratic socialism. Although some were willing to predict, for example, that prisons probably still would be needed (but for many fewer prisoners in a very different setting), others were less inclined to offer blueprints for the future. Although this stance can be understood in terms of the Marxist focus on principles of dialectical logic, it made no sense to contemporary policy makers (and many criminological theorists) who knew and trusted only the instrumental logic of ends-means calculation that insists that the policy makers spell out precisely what they expect to find at the end of the political journey before undertaking it in the first place (Ball, 1978a, 1979).
Although conflict theory had little direct impact on social policy, it had a great deal of impact within criminology itself. It led to considerable rethinking as to the nature of law, with most textbooks taking a more critical stand than was the case at the beginning of the 1960s. More recent criminological conflict theorists working in the Marxist tradition have moved toward structural Marxism and away from the instrumental Marxism that seemed so close to the notion of a conspiracy of dominance by a tiny elite at the top. This instrumental Marxism had tended to portray the capitalist elite as an omniscient few who knew everything and always pulled the strings at exactly the right moment to ensure that their interests were served. Structuralism locates the basis of social control factors such as law in class relations in general rather than asserting that it is entirely within the total conscious control of the capitalists at all times. Structural Marxism bears a resemblance to the formalism of Simmel, Vold, and Turk in that it maintains that social conflict is a matter of the inherent social dynamics of a particular system. It differs by taking a more historically relative position, maintaining that the key to understanding these dynamics lies not in formal logic that deals with social systems in the abstract but rather in a dialectical logic that is rooted in an understanding of the structural features of capitalism in particular.
At the same time that the Marxist conflict theories were attacking capitalism, they were criticizing conventional criminology. This criticism had consequences, even if only in making it more difficult to be complacent about the field. These criticisms included charges that conventional criminology was itself a part of the capitalist system and tended to support it, thereby contributing to the crime problem rather than to its understanding or its solution. The more radical conflict theorists insisted that conventional criminology had tended to accept the law as given, concentrating on the behavior of the offenders and searching for some pathological source of their behavior in biological, psychological, or social factors. They maintained that this very search tended to exaggerate the notion that the criminals were in some important way “different from the rest of us” when in fact the problem lay in the creation and enforcement of the laws that produced the criminals. Some demanded that crimes also be considered from the perspective of the criminals, using the writings of prisoners as part of an attempt to escape a narrow class-biased point of view.
Some of the radical criminologists leveled heavy criticisms at the efforts of conventional criminology to maintain a value-free “scientific” posture that refused to get involved in political debate or political action, insisting that scientific criminology confine itself to the “facts.” This position went back to the development of the positivistic approach discussed in Chapter 2. The critics of positivism charged that conventional criminology, by refusing to take a moral stand, was implicitly accepting the moral ideology provided by the powerful and forced onto the powerless. When mainstream criminologists responded that they were not simply accepting the ideology of the powerful and that they were in fact operating on the basis of broad social consensus, the radicals argued that this public consensus was a misleading mirage based on the power of the elite to shape public opinion (Michalowski & Bolander, 1976; Quinney, 1970b; Reiman, 1979). As such, it seemed to them to represent a “manufactured consensus” (Greenberg, 1981, p. 9). Indeed, some radicals insisted that conventional criminologists seemed to “reproduce the hegemony of the existing relations of property, race, and sexual privilege,” either “to regain prestige, to build research empires, or because they truly believe in the ideas of those in positions of power” (Krisberg & Austin, 1978, p. 119).
The radical theorists insisted that even the reforms urged by conventional criminology were simply minor tinkering that tended to support the further survival of a corrupt social system by making it appear that the powerful do care and that progress is being made toward economic and political justice. Meanwhile, they added, conventional criminology was providing the knowledge necessary to detect and control those seen as threats to the powerful. For example, Platt (1969) argued that the original establishment of the juvenile court was not a means of helping youths but rather a technique by which upper-class, Republican, Protestant women extended control over the children of the Catholic and Jewish immigrants. In a similar vein, the concept of rehabilitation was criticized as a tool of political oppression that justified prolonged and invasive tinkering with the minds and bodies of prisoners under the guise of assisting them (Smith & Fried, 1974; Wright, 1973).
Peacemaking Criminology
Perhaps nothing exemplifies the way in which the context of the times conditions the development of criminological theory so clearly as the evolution in the thinking of Quinney (1969, 1970a, 1970b, 1974a, 1974b, 1977, 1980), especially as he moved into the more recent phases of his theorizing (Pepinsky & Quinney, 1991). As he made clear in the earlier quotation, Quinney “moved through the various epistemologies and ontologies in the social sciences,” always finding that another approach was “necessary for incorporating what was excluded from the former, and so on,” trying to keep his work “informed by the latest developments in the philosophy of science” (in Bartollas, 1985, p. 230). He also made clear that this search has been conditioned by “the social and intellectual changes that are taking place in the larger society, outside of criminology and sociology” (p. 230). Eventually, Quinney came to join those who stressed an approach to social conflict reminiscent of Gandhi. Instead of following the Marxist path that calls for a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, he embraced the “peacemaking” approach that tries to accommodate conflict through various means of conflict resolution such as moral suasion and informal negotiation (Wozniak, 2003). It is interesting to note that this approach, which often is scorned as totally impractical by those who favor confrontation, actually may be much more effective in the long run (Fuller, 1998; Fuller & Wozniak, 2006; Wozniak et al., 2008). The main stages of Quinney’s criminology are summarized in Table 8.1.
Peacemaking criminology accepts the notion that conflict is at the root of crime, but it advocates a policy response that refuses to escalate this conflict in favor of policies of conciliation and mediation (Fuller, 1998; Fuller & Wozniak, 2006). According to Pepinsky (1999), peacemaking is one of two ways of approaching social control, with the other being “warmaking.” Whereas warmaking leads to more and more distrust, as well as efforts to secure more and more power over the opponent or even to destroy the opponent, peacemaking aims to build trust and a sense of community. Although most associated with the tradition of conflict theory, it actually suggests that conflict can be best resolved by building social bonds among people, much as control theory stresses.
This view is much more within the spiritual traditions of faiths such as Christianity (as exemplified by groups such as the Quakers), Buddhism (as illustrated by the fact that Quinney became a practicing Buddhist), and the Hindu tradition embodied by Gandhi. It also has been placed within certain humanistic traditions, so that conflict theorists who wish to stress the earlier, more humanistic side of Marx also are able to connect the Marxist tradition to peacemaking criminology (Anderson, 1991). As Pepinsky (1999) pointed out, peacemaking criminology reflects the position of many marginalized people who realize that they cannot obtain their goals by overpowering the opposition. Thus, it also has been seen as close to certain elements of the feminist criminology described in Chapter 10.
Peacemaking criminology reflects an assumption that “two wrongs do not make a right” or that a “war on crime” will only tend to make society itself more violent. Very sensitive to many of the issues raised by labeling theory, it represents an effort to step back from the alienating competitive sense of the other as a stranger to recapture a sense of common humanity and mutual community. Although it stresses development of social bonds, the bonds that it wishes to create run deeper than those suggested by much control theory. Pepinsky (1999) pointed to Christie’s (1981) observation that the more we come to really know someone, the more we lose our capacity to inflict pain on that person. Peacemaking criminology also stresses that the more we know ourselves, especially the uglier side of ourselves, the less likely we are to project it onto others (Pepinsky & Quinney, 1991).
In this view, the violence endemic in contemporary society is manifested by the homicide committed by the criminal, on the one hand, and the death penalty administered by the state, on the other. Each expresses the same underlying set of social premises. The violence of the state reflects the same underlying values as the violence of the criminal—a willingness to use violent means to deal with opposition.
It is not surprising that peacemaking criminology focuses on developing means of building trust even in the midst of conflict or that it stresses construction of a “social fabric of mutual love, respect, and concern” (Pepinsky, 1999, p. 59). In this way, it leads to social policies such as the recent “restorative justice” movement (Consedine, 1995; Fuller & Wozniak, 2006). Recall that restorative justice was described in the last chapter. The goal of this approach is to reduce harm by restoring victims, the communities, and the offender from the damage a crime has caused. The role of the state is not to inflict more pain and to seek vengeance but to create a context in which reconciliation can occur. Offenders must show accountability and personal responsibility, but they also should receive support, reintegration, and, in some cases, forgiveness. The purpose of this approach is to do justice but in ways that connect people together, not separate them (Fuller & Wozniak, 2006).
As might be expected, peacemaking criminology has been strongly criticized for utopian thinking and for the suggestion that power can be countered by something other than power (see, however, Wright, 2012). Gibbons (1994) pointed out that the sorts of humanistic policies advocated by peacemaking criminologists have a long history in reformist criminology and that they have not developed a theory that would suggest how to achieve the larger structural changes necessary to build close human ties, spiritual understanding, and genuine caring within a large and inherently impersonal society (see also Fuller, 1998; Fuller & Wozniak, 2006; Wozniak et al., 2008).
CONCLUSION
One does not have to accept radical conflict theory and peacemaking criminology to realize that it is easy to be taken in by the assumptions of the times. Indeed, the present book itself represents an effort to show how thinking about crime is intimately shaped by the nature of social context. Complacency has no place in criminology; both theories are anything but complacent. Whatever their defects, criminological conflict theory and peacemaking criminology certainly have succeeded in providing for a broadened reorientation and an increased sensitivity to issues previously overlooked or treated only in passing (Thomas & Hepburn, 1983).
FURTHER READINGS
Source: F. T. Cullen, & P. Wilcox. (Eds.). (2010). Encyclopedia of Criminological Theory. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Readings are available online at www.study.sagepub.com/lilly7e.
Bonger, Willem: Capitalism and Crime
Chambliss, William J.: Power, Conflict, and Crime
Quinney, Richard: Social Transformation and Peacemaking Criminology
Turk, Austin T.: The Criminalization Process
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