The Culture of Control: Social Change and Social Order in Late Modernity

The crime control changes of the last twenty years were driven not just by criminological considerations but also by historical forces that transformed social and economic life in the second half of the twentieth century. For our purposes it is useful to distinguish two sets of transformative forces: First, the social, economic, and cultural changes characteristic of late modernity: changes that were experienced to a greater or lesser extent by all Western industrialized democracies after the Second World War and which became most pronounced from the 1960s onwards. Secondly, the political realignments and policy initiatives that developed in response to these changes, and in reaction to the perceived crisis of the welfare state, in the USA and the UK from the late 1970s onwards. These changes in social and economic policy—a combination of free-market 'neo-liberalism' and social conservatism—had echoes in other states such as New Zealand, Canada, and Australia. But they were developed in their most thoroughgoing form in America under the Reagan and Bush administrations (1981-92) and in Britain under Prime Minister Thatcher (1979-92) and they have continued in more muted forms in the New Democrat administrations of Bill Clinton (1993-2000) and, in Britain, under the Conservative government of John Major (1992-7) and the New Labour government of Tony Blair from 1997 onwards. Leaving aside for a moment the national differences that distinguished the American experience from that of Britain, one can summarize the impact of these developments as follows: The first set of forces—the coming of late modernity—transformed some of the social and political conditions upon which the modern crime control field relied. It also posed new problems of crime and insecurity, challenged the legitimacy and effectiveness of welfare institutions, and placed new limits on the powers of the nation-state. The second set of forces—the politics of post-welfarism—produced a new set of class and race relations and a dominant political block that defined itself in opposition to old style ‘welfarism’ and the social and cultural ideals upon which it was based. Without this political realignment, the most likely response to the critique of correctionalism would have been incremental reform, improved safeguards, enhanced resources, the refinement of procedures. Instead, what occurred was a sharp reversal of policy and opinion and a remaking of the whole crime control field. This chapter will argue that the tunt against penal-welfarism took a ‘reactionary’, all-encompassing form because underlying the debate about crime and punishment was a fundamental shift of interests and sensibilities. This historical shift, which had both political and cultural dimensions, gave rise to new group relations and social attitudes—attitudes that were most sharply defined in relation to the problems of crime, welfare, and social order. These new group relations—often experienced and expressed as highly charged emotions of fear, resentment and hostility—formed the social terrain upon which crime control policies were built in the 1980s and 1990s. The causes of this historical shift had little to do with criminal justice, but that did not prevent it from being massively consequential in its criminological effects. Broad social classes that had once supported welfare state policies (out of self-interest as well as cross-class solidarity) came to think and feel about the issues quite differently. Changes in demography, in stratification and in political allegiance led important sections of the working and middle classes to change their attitudes towards many of these policies—to see them as being at odds with their actuarial interests and as benefiting groups that were undeserving and increasingly dangerous. In this new political context, welfare policies for the poor were increasingly represented as expensive luxuries that hard working tax-payers could no longer afford. The corollary was that penal-welfare measures for offenders were depicted as absurdly indulgent and self-defeating. If the searing experience of Depression and war had been the social surface on which the welfare state and penal-welfarism were built in the 1930s and 1940s, by the early 1980s that matrix of politics and culture was a dim historical memory. The politics of the later period addressed a different set of problems—many of which were perceived as being caused by welfarism rather than solved by it. I will argue that the gradual formation of new class interests and sensibilities came about in response to the crisis of the welfare state and the transforming dynamics of late modern social life, but I will also insist that this response was the result of political and cultural choices that were by no means inevitable. In the following pages I give an account of this social and political realignment. This account looks at the social and historical processes that have reconfigured the way that we live in the last third of the twentieth century and the ways in which we have come to think and act in relation to crime. It is the story of the development of late modernity, our political and cultural reactions to it, and the implications that these have had for crime, crime-control, and criminal justice. My account is not intended as a history of the period, but rather as an exploration of social changes that influenced, or posed problems for, the crime control field. Much of what follows will be familiar to the reader—part of ‘what everyone knows’ about the late twentieth century. But it is important to recall it nevertheless. By calling to mind some of the great social facts of out recent history, I hope to unseat the ‘presentist’ mindset that so often dominates out discussions and diagnoses. All too often we tend to see contemporary events as having only contemporary causes, when in fact we are caught up in long-term processes of historical change and affected by the continuing effects of now-forgotten events. Our present-day choices are heavily path dependent, reflecting the patterns of earlier decisions and institutional arrangements, just as our habits of thought reflect the circumstances and problems of the periods in which they were first developed. The theory of historical change I bring to bear in what follows is an action-centred, problem-solving one in which socially situated actors reproduce (or else transform) the structures that enable and constrain their actions. My substantive claim is that the political, economic and cultural supports that had previously underpinned modern crime control were increasingly eroded by late modern social trends and the intellectual and political shifts that accompanied them. These trends, in turn, posed novel problems, gave rise to new perceptions, and shaped a variety of practical adaptations, out of which gradually emerged the crime control and criminal justice practices of the present period. The theory assumes that the emergence of these practices is typically the outcome of practical problem-solving and of political and cultural selection. In consequence, it is a complex process in which competing accounts of problems and solutions are always in play, different interests and sensibilities are always at issue, and the capacity to select solutions on the basis of hard information is only ever partial at best.

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