Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Street Crime
Street Crime
STREET CRIME
STREET CRIME STREET CRIME
SIMON HALLSWORTH
Street crime remains high on the public and political agenda, and is frequently SI MON HALLSWORTH
the subject of media attention and concern. This book aims to provide a detailed
and accessible account of the phenomenon, placing the subject in its historical,
theoretical, and political context.
The book begins by examining the history of street robbery and traces it from the
medieval period of the outlaw to the underworld of the Victorian city. It
examines the available evidence in order to consider just how serious a problem
street crime is, and considers why it has become such a contentious political
issue. The book provides an overview of contemporary theories of street crime
and provides a critical analysis of their strengths and weaknesses.
The author then develops an alternative framework to interpret street crime. This
focuses upon studying the interrelationship between three key variables: the
SIMON HALLSWORTH
production of motivated offenders, the availability and suitability of victims, and
an analysis of the limits inherent in current control strategies.
The book concludes by arguing against a social response that criminalises young
people for an offence intimately connected with the rise of a consumer society
into whose values the young are ruthlessly socialized but which denies many the
capacity to consume legitimately. The author contends that a socially just
response is not one predicated on a war against street robbers but upon a
politics designed to incorporate them.
The author
Simon Hallsworth is Director of the Centre for Social and Evaluation Research at
London Metropolitan University. He is currently involved in work studying youth
gangs and collective delinquency. He is also co-editor of The New Punitiveness
(Willan, 2005).
www.willanpublishing.co.uk
Street Crime
i
Crime and Society Series
Published titles
ii
Street Crime
Simon Hallsworth
iii
Published by
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
iv
To Adam and Lucie
v
vi
Chapter title
Contents
Introduction 1
Bibliography 177
Index 183
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Street Crime
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Introduction
Introduction
It was a cold wet Friday evening somewhere back in the winter of 1988.
That was the day I became a victim of a street robbery. I was living at the
time in Brixton and the robbery took place along one of the many small
backstreets that lead off from Brixton Hill. It happened as I was returning
home having visited a local shop where I had purchased a few goods.
These I had stored in a small rucksack.
I had almost reached Brixton Hill when I became aware of the
presence of a group of young men congregating on the pavement some 50
metres ahead of me. Though, to be fair, the idea of young men
congregating together was nothing new – this was, after all, an area with
a vibrant street culture – there was, nevertheless, something about the
behaviour of this group that caught my attention. It might have been
something about the way in which they were observing me, but I think it
was more to do with the fact that the road I was walking along was not a
place where young men typically congregated.
With alarm bells ringing away, I resolved to avoid the group by
turning into a small side street while also quickening my pace. As I
turned, however, so did the group. I ran and they ran after me – only, I’m
afraid, a lot faster. Unable to escape, I stopped and confronted them.
Unfortunately it was not the most propitious of locations – a small lane
off the main road in darkness. Things were not looking good. There were
six of them aged, I guess, between fifteen and eighteen. Two members of
the group were clearly older than the others and these were also the most
aggressive and active in what followed. One of them pulled a knife which
he held to my throat. He looking unswervingly at my face and emanated
what I can only describe as a sense of barely controlled aggression. The
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Street Crime
2
Introduction
attack would not even make the grade of a recorded offence. Like so
many others, it would be left to a memory that would fade over time.
It did. I had not been injured and simply got on with my life. But I was
lucky. Many other people I knew had been a victim of street crime, and as
this book was being written many more people were becoming victims of
what the media was representing as an unprecedented increase in this
crime category. Muggers, the papers appeared to suggest, were once
more on the move and the good society was once again under threat.
Ominously, the spectre of the black mugger reappeared and Brixton once
again hit the news as the capital’s street-crime hot spot.
Following tracks already beaten out by previous Conservative
administrations, the Labour government under Tony Blair responded by
readying itself for war. The chief of the Law Lords, Justice Woolf,
demanded yet more imprisonment for street robbers, most of whom
were already being jailed when caught anyway. This was an intervention
that slipped seamlessly into the clarion call for ‘zero tolerance’ routinely
made by a tabloid media that had worked itself into a frenzy of moral
indignation and rage.
It was against this background, the latest in a long line of moral panics
about street robbery, that I found myself commissioned by Government
Office for London to study rising street crime in the area where it
appeared to be the highest. Ironically, this was in Brixton, my one-time
home and the place where my own victimisation had occurred many
years before. This book came out of that experience.
Given the prominence of robbery in urban street life and the social
attention routinely brought to bear upon it by the media and populist
politicians, it came as something of a surprise to find that, as an offence,
little had been written about it and the people who were or who had been
perpetrating it. Indeed, with the exception of Stuart Hall et al.’s seminal
work on ‘mugging’ written in the 1970s, almost nothing had been
substantively written about the subject. And even taking into account
Hall et al.’s work, Policing the Crisis was principally written as a critical
exercise in documenting the social response to street robbery – not
attending to the task of explaining it. This absence of discussion,
particularly on the part of more critical traditions in criminology helped
frame the principal themes of this book. These will be directed at
providing a historical context in which to situate contemporary concerns
about street robbery; reviewing how different traditions in criminology
have sought to account for the problem; and by developing a framework
of analysis I will subsequently apply to explain street crime’s con-
temporary rise in British society.
In the remainder of this introduction I have two aims. First, to define
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Street Crime
more specifically the objective of this enquiry: what is street crime and
how for the purpose of analysis should we define it? Second, to examine
how I will approach this objective by describing the structure of the book
as well as indicating the broad parameters of my argument.
At first sight, the term ‘street crime’ appears a relatively obvious and
straightforward crime category. One that, taken at face value, should
embrace all crimes perpetrated in publicly shared space. And it is true
that in some cases this omnibus meaning of the word is indeed deployed
by various policy makers – not to say academics. For example, in recent
Home Office advice circulated to local crime-reduction partnerships in
London, the term street crime is used in ways that include street robbery
but which also make reference to gun crime. In a far more systematic
attempt to get to grips with the meaning of ‘street crime’, Les Johnson has
produced a comprehensive analysis of the various offences that could be
included in the term (Johnson 1998). This omnibus use of the term,
however, is not the way it is deployed by the police, who code it in ways
that impose a far more prescriptive meaning. As an offence, street crime
is used to:
What unifies all forms of street robbery is that it occurs in public space
and involves the illegal appropriation of the goods or property a victim
or group of victims may be carrying. Other offences that may occur on the
street, for instance public disorder offences such as assault, are coded in
different offence categories and are not labelled as street robbery despite
occurring in the context of the street. While this may appear an arbitrary
way of coding reality, there is, in effect, a kind of rationale to it. All the
offences that fall within the remit of its official police definition of street
crime have an exclusive focus on a form of acquisitive crime conducted in
a street context. While violence or the threat of violence may well be used,
it is worth noting that this may not be the case as, for example, with
pickpocketing.
Official definitions, it must be emphasized, do not exhaust the
meanings associated with the term street crime. In public and in
particular media parlance, street crime is often associated with the term
‘mugging’, which is not a formal offence category. Nor is it a term
4
Introduction
5
Street Crime
To explore the phenomenon of street crime, I have divided the book into
three sections. In the first I contextualize the problem of street robbery by
examining the history of the street robber as he has evolved and
developed in British society since the Middle Ages. The underlying
rationale informing this derives from the observation that, in our
contemporary age of amnesia, it is all too easy to forget the past and lose
sight of just how much it informs the present. The second section of the
book critically explores the theories that have been proposed to explain
the phenomenon of street robbery in recent years. In the third section I
develop and apply my own theoretical framework to explain rising street
robbery in contemporary society.
There are two chapters in the first part of the book. The first considers
the history of the street robber; first in the incarnation of the medieval
outlaw, and second as the highwayman of the seventeenth century. As
this chapter will show, while we, and often for entirely justified reasons,
view the street robber as a folk devil, this has by no means always been
the case. Historical study shows that the street robber is a figure upon
which a number of far more positive associations could also be projected,
as the Robin Hood mythology of the fifteenth century and subsequent
stories about the highwaymen of the seventeenth century testify. In the
second chapter I consider the development of street robbery in the
developing urban context. The chapter examines how the figure of the
urban robber changes from age to age. It examines the ‘canting’ language
associated with pickpocket slang, and studies the incredible variety of
forms through which street robbery expressed itself in its urban setting.
The chapter concludes by examining how, as a distinctly modern
capitalist society developed, an array of forces coalesced in ways that
would both lead to and produce the street robber as the anonymous folk
devil we know today.
The second part considers how street robbery has been studied and, on
the basis of a critique of these approaches, an alternative framework of
6
Introduction
7
Street Crime
8
Introduction
motivated offenders are likely to dwell. This factor, I will suggest, can
explain why some areas have disproportionately higher levels of street
robbery than others.
Chapter 8 examines the forces that act to produce motivated offenders
who are both willing and able to perpetrate acts of street crime. Rather
than approach the study of offenders in terms which conceive them to be
essentially different from the law-abiding citizenry, the chapter argues
that the problem of offending is acutely bound up with the ways in which
young people have been socialized. At stake here is their successful and
ruthless socialization into the consumption norms of the free-market
capitalist society. Drawing on the work of Merton, I then indicate how
street crime occurs where the conditions for legal consumption avenues
are denied. This, I will argue, is specifically a problem for the kind of
communities over-represented among the population of offenders. In
other words, multiply disadvantaged communities.
The chapter then examines the diverse processes of differential
association that may help explain why only some disadvantaged people
resolve thwarted consumption by engaging in street robbery. This
investigation requires an examination of outlaw culture, the seductions
and benefits that can accrue from engaging in it, and the relationship
between offending behaviour and the construction of illegal opportunity
structures in particular areas.
Chapter 9 considers how deficiencies in existing social control strategy
have also worked to create a context in which street crime can flourish. It
does this by examining, in turn, five current social control strategies.
These include studying the impact of law enforcement; the role of the
judicial system; the respective impact of situational and social crime
prevention; and managerially driven attempts to improve system
performance through integrating and coordinating community safety
effect. As this chapter will show, each strategy alone and in conjunction
with others failed to confront rising street robbery rates for a variety of
reasons.
In the conclusion I develop my own political standpoint with regard to
the issues this book has sought to highlight and discuss. Here I develop
the case for seeing street robbery not as a problem society confronts and
as an outside that must be beaten back, but as a problem of the kind of
society in which we live today. A society that engineers dreams of
material consumption among a population socialized to believe that this
is what the good life must be, while simultaneously excluding vast
swathes of it from the possibility of being able to gratify such dreams
through legitimate consumption rituals. I conclude by examining the
implications of this line of reasoning for how we respond to street
9
Street Crime
Notes
1 The British Crime Survey marks an exception to this rule as it uses the term
as a component of the BCS violence typology which it defines as ‘a popular
rather than a legal term, comprising robbery, attempted robbery, and snatch
theft from the person’. See C. Kershaw et al. (2000).
10
Outlaws and highwaymen
Part 1
A Short History of Street Robbery
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12
Outlaws and highwaymen
Chapter 1
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Street Crime
Outlaws
To understand the figure of the robber as he appears in the medieval
world, we must first use our imaginations and reconstruct in our mind’s
eye the appropriate kind of society. This is a society which was formally
ruled by kings who certainly wanted to project power throughout the
length and breadth of the land but were nevertheless limited in the
sovereignty they could exercise. There are two reasons for this. First of
all, a considerable amount of power also resided in the hands of the
warrior lords of medieval society, which effectively delimited the power
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Outlaws and highwaymen
15
Street Crime
16
Outlaws and highwaymen
While many robbers were likely to derive from the cast of soldiers who
were forced to dwell beyond the highly limited boundaries of medieval
society, it was also a practice in which the more privileged ranks of
medieval order could engage. While this may well appear surprising, it is
worth remembering that the medieval aristocracy were by no means the
privileged domesticated class they would subsequently become under
the force of what Elias terms the ‘civilizing process’ (Elias 1978). In the
Middle Ages, they were first and foremost a violent warrior class
attached to decidedly warrior-like principles. They could and would
condone robbery and a multitude of other evils as well. This was a fact
recorded with considerable sarcasm by one anonymous Franciscan friar
in 1317, who also noted with irony not only their extensive participation
in robbery, but that involvement in such acts was obscured through the
use of less stigmatizing labels such as ‘shaveldour’ and ‘ryfelour’.
Take note that among all nations the English may return thanks to
God for a special privilege. For it is said that Ireland and Wales are
overrun with robbers, who steal their neighbours’ cows, oxen and
other cattle, on account of which they are openly called ‘robbers’.
But in England — may God be praised — this is not the case. What
do we find instead? Among us, gentlemen are called ‘shaveldours’
and ‘ryfelours’. For men of this kind break into the treasure-houses
of the great, carry off property, drive away herds, plunder
churchmen, nor does this touch their consciences; instead, they are
hugely delighted when they can plunder an abbot, a prior or
another monastic, and they say: ‘Undoubtedly it was God’s will
that such a peasant, monk or friar encountered us today.’ It seems to
them that whatever they do, they do justly and with reason. And so
they do nothing for which they do not know how to come up with
reasons that appear to be satisfactory, as a result of the lying way
they disguise them and misrepresent them. (cited in Spraggs 2001)
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Street Crime
By the Tudor period it would appear that little had changed. As Harrison,
a commentator of the period, had occasion to note, the gentry were by no
means innocent of robbery, though he also draws attention to the fact that
it was a livelihood also engaged in by those lower down the social order.
In particular, by those who found themselves either without wages or
with wages that were too low to support them.
While it would appear that highway robbery was a specifically illegal act
recognized as such by most people, the reality was far more complex than
this. Armies of this period, including the ‘honourable’ crusaders of the
thirteenth century, were also engaged in the business of robbery and on a
vast scale. Indeed it is evident that it was specifically in order to obtain
plunder that would provide the second and third sons of the medieval
aristocracy with a material incentive to sign up for war in the first place.
The same motive also provided a material incentive to the foot soldiers. It
is from this practice that the term ‘freebooter’ derives.
Robbery in medieval society was therefore by no means perpetrated
by the class of outlaws alone. If we look at the complex tribal conflicts
between lords, each attempting to expand his landholding, or lay claim
to that of another on the basis of some dynastic quarrel over succession,
robbery appears as an intrinsic aspect of life at this time. Together with
violence, in a society that had by no means been pacified, robbery is a
trade in which the medieval lords excelled. Given that, there is a good
case to be made for suggesting that England’s early history was indeed
grounded in robbery and violence. Indeed, all that separated the noble
from the outlaw was not a greater or lesser capacity to engage in law-
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Outlaws and highwaymen
abiding behaviour. It was rather the case that, in the brutal and
competitive struggle in which the medieval order engaged, some robber
bands were better equipped by force of arms to win out against others.
This would confer, not least, the power to define what the law was and
who the outlaws would be.
How, though, did the public perceive the figure of the outlaw? It is at
this point that we must note some distinct differences in the way in which
people responded to the dangers of being robbed by outlaws and the way
in which the figure of the outlaw was represented in music, folklore and
literature. When it came to the reality of dealing with the threat of being
robbed, most people took considerable steps to avoid it. For the most part
this meant travelling in company, and ideally with arms for the sake of
protection. This habit would remain until the eighteenth century, after
which time the highways became more secure as society itself became
increasingly pacified. William Harisson, a commentator on travel in early
sixteenth-century England, describes the extensive preparations that the
travelling public had to take:
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Street Crime
… as fame goes lived in a wood here, and was a great robber, but a
generous one; for he plundered the rich to feed the poor: he
generally took bread for this purpose from the Baldock Bakers, who
catched him at an advantage, put out his eyes, and afterwards
hanged him at a knoll in Baldock field. (Harris 1971)
What these legends do attest – and this is something we shall also see
when we consider the figure of the highwayman – is that the robber
outlaw or robber per se was never considered by the wider public as an
unmitigated figure of evil. He was not in other words perceived in quite
the way in which we are now enjoined to view the figure of the street
mugger today: as an embodiment of evil we are taught to fear and hate.
Clearly the outlaw and the robber certainly possessed a folk devil status,
but folk devils do not always, as the Robin Hood legends attest, inspire
universal hatred. Thus we find in medieval society, not least in the way
the figure of the outlaw was evoked in the Elizabethan age, a
representation of the outlaw as an ultimately honourable being, and
robbery itself as by no means a dishonourable trade. At certain periods it
is evident that the robber could symbolize something entirely noble.
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Outlaws and highwaymen
Others offered a similar refrain, reflecting the mood of a public that was
by no means supportive of the forces of law and order or indeed of
respectable society. Nor would such a world occur until the nineteenth
century, and even then its appeal was still far from universally accepted.
Up until that time the robber could be viewed as a heroic figure; an
outsider by no means considered an enemy of the people. In fact, as this
quote from Thomas Wilson in 1572 suggests, robbery could be used to
identify a national trait by no means widely condemned.
As the medieval ages drew to a close, the term ‘vagabond’ gradually came
into being to denote the space once occupied by the outlaw. It remained,
however, a catch-all term into which, like the term outlaw, could be
projected everyone of whom the Tudors and later the Stuarts would
disapprove (Briggs 1996). Robbery on the highway, however, still appeared
as a significant crime in Elizabethan society, though its presence was
certainly far less pronounced than crimes of theft against property. Between
the years 1559 and 1602, of all the felonies recorded in Essex by the assizes,
robbery (collated together with burglary and forcible assault) made up 18
per cent of the total number of offences. This contrasts with a figure of 66 per
cent for theft from buildings. Witchcraft, for those interested in such things,
represented 7 per cent of the total (Briggs 1996).
Just as developments in the means of production would, as Marx
would observe, drive medieval society into the age of capitalism, such
developments also changed the way in which robbery would henceforth
be accomplished. Whereas in medieval society swords and bows would
have been the tools principally used to perpetrate robbery, from the
Tudor period onwards it was a trade increasingly plied with pistols a fact
starkly recognized by the Elizabethan authorities.
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Street Crime
The highwayman
As with the medieval outlaw, the highwayman likewise enters history in
an ambivalent form; as much a figure of myth and legend as a menace to
be shunned and feared by all. Like the outlaw robber, the highwayman
would also inspire poems, plays and songs testifying to his (and
occasionally her) tenacious exploits. Like the outlaw, highwaymen
would also inspire fear on the part of the travelling public on whom they
preyed and as with the outlaw, the punishment dealt out to convicted
highwaymen was harsh and brutal (Linebough 1991).
What also aligns the medieval outlaw with the seventeenth-century
highwayman is that they were both livelihoods that could be practised by
the gentry and soldiers as well as by the poor. Highway robbery, in other
words, from its medieval beginnings to its eighteenth-century
incarnation, was always an occupation that attracted adherents from
across the social spectrum. Why this is so remains an interesting
question. To an extent it is quite possible that the historical sources are
somewhat biased in their accounts. In effect, the literate class was also the
affluent class, and were therefore more likely to be fascinated with tales
of degenerate or fallen nobility than they were with a class of vagabonds
viewed as subhuman to begin with. This would certainly be the
predominant view of the robber mediated through the thriving trade in
popular crime literature of the time. This genre, or ‘cony catching’
literature as it was known, was associated closely with figures such as
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Outlaws and highwaymen
23
Street Crime
the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, so the highwayman could also
appear as a High Toby or a Knight of the Road. What appears to have
cemented the term ‘highwayman’ into our historical consciousness was
the fact that it was an expression that became synonymous with the
activities of a procession of famous robbers whose notoriety derived both
from their exploits and from the way these were subsequently mediated
in literary form. In many respects they do fulfil the criteria for the role of
the social bandit, even if Hobsbawn remains adamant that the
highwayman should not be viewed this way (Hobsbawn 2000). For
many, these robbers did perform a nascent political role, which lay
precisely in their struggle with the forces of law and in their robbery of
the class of exploiters.
While it is difficult to identity any one person responsible for setting in
motion the cult of the highwayman, it is with Gamaliel Ratsey, a
gentleman soldier of the early seventeenth century, and Captain James
Hind that the myths begin to assume the form that would persist for the
next 200 years (Spraggs 2001).
Hanged in 1605, having committed a number of notorious robberies,
Ratsey’s life became the subject of a number of popular stories. These, as
Spraggs observes, would come to assume the status of models around
which later stories, subsequently attributed to other highwaymen, would
coalesce.
In terms of content, there are a number of similarities that unify these
robber narratives. All converge on the figure of a man (and very
occasionally a women) who is forced to make his living by robbery, often
as a consequence of forces beyond his control.3 Having taken to a life of
robbery, however, it is a trade which is then undertaken with honour,
decency and, not least, a sense of humour. Though capable of using
violence, it is the capacity to avoid using it and indeed a repugnance at
using it unnecessarily that renders highwaymen both folk heroes as well
as gentlemen. While many of their victims are indeed innocent, it is also
the case that some are not and that by virtue of this their victimization is
implicitly justified. Like all noble social bandits, they are generous to the
poor and chivalrous to women. Within the highwaymen narrative, there
is an implicit sense that there is a tragic moral destiny at work that will
invariably culminate in the hero being caught before being put violently
to death. The law can be avoided (and their notorious capacity to evade
capture remains a core feature of the legend) but cannot be circumvented
forever. Justice will be done and, importantly, must be seen to be done.
Inevitably the hero is caught, found guilty and sentenced to death. The
stories conclude with the hero facing execution with equanimity and
dignity, well respected and loved by all.
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Outlaws and highwaymen
25
Street Crime
26
Outlaws and highwaymen
27
Street Crime
traveller’s money is thrown into the hat, for were one to make the
slightest attempt at self-defence the ruffian would turn bridle and
fly, but not before attempting to revenge himself by killing you. If,
on the contrary, he receives a reasonable contribution, he retires
without doing you any injury. When there are several highwaymen
together, they will search you thoroughly and leave nothing. Again,
others take only a part of what they find; but all these robbers ill-
treat only those who try to defend themselves. I have been told
that some highwaymen are quite polite and generous, begging
to be excused for being forced to rob, and leaving passengers
the wherewithal to continue their journey. (cited in Spraggs
2001)
Though Dick Turpin would, like many highwaymen before him, find his
life embroidered with the stuff of legend, at the level of cold hard reality,
what we know about his life attests to an existence by no means as
dashing and noble as it was subsequently reported. Though presented as
a lone debonair highwayman, Turpin in fact came to highway robbery
late in life. The majority of his criminal career was spent working in
association with a number of other robbers (the Essex Gang), who
specialized in attacking farmhouses in the Home Counties and who were
by no means averse to using ultra-violence to separate victims from their
possessions. It was at a later stage in his life, when working with one
‘Captain’ Tom King from a cave in Epping Forest, that Turpin began to
acquire his reputation as a highway robber. By the time he was captured
he had killed two people, while terrifying scores more. As with Hind and
Du Vall before him, Turpin’s eventual destiny was his execution, which
took place at York Racetrack in 1739. True to the myth, he went to his
death with courage, a fact recorded in a York newspaper which noted
how Turpin ‘with undaunted courage looked about him, and after
speaking a few words to the topsman, he threw himself off the ladder and
expired in about five minutes.’
What we can be fairly sure about is that until the late seventeenth
century the threat posed by highway robbery remained considerable.
British society at this time was still disorderly in ways that it would not
be in the eighteenth century. From the time of the Stuarts through to mid-
Georgian England, the reach of the law remained limited as there was no
national police agency capable of enforcing it. Such law enforcement as
did exist remained corrupt and ineffective and it is perhaps this above all
else that provided the space in which the highwayman could thrive,
largely free from the threat of detection or apprehension (Linebough
1991). At the same time, more highways were being established, the
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Outlaws and highwaymen
… robberies are very rare in France, where daily frauds and sly
pilfering prove, that the lower class have as little honesty as
sincerity. Besides, murder and cruelty almost always show the
dastardly ferocity of fear in France; whilst in England, where the
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Street Crime
There are a number of reasons that can be cited to explain this seemingly
bizarre love affair with robbers and robbery. Before we consider these
reasons, however, it is also important to add a note of caution: while the
cult was widely celebrated, not everyone participated in its expression.
In the eyes of the law, robbery would typically be met with a death
sentence, as the tales of highwaymen in texts such as the Newgate
Calendars testify. While we have good records attesting to the many
positive responses highwaymen provoked in their affluent victims, the
reactions of more mundane and less wealthy victims typically pass by
unremarked and too often unrecorded. Indeed, as Blok has convincingly
argued in his response to Hobsbawn’s positive evocation of the social
bandit, most highwaymen were a long way from being the friend of the
peasants who constituted the majority of their victims (Blok 2001).
If we examine the popularity of the highwayman, a number of facts
need to be considered. First of all, highwaymen did not appear from
nowhere; their presence marks a continuity with older myths about the
outlaw robber. In this sense they simply reiterate older narratives, albeit
in a more contemporary form. Why tales of robbery and the exploits of
robbers were so popularly received is possibly due to a number of
features common to English society as it developed from the eleventh to
the eighteenth century. Throughout this period we witness a society
characterized by incredibly wide disparities in wealth and income. While
the rich enjoyed high standards of living the majority of the population
were barely able to survive on a subsistence level. Indeed, as Linebough
observes, poverty in the eighteenth century was so acute that
contemporary historians have yet to explain adequately how the poor
actually survived at all. To survive meant living in the context of a life
where the spectre of poverty was always close at hand and where
mundane drudgery was the order of the day. While most of the
population would have grown up aware that there was such a thing as
the King’s Peace, it was by no means evident that many trusted those
who represented it. The system was and would remain for centuries
arbitrary, ineffectual, corrupt and repressive; a brutal instrument through
which ruling-class rule was secured and continued. These background
factors therefore provide a powerful set of reasons why poorer members
of society would find themselves attracted to the figure of the robber and
also help explain why this figure could be accorded folk hero status.
Who, after all, would have too much sympathy with robbery of the rich
30
Outlaws and highwaymen
and powerful, not least when the economic order they controlled was
nakedly exploitative to begin with.
At the same time it is easy to see why the daring exploits of the robber
could be celebrated. Their ability to evade the forces of law and order,
would commend itself to those whose lives lacked such excitement and
who would often have good cause to dislike the forces of law and order to
begin with. Perhaps of more significance, particularly for the labouring
masses, was the fact that the highwayman embodied an active spirit of
resistance to the repressive order that exploited them all. Thus, ‘riding
the acompt’, while certainly a trade, was also attached to a particular
politics. In their defiance and in their bravery the highwaymen not only
challenged the law but actively demonstrated their contempt for it and
for the society it sustained. A vicarious identification, in these circum-
stances, becomes easy to understand. Why would the majority of people
actually have cause to identify with King and Country at all?
The fact that robbery was indeed robbery could also be overlooked or,
perhaps more accurately, be denied by reference to the many allegedly
positive attributes of the robber. Finally, if the scales of justice still
appeared to tilt towards the highwayman and against wider notions of
‘justice’ and just desserts, the highwayman almost without exception
was caught and executed. Their brave exit from life, usually
accompanied by (often widely distributed popular media) noble
speeches, acted to justify their election to the pantheon of heroes, even if,
ostensibly, it marked the triumph of the law over those who chose to
transgress it.
Of course, different audiences identified with the highwaymen in
different ways and for different reasons. For the bourgeoisie, what was
served up was a representation that cloaked the highwayman in
romance, and it is in this guise – as a dashing debonair hero – that he is
largely remembered. Noye’s poem the Highwayman (Noyes 1928) perhaps
best captures this highly depoliticized representation. For the working
class, however, the highwayman represented and embodied the spirit of
resistance in the face of harsh repression. And it was to celebrate this
spirit that ballads, poems, stories and plays were written. Though by no
means the only play that celebrated the highwayman, it would be Gay’s
eighteenth century classic The Beggars Opera that best captures the spirit
of the highwayman as hero (Gay 1727 (1983)).5
By the late eighteenth century, highway robbery had begun to decline
and became increasingly rare. According to Spraggs, the last recorded
highway robbery occurred in 1831 (Spraggs 2001). By then the figure of
the highwayman had already become a figure of history and the stuff of
legend. As the State developed, and the reach of the law extended with
31
Street Crime
Notes
32
Street robbery in the urban context
Chapter 2
33
Street Crime
with the expansion of the late-medieval city and its burgeoning economy.
The rapid expansion of London is of profound importance, not least
because this created the preconditions in which street crime in all its
strange complex permutations could thrive. In his social history of
London, Porter describes just how rapidly the capital grew between the
fifteenth and nineteenth centuries:
As we move from the medieval period into the times of the Tudors, the
figure of the street criminal changes in terms of the way in which he is
now evoked. From a designation as ‘outlaw’ it now reappears in its most
general form as ‘vagabond’, an umbrella term used to classify all of those
‘idle and suspect persons living suspiciously’, as an Act of 1495 described
them (Briggs 1996). As with the term ‘outlaw’, into this same category
could be placed all those who offended or were thought to offend the
sensibilities of the English social order. The term ‘criminal’ did not
appear until the nineteenth century. The term ‘vagabond’ performed
instead the role the term ‘criminal’ would subsequently take.
Included within the class of vagabond were those unfortunate enough
to be poor and unemployed, and who as a consequence were forced to
beg for their living, as well as a class of more or less professional
criminals. While both groups belonged to the lowest socio-economic
groups in society, what also unified both despite their differences was
that whether they participated in crime or not, they were generally, as
Briggs et al. note, likely to be considered as part of the criminal class of
‘rogues’. It would not be until the nineteenth century that more
systematic attempts would be made to distinguish between what would
be conceived as the deserving and undeserving poor, between those who
were criminally inclined and those who were not.
The underworld
What we can observe from the Tudor period onwards is the beginning of
a process of development that would culminate in the idea of criminal
underworld. This may be regarded as a subterranean economy which,
like the formal economy, came complete with its own distinctive division
of labour. Like the formal economy, the underworld was also character-
ized by an array of different trades. Finally, just as trades in the formal
34
Street robbery in the urban context
economy develop their own specialist language, this process can also be
observed in what would become the growing criminal underworld of
urban centres such as London.
Though elite representations of crime would systematically overstate
the degree to which the underworld was organized, by the seventeenth
century there clearly existed in London a distinct and professional
criminal class for whom street crime was a way of life.
35
Street Crime
While young cutpurses would no doubt have appeared low down in the
hierarchy of crime, by virtue of the skills they possessed, they did,
specifically if reared to the art from an early age, belong to the pro-
fessional fraternity of criminals. Below this category and comprising the
lowest orders in the fraternity of vagabonds came the beggars. Finally,
reflecting the low status of women in society more generally, there were
the prostitutes. Together, as Briggs et al. note, the beggars and the
prostitutes constituted the peasantry of crime (Briggs 1996).
The development of cities provided an ideal environment in which
street robbery in its various forms could take root and thrive. Just as
fashions in clothing would change, so too would the descriptive labels
applied by the public and by the street criminals themselves to describe
the art of robbery. While the semantics changed, however, the grammar
remained consistent. Street crime was, as it remains today, a fact of urban
existence; a perennial feature of urban life and living in deeply
inequitable societies.
By the eighteenth century the term ‘nypper’ had largely disappeared
and given way to an array of new descriptive terms, including ‘gonalph’
and ‘buzzer’ (Ackroyd 2001). The ‘footpad’, also known as ‘the
gentleman of the pad’, came by the nineteenth century to designate the
street mugger of the Georgian and later Victorian period. They typically
operated from spaces within urban centres, with their target the unwary
or undefended traveller.
But even these terms, unanchored in legal discourse, are free-floating
and at times become interchangeable. In the eighteenth century, a
footpad was also known as a Low Toby, while the highwayman became,
by logical extension, the High Toby. What compounds matters further is
that the terms that were used were themselves products of the class of
thieves who had evolved their own rich and deeply textured vocabulary
to describe their world.
This language, known as ‘flash’ or ‘flash lingo’, was fortunately (for us
and for posterity) collated with loving care and attention by Captain
Groce (with, it is claimed, subsequent additions by ‘Hellfire Dick’) and
reproduced in his inestimable 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (Harris
1971). Otherwise known as a ‘Dictionary of Buckish Slang, University
Wit and Pickpocket Eloquence’, this wonderful text defines the various
terms by which the criminal underworld depicted themselves to
themselves. It also provides detailed descriptions of the different forms
of street crime and the manner in which they were perpetrated.
Thus, we find that by the eighteenth century a pickpocket could also
be known as a ‘File’, ‘File Cloy’, a ‘Foyst’ or ‘Fork’, while the expert of the
breed could also be termed a ‘Rum Diver’. A pickpocket who specialized
36
Street robbery in the urban context
37
Street Crime
produced locally in Bethnal Green close to the Jago in the 1870s, also adds
weight to this interpretation. The tale of mugger’s re-importation
however is something that will not concern us here.
Just as more legal and legitimate professions develop their own
technical language to describe their activities, the same can also be
observed to happen with regard to the criminal underworld. Crime, after
all, is by no means something that can be perpetrated without recourse to
the right skills, and to perpetrate successfully entailed some under-
standing of the various techniques through which crimes could be
committed. At the same time, in a world where punishments were
severe, being able to communicate without allowing others to
understand what was being described was also an important con-
sideration. Last and by no means least, in the language of street crime we
can also observe a semantic creativity astonishing in the level of wit and
humour it was able to attain.2 To ‘fib the cove’s quarron in the rumpad for
the lour in his bung’ meant literally to beat a victim in the highway for the
money in his purse, while ‘the cull has rum rigging, let’s ding him and
mill him and pike’ meant that the fellow has good clothes, let’s knock him
down, rob him and flee. To rob someone would be ‘to do them over’, an
expression that remains with us today, while to ‘frisk the dummee of his
sceens’ meant to take the banknotes out of his wallet.
Just as the canting language defined the art of robbery, so too would it
designate its variations. A ‘flying porter’, for example, was a robber who
specialized in a racket that involved making victims believe that in return
for money he could remonstrate with the robbers (whom of course he
would claim to know) and return their stolen property. Needless to say,
such an eventuality would not occur, as he would simply take the money
and run. This, by the way, is precisely what happened when the intrepid
(albeit rather idiotic) investigative reporter Donal Macintyre attempted
to have himself ‘mugged’ in Brixton in 2002. Having successfully
managed (after three days of trying!) to have his phone stolen he was
approached by someone who claimed to know where the robbers lived
and who, in return for money, would retrieve his stolen goods. Though
money was exchanged (twice!), this did not happen. The crime was by no
means new, the art of the ‘flying porter’ having a long history.
Street robbery was also an art that could be perpetrated in different
ways, and different people would specialize in the art of targeting
different victims. To ‘fork’ someone, for example, would involve a
pickpocket thrusting his fingers ‘strait, stiff open and very quick, into the
pocket and so closing them hook what can be held between them’. ‘To go
out on the drag’ meant following a cart or wagon with the intention of
robbing it, while the ‘drag lay’ involved waiting in the streets in order to
38
Street robbery in the urban context
wait and rob someone. Unsurprisingly, the ‘kid lay’ involved robbing
young people or apprentices, while a ‘bug hunter’ was someone who
preyed upon drunks.
Given the importance of snow to the lives of Eskimos, it is un-
surprising that they have developed a far more elaborate and extended
array of terms to describe it than can be found in the language of other
peoples. For the same reason, when we consider the criminal under-
world, what we can also observe is a highly developed vocabulary in
respect of the various forms of punishment on offer. We also find, un-
surprisingly perhaps, a similar level of semantic creativity at work to
describe the apparatus of the law delegated with the task of administer-
ing it. Growing up in the shadow of the gallows clearly fuelled the
development of a vast array of terms to describe it. Thus it could be
referred to as ‘the old evergreen’, the ‘triple tree’, the ‘Norway
Neckcloth’, the ‘topping cheat’, ‘Jack Ketch’ (named after a notorious
hangman) or the ‘drop’; while ‘to be stretched’ meant to be hanged. The
pillory, also a regular punishment, was referred to as ‘the stoop’, while
‘babies in the wood’ referred to those who had been placed in the stocks.
Even the final journey to the gallows had its own description as in ‘to ride
backwards up Holborn Hill’ which meant to go to the gallows at
Newgate. Finally, to prove that some things just never change, policemen
were referred to as ‘pigs’.
39
Street Crime
40
Street robbery in the urban context
here and if they had they would find it to their interest to get out of it as
soon as possible’ (Ackroyd 2001). This was a sentiment that would be
widely reported by a growing army of urban missionaries who, by the
Victorian age, found themselves drawn towards yet repelled by the
squalor of life in London’s poorest areas.
Just as the highwaymen of the eighteenth century could find
themselves projected into folk hero status, we can observe a similar
process occurring in the seventeenth century with respect to certain
urban criminals who, like the celebrated robber and escapologist Dick
Sheppard, captured the imagination of the public. As we move into the
nineteenth century, however, the processes that facilitated such
identification between the public and the criminal would begin to fade
away and eventually disappear entirely. While Mayhew observed in the
nineteenth century the customary respect conferred by poor coster-
mongers for those who eked out a living through crime, and though
Sheppard was considered a hero among the young thieves he
interviewed, this was, in many respects, the last audience who were
moved in this way (Mayhew 1861 (1985)).
From about the eighteenth century, the romantic idea of the highway
robber immortalized, for example, in John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera,
would disappear (Gay 1727 (1983)). Henceforth, the street robber would
be reconsidered in an altogether less positive light. From the folk hero of
legend, the street criminal had by the Victorian age become a folk devil
who remains with us today. So, from the romanticized hero Macheath of
Gay’s opera, we move by the 1840s in the direction of Bill Sykes and
Fagin in Charles Dickens’s novel Oliver Twist (Dickens 1837–9 (1994)).
From a character the public is invited to identify with, we move instead
in the direction of villains represented as so evil that no one could
possibly identify with them.3 England’s long and noble history of
identifying with its robbers had finally changed.
41
Street Crime
42
Street robbery in the urban context
43
Street Crime
44
Street robbery in the urban context
theatre, brings forcibly home the tenor of such accounts. Having watched
with heady disdain the antics of a young dancer, he finds himself
appalled by the popular reception accorded to ‘a funny gentleman’
who clearly offended every moral standard he believed himself to
uphold.
The most obscene thoughts, the most disgusting scenes were coolly
described, making a poor child near me wipe away the tears that
rolled down her eyes with the enjoyment of the poison. There were
three or four of these songs sung in the course of the evening, each
one being encored and then changed. One written about Pine–
Apple Rock was the great treat of the night, and offered greater
scope to the rhyming powers of the author than any of the others. In
this not a single chance had been missed; ingenuity had been
exerted to its utmost lest an obscene thought should be passed by,
and it was absolutely awful to behold the relish with which these
young ones jumped to the hideous meaning of the verses. (Mayhew
1985)
45
Street Crime
spectacle of the scaffold would once have provided a point where crowds
could gather to hear the condemned bear testimony to the inequitable
order that would kill him, this was no longer possible in a modern order
which actively suppressed not only the possibility of physical contact but
also eliminated the literary industries that would actively connect the
convict with a wider audience. From a pre-modern order in which the
testimonies of the condemned would be widely circulated in the form of
the ‘Ordinary’, a pamphlet which published proceedings from the trials
at Newgate (Linebough 1991), we see the gradual development of more
censorship concerning the material to be made available.
Cumulatively over time, this politics of distance would act decisively
to separate the condemned from their public. At the same time, in an era
characterized by the rise of a mass media whose political affiliations
reflected dominant and elite representations about crime, so the public at
large would only find mediated to them a discourse in which crime and
the criminal were reproduced in pathological terms. While the rise of
criminology as a discipline might suggest a new way of humanizing the
deviant, it is evident that in its earlier biological reductionist forms it
simply helped criminalize the criminal further, by suggesting that their
difference owed less to the social conditions in which they lived and
more to symptoms of atavistic degeneracy that were held to drive the
criminal to crime in the first place.
Against a background characterized by real worries about an offence
that has a long prehistory, we can see projected on to street crime and the
street criminal fears and anxieties that were also attached to series of
entirely dubious normative assumptions. What these work to accomplish
is to represent the problem of street crime in ways that move it away from
its point of experiential origin and reconstruct it as indicative of things
greater and more threatening than itself.
At the heart of the emerging constellation of representations are three
related representations of street crime and street criminals. The first
centres on notions of essentialized difference, the second on conceptions
of dangerousness, the third around ideas of pollution. As we have
observed in the descriptions of the criminal class, what we are presented
with are ideas of people who are by nature, appetite and inclination
profoundly different from the normal law-abiding citizen. It is in this
sense that they are in Miles’s term a sui generic species of humanity. The
symbols of their otherness are evident in such matters as their biology,
their appearance, their dress and, last but not least, by virtue of the fact
that they have their own language.
Not only is this an alien species, but it is also at the same time a
dangerous class, a class that threatens the law-abiding population not
46
Street robbery in the urban context
Notes
1 Which, etymologically, is where the term ‘filching’, as in the verb ‘to steal’,
derives.
2 Which well justifies Max Harris’s observation that in relation to the ‘feeble
colourless dry products’ of the aristocracy, the language of the criminal
underworld was indeed a ‘miracle of quick witted creative invention’. See
Harris 1971.
3 Though, that said, Dickens painted an entirely sympathetic picture of the
Artful Dodger, indicating the appeal of the older outlaw narratives had by no
means disappeared entirely.
4 For an examination of other Victorian moral panics around street crime, see
Pearson, G. (1983). Hooligan: a History of Respectable Fears. London: Routledge.
For a consideration of an eighteenth-century predecessor in Chelsmford, see
47
Street Crime
48
Interpreting the data
Part 2
Accounting for Street Crime
49
Street Crime
50
Interpreting the data
Chapter 3
51
Street Crime
one of three specific ways. These refer to direct robbery where violence is
threatened, to snatch, and to pickpocketing. Though most media
attention typically focuses on the former – the category that constitutes
what the public and media like to term ‘mugging’ and street youth
‘jacking’ – it is worth noting that this may in fact form only a small part of
the overall street crime picture.
Crimes appear on police statistics if they have been reported and
recorded. The problem, though, is that not all street crimes are reported,
and it is by no means evident that on all occasions the way they are
reported represents the correct offence category. The offences that do get
reported may also have intrinsic to them a certain set of biases that can
obscure the reality they will, as statistical evidence, be used to represent.
If the goods stolen in an act of robbery are relatively inexpensive, a
victim may well choose not to report them missing. If the victim is young
and lives in close proximity to the perpetrators, who are likely to be
older, they may be afraid to report their victimization. If for some reason
you distrust the forces of law and order, and this could be the case among
some sections of the black population (Bowling 2002), you may not
report your victimization anyway. Where, for example, someone is
victimized either through having their pockets picked or their bags
snatched, research indicates that there is a tendency on the part of
victims to assume that their assailant is black, even though they may not
have the visual evidence to support that assumption. Momentary
encounters, in other words, do not provide the visual evidence needed to
make an accurate ethnic distinction. Finally, not all street crime offences
that are reported may be accurate. There may well be a number that are
bogus in so far as they involve callers who claim to have had goods such
as mobile phones stolen when they have not. By reporting the event,
however, a crime number is given and a crime event is constructed. This
can then be used for the purposes of an insurance claim. What
subsequently appears in the police statistics, as a reported street crime,
may thus be nothing of the sort. What we have instead is an exercise in
insurance fraud.
Given the limits and limitations of police statistics, victim surveys are
now regularly used to establish a more accurate picture of crime. Using
structured questionnaires which respondents either self-complete or
complete with the aid of an interviewer, these surveys seek to establish
the reality of crime by directly engaging with a randomly selected
sample of the population. The scope of victim surveys may change to
reflect policy preferences, but in general what such surveys provide a
direct and unmediated access into individual perceptions and
experiences of crime and its social and material impact.
52
Interpreting the data
53
Street Crime
Percentage change
Burglary –21
Other thefts of
personal property –21
Other household
theft –7
Common assault –3
Vandalism –2
Robbery 14
Figure 3.1: Changes in selected offence categories between 1981 and 2000
Source: Kershaw 2000.
54
Interpreting the data
55
Street Crime
Profiling offenders
According to BCS statistics, perpetrators of street crime are typically
concentrated among younger age groups. The survey indicated that
children of school age committed 7 per cent of muggings, while 56 per
cent were aged between 16 and 24 and 33 per cent were older. Below the
age of 14 and above the age of 19, the rate of participation in street crime
decreases fairly rapidly. Evidence also shows that the age of those who
engage as perpetrators of street robbery has changed quite dramatically
in recent years. Smith’s Home Office study of street robbery showed that
the involvement of younger age groups in street robbery has increased
significantly as a proportion of the total population of offenders (Smith
2003). Whereas the 11–20 age group made up only 56 per cent of the
population of offenders in 1993, by 2000 this figure had risen to 78 per
cent. As Smith observes:
56
Interpreting the data
strated was that street crime levels within each borough were likely to
account for a far higher proportion of total crime as the level of
deprivation increased. The deprivation indicators Fitzgerald et al.
identified as most significant in explaining and predicting levels of street
robbery were the presence of pockets of deprivation evidenced
specifically by high levels of unemployment and a concentration of
youth poverty. What these results indicate is that class disadvantage is a
factor in street robbery.
Though females also perpetrate street robbery, the overwhelming
majority of offenders are male. According to the BCS, males committed
91 per cent of street robbery offences, women 7 per cent and both sexes 2
per cent (Kershaw et al. 2000). Though predominantly a masculine
pursuit, the scale of male offending tends to obscure the steep increase in
recent years among young women now engaged in street crime. As
Fitzgerald et al. note:
57
Street Crime
ethnic group did appear to reflect local demography. In the case of his
sample from Birmingham, Smith found that the representation of Asians
among the population of offenders reflected the representation of the
Asian community among the population of the city quite closely. In the
case of Lambeth however the representation of the black population
among the population of offenders appeared significantly dispropor-
tional to its representation in the local population even accepting that the
area has a large black community.
As Smith makes clear – and this point needs emphasizing – figures
pertaining to the differential involvement of different ethnic groups in
street robbery does need to be treated with extreme caution. The
available street population within an area might not reflect the profile of
its residential population, a finding also confirmed in recent surveys of
stop and search patterns (see Stenson and Waddington 2004; Hallsworth
and MaGuire 2004). It is also worth noting that in the case of police data,
not all victims report their victimization and this may well skew the
reported and recorded figures. Finally, given that reported rates of street
robbery only provide details of the ethnic characteristics of offenders,
they cannot reveal anything about the ethnic profile of the offender
population because such figures do not take cognizance of repeat
offending. It could be the case that a small number of offenders are
responsible for a disproportionate number of robbery offences.
While recognizing these health warnings, it would appear to be the
case that different ethnic groups do become involved in different crimes,
and this cultural factor needs to be taken into consideration when
examining the differential involvement of different groups in street
crime. Fitzgerald et al. found that across the UK, young black males
account for a significantly higher proportion of offenders being
supervised by Youth Offending Teams (YOTs) for robbery than would be
expected given the pattern of their representation in the national
population: whereas they constitute 27 per cent of the offending
population, they make up only 10 per cent of the national population. In
their examination of the involvement of different ethnic groups in
different offence categories in a YOT located in London, Fitzgerald et al.
discovered significant differences in the offences perpetrated by
different groups. Nearly a quarter of all white young people supervised
by the YOT had been found guilty of motoring offences; and this was
true of nearly a third of the young offenders from minority ethnic groups
with the exception of black people. On the other hand, black young people
were more than three times as likely as whites to have been found guilty
of robbery, but half as likely to have been convicted of burglary. As
Fitzgerald et al. observe, what this indicates is that black communities
58
Interpreting the data
Profiling victims
If the profile of those engaged as offenders derives from a restricted
sector of the population, the same cannot be said of the class of victims,
who are drawn from a far wider selection of the resident population.
Among the population of victims, however, young people appear over-
represented. Just as the population of offenders are predominantly male,
so too are the population of victims who comprise 76 per cent according
to Smith’s research. The specifically masculine aspect of street robbery is
also brought home by statistics that indicate that 71 per cent of robberies
involve male victims being victimized by male offenders. The precise
proportion of males victimized did, Smith found, vary across the
different districts he studied.
Just as offenders were disproportionately drawn from lower age
groups, this trend was also reflected in the population of victims. Thus,
just as most offenders were in the 11–20 age range, 45 per cent of the
victim population fell into the same age range. Among the population of
victims in 2002, according to Metropolitan Police statistics, 25 per cent
were aged between 11 and 15, while those aged between 16 and 22
composed 22 per cent. Unlike the population of offenders, however, the
population of victims does include significant numbers of people who
fall outside the 11–20 age range, though, as with the offender population,
this population tails off in older age groups and among the very young.
What this suggests is that there remain significant numbers of very
young and very old people who are victims of street crime.
The police data collated by Smith shows that the population of victims
has become both younger over time and also greater in number –
something it shares with the population of offenders. As Smith notes,
this also distinguishes trends in street crime from trends in other offences
such as burglary or assault, which remain more static over time when
assessed in terms of the profile of their victims. According to
Metropolitan Police data, the number of people aged between 11 and 20
who were victims has increased by a factor of three between 1993 and
2002. Among the population of 11–15 year-olds the rate of increase over
this period was a staggering figure of 320 per cent, while for the
population of 16–20 year-olds the rate of increase was 296 per cent.
According to Smith’s study, the rate of increase was most dramatic from
1998. In 1993, for example, only 12 per cent of the victim population was
aged between 11 and 15. By 2002, it had increased to 22 per cent.
59
Street Crime
60
Interpreting the data
had been robbed at night, with one-third robbed between 10.00pm and
2.00am. The rate of victimization at night, however, was also contingent
upon factors specific to the area concerned. Of specific significance in
this respect was the presence or absence of a night-time economy. Where
this was present, not only was the rate of victimization higher than in
areas where it was not present, but also victimization unsurprisingly
rose during the evening period.
Though streets constitute the principal location where street robbery
occurs (accounting for 51 per cent in Smith’s study), other open spaces
such as subways, parks, footpaths, alleyways, footbridges and commons
account for a significant 11 per cent of the total. 16 per cent of robberies
occur around a range of commercial premises such as banks, pubs, off-
licences and building societies, while 12 per cent occur while people use
either their own private transport (4 per cent) or public forms of
transport (8 per cent).
Street robbery is an offence that can be perpetrated in a number of
ways. Different offenders will consequently adopt the method they find
most suitable to rob the particular class of victim they aspire to target. In
terms of the different approaches, street robbers can adopt an approach
that involves a relatively long contact between offender and victim or
one where the nature of the interaction is relatively short. Robberies that
occur when victims are lulled into a false sense of security prior to being
robbed exemplify the former, while forms of snatch where, for example,
a bag or phone is literally ripped out of the hands of a victim, exemplify
the latter. In his study of the robbery event, Smith identifies five principal
approaches, and these are summarized in Table 3.1 below.
A characteristic feature of all the approaches is that they rely upon a
high degree of physical activity to perpetrate. If the assailant engages in a
snatch, then he must be able both to take the object and escape with it.
While the ability to outrun and outwit those who may wish to intercept a
street robber is also a required skill, this ability must also be supplemen-
ted by the capacity and will either to threaten a victim with violence or
use violence as a first resort.
Smith’s study indicated significant differences between different
groups of victims and the kind of approach adopted to rob them. Males
were, he found, more likely to be targeted using confrontation and con
techniques, while women were more likely to be targeted using snatch.
Both groups were equally likely to be targeted using a blitz technique.
Smith’s study also indicated that the age of a victim affected how they
were typically targeted. Younger age groups, he found, were far more
likely to be victims of confrontation and con robberies, while victims of
blitz and snatch robberies were typically older (Smith 2003).
61
Street Crime
Blitz. Violence is used to overwhelm, stun or control the victim prior to the
removal of any property or prior to any demands to hand over property.
Violence is the first point of contact between the victim and the suspect. There is
no prior verbal exchange between victim and offender, though threats and abuse
may follow the initial assault.
Con. The suspect ‘cons’ the victim into some form of interaction. This typically
takes the form of some spurious conversation, e.g. ‘Have you got a light/the
time mate?’ This is the initial approach to the victim, regardless of how the
robbery subsequently develops.
Snatch. Property is grabbed from the victim without prior demand, threats or
physical force. This is the initial contact between the victim and the suspect.
Physical force is used to snatch property from the victim, which is nearly always
on display, e.g. handbag. There is no physical search of the victim by the suspect.
Victim-initiated. The victim initiates contact with the suspect and becomes the
victim of a robbery, e.g. a drug deal, procuring sex, etc.
62
Interpreting the data
Item No. %
Cash 986 25
Mobile phone 694 18
Debit, credit, cash cards 337 9
Purse, wallet 327 8
Personal accessories 312 8
Handbag, rucksack, briefcase 241 6
Personal documentation 226 6
Jewellery and watches 224 6
Other 610 15
All property 3957 100
Table 3.3. British Crime Survey estimates of mobile phone thefts (those aged
16 or more)
*Based on risk figures grossed up to the population of England and Wales aged
16 or more. The risks relate to incidents in which a phone was stolen or an
attempt was made.
Source: BSC (cited in Harrington 2001).
63
Street Crime
Knives were by far the weapon of choice for most street robbers, and
were used in one in five robberies. The use of blunt instruments such as
coshes, baseball bats and hammers was relatively rare, and these were
used in only 3 per cent of cases. Men were far more likely to be
threatened with a weapon than a woman, but women were also far more
likely to be a victim of a snatch during which weapons are rarely used.
Though men were more likely to be confronted by robbers bearing
weapons, they were far less likely to suffer a physical injury than women
(Smith 2003). The reason for this is probably that when presented with a
demonstration of overwhelming force (i.e. being shown a knife), men are
far more likely to cooperate with their attacker. A snatch is, however, an
abrupt and sudden act, and may lead the victim to resist their assailant.
Women, Smith found, were far more likely to do so than men. By its
nature, a blitz style of approach almost always resulted in some form of
injury.
If we compare the injuries sustained by victims of street robbery with
injuries sustained by victims of domestic violence, however, an
interesting pattern emerges, as was observed in the BCS (Kershaw 2001).
Though weapons were far more likely to be used in street robbery than in
domestic violence, the rate of injury among those subject to domestic
violence was significantly higher. According to the BCS, whereas 70 per
cent of victims of domestic violence reported an injury, the figure for
what the BCS recorded as ‘mugging’ was 28 per cent. Though it is a crime
in which violence figures prominently, it is not a crime where most
victims are injured as recurrently as domestic violence. One lesson that
we might bear in mind as we consider these factors is that while street
robbery occasions a lot of fear and considerable media attention, its
damage is far less pervasive than that occasioned by less sensationalized
offences such as domestic violence.
Finally, in relation to the wider social costs accumulated by street
crime it is particularly informative to consider these in relation to other
crimes in order to put them in context. In a careful and diligent attempt
to compare the respective costs of corporate crime and street crime in the
US, Winslow estimates that the cost of corporate crime to the economy
came to $1–2 trillion per year and estimated that $18 billion were spent
each year by the federal government of the US in confronting it.
However, the amount dedicated to confronting street robbery in the US
was $147 billion (Winslow 2003). Its social consequence is a mass
incarceration system that now routinely imprisons over 2 million of the
US’s poorest citizens, many for street crime offences. As street-level
homicide in the US was estimated to cause 15,500 deaths, this may seem
appropriate to some. However, it is worth noting that the financial costs
64
Interpreting the data
Conclusion
What this brief survey of the available data indicates is that street crime
is an offence typically concentrated around young urban males, typically
those living in poorer socio-economic conditions. Though the over-
representation of minority ethnic groups in street robbery is certainly a
factor in some areas – notably Lambeth in London – it is not a consistent
feature of street robbery across the UK as a whole. Just as young people
appear over-represented among the population of offenders, so too do
they appear over-represented among the population of victims, though a
significant number also come from older age groups.
The data also indicates that while most other offence categories have
decreased in recent years, street robbery remains an exception to this
general trend in that it has risen, and risen sharply. That said, it
comprises a relatively small percentage of the total crime figure.
Evidence suggests that cash and mobile phones are the objects most
often obtained in street robbery. The dramatic rise in mobile phone theft
in recent years is a characteristic feature of the recent surge in street
robbery more generally. Though street crime can be perpetrated without
the use of violence, violence is a recurrent feature of the offence.
Weapons are often used in the perpetration of street robbery and injuries
are commonplace, specifically among women, who are also more likely
to find themselves a target of a snatch than males. In relation to the
65
Street Crime
crimes of the powerful, street crime occasions far less material and social
cost though disproportionate media and political attention.
Having considered as it were the hard facts about street robbery, let us
now consider how different commentators have sought to explain
precisely why certain groups engage in street robbery, and explain why
street robbery appears to have risen in recent years.
Note
66
The view from the right
Chapter 4
67
Street Crime
68
The view from the right
A healthy and crime-free culture for Murray is one where the nuclear
family form prevails as the norm and from which other family forms –
particularly single-parent families – are noticeable by their absence.
The young in such a context are socialized appropriately, not only
because there are two parents available to socialize them, but also
because the process of socialization requires the presence of a male role
model. As far as Murray is concerned, this is a figure that can only be
provided by the male head of the nuclear family. In other words, an on-
site male parent. Women by implication, he argues, cannot provide the
support young men require to fulfil this socialization role. Unless
69
Street Crime
70
The view from the right
71
Street Crime
That these corrupting forces are allowed to exist without serious censure
presupposes – at least for the right – that there are a number of things
wrong with the society that has encouraged such developments. For
clearly and self-evidently, something had to be wrong with society for a
situation to occur in which young people were being exposed to such a
corrupting set of influences. In their attempt to identify the deeper
causes of street robbery, the right have typically identified as a principal
determinant the failure of existing informal and formal social control
measures. To establish the precise relation of this causal factor to street
robbery, this argument suggests that acts like robbery are encouraged
because there is a surfeit of the wrong kind of control and a deficit in the
forms of control and regulation that might prevent it. Who then is to
blame for this state of affairs?
72
The view from the right
Critique
So far we have considered the various factors that right of centre
commentators have adduced to explain why certain people turn to street
robbery. In what follows I will present a critical overview of this position.
Is it a fair and accurate representation of the factors that lead to street
crime, and if it is not, in which respects is it wrong? In developing this
critique, I will address not so much the work of particular theorists, so
much as the general propositions that underpin right of centre thinking
as a whole. In so doing my aim will be to answer the following questions,
each of which problematizes a fundamental plank in the argument
developed by the right:
1 Does the deficit model of the street robber accord with what we
know about street robbers?
2 How pathological is the parent culture that is typically held
responsible for producing the street robber as a motivated offender?
3 Is liberalism really to blame for encouraging the pathological
developments within poor communities that give birth to the street
robber?
The first point to be made when considering the deficit model of the
criminal articulated by the right is that it is by no means a new way of
73
Street Crime
looking at what is, after all, an old problem. If we return to the historical
record and consider, for example, how the Victorians considered their
own street robbers then one conclusion that can be reached with some
certainty is that not much has changed between then and now. Writing in
1839, W.A. Miles had no problem connecting rising crime in London (as
we saw in chapter 2) with what he identified as a criminal underclass he
depicted graphically as ‘a race sui generis. A race, he claimed, that was
‘different from the rest of society not only in thoughts, habits and
manners, but even in appearance’ (Miles 1839). Writing in the same vein
in 1849, Thomas Beggs also had no problem identifying the criminal
classes with ‘veriest debasement’. They yielded, he argued, ‘obedience
only to the animal instincts; brooding in the spiritual darkness in a day of
gospel light’ (Beggs 1849). The tone may be different from that deployed
by Murray, but the idea of a criminal fraternity constructed in terms of
essentualized difference is very much the same.
Just as populist commentators on the right today highlight the
contaminating impact of violent mass culture upon the street criminal, so
too did the Victorians who, like Mayhew, believed terrible moral
consequences would befall those exposed to it. Remarking on the
debilitating impact of the halfpenny romances on the London poor,
Mayhew indignantly observed: ‘One of the worst of the newest ones is
denominated “Charley Wagg, or the New Jack Shepherd, a history of the
most successful thief in London.” To say that they are not incentives to
lust, theft and crime is to cherish a fallacy’ (Mayhew 1861 (1985)).
But what status ought we to concede to this kind of explanation. Is the
robber really as different as the right suggest. To answer this question we
need as a precursor to attend to what offenders actually have to say. This,
it could be pointed out, is not something that many commentators on the
right have chosen to do. Under the dead weight of presumption,
offenders’ testimonies are largely absent from consideration.
As part of the interview research I conducted among young street
robbers in Lambeth, I sought to rectify this deficit by asking them a series
of questions designed to see just how aware they were of the moral status
of the offences they had committed. I did so to test the claim we find
inherent in the deficit approach to the offender which suggests that what
we are dealing with is a hardened predator devoid of moral
consciousness. To examine this issue I asked the offenders whether they
viewed what they had done as wrong. The first point that could be made
was that all of them recognized clearly that they had broken rules and
that what they had done was morally reprehensible. They could, in other
words, tell right from wrong. What their testimonies indicated was not
only that most had internalized a moral consciousness, but also that it
74
The view from the right
was a well-developed one. As one interviewee put it: ‘I know I was a bad
boy’.
All accepted that the police were right to have apprehended them and
they also accepted, albeit with a sense of pragmatic acquiescence, the
right of society to punish them for what they had done. To this extent it
was evident that they had internalized a series of dominant norms that
condemned rule-breaking. When pushed further, it was also evident that
most possessed some sense of a moral universe. In form, this moral world-
view often approximated a version of Kantianism. This was reflected in the
belief often echoed by the offenders interviewed of their desire to live in a
world in which the moral imperative of doing unto others as you would
have them do unto you should hold sway and prosper.
The capacity of street robbers actively to identify with many of the
values of the dominant society they prey upon, in particular its
materialist culture, also supports the idea that they are not simply a
predatory outsider totally devoid of what law-abiding people possess.
Indeed, as Sykes and Matza observed many years ago: ‘While
supposedly thoroughly committed to the deviant system of the
delinquent subculture, he [the deviant] would appear to recognise the
moral validity of the dominant normative system in many instances’
(Sykes 1957). Returning to the research conducted with young offenders,
the truth of this observation came through repeatedly. None saw
themselves as career criminals and most had a future exit strategy that
typically involved passing exams and getting a job. While they had
clearly ‘drifted’ into crime in Matza’s sense of this term, all saw their
future in the formal economy. What I took from this was the observation
that, for most of the street robbers I interviewed, street robbery was not a
place they wished to remain, but was simply another temporary and
unstable job in a world where good jobs were largely absent.
75
Street Crime
control and at the mercy of more primary drives. If true, this hypothesis
would apparently explain a lot. Drugs, after all, do strange things to
people, and those with an addiction are driven by it to commit all kinds
of unspeakable acts … aren’t they? Well not in the case of the street
robber.
Again, from the interviews I conducted with young street robbers –
and this is replicated in other research (Kershaw 2001; Fitzgerald et al.
2002) – there is no evidence at all to suggest either that drug use
stimulates the desire to rob or that growing drug use explains the recent
rise in street robbery. Indeed, when I brought this issue up in interviews
conducted with young offenders, one common reaction was outright
incredulity in the face of the suggestion. These young men, aged
between 15 and 19, were very conscious of their bodies and had clearly
bought into the myth of the body beautiful. Their physical prowess
evident both in the ability to be able to handle themselves in the event of
trouble and not least avoid what they viewed as the lumpen efforts of
overweight police officers to catch them, was very important to their self-
image as virile males. This did not mean that they did not use drugs, but
what it did mean was that what they did use was for recreational
purposes and was not directly connected with street crime. To this
extent, like many young people in British society, they were part of a
generation who had been well and truly socialized into a society where
drug use had become normalized. Marijuana appeared in most cases to
be their preferred drug of choice. When I asked them what they thought
of heavy drug users such as heroin addicts, what I discovered was that
for these young men this was by far their most despised category of
being. They were, in their estimation, a category they considered the
lowest of the low. As one young man stated when I asked him whether
he (and other street robbers he knew) used crack he was adamant that
‘it’s not us’. He went on: ‘the people what uses it are like tramps and so
forth’.
The fallacy of this kind of ‘explanation’ is also well illustrated by the
application of common sense. To perpetrate street robbery well you have
to have your wits about you. You have to move quickly and think on
your feet. Being ‘stoned’, ‘out of your box’, or addled on crack cocaine or
heroin does not kit you out well for this role. Street robbers are well
aware of this. So indeed are heroin addicts, which is one reason they
rarely engage in street robbery.
In summary, it could be said that while it is evident that young people
who commit street robbery are certainly individuals who commit
immoral acts, their engagement in street robbery does not follow on from
the idea that they have no moral sensibilities. Nor are they at the mercy
76
The view from the right
Let us now turn to the next two planks in the argument proposed by the
right and consider, firstly, just how pathological the parent culture is into
which the street robber is allegedly born, and secondly, assess how far its
pathologies are created by liberal tendencies at work in the welfare state.
To begin with, what evidence is there to suggest that people who
perpetrate street robbery do so because they have been mal-socialized as
a consequence of their exposure to workshy parents mired in
permissiveness and addicted to a dependency culture?
If we consider what other studies of crime among working-class
communities have to tell us, a number of serious objections could be
directed against this line of argument.
In a recent attempt to study the social background of those who
engage in street robbery, Fitzgerald et al. found little evidence to suggest
that robbers were the products of a malformed and maladjusted
underclass (Fitzgerald et al. 2002). What their work indicates is a
background culture characterized by what they liken to serious patterns
of social disorganization. What their study brought to light was a world
of highly stressed individuals, particularly single parents, attempting to
do right in a hostile social and economic context. It is poor living
conditions acting in conjunction with a highly restricted access to the
labour market that, they argue, produces the conditions that foster the
kind of street life and street culture that can and will result in street
robbery.
This analysis, it must be emphasized, does not deny the fact that
certain young people will indeed find themselves – as the right argue –
mixing with street cultures that can encourage involvement in street
robbery. Where this analysis departs radically from the right, however, is
by suggesting that the social forces that create the preconditions for this
do not emanate from cultural failings among working-class populations
but from the socio-economic failings of free-market capitalism. The
problem for writers such as Murray is that they do not want to recognize
the fundamental importance of these issues. The role of unemployment
and underemployment, for example, have no explanatory status in
Murray’s account, nor does he adequately attend to the changing
economy of British society, even though it has changed significantly and
with profound consequences on issues such as street robbery – a point I
will pick up on in the next chapter.
With regards to the claim that society is too lenient and that there are
no effective deterrents available to discourage young people from crime,
77
Street Crime
three points can be made against it. To begin with, it is important to note
that the overwhelming majority of those aged 19 or over successfully
convicted of a street robbery offence will receive a custodial sentence. If
you are black and live in areas like Brixton, this percentage is higher than
if you are a white street robber. Sentences are also routinely meted out
even if the robbery was a first-time offence. Indeed, from evidence
collated from Lambeth (Hallsworth and Richie 2002) you were more
likely to receive a harsher sentence for robbery than you would for
assault. The idea that Britain is ‘soft’ in relation to the way it deals with
street robbers is one of those ongoing myths the right habitually seeks to
sustain – despite the availability of evidence proving the contrary.
Having examined the arguments that right of centre commentators
have adduced to explain street robbery, it is clear that they offer
explanations that can be criticized on many fronts. The evidential basis
remains weak and the deficit model of crime at the heart of right thinking
remains highly problematic. Shorn of hard evidence, what we find is less
an appropriate account of street robbery, and more a series of
persecution texts directed at blaming poor communities for the crime
that bedevils social life within them. If the right fails to address the
problem of street robbery, however, can commentators of the political left
fare any better?
Notes
1 For examples of this see Jenson, A. (1969). ‘How Much Can we Boost IQ
and Scholastic Achievement?’ Harvard Educational Review 39: 1–123.A.;
Herrenstein, R. and Murray, C. (1994) The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class
Structure in American Life. New York and London: Free Press. For a
contemporary critique, see Bowling, B. and Phillips, C. (2002) Racism, Crime
and Justice. London: Longman.
2 See Wartella, B. (1995) ‘Media and Problem Behaviours in Young People’ in
Psychological Disorders in Young People, D.S.M. Rutter. London: Wiley:
296–323. For an overview of this literature, see Reiner, R. (1997) ‘Media Made
Criminality’ in Oxford Handbook of Criminology, R.M.M. Maguire and
R. Reiner. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
78
The view from the left
Chapter 5
79
Street Crime
Street crime is the only form of serious crime where the victim is in
the same social category as the offender. It is lower working class
against lower working class, black against black and neighbour
against neighbour. Much of it represents the ultimate in anti-social
behaviour and unites all sections of the population against a
common enemy. (Young 1979)
80
The view from the left
racist agenda set upon proving that the black population is inherently
criminogenic and poses by its presence a serious threat to the white
population and the British way of life.
As critical criminology emerged, not least to resist the racializing
agenda of the right, it was from the beginning unprepared to endorse a
research agenda that would appear to concede legitimacy to what Gilroy
would term the ‘myth’ of black criminality (Gilroy 1987). To do so, it was
felt, would be to reproduce the dangerous reification of ‘black crime’
while also marking out the black population as a suspect community for
yet more coercive regulation and control. This standpoint, it could be
noted, has become something of orthodoxy for the critical left, and its
sway still remains intact – up to the present day1 – a point I will return to
below.
The left’s failure to address street robbery with the kind of panache it
reserved for youth subcultures also follows through from the perception
that, all things considered, it was not a particularly complicated offence
or one that required its own unique theory to explain. As far as offences
go, it remains, after all, on the lowest rung of any hierarchy of crime;
while, as a crime perpetrated by the poor, its persistence in capitalist
societies was held to be unproblematically connected with the
disadvantages the poor confront. Considered this way, street robbery has
been traditionally conceived as simply an emergent feature of the
structural inequalities always present within a capitalist mode of
production (Platt 1978). Capitalism, after all, invariably produces
disadvantage, and disadvantage in capitalism will invariably provoke
adaptations that lead to offences such as street crime. The seemingly
straightforward obviousness of this equation, I would suggest, has
resulted in a tradition that has not really felt the need to enquire
comprehensively into street robbery as an offence. What it has sought to
do instead, is either to prove statistically the relation between inequality,
deprivation and involvement in crime, and to demonstrate that rising
crime among the urban poor is connected to changes in the social
structure of capitalist society in the postwar period. Fitzgerald et al.’s
(2002) work on the social conditions behind contemporary street robbery
which we considered in the previous chapter exemplify this kind of
research tradition. The problem is either one of deprivation, poverty or
exclusion (Box 1987), or rising patterns of relative deprivation (Young
1984).
The final reason that can be adduced to explain why the left has failed
to provide detailed accounts of street robbery follows through from the
assumption that the social attention directed towards this offence is not
justified by its seriousness. When compared, for example, with the
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Street Crime
crimes of the powerful, street robbery occasions far less material harm to
society, a fact powerfully illustrated in a study conducted by Snider who
estimated that while the annual cost of street crime in the USA came to a
figure of some $4 billion, this was less than 5 per cent of the amount lost
through corporate crime (Winslow 2003). Despite the social and material
costs posed to society by crimes perpetrated by the powerful, however, it
is also evident that their acts receive less attention and certainly far less
censure than the crimes committed by the poor. At the same time, it is
also evident that, while they occasion far less harm, offences like street
robbery receive a disproportionate amount of media and political
attention.
Given the costs of corporate crime but the silence that surrounds it,
and given the saturation coverage accorded to working-class crime
despite the relatively low scale of harm it occasions, critical crimino-
logists have responded in two very different ways. On the one hand, a
growing number have begun to rectify this research deficit by drawing
attention back to the crimes of the powerful and away from the
traditional focus of criminology upon working-class crime (Croall 1992).
Others, however, have begun to examine in far greater detail precisely
why relatively low-status offences such as street crime came to assume
such a significant role on the public agenda.
Though the left has not conceded to the study of street robbery the
same kind of attention it has reserved for other forms of crime, it is
nevertheless the case that the single most influential text on street
robbery in postwar criminology was composed within this tradition. The
text in question was Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, Law and Order,
written in 1978 by Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke
and Brian Roberts of the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies. As this
text exemplifies a conventional left position on street robbery, in what
follows I will consider its central arguments before subjecting the
position of the left as a whole to critique.
Policing the Crisis was written as a critical analysis of street robbery and,
in particular, the moral panic that surrounded it during 1970–72 in the
UK, a period during which the urban black ‘mugger’ first made his
appearance in Britain. The text begins with an examination and then a
critical demolition of the evidential basis that the media deployed to
justify the selective and sensational attention they gave to street crime
during this period. The newsworthiness of street crime, Hall et al.
82
The view from the left
What they then sought to explain was how and why this moral panic
around mugging had appeared when the facts did not by ‘sober, realistic
appraisal’ justify the attention it had received. As empirical facts about
street robbery could not provide them with an answer to this question,
their focus shifted towards accounting for the social response itself. From
looking at the deviant act – the conventional focus of criminological
enquiry – they refocussed instead upon ‘the relation between the deviant
act and the reaction of the public and control agencies to the act’ (Hall et
al. 1978).
To accomplish this task, they began by assiduously studying the
genesis of the moral panic, paying particular attention to the way in
which the mugging label came into popular usage during this period
and was then subsequently applied. As their research demonstrated,
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Street Crime
prior to the 1970s the term mugging had no history of use in postwar
Britain. It was, however, a term routinely used by commentators in the
US to describe street robbery. What the British media had done, Hall et al.
argued, was to adopt this term to describe what they then claimed was in
the process of happening on Britain’s inner-city streets.
What was imported, however, was far more than a new description of
an old offence. For in this American import, what was being
appropriated was a label to which an assemblage of already existing
references and associations were attached. The mugging label thus came
contextualized and racialized when the media began to apply it in a
‘scene-setting’ manner to help to explain events in a British context. As
Hall et al. note:
When the British media began to deploy the term mugging to define
what they claimed was happening on the streets of Britain, they did
so against a background characterized by economic decline, and not
least the breakdown of the postwar welfare state settlement. It was at
this moment that the black community, already one of the poorest
and most economically marginalized populations in British society,
found itself singled out for special treatment. This revealed itself, Hall et
al. argue, in a movement that would see black communities in general
and young black males in particular subjected to an undeclared urban
war by the police, the active agents of a deeply repressive and racist
state.
By the time the moral panic over rising street crime had begun, Hall et
al. argued, this urban war was already well under way. Young black
males were finding themselves subject to racialized targeting by the
police, while the areas in which they lived were subject to highly
intensive and coercive policing. It is in this context that an articulation
between police activity, media coverage and street crime activity began
to be forged. The robbers provided the facts; well-reported police arrests
confirmed them; and both street crime and the response towards it
provided a context the media then began to interpret by reference to the
mugging label it had imported from the US.
84
The view from the left
85
Street Crime
86
The view from the left
87
Street Crime
Critique
Having studied how the left has approached the issues posed by street
robbery, what lessons can be learnt? To answer this question I will begin
by reconsidering the reasons why left of centre commentators have often
proved hesitant to study street robbery. This is necessary because, as I
will argue, their silence remains a problem. I will then consider the status
88
The view from the left
89
Street Crime
90
The view from the left
Note
1 For a recent example in this genre, see Bowling, B. and Phillips, C. (2002)
Racism, Crime and Justice. London: Longman.
91
Street Crime
Chapter 6
92
Towards a framework of analysis
an underclass. Such accounts fail because the evidence does not support
the conjecture advanced to explain the problem. Nor does the available
evidence support a more radical interpretation of the street robber as
someone who has been excluded from society. As we have seen, the
desire of the street criminal for the very goods society itself classifies as
desirable suggests a level of incorporation incommensurate with this
perspective.
Even when the focus of analysis does offer some insight into why
street crime occurs, such accounts are methodologically limited in terms
of the explanations they advance because the focus of enquiry is too
narrow and in its restriction it ignores the complexity of what it is trying
to explain. The problem here is that the complexity of the world is lost in
accounts which seek to advance an explanation premised upon the
search for a single monolithic cause – be this the pathological
implications of a dependency culture, or the hyper-exploitation inherent
in late-modern racialized capitalist societies.
Rather than identify a monolithic cause and assert that this explains
everything, in what follows I will begin with the assumption that street
robbery (like all crime) is a multidimensional problem that requires, as
Young et al. have argued, a multidimensional framework of analysis to
interpret it (Young 1986). The framework should be one in which a
number of relevant factors need to be considered both individually and
in relation to each other if we are to reach an explanation we might want
to consider comprehensive.
In their own attempt to think through what a comprehensive social
explanation of crime would entail, ‘Left Realists’ such as Lea and Young
have identified what they term ‘the square of crime’ as a heuristic to
facilitate the task of analysis (Young 1984). Crime, they assert, is indeed a
multidimensional phenomenon, and to understand it requires ex-
amining four distinct though interrelated elements which constitute
collectively the social relations of crime (see Diagram 6.1 below).
As Young explains:
93
Street Crime
Police Offender
94
Towards a framework of analysis
If one or more of these key ingredients are missing then, Cohen and
Felson contend, a crime will not occur. People, for example, may well
aspire to commit criminal acts but unless they are motivated in the sense
of possessing an inclination to offend and the ability to carry through
their inclination, they will not perpetrate an offence. Nor will a crime
event occur if targets are neither available nor suitable to victimize. If
people, for example, do not carry desirable and valuable goods, they are
unlikely to be robbed in the way those that do are. For the same reason, if
suitable targets are not present in vicinities that motivated offenders
inhabit, then again a crime is unlikely to occur. Finally, if capable
guardians impose regimes of control that make a crime either highly
likely to be detected or which ensure that suitable targets are heavily
defended, motivated offenders are unlikely to be deterred from crime.
Assuming that criminal motivation is a given attribute of all offenders,
what routine activity theorists seek to study is ‘the manner in which the
spatio-temporal organisation of human activities creates opportunities
that help people translate criminal inclination into action’ (Cohen 1980).
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Towards a framework of analysis
represented in Diagram 6.2 below. If we use this model as the basis for
explaining street crime, then the aim of a comprehensive explanation
must be to account for each of these three elements and their
interrelation with the other two.
Premised as it is upon a rational choice theory of human nature,
routine activity theory (like control theories more generally) simply
accepts that humans will, in the right circumstances, be motivated to
perpetrate crime, but crucially without questioning precisely why a
particular group of people as opposed to others actually become
offenders. Though this a priori assumption about human nature does, as
routine activity theories demonstrate, allow for an interesting and in
some ways penetrating analysis of crime events, it is nevertheless too
delimiting. If our aim is to explain street robbery in a comprehensive and
fully social way, then clearly the forces that act to produce motivated
offenders also need to be accommodated. To do this means shifting
decisively beyond the substantive limits of routine activity theory, which
simply takes motivation as given.
But this begs the question: How do we think through these causal
forces and their interrelation? For the purpose of the analysis that will be
subsequently developed, the question of offending will be addressed
through studying the production of motivated offenders via an analysis
of the array of social forces that produce them. To establish this, we need
to ask why street robbers want what they seek to acquire through street
robbery so much that they will break rules and engage in highly risky
behaviour to get it. This invites an explanation that requires us to
examine three issues.
Social
Offender Victims
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To address these issues I will deploy an approach that derives from two
theoretical traditions in criminology: the strain theory of Robert Merton,
and a theory of differential association derived from Edmund Sutherland.
Merton’s approach suggests that crime is an adaptive response to a
situation where socially induced desires cannot be satisfied because the
social structure of society does not universalize the means that allow this
to occur (Merton 1953). In the modern state most people, whatever their
social background, are socialized into a way of life that holds out certain
things as desirable. In western societies, material success is one
important aspect of this dominant system of values. The problem,
though, is that only some groups are placed by virtue of privilege of birth
in a situation that provides them with the life chances and thus the
means to gratify these desires through socially legitimate avenues, i.e.
getting a good job and progressing up the occupational hierarchy. Those
that lack these life chances (the lower working class or minority ethnic
groups) consequently experience the contradiction between what they
have been taught to desire and the limited options available by which
they can be gratified as a form of strain. This anomic situation may then
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Towards a framework of analysis
population, and what it is about such groups or the goods they carry that
marks them out as suitable and assessable targets.
The third variable in Cohen and Felson’s model pertains – as we have
seen – to what they term the absence of suitable guardians. Evidently
crime is perpetrated in the context of a world that has (a) defined it as
such; and (b) initiated an array of efforts to prevent it. While keeping
faith with the idea that guardianship is something we need to consider,
my intention in what follows will be to substitute the term guardianship
with the more nebulous but inclusive term ‘social control’. In
justification for this I would suggest that one problem that follows
through from referring only to the absence of suitable guardians is that
guardianship itself refers only to a limited domain of the control efforts
that can have a bearing on crime. It typically signifies the presence or
absence of defences, and while this is certainly a relevant consideration,
it is not a sufficient one. It fails because it does not embrace the totality of
controls that society imposes to prevent crime and deviance. The term, I
would accept, does include ideas of situational defence and law-
enforcement activity. It does not, however, include control mechanisms
such as deterrent punishments, or indeed an array of proactive
interventions that we might also want to consider important for
preventing particular crimes. Where, for example, do social crime
prevention methods such as educational programmes or rehabilitation
programmes figure?
My answer to this would be to suggest that such control systems do
not fall within the remit of capable guardianship. These limitations
justify, therefore, the semantic shift from an analysis of guardianship to
an analysis of social control, or more specifically deficits in social control,
because that is what we need to study in order to account for street
robbery. Again and self-evidently, if the array of social control systems
society initiated to prevent street crime was successful, there would be
no crime as it would be impossible to perpetrate.
To study the deficits in social control raises the issue of defining what
social control is for the purpose of analysis. By way of a provisional
definition I will define social control as the array of interventions that is
imposed to prevent an offence from being committed. These include
interventions that can be viewed as statutory and formal, as well as those
which are non-statutory and informal. The array of interventions that fall
within the remit of this definition would include responses that are
reactive (that respond to an offence after it has been committed) or
proactive (which are designed to prevent the likelihood of an offence
being committed).
While recognizing that there are different ways to examine social
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control, for the purpose of this investigation I will approach its study by
investigating what I will suggest constitute the four dominant
approaches that we, as a western society, currently impose to prevent
crime. In this respect and in this order I will examine:
• Law enforcement.
• Deterrence and punishment.
• Situational crime prevention.
• Social crime prevention.
• The integration and coordination of social control effort.
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• Attempts to warn and inform young people about the dangers and
moral consequences of rule breaking.
• The provision of activities designed to allow potential criminals to
sublimate their urges in more socially benevolent ways.
• Modifying the life chances of different populations in ways that
reduce the social factors that are held to constitute the structural basis
of crime.
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Towards a framework of analysis
approaches to the problem and more proactive ones. Are resources being
channelled in ways that typically address the problem only by looking at
the symptoms of its expression (a street crime epidemic), or are adequate
steps also being taken to resource the interventions that might have a
bearing on addressing its causes?
In today’s mixed economy of crime prevention and community safety
effort, the issue of how the various players within any locality are
brought together in ways that ensure a coordinated effort also needs to
be considered. How, we will need to enquire, are the diverse partners in
crime control (such as the police, youth workers and probation officers)
brought together in ways that ensure each organisation performs its
function to promote a holistic solution to the problem? In considering
this issue, it will be necessary to examine the kinds of strategic thinking
that different crime-prevention partnerships engage in. Are the right
players making the right decisions, and do all the players that need to be
involved actually involve themselves in community safety effort?
Finally, in a world governed by a managerialist culture characterized by
the production of strategic plans, and where progress is charted in
relation to specified benchmarks, how relevant has this culture been to
ensuring that street crime has been confronted effectively?
By examining the forces that produce motivated offenders,
suitable victims and deficits in social control, it is possible, I would
suggest, to provide a comprehensive explanation of street crime and
its contemporary rise in British society. This will also prove to be one
that can explain the observable trends in street crime identified in
Chapter 3.
To apply this framework of analysis, my aim will be to study each of
the three strands discussed above in turn, drawing attention to the
relationships between each of the constituent variables. I will begin in
Chapter 7 by examining the forces that act to produce suitable victims.
This will then be followed by chapters dealing respectively with the
production of motivated offenders, and the consideration of deficits in
the social control response.
Street crime, as we saw in the previous chapter, occurs at different
rates in different times and places. While the task of explaining it must
draw attention to factors that are common to all street crime, analysis
must also be susceptible to a range of variant factors that explain why
street crime rates not only change over time but in relation to place. In
order to accomplish this task, my aim will be to draw where appropriate
upon recent and relevant research conducted by others. I will also,
however, draw directly upon the research I conducted in Lambeth
between 2001 and 2002 on rising street robbery in the area.
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106
Suitable and available victims
Part 3
Street Robbery and
Contemporary Society
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Suitable and available victims
Chapter 7
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110
Suitable and available victims
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112
Suitable and available victims
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Suitable and available victims
of street robbery, we need to study the factors that bring them onto the
street where they can become victims. We also need to study this in
relation to the factors that have led to street crime being recorded as one
of the principal means by which young people now regularly victimize
each other. This is not an unimportant or trivial factor, for this can also
help to explain the dramatic surge in street crime we have witnessed in
recent years.
Young people in general, and young men in particular, typically
spend their day-to-day leisure lives in the context of the street. The street
provides young people not only with a place to meet and socialize, but
also with an opportunity to plan and execute different activities. It is in
the street, for example, that they commune as friends; it is on the streets
that they make their way to and from school; and it is in the context of
street life that they engage in or find themselves the victims of street
crime.
While adults often find the presence of young people gathering
together on the streets threatening, it could also be pointed out that street
life is by its nature exciting. It always has been. This is where thrills are to
be found and where the identity of young people is also forged. There
are, however, a range of other factors that act independently of the
enjoyment factor to propel young people onto the street and into the
vicinity of those who would perpetrate street robbery.
In run-down inner-city areas the presence of young people on the
street is also conditioned by other factors that pertain to the socio-
economics of the area. The first factor that may be identified pertains to
the paucity of services and facilities available to young people. In the
case of Lambeth, for example, the services available to young people
have been decimated in recent decades by regular and sustained cuts to
youth services. While youth services can and are offered through the
mechanism of the free market, much of what is on offer in Lambeth is
often too expensive for young people on poor estates to use. In my
investigation into the roots of street crime in Lambeth I discovered that
some areas of the borough were devoid of youth services altogether.
These factors, acting in conjunction with poor and often overcrowded
housing, help to propel young people onto the street because in effect
there is no alternative available to them. Being spatially compressed not
only in high-density estates, but also in other high-density environments
in which the adult world chooses to corral them, clearly raises the
probability of victimization. Such routine activity invariably raises the
likelihood of becoming a victim of street crime, precisely because these
activities place young people in a risk environment where dangers of
many kinds await them.
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Suitable and available victims
If you had someone who look like a tramp come up and try and talk
to you are you really going to want to speak? But if you is dressed
nice, and have good things, you going to take them serious.
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Suitable and available victims
attack and rob them. Their motive would appear to be both a love of
violence and their hatred of a group which had consciously adopted a
more visible counter-culture style (they did not wear designer clothes
and favoured instead a second-hand, more ostensibly grungy look).
Though mobile phones could be and were stolen, the act of robbery often
involved taking marijuana from these young bohemians. An offence,
needless to say, which also meant that it could not and would not be
reported to law-enforcement agencies.
If these factors help explain why younger populations are victimised,
they do not explain patterns of street robbery directed at older age
groups. To study patterns of victimization among this population –
particularly in areas such as Lambeth, where a higher than average
proportion of the victim population are in the over-18 age group – we
need once again to study the changing routine activities of this
population. In particular, we need to study how such routine behaviours
have changed in relation to changes in the demography and socio-
economic profile of the area. These, as we shall observe, have also acted
to widen the potential pool of victims in an area where there are many
motivated offenders.
Following the urban disorders of the late 1970s, Lambeth underwent a
significant process of urban regeneration designed to alleviate its status
as one of London’s poorest and most multiply deprived boroughs. This
has involved a significant investment in projects designed to improve the
physical environment of the borough and to help and support local
businesses and retailers. If we examine how regeneration has impacted
on life in Lambeth, three specific developments may be observed, all of
which have implications for patterns of victimization in the area.
The first way in which the impact of urban regeneration may be
observed is via the process of ‘gentrification’ occasioned by the
movement of affluent and predominantly white populations into
Lambeth. This process of reverse colonization is common to other poor
London boroughs, and a principal motive driving it forward appears to
be access to private housing stock that is relatively more affordable than
property in more affluent boroughs. An economic regeneration strategy
implemented by the council designed to improve the physical
environment of the borough may also be important in stimulating this
demographic shift. This involved an attempt to make Lambeth more
public-friendly by renovating its decaying parks and public spaces,
particularly those on major arterial routes leading through the borough.1
Apart from the renovation of the physical environment, a con-
siderable slice of the regeneration pie was also invested in Lambeth’s
economic base. The relative success of this initiative is evident in two key
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Suitable and available victims
Note
1 I was a recipient of this renovation while living in Lambeth during the 1980s.
As a local resident I found that our front gardens had been deemed in need of
renovation and that a considerable slice of public money was to be spent on
renovating and rebuilding them. As a student I was of course delighted if
somewhat disturbed by such largesse being extended to an area that was by
no means impoverished.
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Chapter 8
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The production of motivated offenders
possess them? While one answer to this question might be to suggest that
such desires represent aberrant personality traits on the part of those
who hold them, this, I suggest, is the wrong way of looking at the issue. A
more productive line of enquiry involves seeing such desires not as
deviant but as a common trait evident in most young people. More to the
point, it is my contention that if we want to understand from where the
will to possess desirable objects derives, then its proximate cause is
exposure to and socialization into capitalist consumption norms
stimulated by capitalist culture industries.
Let us consider this in more detail. What I am proposing is that young
offenders are products of a society in which the consumption of material
goods is an integral aspect of their lives. As such, it is a universally
distributed desire. It is something acquired, moreover, via a range of
sources. It is a message they see mediated through the medium of
advertising which targets them directly; it is something they learn to
acquire through direct involvement in consumption rituals, either as
observers or as active consumers themselves. As we shall now see, the
impact of being produced as consuming beings in free-market societies
has important implications for how young people live and perceive the
world around them.
In their exposure to the consumer society, young people learn from a
very early age that wellbeing and success in life are contingent upon the
possession of desirable goods. In particular, branded goods marketed to
them by the culture industries. They are also taught, and from a very
early age are given to understand, that through the possession of these
desirable objects – the right trousers, trainers and accessories such as
mobile phones – other desirable things follow, including self-respect and
the respect of others. In and through mass consumption, identities are
produced and reproduced. In consumption, a lifestyle is simultaneously
lived and constructed. To ‘be’ is literally to be in a world defined by the
possession of these desirable goods. Possession defines the bearer, not
only as a possessor of what everyone desires, but as a viable and
sovereign agent in his or her own right.
In the possession of desired goods, things are not simply appropriated
– identities are also produced and reproduced. By and through processes
of cultural appropriation, a sense of who and what you are is constructed
while, in the competitive order of the young, a sense of distinction
relative to other people is forged. The consequences of this process are
stark. Your status relative to others is marked out and defined by the
kind of phone you possess, the trousers you wear, and the way you wear
them. Possession of desired goods also provides a visible marker that
defines where you stand relative to others in the world around you. Non-
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The production of motivated offenders
While the will to consume is a universal disposition into which all young
people are socialized, the free-market society is not an economic order
that universalizes the means necessary to ensure that all young people
can appropriate the social goods that they have been taught to desire
legitimately. In a free-market capitalist society that both produces and
tolerates wide and growing inequalities, what we find is a socio-
economic reality in which certain populations are accorded the means to
gratify their consumption desires, while others are located in socio-
economic conditions that effectively prohibit consumption. What
distinguishes these two populations is their differential access to life
chances. These include labour market opportunities and established
wealth that allows consumption desires to be socially realized in
legitimate ways.
The differential distribution of life chances can be starkly observed if
we consider once again the case of Lambeth, and the socio-economic
characteristics of the area. While the borough is home, as we have seen,
to a predominantly white affluent population, well-equipped with the
resources that will allow it to consume easily and legitimately, the same
cannot be said for more deprived communities, including Lambeth’s
black population, which also produce the majority of its offenders. For
while Lambeth has witnessed a significant process of economic and
social regeneration over the last two decades, the effects of regeneration
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have been very uneven and not everyone can be considered winners in
the process. The socio-economic position of young working-class people
– particularly young black people on the estates – remains desperately
poor, as deprivation indicators for the area testify. Unemployment, for
example, remains at around 40 per cent on the estates in the area. This is
far higher than the average unemployment rates for London and the UK
as a whole. To this must be added a range of factors which enhance
deprivation and social exclusion more generally. These would include
the impact of institutional and overt discrimination towards the black
community, particularly young black males, that limits entry into the
labour market. One young man explained graphically why robbery
became for him and his friends a career choice:
Some of them do it, yes, for the money, but most of them can’t get
money from their parents most times. And then most don’t work.
And some of my friends don’t have homes so they have to be
hustling. They have to make money somehow.
Benefits for poorer populations are also harder to obtain, given the
governmental response to what has been represented as a ‘culture of
dependency’. For the same reasons, young people under 18 are now
unable to claim any benefits at all. If we consider the impact of receiving
low rates of benefit in conjunction with living in the most expensive city
in the UK, it is evident that poor populations in Lambeth find it
extraordinarily hard to sustain a minimal lifestyle, let alone gratify overt
consumption desires they have been taught to regard as normal. As one
young man expressed this:
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The production of motivated offenders
been to compress young men together for large parts of their day-to-day
lives on local streets. Another, as noted by Rutherford, has been to
increase pressure on already highly pressurized families, many of whom
are also welfare-dependent (Rutherford 1997). This in turn produces a
pattern of routine activity that creates the space in which street robbery
becomes a distinct possibility. To escape from over-crowded and often
highly pressurized family units, young men congregate in the streets.
There, the conditions are created both for meeting and having to deal
with outlaw cultures that practise street robbery, while also placing
young men in proximity to populations of assessable and suitable
victims. In other words, into conjunction with more affluent populations
who, as we have seen, carry the very goods poorer sections of the
community cannot readily appropriate legitimately. Economic change,
then, itself helps to sustain an environment that is highly conducive to
crime.
The situation in poor inner-city areas like Lambeth is consequently
characterized by patterns of real deprivation and poverty among certain
sections of its population. Like the affluent society around them,
however, these populations also share the dream of a good life defined in
material terms. This is thus a population characterized not only by real
deprivation, but also by intensifying levels of relative deprivation as
well. Together, these factors have created what criminologists such as
Lea and Young (Young 1984) would consider to be a highly criminogenic
environment. In effect, it is my premise that by failing to universalize the
conditions by which desirable goods may be universally appropriated,
the free-market society has created a situation in which some young
people have ‘innovated’ in their consumption. They do so by becoming
involved in cultures that sanction rule-breaking. Unable to consume
legitimately, many have come to develop innovative consumption
strategies, one of which is street crime.
The turn towards street crime can therefore be viewed as a practical
and rational resolution of the contradiction of being socialized into a
world which shapes you to aspire to the consistent consumption of
material goods and being located in a socio-economic reality that does not
universalize the legitimate avenues by which such goods can be appro-
priated. In making this statement, it must be emphasized that such a
resolution is by no means inevitable. Only a few young people respond to
the predicament of unrealized and unrealizable consumption in the same
way. Many poor people struggle through legitimate avenues such as
education to accumulate the life chances that will allow them to become,
as it were, ‘normal consumers’. There are also other patterns of
adaptation available to young people faced with this contradiction. Drug-
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taking and radical political mobilization, for example, represent other life
opportunities that might not necessitate participation in street crime.
So far we have studied why young people wish to consume, and we have
examined why alternative and illegal consumption strategies might be
pursued. What we now need to consider is why some young people, and
indeed a growing number of them, have chosen to drift in the direction of
a consumption strategy that resolves itself into street crime. Why, we
must ask, have they chosen to become flawed consumers? To accomplish
this we must move from a consideration of structure towards an
examination of process, in particular the diverse processes characteristic
of what terms ‘differential association’ (Sutherland and Cressay 1979).
We need to attend, in particular, to the social process by which allegiance
to norms stressing adherence to rule-abiding behaviour become aban-
doned in favour of an alternative value system which encourages rule-
breaking that embraces street crime.
I will argue that there are five factors we need to examine in order to
explain how this process works.
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by no means evident that there was too much of this around. The role of
organizations such as churches was entirely limited, given the secular
and materialistic character of the world in which young people tend to
live. While the free market can certainly encourage the will to consume –
itself part of the problem – it must be emphasized that it offers no
alternative morality or vision of the good life beyond the will to consume
more. It is, in effect, an amoral entity. The pronouncements of other self-
professed moral entrepreneurs such as politicians had no impact on the
lives of these young men. They were perceived to embody a world that
was distant and irrelevant to their lives. Nor could what they said be
trusted. As with many forces of authority in their lives, such figures
could easily be viewed as the enemy. Nor did political ideologies have
much if any impact upon the conduct of these young men. To this extent
they were certainly products of a postmodern depoliticized culture that
had well and truly separated itself from older and more benevolent
narratives of progress. Nor were there many remnants left of older
working-class patterns of solidarity that might have induced their young
into showing more respect for older traditional values. Capitalism’s
triumph at the ‘end of history’, as Fuketyama characterized the process,
had successfully eliminated even these (Fuketyama 1992). In the era of
unfettered competitive individualism, celebrated as a virtue in the free
market, belt-and-braces socialism was well and truly starved of the
oxygen that might once have nurtured it.
While much has been made by the media about the need for
appropriate role models in young people’s lives, what the interviews
with young offenders revealed was that these young men tended to have
none. If they did then it was often their parents, and in particular their
mothers, which was itself an interesting insight because it clearly
demonstrated how attached they were to traditional notions of family
life. Leaving aside the arrogant assumption on the part of the adult
world that youth should respect it more, it could also be remarked here
that even if a positive role model could be identified, so too could plenty
of others that wider society would not view in such terms. Among these,
as we shall see, could be those who were successful practitioners of street
crime and crime more generally.
For young people to become involved in street crime it is not enough
that the voices that might condemn such behaviour go unheeded.
Involvement in such activity is also contingent on being in contact with
or in close proximity to what I will generically term outlaw groups who
not only engage in rule-breaking, but who also inhabit a culture that
justifies such activity and actively encourages it. As indicated above,
while all young people are socialized to become active consumers of
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The production of motivated offenders
Like they would say, ‘Are you coming out there?’ and if you like
said no, then they say ‘You going to come along with us’ and I
would say no so they say ‘You a pussy, you going to have to come
with us’.
Another young man cited his exposure to a gang of older men (aged 19–
21), all of whom were involved in illegal activity, specifically robbery and
selling drugs. In his words:
They (the older gang) were gerrying me on like to make sure I did
it. Then after I did do it like they said ‘He’s one of us now’ and after
that they didn’t say so much.
Where the analogy with Fagin ends is that the groups of offenders who
inhabit these outlaw cultures do not approximate the Fagin model of an
organized criminal gang. What we are often looking at here are looser
associations, specifically composed of young men, all of whom will have
offended and who consider offending behaviour to be an obligation. At
the heart of these associations will be certain people who are more
proficient and more motivated to offend than others. They are often
likely to be older than the people around them, and many will have had
their criminal status conferred by having been ‘successfully’ processed at
some time or other by the criminal justice system. In the words of the
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young offenders interviewed for the purpose of this research, these were
the ‘bad-boys’: an already existing population of highly motivated
offenders, many of whom would already have served custodial
sentences. There was, said one young man, ‘no leadership thing’. These
men are those who have already been labelled criminal by the wider
society, and who have, as designated criminals, consequently
internalized the label and accorded to it a number of positive con-
notations. In effect, as a consequence of successful labelling processes
conferred by the criminal justice system, there now exist a number of
young men who quite happily accept and celebrate their outlaw status.
They live the life, they walk the walk and they talk the talk. This came
through powerfully in a conversation with a young man in his early 20s
who had recently been released after serving a prison sentence for
robbery. In response to how he felt he was perceived by those around
him, he characterized their response as, ‘Yes, it’s a kind of respect in a
way. Now, no matter what I do, even if I choose not to do crime, they
respect me because I earned their respect by doing crime.’ When I asked
him about the friends he grew up with on the street, he laughed and
admitted, ‘Yes, most are in jail.’
Though quantifying precise numbers remains inherently difficult, it
could be surmised that these outlaw associations are widespread, and
are specifically active when legitimate employment avenues are blocked.
As my research in Lambeth suggested, many were well-established on
many estates. Group membership is often conferred by point of origin or
proximity to a particular territory and by virtue of the fact that most of
those who are involved in such associations have grown up together.
They would have gone to the same schools and have the same friends.
Interviews also indicated that the more confirmed members of these
groups were those who were the oldest and who were also involved in a
range of other illegal activities. In particular, they were likely to be
connected with grey and illegal markets. They would know, for example,
where to buy drugs to deal and who to market them to. They would also
know who to fence stolen goods to and were often in contact with those
who would commission them to appropriate certain objects: 20 mobile
phones, for example, with this particular specification. When I asked one
young man about these networks he said:
Yes there are a lot of people who do stuff. It’s like you with a friend
and you met people and they maybe sell heroin and you’re with
someone else who knows someone else who knows someone else
whose selling something.
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The most accomplished of the ‘bad-boys’ also knew precisely what make
to take and were very selective about what they chose to target. As one
young man commented, ‘He don’t steal anything less than a 32-10. He
wouldn’t steal that. It’s the newer phones. You don’t steal anything less
than you can sell for £200.’
What acted to reinforce the involvement of young men who found
themselves in proximity to such associations was the way in which the
focal concerns of the group often came to predominate over other more
legal and legitimate attachments young people might have, such as their
families. As one man explained, ‘All you know about is your friends. You
forget your family. Friends are all that matter.’
And another: ‘It’s like your friends are all there is and you don’t think
of the consequences.’
And another: ‘When you got a set of friends and someone fights, you
got to fight with them.’
And when they find themselves together, for example at a youth club:
‘There you meet people and … someone suggests “Let’s do this”, and
that’s how things [crime] begin.’
Group membership also brings other positive benefits, specifically
security in a dangerous world: ‘When I’m with them no one like tries to
trouble you. But when I am by myself then they would try and trouble
me.’
In terms of the values celebrated within these outlaw groups, what we
can observe is a hybrid subculture which is forged out of a symbiosis
between activities celebrated in the wider society and those condemned
by it. Where it joins with the wider order is in its celebration of
conspicuous consumption, and the linking of acquisitive materialism
with notions of status and standing, distinction and respect. Where it
departs is in its pursuit of socially sanctioned consumption norms by
illicit means that sanction violence and rule-breaking as a way of life.
This orientation also goes hand in hand with a celebration of a world that
is specifically gendered in its form. Typically, what we can observe here
is a world in which a particular vision of masculinity is celebrated. This is
one in which the capacity to practise violence is validated and where
being tough commands respect. This is also a cultural order in which the
capacity to assert physical self is celebrated as a valid marker of being a
man. It is a social currency that commands respect and begets for its
holder social distinction and honour. For the young men I interviewed,
fighting was a recurrent feature of life in a world considered violent and
dangerous. ‘Yes, you have to fight all the time’, said one young man,
while another noted ruefully that even though he knew many people in
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Brixton, ‘There are still people out there you got to be careful of.’ This
vision of masculinity, moreover, reaches into the detail of life. It is there
in the physical presentation of self to the world: it is evident in the
clothes, in the language, in the walk, and in speech itself. It is evident in
acts and deeds, in what is spoken about, and what is celebrated in
speech.
The gendered character of this world-view is evident not only in what
it selects as worthy of celebration, but also in what it has to deny in the
process of its own becoming. The vision of purified masculinity that it
celebrates is often brought about at the cost of disavowing much of what
wider society has chosen to endorse. This can include the idea that
worldly success can be established through hard work at school, or that
self-respect can be accomplished through entry into the legitimate job
market. Often the way in which this disavowal is socially demonstrated
is by coding such activity as explicitly feminized behaviour. Working
hard at school or demonstrating intellectual effort are perceived as
unmanly, as something that real men do not do. This could lead some
young men actively to preclude themselves from mainstream society
and work in the formal economy (Willis 1977). As one young man
observed: ‘They don’t want it [work]. They ain’t looking for it.’
This gendered perception is also associated with a disavowal of what
society itself codes as feminine: this can include being overtly emotional,
intimating care and evincing compassion for others. Unsurprisingly, the
kind of culture this produces and the kind of individual it sanctions is not
well equipped to interact with society on its preferred terms. What it
sanctions is a form of ‘lawless masculinity’ (Cambell 1993), evident in
males unable to resolve conflict without recourse to aggression, and who
are often homophobic and sexist in their behaviour. This kind of
individual is, however, well-equipped and motivated to practise street
crime and engage in criminal behaviour more generally. Such
individuals, once confirmed within the rituals of outlaw culture, not
only reproduce it, but can actively induct other young people into it as
well.
The culture of aggressive masculinity discussed above is not unique to
Lambeth or indeed to any specific ethnic group. Criminologists have
explored variations of it in different countries and between different
groups (Willis 1977; Cambell 1993). In content it remains quite consistent
over time and between states. It does, however, manifest itself via a
number of stylistic variations which distinguish various outlaw cultures
from each other. The social rituals it practices may vary, as might its
stylistic expression, for instance through the style of clothes, music etc.
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The production of motivated offenders
who have been processed this way. It can and often is worn as a marker
of respect. Second, it is also a process in which young men can and do
acquire an enhanced set of criminal skills. Thirdly, when young men are
released back into society their life chances are so reduced that
participation in crime becomes their only viable option. As a research
project conducted by the local probation service in Lambeth found, the
living conditions for many offenders could only be described as chaotic.
The final factor that is important in sustaining a culture conducive to
the production of motivated offenders ready and willing to commit
street crime is that the desire to break rules in this way can easily be
sanctioned. This can happen both by those who break them and by
onlookers as well. As the work of Sykes (1957) and more recently Cohen
(Cohen 2001) has shown, one reason why people break rules and
continue to do so is that they can deploy various techniques of
neutralization to justify what they do. These techniques can take a
number of forms, and involve the creation of plausible narratives that
can act to justify rule-breaking or inaction in confronting it. In Lambeth,
one such narrative was that young people were engaged in a kind of
Robin Hood existence: stealing from the rich and giving to the poor.
Another was that in street crime young black people were engaged in
‘resistance’ to white racist culture.
Notes
1 Which was strangely ironic, because in the meetings I convened with them
the headteachers were adamant that the environments they provided for
young people were bastions of morality and good citizenship.
2 The relation between the gangster hip-hop look and US penitentiary culture
was explained to the author by D. Brotherton.
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Chapter 9
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Policing
When the media and politicians debate the street crime problem, it is
typically to the police that they and everyone else tend to look for solu-
tions and, not least, quick results. As the police have also traditionally
been more than happy to accept this role, this has only managed to
confirm such expectations in everyone’s minds. An inevitable con-
sequence of this is that it places the police under immense pressure to
deliver results and to deliver them quickly. Which is all very well if
(a) they are prepared and (b) they can respond quickly to the problem.
Faced with a real and sharp escalation in street robbery in the late 1990s,
however, it was clear that they were neither prepared nor were able to
respond rapidly and convincingly to address the problem. In fact, it
would not be an underestimation to suggest that they were totally
unprepared for the rise in street robbery with the consequence that, as
media coverage intensified, they found themselves the subject of an
intense critique from both the media and the government.
To account for their own failure, the police originally blamed the
sharp and sudden escalation in street robbery on the aftereffects of the
September 11 atrocities in the US. In the face of the terror threat, security
had to be considerably enhanced, with the result that resources that were
usually deployed on the streets were used instead for anti-terrorism
purposes. At the centre of this argument was the contention that street
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bring street robbery under control thus weakened the credibility of social
control agents, which in turn fuelled the rise in street crime further.
In considering the role of police performance, specifically in high-
crime areas like Lambeth, a number of other factors also need to be
considered. All inner-city areas pose more problems for the police than
rural or suburban areas. In the case of Lambeth, these problems have
been accentuated historically by a legacy of poor police/community
relations and a history of urban disorder in the 1980s (Scarman 1981).
Lambeth, according to the Metropolitan Police’s own regulatory
authority, is recognized as being among the most difficult areas to police
in western Europe. While community relations have improved
remarkably in the last few years, not least as a consequence of a range of
initiatives led by the borough’s (then) innovative police commander
Paddick, imposing the rule of law in such areas is by no means easy to
achieve. One problem concerns the form of policing that would be
considered acceptable to the wider community in an era when their
representatives are now actively consulted. As one officer observed,
while active consultation had certainly improved community relations,
it did so, at a cost to the police of not being able to deploy all the coercive
powers at their disposal. Another issue concerns the probable impact on
areas like Brixton if strong-arm tactics were to be used. Order on the
streets is always, it should be noted, a negotiated affair. Enforcing control
through coercive law and order means alone remains problematic, not
least because community memories are long and disorder remains a real
possibility. While reclaiming the streets from street robbers consequently
remains a police priority, it is evident that police attempts to accomplish
this have to occur in ways that ensure recent gains in their relationship
with the wider community are not prejudiced.
Punishment
Though the police are often seen as the key institution in the fight against
street crime, the role of the judicial system and the organizations that
support it must also be considered of fundamental importance.
Cumulatively, these bodies perform a number of important functions. In
the act of punishment dispensed to offenders, a message is sent out to the
public that they have erred and should desist from further offending. To
ensure that offenders who have been caught understand the deterrent
message they have received, they are also subjected to a range of
interventions designed to ensure that they are rehabilitated, or at least
that the risk they are held to pose is managed.
The sanctions that the state deploys to deter and punish those guilty of
street crime can range from benign forms of intervention, evident in
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impact upon street crime, we will see that its results are variable. More
specifically, I would suggest that:
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• Attempts to warn and inform young people about the dangers and
moral consequences of rule-breaking.
• Providing activities so that young people can sublimate their urges in
more socially benevolent ways.
• Increasing the life chances of young people and their families in ways
that reduce the forms of exclusion and deprivation that constitute the
structural basis of street crime as an adaptive strategy.
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Like many boroughs in London, the state of the youth service in areas
like Lambeth and, not least, its contribution to community safety effort
remains questionable. It is certainly not able in its current form to
perform the crime-prevention role outlined above. There are a number of
reasons that may be posited to account for this. First, in common with
other boroughs, the idea of a youth service organized around the
comprehensive provision of youth clubs has been questioned and
abandoned. Second, this questioning has gone hand in hand with a series
of sustained budget cuts that have literally decimated the forms of
provision the council did operate or support. Third, in the face of
financial retrenchment, the local authority has responded by effectively
off-loading responsibility for youth provision onto a voluntary sector ill-
equipped to undertake the infrastructure support role now being foisted
upon it. Fourth, given access to inherently limited and precarious
funding regimes, those seeking to work productively with young people
are forced to engage in ‘beauty competitions’ in order to sustain often
minimal funding for their activities.
While by no means decrying the activities of those who do provide
services for young people, questions also need to be posed as to whether
the services meet the needs of all their potential consumers and fulfil
what may be considered a relevant community safety role. While
organiza-tions such as the scouts, guides, army and navy cadets and
woodcraft folk are worthy and continue to attract a population of young
people, it is by no means evident that their appeal is particularly great to
high-risk populations in deprived areas – the populations, in other
words, most at risk of becoming engaged in street crime. Though
recognizing that new spaces in place of old youth clubs need to be
constructed, there remain few bold experiments that are orientated
towards constructing such environments. Many of the kinds of activities
that high-risk groups might value such as gyms, access to studios and
electronic music equipment are either lacking or remain prohibitively
expensive – as young offenders pointed out in interviews.
If we consider street crime as an adaptive strategy to thwarted
consumption, and thwarted consumption as a function of real and rising
patterns of relative deprivation in the borough, then self-evidently an
important crime-reduction strategy must lie in reducing these factors. If
we look at the social policies that might help to achieve this pattern of
reduction, these are embraced within the general rubric of social
regeneration measures that have been deployed in the last two decades.
Though the crime-reducing aspect was not a principal aim of social
regeneration, in recent years this function has increased dramatically. In
fact, regeneration effort is often spoken of as if it were a de facto crime-
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not least through the provision of significant sums of money that local
authorities are then obligated to bid for (Hughes 2002). As for more
proactive measures then, as we have seen above, those who might be
expected to be involved in these either absent themselves from the
policy-making table, or are so autonomous that they are not obligated to
sit at the table at all. The sheer proliferation of funding streams and the
orientation towards short-term funding also subverts ideas of collective
effort or effort that works towards securing long-term goals. The number
of strings typically attached to projects funded by government, working
as they do in conjunction with systemic biases that favour situational
prevention, also prevent a wider and more holistic agenda being pur-
sued, because the necessary autonomy local partnerships require to plan
in this way is effectively subverted. What these constraints result in, I
would suggest, is the construction of a climate in which developing a
fully holistic and comprehensive solution to street robbery is always
likely to be subverted from the beginning. This has certainly been the
case in Lambeth, as its rising robbery rate suggests.
The inherent disorganization in community safety practice itself fuels
this fragmentation, not least because it provokes the development of
more managerialist solutions to wider social problems that are then
imposed by government to ensure more joined-up thinking, better
partnership working, etc. in a policy context that already subverts such
outcomes to begin with. Lambeth was an interesting case study into the
nature and often futility of such measures. Let me explain.
In the face of the street robbery epidemic in Lambeth, the government
(after seeking to blame everyone else for the problem) decided to initiate
firm action. Deputations of the powerful were despatched to Lambeth
with orders to ‘knock heads together’,2 while advisory bodies such as
Government Office for London (itself under pressure from the govern-
ment) unleashed a stream of managerial directives designed to integrate
and coordinate community safety effort more effectively. At its best this
pressure would eventually lead to a more integrated structure of pro-
vision within the borough. It would certainly lead the council to place
crime control far more at the centre of its agenda than had hitherto been
the case. Managerialism, however, has its limits and any consideration of
deficits in control has to address these.
The chosen vehicle by which the government and its advisors chose to
improve the system of delivery in Lambeth (as well as other high street
crime boroughs) lay in making local crime-prevention teams develop a
barrage of strategies designed to address the problem. Many of these
involved serious duplication with other strategies. Thus, in addition to
having to deliver a Crime and Disorder Audit along with an associated
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Conclusion
Notes
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Chapter 10
Conclusion
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Conclusion
they engage (the use of illegal drugs and their love affair with casual
undiscriminating violence).
My point is this. If we begin with this interpretation and apply it to
make sense of the problem of street robbery, it is easy to see how a certain
array of solutions follows through from the prognosis it offers. For if the
problem to the inside (the good society) is that posed to it by a lawless
predatory outside (the underclass), then self-evidently the policy
response must be to defend the good society from its outside. So a
particular set of ‘solutions’ follows logically through from the prognosis
offered. One would include intensifying the defences of the good society
in order better to protect it from the enemy it confronts. Another would
be to heighten its vigilance in order better to know what its outside is
doing. These represent the kind of proactive measures that could be put
in place. There are, needless to say, more reactive responses. These
typically coalesce around the metaphor of a war. These would include
taking the appropriate steps to ensure that the outside is beaten back; or
alternatively, is taken out of circulation in ways that prevent its lethal
contagion. If this sounds too simple, let us consider just how far this
prognosis logically predicts the kinds of solutions we have seen actively
posed and proposed to the problem of street crime in recent years.
For intensifying defences read the gated community, situational
crime prevention and what Davis has identified as the pervasive
‘militarisation’ of public space that has followed through in its wake
(Davis 1990). For heightened vigilance read pervasive surveillance
evident in the rise of CCTV. As for ‘beating back’ the threat, read zero-
tolerance policing and increasing levels of stop-and-search directed at
the young and, not least, black communities. As for policies that embody
the need to remove the ‘outsider’ from circulation, read longer prison
sentences, the renaissance of incapacitation and – as an inevitable
outcome – the highest prison population in postwar British history.
The move from definition to solutions conceived in these terms
appears entirely logical and, to many, entirely just. After all, if the street
robber is an alien, and a dangerous one at that, then clearly all the policy
options outlined above must make good sense. Not only are they
workable solutions, but they are, in terms of this line of reasoning, also
socially just in that ‘just deserts’ are seen to be delivered to those for
whom harsh punishment is no more than deserved. Given the punitive
nature of our times, these policies also appear to chime well with the
needs of law and order that the public appears to demand from its
populist and authoritarian New Labour government.
My problem with this interpretation is that I do not accept the
prognosis offered and remain deeply concerned about the array of
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policies that are touted as its ‘logical’ solution. I oppose the prognosis on
the basis that, far from being an accurate representation of the truth of
street crime, it presents an untruth. As I will argue, street robbery, far
from being a problem society faces, is on the contrary a problem of our
society and of its contemporary organization and structure. The robber is
not an independent variable, but a dependent one. Just as I hold the
interpretation of the problem to be suspect, so I also remain deeply
worried about the kind of solutions that have been proposed to address
it, as these are shaped within and by this interpretation. My worries here
not only relate to the fact that many of the solutions are inappropriate
and consequently will not accomplish what is expected of them, but also
that they fail because it is my contention they are unjust. Finally, I remain
opposed to this orthodoxy because in its hegemony it reinforces a kind of
common sense about crime that is dangerous. In particular, it reinforces
the illusion that crime is associated with the most marginal sections of
our society, while absolving society and the powerful from their role in
creating the preconditions in which street crime flourishes.
When I argue that we need to conceive the problem of street robbery
as a problem of our society, my aim is to challenge the view that follows
from the dominant orthodoxy, which – as we have seen – is to consider
the robber as an outsider. Against this interpretative orthodoxy, I want to
restate the case for a criminology of sameness not of essentualized difference, a
criminology that recognizes the street robber as product of our society
and of the way in which our free-market capitalist society is organized.
In so doing, I want to suggest that the issue I am addressing is not a
minor squabble over semantics. On the contrary, it is fundamental to
how we perceive and ultimately engage with the problems street
robbery poses.
My disagreement with those who believe that the street robber is an
alien outsider are developed in Chapter 4, which examined and
criticized the forms of underclass thinking upon which this inter-
pretation rests. The terms of my critique were to suggest, in opposition to
such approaches, that they systematically overstated the otherness of the
street robber while losing sight of the many characteristics that unified
this figure with the society that had in effect produced him as a folk devil.
Most street robbers, as we saw, possessed moral consciousness, most did
not conceive their future in terms of a criminal career, and none of them
was driven to street robbery by the demands of a chaotic drug culture.
More to the point, as my own research confirmed, to understand why
they came to street robbery it was profoundly important to recognize
how far their need to possess the consumer objects they sought to
appropriate was a function of free-market capitalism and the cult of
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This is a good description of the world the street robber inhabits. Their
‘mutilated’ world, and ours as well. The inhumanity of free-market
capitalism is that its way of being sets in motion the logic of consumption
that establishes the basis for the consuming desire that underpins the
contemporary problem of street crime. As we have also seen, its com-
modifying logic has helped to eliminate alternatives that might negate
this desire.
What really separates the street robber from young people in general,
however, is not the will to consume or the dominance of consumption
rites in their life. All young people, it could be argued, are subject to and
subjugated by this consuming imperative. What really separates them is
access to those avenues where consumption can be gratified legitimately.
At the end of the day, it is their subjugation to consumption in addition to
being situated in a socio-economic context where consumption rites can
not be legitimately satisfied that provokes the Mertonian adaptation that
resolves itself into street robbery. In other words, by consumption
pursued through illegal means. If the free market has subjugated young
street robbers at the point of their desire, it also excludes them forcefully
from those avenues that might allow consumption desires to be sub-
limated legitimately. As it incorporates them in one way, so it system-
atically excludes them in others.
Jock Young has recently and powerfully drawn attention to this
strange kind of society (Young 2001), a society that simultaneously
expels the very beings it incorporates in other ways. His powerful
metaphor is that of bulimia and the bulimic society. This condition, he
argues, is not simply a pathology of young women whose lives revolve
around rituals characterized by eating and vomiting. This trait also
describes well the operation of the contemporary free-market society. On
the one hand, it opens its arms to all, promising a future of eternal
material bliss. On the other, its social relations systematically ensure that
many are excluded from this material dream by being denied the
opportunity through which it can be appropriated.
The street robbers I studied in Lambeth illustrate this contradiction
starkly in their lives. They want and desire the good life as it is pre-
packaged in its commodified form by the culture industries. They want
to move onwards and outwards; they can visualize exit strategies. At the
same time this life is not achievable within the terms of the class position
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Conclusion
they have been allocated, in the very areas where they are forced to
grow up.
It is this feature of late capitalism, its pathological bulimic quality, that
distinguishes it from its earlier incarnation. And it is this feature that
makes the kind of street robbery we see in areas such as Lambeth today
different from that which prevailed in earlier times. In earlier phases of
its development, capitalism simply produced a class which was totally
excluded. This is the class of poor people studied by people like
Mayhew. In such an exclusionary order, robbery was not conditioned by
the need to construct an elaborate lifestyle, but emerged as a pragmatic
response to terrible patterns of deprivation and poverty. For those with
nothing, it really did mark a survival choice. What you appropriated
could be exchanged for the bare necessities of life. It could be observed
that this is a perennial feature of poor societies. It is and remains a source
of livelihood for those who have none.
While certainly located in poorer socio-economic groups, the street
robbers of today are different because they rob not in order to provide the
means for survival but to construct through the appropriation of
desirable goods a lifestyle and through this an identity they conceive as
essential to their wellbeing. To look at this another way, you do not need
to steal mobile phones in order to eat, you do so in order to accumulate
the appropriate symbolic capital through which being – as it is defined
within consumer capitalism – is accorded meaning. Yes it is still about
questions of survival, but the terms by which survival is now registered
have changed significantly.
At this point, let me attempt to offset a criticism I can sense being
directed at this kind of analysis. This would be to suggest that I am
presenting the street robber as someone who in effect does not make
choices. My analysis, it could be claimed, denies their humanity even in
my attempt to restate it. It does so by presenting an over-socialized view
of the subject. In terms of this critique, I could be considered to have
produced a vision of an individual who has no capacity to exercise free
will, and who is simply a product of forces acting over and beyond them.
My response to this would be to return to the analysis I offered in
earlier chapters which, while attempting to understand what might be
considered the deeper structuring forces that propel young people to
crime, also examined processes of differential association as these were
also experienced. As this analysis made clear, the route-way towards
crime was by no means simple. Choices could be made. There was no
one-way street. The making of choices, however, was always, as I also
sought to establish, initiated within parameters established by the nature
of the world in which they lived and the round of their lives. These were,
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from the outset, also curtailed in terms of the possibilities they made
available or obviated. A particular configuration of forces, for example,
could well make the road to street crime a likely choice for a particular
young man, especially when this configuration involves finding yourself
in the proximity of already existing outlaw cultures, a highly developed
illegal and grey market, and a general cultural tolerance of street crime
among your peer group. It could well be, though, that even in the context
of such a world the choice to commit crime was not made. Maybe some
significant person could and did make a difference. Nothing, in other
words, is inevitable. Most young people, after all, do not go on to become
street criminals.
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better. All it typically does is brutalize better those who have already
been brutalized.
Given that the majority of street robbers are under 18, it could be
remarked that if Lord Woolf’s call to imprison these was taken at face
value, the government would not only be pushing more young people
into precisely the kind of places they need to avoid, but it would also
mean abandoning one of the few government initiatives that was
actually evidence-based. This was the truth, stated clearly in the 1998
Crime and Disorder Act, that held that locking young people away was
ultimately a counterproductive thing to do and consequently needed to
be avoided where possible. This truth was embraced in the creation of
Youth Offending Teams which had as their mission a clear commitment
to ensure that under-18s were dealt with through non-punitive measures
where at all possible. Promoting Orwellian double-think is of course
something all governments engage in, not least in pursuit of demon-
strating effective statecraft to their sceptical electorates. Quite why New
Labour should choose to abandon one of the few intelligent planks of its
penal policy, however, beggars belief. What it does suggest is just how
cravenly abject the government can be to the right-wing tabloids and
their distorted perspectives on law and order (Tonry 2004).
Next there is the vexed question of whether or not a prison sentence is
a just punishment for street robbery. Now clearly if a person is assaulted
and if serious injuries are sustained, then a good case could be made for
such a sentence. As our research in Lambeth indicated, however, a prison
sentence, far from being used as a means of last resort for the worst street
crime offenders, had become the single preferred way of addressing the
problem, specifically for those over the age of 18. Indeed, as the figures
graphically indicate, if you were black you would invariably receive a
prison sentence, even if the offence was your first (Hallsworth and Richie
2002). Indeed, a sentence of incarceration for street robbery in Lambeth
was far more likely than the possibility of receiving one for assault. This
might well be read as indicative of the success of a project built on a
politics of judicial vengeance, but from where I stand it appears sympto-
matic of a sense of reason that has gone astray.
The adherents of lock-down solutions might do well to consider the
material cost of the incarceration policies they want to sanction. A mobile
phone costs around £100. It costs over £35,000 per year to imprison an
offender for stealing one. There is no reason to suppose that a single
prison sentence will be the last for those sent to prison the first time
round. Incarceration is not, in other words, value for money or money
well spent. If private corporations operated the same way, they would
undeniably be closed down.
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Conclusion
Finally, let us consider the implications that follow though from that
other great growth industry, situational crime prevention. Is it possible
to solve the problem of street crime by aspiring simply to design the
problem away? Though I remain sceptical of situational approaches, not
least because these are too often disarticulated from a social crime-
prevention agenda, there is certainly a case to be made for suggesting
that this approach offers a better chance of success than the repressive
measures considered above. Having made this point, it must be noted
that the success of an intervention strategy is measured not by what it
may promise but by what it concretely achieves. Despite all its talk of
identifying ‘rational’ and ‘pragmatic’ solutions to problems such as
street robbery, and despite the huge sums of money invested in
implementing such solutions in relation to it, situational crime
prevention has failed spectacularly.
As I argued in Chapter 9, the kinds of situational defences that could
have worked were never implemented, for example immobilizing
mobile phones after they had been stolen. At the same time, expensive
interventions that did not work were implemented with a recklessness
that was extraordinary. And so we find ourselves today inhabiting a
country subject to more pervasive CCTV than any other society in the
world – without any tangible evidence that this technology could and
does prevent street robbery. As with zero-tolerance policing and other
reflex strategies such as curfew, what this particular instance of
‘pragmatic’ what-works criminology represents is less a rational ‘joined-
up’ response to a particular problem and far more a symbolic, politically
motivated empty gesture with sinister overtones.
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174
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Note
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Bibliography
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