Chapter One: Practical Criminality

In his essay entitled 'Who thinks abstractly?', Hegel provided us with the following description: 

Hegel's aim here was to show that the common-sense view of abstract and concrete thought is the inverse of reality. The criminal appears as a very 'concrete' phenomenon: the murderer on the tumbril, the defendant in the dock. However, in order to focus on this one aspect of his identity, his criminality, others have to be suspended and annulled. His criminality has to be abstracted out from the complex of other characteristics which make him what he is and be regarded as dominant. In the criminal trial, of course, some of these other characteristics, such as his unhappy childhood, may re-enter the frame in a subordinate role as mitigation. While they do not influence the initial characterisation of our individual in terms of his crime, they represent a move towards a more concrete and many-sided view of his nature. For Hegel concrete reality is not something we start off from, readily given to observation, but which we arrive at as a conclusion. 

But the important point for us here is that this process of abstraction is the foundation stone of modern law and criminal justice. All societies have some notion of 'crime' and individual redress of interpersonal conflicts and harms. But in pre-modern society this is usually integrated into other social relations such as status and kinship, etc. It might be one thing to rob or kill a member of your own family, another to rob or kill a stranger; one thing for a nobleman to harm a peasant and something quite different for a peasant to harm a nobleman or a priest. The focus on the criminal identity of the individual was less sharp and was still locked into other contexts and characteristics of the individual. It was of course much harder to think abstractly in a society where nearly all social relations were interpersonal ones of status and submission. By contrast, in modern society where a large proportion of relations are ones involving passing strangers, or individuals whose relationship centres around a single dimension of work or economic exchange, it is far easier to think of people abstractly because we know so little about them anyway. So when they kill, it is the killing that defines them. If a mediaeval king or the lord of the manor killed, then it was hard for all those under his personal rule to forget that even though he had killed, he was still the king or the lord of the manor. 

The assumption that criminality is largely an individualistic response, which does not have to be individualised by the powers that be, is easily made. Most social mechanisms involve the actions of individuals in one way or another but it does not follow that it will be the individual who is constructed as the responsible agent as opposed to families, communities, ethnic groups or more impersonal market forces. Older, pre-modern forms of 'crime control' such as ethnic warfare, feuding, vendetta, etc., testify to the essential modernity of criminalisation and its link to the emergence of the notion of the free individual and the abstract legal person. In addition, and again this is easily taken for granted, crime is usually seen as an episodic disruption of an otherwise harmonious ongoing process. This is linked to its nature as individual act rather than ongoing institutional or social process. 

It is also linked to the existence of the other, the stranger. In the closed mediaeval village community in which the status of all individuals was known and integral to their being, harms and wrongs had to be dealt with in terms oftheir status rather than through its negation. Conversely, those from outside the community tended to be feared and 'criminalised' quite irrespective of their actions. Modern society makes possible the re-production of individuals as 'criminal other' even before the judge, let alone the state, has decreed it. Modernity provides the resources and possibilities for this in the notion of the free individual as abstract person, half-way, as it were, to criminalisation. The issue for the modern court is whether the right individual has been taken: the one who actually committed the offence. If so, the status as criminal is assured automatically by their actions. The degradation ritual of the court confirms what has already taken place as a social interaction. Alternatively, because criminalisation has already occurred as a social fact, the modern court - at least in the more progressive jurisdictions - need not overly preoccupy itself with such ceremony and can become an altogether more 'humane' place. 

Thus the process of abstraction - we might call it the criminalising abstraction- which establishes the identities of those who violate the criminal law as criminals irrespective of other characteristics they might have, that leaves, in the words of the great eighteenth-century jurist Cesare Beccaria, 'no further care to the judge than to examine the acts of citizens and to decide whether or not they conform to the law as written' ([1764]1996: 7), is not simply a logical process. The content of abstraction, what is included and what is excluded, who can in actual practice be criminalised, is a social, historical and political process. It is a question of power and imagery. On the one hand the emergence of the rule of law, the doctrine that all killers from the king to the merchant to the landless peasant, will be treated as murderers in the same way by the courts is rightly held to be one of the great achievements of modernity, of the Enlightenment. Its historical precondition is the emergence of the doctrines of individualism and universal human rights. These were based in turn on the ascendancy of capitalist market relations in which individuals related increasingly as abstract legal persons, citizens, buyers and sellers of commodities, bearers of rights and obligations irrespective of other differences and characteristics. Without this the rule of law would be impossible in anything other than a tautological sense. Law is the counterpart of political economy (see Fine 1984; Pashukanis 1978). On the other hand, however, the contentof the criminalising abstraction is never free of the imagery and practice of power. Who can be criminalised; who is virtually 'pre-criminalised' irrespective of their actions; and who can only be criminalised with great difficulty, if at all, irrespective of what they do. These forces, at play within the relationship between formal criminalisation and the substantive character of criminals, reintroduce the older issues of social status and identity into the newer abstractions. Modernity is contradictory from the outset. It is not simply a break from the past but its reworking into new configurations. 

The rule of law and legal equality is also the counterpart of the modern democratic state. Modern states are democratic in so far as the people, through their representatives and with the departure of God and the king, become the ground of the legitimacy of the state and its laws. The state as the most powerful agent in society, freed from direct appropriation by powerful individuals or social groups, is thus in a position to apply the criminalising abstraction consistently. The powerful state, supreme power within its national territory - and frequently beyond its borders - is an aspect of the dual nature of modernity. On the one hand modernity brings the emancipation of the individual from the hierarchical ordering of feudalism and, on the other, the need to secure social order by regulating this process through the various apparatuses of law, discipline and regulation. Hence modernity, as it developed in western Europe during the eighteenth century, is a dual process of liberation and disciplinisation (Wagner 1994). The modernity of criminalisation lies precisely in its subordination of the freedom of the individual to the interests of social stability. It is achieved by the criminalising abstraction which singles out individuals, annuls other aspects of their character and circumstances - be it social status, life history or control over resources - and holds them responsible for their actions in accordance with a general rule of law that recognises their right, as free individuals, to equal treatment. However, since capitalistmodernisation is carried, initially, by a particular social class, the bourgeoisie, those freedoms, and also the potential criminalisation of their misuse, are not distributed evenly. 

This gives modernity a decidedly dark side. As far as criminal justice is concerned, the criminalising abstraction is, firstly, never entirely consistently applied. It is subject to key exclusions. Some, such as women in the marital relationship, are effectively precluded from claiming victim status in the case of violence from their husbands, while the working class bears throughout the early stages of modernity the status of the already criminalised having, for the bourgeoisie and its magistrates, no other identity than the criminalising abstraction itself - in the form of the dangerous classes. Simultaneously the upper echelons of the bourgeoisie by virtue of their social status are able to deflect the rigours of criminal justice to a considerable extent. The content of the criminalising abstraction varies. The poor working-class criminal takes on an exaggerated animal status as brute while the female offender is defeminised as 'mad'. But quite apart from exceptions and exclusions, the very working of a system of universal human rights and legal rules serves to reproduce as well as ameliorate the substantive social inequalities and injustices alongside which they function. The Napoleonic Code, which in its impartiality prevented rich and poor alike from sleeping under the bridges of Paris, is the best known illustration. The enlightened magistrate responds by taking into account the poverty or other disability of the offender as mitigating circumstances at the stage of sentencing. Of course what circumstances count as disability or weakness is itself an issue of power. The Victorian moral reformer could look with sympathy upon the poverty of the poor waif who stole a loaf of bread. By contrast only very recently have such problems as long-term violence by husbands to wives, when the latter turn to what would otherwise be simple premeditated murder, begun to be regarded in a similar light. 

It is nevertheless a mistake to see the development of criminal justice and the criminalising abstraction as simply the perfection of a mechanism of repressive social control. The importance of seeing modernity as a process involving simultaneously mechanisms of liberation and disciplinisation (Wagner 1994) is that neither must be seen as entirely obliterating the other. Indeed each affects the working of the other. If the exclusions mentioned above give a hollow ring to wide areas of so-called liberation, the working of the mechanisms of discipline and regulation have to come to terms with the dynamics of liberation. One side of this is that the masses benefit from the rule of law and the criminalising abstraction. As far as the working class was concerned the rule of law, as the historian Edward Thompson put it, was 'an unqualified human good ... [which] ... while it did mediate existent class relations to the advantage of the rulers ... mediated these class relations through legal forms which imposed, again and again, inhibitions upon the actions of the rulers' (1977: 264-5). 

At the same time the masses have to be progressively brought into and mobilised as part of the process of control and regulation itself. This is well understood in areas such as the progressive extension of the franchise and the legitimation of independent working-class organisations such as trade unions and labour parties. Also understood is the area of social policy (in the most general sense of the term) as the development, during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of a concern with governmentality (Foucault 1979, 1991); with the mobilisation of a wide range of disciplinary mechanisms, including private institutions such as the family to secure participation and conduct, in a process of essentially self-regulation or 'self-carried power' (Foucault 1977: 201). 

Traditional jurisprudence and political science have conspired to see criminalisation as the unproblematic application of clear categories of criminal law exhaustively analysable as discourses and practices of the state including, where changes in the boundaries of criminality are at issue, through the formal legislative process. Such a focus is one-sided. The state remains of course the central institutional locus of the criminalising abstraction precisely because it rises above the particularities and conflicts of society. But it is effective only to the extent that its actions are reproduced and reinforced by a whole complex of attitudes and behaviours in society as a whole. Criminalisation involves much more than the agencies of the state, including their informal and discretionary modes of operation. It is more accurate to say, with Nicola Lacey, that the 'very subject matter of criminal law and criminology appears to slip through our fingers as icriminalisationi is revealed as consisting of a number of interlocking social practices whose operations leave the boundaries of icriminalityi anything but precise' (Lacey 1995: 17). These practices, like the informal and discretionary mode of operation of criminal justice agencies, should not be seen as imperfection or dilution of criminalisation but rather its essential dynamic. It cannot function in any other way. The working of criminal justice cannot be properly understood except as a set of social relations of which the state is only one component, albeit a very powerful one. This becomes clear if we consider two important arguments which at first sight appear to move off at a tangent. 

The social relations of crime control

A purely juridical perspective, concerned with the administration of the law, generally deals with a concept of the criminal offender as already in court, and spends little time thinking about the processes, and particularly the informal ones, whereby he or she arrived there. Yet a glance around the criminal court will reveal the importance of the working of a whole series of social mechanisms and relations. Present are not just the judicial and legal professionals but the defendant, and perhaps the victim as chief witness for the prosecution. How did they get there? Who reported the crime and why, and in the face of what obstacles, or under the pressure of what inducements? A central part of the case of the prosecution or defence may hang on the testimony of witnesses. How did they get there? Why were they prepared to get involved? Why were they prepared to give statements to the police? What obstacles were placed in their way or what pressures forced them to comply? Investigating magistrates, lawyers and police officers may have an implicit understanding of these mechanisms since a good part of their working life is spent dealing with them - gathering information leading to an arrest, securing the appearance of a reluctant witness in court or dealing with victims whose fear of the police may be even greater than their fear of reprisals from their attackers. 

This complex of social relations which makes criminalisation an objective possibility I shall call the social relations of crime control: an ensemble of actors, roles and interactions which sustains the application of the criminalising abstraction and the management and control of criminality. We can describe the basic dynamics at work in a schematic or ideal type form as a 'square of crime', 6a system of interaction between four participants; the state and the criminal justice agencies, offenders, victims, and the various publics and communities involved in the control of various types of crime. 

The state and the public

The social foundation of modern crime control is that various types of conflicts have been handed over to the state to sort out. To use Nils Christie's (1977) terminology, our conflicts have become their property. This handing over has various preconditions. Firstly, the categories of criminal law deployed by the state must bear sufficient correspondence to popular conceptions of guilt, justice and harm that citizens will identify broadly the same acts as crimes as the state, and broadly agree with the types of punishments and sentences meted out by the courts. This is often regarded as guaranteed in liberal democratic regimes by the legislative process together with the assumption of a natural consensus around primarycriminalisations such as murder and theft (see Cohen 1988). Even where this agreement exists, the public must accept the legitimacy of the criminal justice system and the activities of its various officials. This can vary within wide limits, from a rather unlikely confidence in both the competence and the professional integrity of criminal justice personnel to the more realistic scenario of a feeling that there is simply no alternative in dealing with a particular situation to that of calling the police. The crime control activities of the criminal justice agencies cannot be separated in practice from other activities in which they may be engaged. If a community is systematically harassed by a racist police force who label its young men as already criminalised then that community will be reluctant to call upon or give evidence to the police even where serious victimisation has taken place. Such communities may prefer to deal as far as possible with their own conflicts and troubles. 

There is, and this will be discussed more fully later on, a whole host of habits of conduct that citizens must adopt in order to function as an adjunct rather than as rival, or hindrance to the state. How people use and conceptualise public space, read signs of disturbance or irregularity and what consequent action they take, in particular as regards the transmission of information about crime to the criminal justice agencies, are all crucial components of the techniques of governance which extend beyond the agencies of criminal justice and other branches of the state apparatus and permeate the public, local communities and families. 

The state and the offender

Which law violations and problematic situations can be effectively criminalised is an important question of power involving both the state and the public. As far as the state is concerned, notwithstanding formal injunctions (present in some criminal law jurisdictions) on the public prosecutor to pursue all reported crimes, the key issue is that of discretionary behaviour. What crimes and the criminality of which social strata will be the practical focus of police action is a key variable. It is generally assumed that whereas offenders are usually more powerful than their victims, they are weaker than the state. Those in danger of criminalisation have differing resources to mount a counter-attack. The young street criminal from a poor community certainly has no power and in any case usually has an already precriminalised social status. Others, such as organised crime syndicates, may not avoid criminalisation, but may be able to neutralise its effects through corruption and intimidation both of criminal justice agencies and community and private organisations. Others, such as prestigious business leaders and politicians or impeccably respectable husbands are able to deploy their social status as a mechanism with which to deflect in a number of ways the criminalising abstraction. For example, in criminal trials of highly respectable financiers for various business crimes there is often a lingering assumption that really they should not be in court at all and that the matter could sensibly have been dealt with in some other way. Similarly, the ways in which rape trials usually reproduce rather than equalise the power relations between men and women, leading to the criminalisation of the victim rather than the offender, are well known. 

The weakness of the offender in relation to the state is therefore a crucial component of the social relations of crime control. It enables the criminal justice system to reconcile respect for the rule of law, and hence sufficient public support to enable a flow of information about crime to the authorities, with the requirement to control crime effectively. The public could collaborate with the police without fear of reprisal from the weak offender or fear that the police themselves were corrupted by the offender. Conversely, the police could rely on a flow of public information available without intrusive surveillance on their part, and in sufficient quantity and quality to persuade a jury to convict even if the offender chose to remain absolutely silent throughout the entire proceedings as was his right. Not only therefore do the rights of due process and respect for civil liberties not interfere with the effectiveness of crime control but the former are conducive to the latter. Respect for due process and civil liberties secures the public legitimacy of criminal justice agencies and enhances the public willingness to collaborate with them. The weakness of the offender complements the role of the community as an agent of informal noncoercive control in enabling the reconciliation of law with order. As noted above, in the case of more powerful offenders this is problematic. 

The state and the victim

Victimisation is not simply an automatic effect of the criminal action. Victim is a legal category and a social role requiring a certain type of action in relation to the state authorities, namely, passivity. This involves the handing over not only of technical aspects of criminal investigation and establishment of guilt, but also of the moral righteousness at harm suffered, to the criminal justice system (Christie 1977; Elias 1993). It is the state that is injured by crime. In most western criminal jurisdictions the victim takes a passive role as chief witness for the state, though as I shall note later this is beginning to change. Victim is also a social category, a status. To claim the status of victim in the eyes of the state - and the community - requires a certain type of behaviour. A transition must be made from 'sufferer' to victim (see Grant-Stitt 1989). The 'victimising abstraction' parallels the criminalising abstraction and in a similar way involves social power relations and cultural attitudes. The individual or individuals concerned need to act in certain ways in order effectively to secure victim status. Nils Christie identified the ideal victimas 'a person or category of individuals who - when hit by crime - most readily are given the complete and legitimate status of being a victim' (Christie 1986: 18). To achieve such status the victim must be seen to be acting in certain ways: for example, doing something entirely respectable at the time of the crime and having no complicating personal relationship with the offender which might cloud the issues of criminal responsibility. The effect of cultural stereotypes and power relations in the criminal trial process itself is no more clearly illustrated than in cases of rape where the matter before the court frequently shifts from the actions of the alleged offender to those of the victim (see Lees 1996). Victims themselves may not wish to claim full victim status and may aim, at least initially, at an alternative status such as that of disputants. Victims of domestic violence, for example, may call on the police but not wish to assume the full implications of a status as victim of crime, rather wishing the police to simply 'calm down' the situation (Hoyle 1998). That choice may, of course, itself be the effect of power relations. 

The public and the victim

The relationship between the public and the victim reinforces and reproduces that of the state. The public must identify with the victim. This is particularly important in equating the power balance between situations where weak victims encounter powerful offenders. Where, for example, the victim's dependence on the offender will act as a barrier to the claiming of victim status, then the surrounding community must give sufficient support to provide testimony on behalf of, or put sufficient pressure on, the victim to compensate for this dependence. Conversely, the public may obstruct the claiming of victim status through techniques of blaming in which the victim rather than the offender comes to be regarded as the cause of the crime. Such an ideological construct needs to be carefully distinguished from the fact that many offences may arise out of prior interaction in which both victim and offender participate. In cases where the victim is absent, such as homicide or so-called 'victimless' crimes, the community has to substitute for the victim in various ways through reporting and providing evidence. Often the public will take the form of a geographical locality, of a local community of neighbours or perhaps work associates who witnessed the crime, saw something suspicious, etc. But many crimes take place elsewhere than in the victim's own locality or workplace. Members of a wider and more amorphous public must be prepared to respond to police requests for information. It is not so much the location as the activation of community that is important as far as the social relations of crime control are concerned. The forms of behaviour required of the victim - passivity, unambiguity of relations with the offender - may well be required by the community also. By this mechanism social relations of power are reproduced within criminal justice. The community may make or unmake victims. The positive side may be where victims are unaware of what is happening to them except as a result of public mobilisation, as in many cases of corporate crime concerned with pollution or the sale of dangerous goods. The negative side is seen in the denial of victim status through racism or the reinforcing of sexist assumptions concerning culpability in domestic violence or rape cases. 

The public and the offender

Ideally, the relations between citizens must be such that anyone who commits a recognisable harm can be criminalised and their other identities and attributes placed in suspension or mobilised to give substantive content to the criminalising abstraction. The application of criminalising abstraction by the community is central to the whole process of crime control. The process of fitting a particular situation to the legal categories involves a complex play of power and conflict both in respect of the relation of the offender and the victim to other members of the community and of the latter to the state. Criminalisation involves the fitting of troubleor problematic situations into the straitjacket of criminal law categories and the effective recasting as criminals and victims of individuals about whose lives and affinities a great deal may be known in a cohesive community. This is the core of the criminalising abstraction. It is not that the public or the victim must first perform this abstraction and then call the police. Rather, the decision to call the police is the first step in a process one of the possible outcomes of which may be the criminalising abstraction. Cohesive communities may have a variety of complex relations with their own troublemakers. They may be simultaneously fearful of and yet benefit from certain forms of support rendered by local 'villains' which may range from sorting out petty violence and squabbles to providing a supply of cheap stolen goods. In business a certain distaste for illegal violations and corrupt practices of colleagues may be more than compensated for by the feeling that such matters should be handled in-house and are no concern of prying outside institutions such as the criminal justice system. But to the extent that the latter is able to function, the community at some stage must disconnect from the offender; it must tolerate the interventions of the state, the police and perhaps others, such as defence lawyers, knocking on doors, asking questions, taking statements, etc. It must learn to participate in the crime control process on terms set by the state. Nevertheless, even when the police are not called, the role of local communities and families, or business communities, as agents of informal social control of potential offenders is a crucial part of crime control. These structures of informal power enable the preservation of liberal legality by moderating any tendency on the part of the state to a coercive authority, and the abandonment of the rule of law and civil liberties, in the interests of all-embracing crime control. 

"Liberal legality would prove too delicate for a society founded on coercive authority, were not this authority embedded indistinguishably through discipline in the domain of the normal, of the unremarkable." (Fitzpatrick 1988: 190) 

The offender and the victim

Finally, the ideal victim might be thought to be paralleled by the ideal offender as outsider and stranger with no complicating relations with either the victim or the surrounding community. This situation may be approximated in street theft or household burglary by a stranger from another community, or in a clear case of financial fraud perpetrated by a group of professional criminals on a company. The offenders can be criminalised immediately by both victim and surrounding community because they have no other identity arising from a relationship with victims or other members of the latter's social network. However there is a paradox in that the more the offender fits the category of stranger, and is therefore most easily criminalisable, the less information there will be which will enable him or her to be tracked down. The highest rates of crime cleared up by police tend to be where, as in the majority of homicides, the victim was known personally to the offender and the friends, neighbours and relatives have much to say on the matter. But in homicide or brutal violence it is the abhorrent action which demonises and criminalises the perpetrator whatever else his relations with the local community. Even people who have difficulty in coming to terms with the fact that 'such a nice family man as Dr X' could possibly have turned out to be a killer, have no problem in applying the criminalising abstraction where the crime is so horrendous a disruption of civilised normality as to unambiguously dehumanise and demonise the perpetrator. However, in communities where violent death is a much more normal part of the brutality of everyday life, a murder may be less of a departure from normality. 

The idea that crime exists as a distinct entity outside of this complex of relations, waiting, as it were, to be discovered by them, is revealed in the use of the term by both criminologists and criminal justice agencies of the phrase 'the dark figure of unrecorded crime' to refer to matters which are not reported to the criminal justice agencies and processed as crimes. In a strict sense this is a meaningless discourse. Not only is it not clear whether such problematic situations, if reported, would have stood the test of due process in the courts (Lacey 1995), but it is also often not clear how such events would have been conceptualised had they actually been reported and acted upon through the normal channels of criminal justice. For example, respondents to victim surveys, even though the forms of victimisation they are asked to report are usually focused on criminal law definitions, may report incidents to interviewers that they would not report to the criminal justice agencies or which would not have been regarded as crime had they done so. What interviewers are picking up may be in many cases not so much 'unreported crime' as some of the silences and power effects of the social relations of crime control. 

We have described the social relations involved in criminalisation and crime control in rather ideal typical form. Actual reality departs from them in various ways even in situations where they are hegemonic. But that is precisely an illustration of their precariousness as condensations of social interaction. A number of aspects of their working can be underlined. Firstly, they sustain an organised system of moral censures which underpin criminalisation. As Colin Sumner has argued, '[t]he sociology of crime and deviance must ... become a sociology of social censures; their structural roots, institutional forms, discursive and practical meanings, systems and policies of enforcement, hegemonic functions, effects and significance for ioffendersi, and normative validity' (Sumner 1990a: 26-7; see also 1976, 1990b). Censure takes a practical form as the identification and labelling of offenders, their segregation and classification as individuals engaged in distinct types of activity - the application of the criminalising abstraction. Secondly, they function as a structure of communication. The flow of information about 'crime' or 'suspicious events' from the public to the criminal justice agencies, and the structuring and tutoring of public suspicions through requests for information or observations by police or collaborating media institutions, helps to sustain a common language of criminality, together with the renewal and updating of criminal stereotypes. Finally, the social relations of crime control are a mechanism of power involving the handing over of discourses and activities to the state, the abdication of the power and right to settle conflicts and the consignment of such activity to negative connotations of vigilantism and 'taking the law into your own hands' when it should be in the hands of the state, and the forcing of difference and diversity into the universalist discourse of criminal law. The positive effects of power include the rule of law and the overcoming of difference by that same discourse. But state power and the discourses of criminal law are part of 'a dense web that passes through apparatuses and institutions, without being exactly localised in them' (Foucault 1979: 96) but a web which is located in the dynamic of the social relations of crime control as a whole. The object of state activity, of public policy can therefore never be simply the articulation of criminal law and legal power but the wider task of 'government' of this structure of relations to ensure its reproduction and functioning. 

The study of interactions between the components of the social relations of crime control to reveal the various power effects internal to their operation is part of the task of a criminology dedicated to 'a fully social theory of crime' (Taylor et al. 1973). The study of the development of these relations in order to specify their conditions of existence is part of the wider task of an historically informed social theory of modernity. In the rest of this book the aim is to make a contribution to this latter task by linking some of the main developments in the social relations of crime control with the wider changes associated with the contradictory unfolding of modern capitalist societies. The main thrust of the argument will be as follows. 

The social relations of crime control, despite being a key aspect of modernity, take a long time to develop and only ever develop partially, meeting with numerous resistances and obstacles. That is the result of the contradictions and tensions of a modernity whose principal engine of development is the accumulation of capital. Nevertheless, during the long period embracing, in England, the latter part of the eighteenth and most of the nineteenth century the overall tendency was towards their consolidation. Partly, this was a result of conscious social engineering, of a modernising offensive(Wagner 1994: 20) led by the enlightened sections of the bourgeoisie which involved reforms aimed at the education and socialisation of the working class and the reorganisation of the urban environment. This strategy was possible, indeed it only occurred because, the requirements of profitable capital accumulation and the reform of cities and social life were tied to one another. The first required the second. Capitalist expansion itself provided the resources and needed the results of the process. This was the period in which capitalism, still infused with the dynamism celebrated by Marx and Engels in the early pages of the Communist Manifesto of 1848, was revolutionising the forces and relations of production. 

The consolidation of the social relations of crime control is inextricably bound up with these developments. Changes in the structure of cities, communities and in personal behaviour made possible a clearer marking out of the criminal, clearer definitions of crime, and boundaries of legitimate and criminal violence in private and public space. Meanwhile the agencies of criminal justice and social welfare spread into working-class communities and partially displaced traditional forms of autonomous conflict resolution, relegating the latter to the status of auxiliary or informal social control. At the same time within the bourgeoisie itself the development of restraint, the calming of the wild excesses of an earlier period of 'primitive accumulation' and a framework of legal regulation of economic practices made headway. All this is part of what might be considered one of the greatest projects of the first stage of modernity, that of the governance of civil society. These dynamics will be the theme of Chapter 2. 

But the new forms of freedom and emancipation resulting from capitalist modernisation were accompanied by new forms of exploitation, impoverishment and conflict. Crime control was, and of course is, penetrated by these in a number of ways: by the contrast between the benefits of the rule of law and the criminal justice system as a mechanism for the protection of the powerful; by the continual weakening of the social relations of crime control in the face of powerful offenders or community sanctioned social crimeas modes of resistance and survival among the poor. Criminalisation never loses its status as a contested process despite its overall tendency towards stabilisation. This will be the main theme of Chapter 3. 

The middle of the twentieth century is the high point of what Peter Wagner (1994) terms organised modernity. Through the turmoil of the inter-war period the Keynesian welfare state emerges as a mechanism for social and economic stabilisation. Full employment, Fordism, and a process of breakdown in class and regional cultures through mass education and social and geographic mobility seemed, for a time, to have permanently subdued the conflicts and contradictions of the first phase of modernity. This enabled a further stabilisation of the social relations of crime control through the strengthening of consensus around definitions of criminality, the institutionalisation of urban structures and forms of behaviour conducive to crime control. At the same time social planning enabled the welfare state to join the criminal justice system as a conflict regulation mechanism. The period of the 1950s and 1960s in particular was one in which criminal justice issues were progressively depoliticised and unproblematic. The social relations of crime control could be virtually taken for granted except in a few backward areas of older cities, or regions on the periphery of modernisation which could be seen essentially as hangovers from the first stage of modernity or even pre-modernity. Nevertheless steadily rising rates of crime pointed to important fissures in the stabilisation process. Chapter 4 will attempt to draw together some of these themes. 

But this period was short lived. In reality large areas were never touched by expansion, but in any case from the last quarter of the twentieth century modernity has moved into a new type of crisis. The dominant forces have been fragmentation and a weakening of the type of social structure that underpinned the social relations of crime control. This rupture in the dynamics of modernity has been sufficiently profound to have given rise to a plethora of new terminologies and discourses - for example: postmodernity, late modernity, late capitalism, postfordism, risk society - all of which attempt in one way or another to grasp the dynamics of a real crisis in the modernisation process. The ingredients of change are reasonably clear: globalisation, the dismantling of the welfare state, changes in the organisation of urban life and class structure, changes in gender relations, all associated with the changed dynamics of capitalism. These developments, it will be argued, are characterised by a disruptive tendency in which the relationship between the development of capitalism and the development of society has changed. Whereas during the nineteenth century the expansion of capital accumulation, despite its contradictions, did lay down the conditions for social cohesion, stable communities, continuities in social and economic life, the forms in which capital now develops on a global scale tend to undermine these older stabilities. Capitalism no longer develops the social productive forces, or at least not in the same way and not in a way compatible with recognisable forms of social stability. 

The impact on criminality and its control is considerable. There are, it will be argued, two tendencies gathering pace. Firstly, a reintroduction of some of the obstacles that the nineteenth-century development of crime control had to overcome: blurred boundaries between criminality and normal activities and social relations; crime as an increasingly functional as well as a disruptive element in the survival of both poor communities and powerful corporations; fragmentation of communities and urban space which disrupts stable forms of governance of crime while the latter itself increasingly functions as a form of governance. Crime, by becoming increasingly normalised, begins to lose its distinct identity ascrime. Secondly, the same dynamic necessarily characterises the control of crime. The expansion of the latter to the management less of a distinct criminality and increasingly of the poor as a whole, who now reassume the old nineteenth-century mantle of the dangerous classes, blurs the boundaries between crime control and more general social regulation which is itself fragmenting and pluralising under the impact of changes in the nature of global capital accumulation. 

The discussion in the remaining chapters will attempt to unravel some of these themes. None of this will of course appeal to those who see crime as an unproblematic legal category and crime control as simply a technical solution to an essentially unchanging problem. But for others it might serve as a set of pointers to a more developed understanding of the role played by criminality in the development and crisis of modernity.