BEYOND “CRIME” AND “CRIMINALITY” (AGAIN)
July 21, 2017
On the American Society of
Criminology Division on People of Color and Crime listserv, there has recently
been a critical outburst against yet another research journal article finding—as
Travis Hirschi and Mike Hindelang did in the early seventies—that race is
associated with “intelligence” and “crime.” I am reminded of the first 20 years
I spent as a criminologist, explaining levels and trends in levels of crime and
criminality as behavior of those who recorded offenses and offenders, rather
than as indicators of the deviance of those whose behavior they recorded. I haven’t received much direct response, but
Darnell Hawkins has responded by aptly noting the distinction between
criminologist who focus on causes of crime and those who focus on responses, on
administration of justice.
At the time the moment when I
decided that by all measures, from police to victim to self reports to studies
of white-collar crime, “crime” and “criminality” were socio-political
artifacts, biased by class, race, gender and age, at a moment when my students
in a course required for criminal justice majors challenged me: “If you’re so critical of the criminal
justice system, what do you propose instead?”, Richard Quinney proposed that we
solicit contributions for an edited volume on “criminology as peace,” which we
agreed instead to reframe as a process of conflict resolution and call Criminology as Peacemaking (1990); which
I had at the moment defined as a process in which victims and victimizers alike
became “responsive” to one another’s concerns and needs by reorienting them
toward creating and negotiating terms of settlement, as against the “violence”
of remaining stuck on who had done what to whom, of holding on to the distrust,
harm, anger and disregard parties involved brought to the table, from heated or
entropic relations to cooperative or synergistic release of social heat. As I entered a period of victim-offender
mediation a decade later, and as I looked across social systems and networks,
the process of transforming the intransigence of “violence” in which the
actions of some frightened and hurt or threatened others which constitutes the
transformation of hurtful exercises of power over others into the “peacemaking”
process Richard Quinney and I sought to identify and engender, where attention
turns from consequences that have happened toward repairing damage that has
been acknowledged by all concerned. True
to a phenomenon chaos theorists call “scaling,” I have proposed that the
process that makes peace in the face of violence at one level of our relations,
parallels the process by which we make peace intra-personally, interpersonally,
at all social levels from dyads to globally, and in our relations with our
natural environment.
As for policing, recent
experience in such cities as Cincinnati, Dallas and Richmond, California,
indicates that as administrative leadership shifts toward getting to know and
respond to needs of community members for safety, security and service,
overriding emphasis on reporting crime and making arrests, happens implicitly,
if not explicitly as I proposed more than thirty years ago drawing on citizens
to define police performance on their own terms, subject to legal limitations
on power over those entering communities from outside, on “strangers.” As for researchers and policy analysts, I
continue to advocate transforming our criminological assumption that levels and
trends in “crime” and “criminality” are the ultimate indicator of the problem
of our social relations—to transcend politically loaded criteria of for
evaluating response to social discord, including evaluating police performance—a
matter of building trust and cooperation among police and those they police,
superseding attention to finding “crime” and catching “criminals.” In effect, this has the effect of extending
what Jerome Skolnick in 1968 called the “service” style of policing prominent
originally in white, middle-class and wealthy suburban communities, to poorer
urban communities of color. Ironically,
in the criminology mainstream, the fundamental problem of “crime” and “criminality”
are defining “crime” and “criminality” as the primary problem of social
conflict—a source of violence and its perpetuation in itself. Love and peace, hal
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