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Social Democpacy and the Crime Question in Britain

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Social Democpacy and the Crime Question in Britain SOCIAL DEMOCPACY AND THE CRIME QUESTION IN BRITAIN : 1945 to 1980 Submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Centre for Criminological and Socio-Legal Studies University of Sheffield by Ian Taylor October 1981 Abstract This thesis has the twin purposes of (a) providing an historical narrative of the evolution of social democratic, conservative and liberal approaches to crime in Britain since the war, and (b) (in part through this historical investigation) beginning to reconstruct the social-democratic form of "socialist-criminology", in both itsacademic and political versions, for present and future use. The thesis is therefore organised in part as a chronological investigation. Chapters One, Two, Three, Five and Six focus in part on the general development of the crime debates in the 1940's, the middle 1950's, the early 1960's, the late 1960's to early 1970's, and the late 1970's respectively. But they also depart from a purely chronological presentation in order to allow a more detailed interrogation of particular topics in popular, political and academic debate. Thus, Chapter One attempts to describe the general character of social democratic criminology in the form it assumed in the 1940's, with an eye to its longer term effects in the later post-war period. Chapter Two contains an analytical essay on the responses of the different ideologies to Homicide and Capital Punishment. Chapter Three departs from its narrative to examine the re-emergence of the youth problem in the early 1960's as a major social issue. Chapter Five devolves around an essay on the rapid development of the major institutions of State power (particularly, social work, the police and prisons) during the late 1960's and the early 1970's; and Chapter Six, with its historical focus on the late 1970's, contains two other essays: (a) on the rise of the radical Right and its critique of criminal justice and social welfare systems, and (b) an analysis of the relationship between Conservative and Social-democratic ideology and the particular questions of the criminality of the powerful and so-called organised crime. Chapters Four and Seven depart from this form of presentation. Chapter Four provides an account and a critique of social democratic approaches to crimes against women and the criminality of women. Chapter Seven is the programmatic conclusion to the critique of social democratic criminology provided earlier: it is an attempted first move, in seriously changed circumstances (at the end of the post-war boom), to sketch out the elements of a reconstructed socialist criminology. CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE CRIME AND THE POST-WAR SETTLEMENT 1945-1951 11 1.1 Introduction : "Social Democracy" in the 1940's 11 1.2 Labourism and Crime in the 1940's 25 1.3 Labour and the Treatment Professionals 41 1.4 Social Reconstruction and Crime Control 47 1.5 Conservative Criminology in the 1940's 58 1.6 Labour and the Police 62 1.7 "The Climax of Labourism" 68 CHAPTER TWO CRIME AND AFFLUENCE 78 2.1 The Reality of Affluence 79 2.2 Images of Affluence 82 2.3 The Conservative Governments of 1951 to 1964 91 Penal and Social Policy 2.4 An Essay on the Politics of Capital Punishment 100 2.4(a) The Conventional Accounts of Abolition 100 2.4(b) The Inevitability of Liberal Reform 112 2.4(c) Reformist Conservatism and Capital Punishment 116 2.4(d) Real Conservatism and Capital Punishment 119 2.4(e) Social Democracy and Homicide 128 2.4(f) Homicide, Non-Natural Death and Ideology 135 Chapter Two Footnotes 145 CHAPTER THREE THE DISCIPLINED CONSENSUS AND THE YOUTH QUESTION 151 3.1 The Fabians and 'Treatment' 154 3.2 The Political Character of Professional Liberalism 164 3.3 Radical Liberalism and the Critique of Institutions 171 3.4 Conservatism and the Delinquent Generation 176 3.5 The Youth Problem as a Metaphor 187 P age 3.6 The Juvenile Labour Market 1950-68 191 3.7 Three Moments of Moral Panic 201 3.7(a) The Teddy Boy 1953-1957 202 3.7(b) The Mods and Rockers 1964-1966 210 3.7(c) The Skinheads 1968-1971 214 Chapter Three : Footnotes 227 CHAPTER FOUR WOMEN, SEXUALITY AND THE CRIME QUESTION 231 4.1 The Problem That Has No Name 235 4.2 The Moment of Wolfenden Reformism 246 4.3 Conservatism and Social Democracy on the Family, Class and Patriarchy in the Post-War Period 252 4.4 Contradiction and Change in Sextial: Divisions 257 4.5 The Delinquency of Girls 266 4.6 Prostitution 274 4.6(a) Ideologies and Prostitution 278 4.7 Rape and Sexual Harassment 293 4.8 The Challenge of Permissiveness 305 4.8(a) The Radical Right on Permissiveness 306 4.8(b) Social Democracy and Permissiveness 310 4.8(c) A Permissive Society? 313 4.9 The Marketing and Control of Sexuality 317 4.10 The Social Effects of Pornography and Mass Media 322 Permissiveness Chapter Four : Footnotes 329 CHAPTER FIVE : SOCIAL CONTROL AND THE STRONG STATE 339 5.1 The Expansion of the State 345 5.1(a) Economic Management 350 5.1(b) Socialisation of Costs 351 5.1(c) Maintenance of Social Peace 352 5.2 The State and Technology 354 5.3 The Local State 358 5.4 State Control of Youth to 1979 368 Page 5.5 Prisons: Rehabilitation to Positive Custody 393 5.5(a) Long-term and Life Sentences 401 5.5(b) "Chinese Boxes" 404 5.5(c) Prison Medecine 407 5.6 Restructuring Policing, 1962-1980 409 Chapter Five : Footnotes 428 CHAPTER SIX : CRIME, POPULISM AND THE ADVANCE OF THE RIGHT 439 6.1 The Crisis of Capital and the State 439 6.2 Thatcherism 446 6.3 The Magistracy and the Right 464 6.4 The Magistrates' Campaign against the 1969 Act 469 6.5 The Expansion of "Secure Accommodation" 473 6.6 A Right-Wing "Sociology" of Youth 477 6.7 The Thatcher Government and Youth Control 485 6.8 Conservatism and Real Crime: an essay on organised 494 crime and the crimes of corporations Chapter Six : Footnotes 524 CHAPTER SEVEN RECONSTRUCTING SOCIALIST CRIMINOLOGY 533 7.1 The Riots of 1981 533 7.2 The Incoherence of the Two Liberalisms 541 7.3(a) Social Democracy as Authoritarian Statism 546 7.3(b) Social Democracy and Reform 550 7.3(c) Social Democracy and an Alternative Social Strategy 555 7.3(d) Social Democracy and Commonsense 564 7.4 Agencies for a Transitional Socialist Criminology 567 7.4(a) The Prison Movement: Rehabilitation, 569 Abolition, Justice 7.4(b) The Police Critics 584 7.4(c) The Legal Critics 599 7.4(d) The Women's Movement and Law Enforcement 616 7.5 Democratisation and Socialist Reconstruction 633 Page 7.6 Right-wing Criminology: a Class Rhetoric about 638 Social Disorder Chapter Seven : Footnotes 644 APPENDIX ONE : THE AETIOLOGY OF HOMICIDE IN BRITAIN 652 A Crime Between Family and Friends 660 Homicide and the Courtroom 661 Capital Punishment and Firearms 664 APPENDIX TWO : Leaflets issued to students and staff by 669 the University of Sheffiled November 1980 to January 1981 BIBLIOGRAPHY 674 -1- INTR UCT ION This thesis does not take the usual form of doctoral dissertations in social science, and some explanation - and possibly even special pleading - is required. The thesis began life in 1975 as I began to produce the first draft of a book I had just suggested to Macmillans. The idea of this book was to try to trace the influences of social democratic ideology, in particular, on crime policy throughout the post-war period, and the primary objective was to try to construct a rather more specific and concrete picture of the relation- ship between Labour Party policy thinking and the developnent of what may be called tithe welfare approach' t to crime than is currently available in the literature. Much of the existing literature on post-war crime policy was (and is) merely celebratory of the welfare approach (as in the work of Howard Jones, Barbara Wootton and others), whilst other more critical work (like the work of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, now published in Policing the Crisis) was and is pre-occupied with slightly different questions (for example, with doing a critique of existing assumptions about the character of the state and also with advancing an account of changes in the structure of domination, or ihegeonyut). Neither approach to the question of social democratic crime policy and social policy generally was immediately useful, in my view, in confronting the urgent problem increasingly identified during the 1970's, especially by the right-wing commentators - that the welfare approach had failed as a form of crime control and as a precursor of viable social order. Despite the massive expansion of' the social work apparatus and the unification of all social work agencies in 1970, and despite the passage of the liberal Childreris and Young Persons Act of 1969, juvenile and adult crime continued to increase exponentially. Crimes of violence, which are not -2- so prone to overreportage and are not so straightforwardly the product of changes in police practice as are the mundane property offences that make up the bulk of the criminal statistics, increased even more rapidly than these other of fences; and thus, although the question of crime and delinquency was obviously the subject of an anxious and heavily ideological coverage in the media, it was also clear that popular concern about rising crime was - in some senses - "real". But the existing approach in Labour Party circles, and amongst "social denlocratstt1 generally, seemed either to be to deny the reality of such concern or else, in acimowledging the reality of crime, to advocate even "more of the samett by way of State interventions and response.
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