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The Poverty of a Classless Criminology-The American Society of Criminology 199 1 Presidential Address

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The Poverty of a Classless Criminology-The American Society of Criminology 199 1 Presidential Address THE POVERTY OF A CLASSLESS CRIMINOLOGY-THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF CRIMINOLOGY 199 1 PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS JOHN HAGAN* University of Toronto When criminologists write of the “Myth of Social Class and Criminality” (Tittle et al., 1978) or ask “What’s Class Got to Do With It?’ (Jensen and Thompson, 1990), they express a skepticism about the connection of class with crime that distinguishes them from other scholars as well as laypersons. Popular discourse of earlier eras included frequent references to the “dangerous” and “criminal classes,” and scholarly discourse today features discussions of an “underclass,” which is assumed to prominently include criminals. The dangerous and criminal class concepts probably are heard infrequently today because they were used in such an invidious and pejorative fashion. The underclass conceptualization has the potential to be used in the same way, even though it was invented to call attention to processes of disadvantagement and subordination. Thus, new as well as old depictions of class and crime can prove problematic, and their uses demand careful scrutiny. However, the simple omission of class from the study of crime would impoverish criminology. CONVERSATIONS ABOUT CLASS AND CRIME Riesman (1964) describes sociology as a “conversation between the classes.” Although “conversations” linking class and crime predate both modem sociology and criminology, this metaphor usefully highlights the lay- ers of meaning that are often communicated in discussions of class and crime. Discussions of criminal or dangerous classes are traced by Silver (1 967) to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Paris and London (see also Gillis, 1989; Ignatieff, 1978; Tombs, 1980), and they were common as well in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Canada and the United States (Boritch and Hagan, 1987; Monkkonen, 1981). Daniel Defoe (173O:lO-11) wrote of eighteenth- century London that “the streets of the City are now the Places of Danger,” *The writing of this address was supported by a Killam Research Fellowship. Gwynne Nettler stimulated many of my thoughts about the topic of this address in ways that go beyond what I can formally reference. I am grateful to Fiona Kay for research and editorial assistance, and to my colleagues, A.R. Gillis and David Brownfield, for helpful comments. I alone assume responsibility for views expressed. CRIMINOLOGY VOLUME30 NUMBER1 1992 1 2 HAGAN and Charles Brace (1872:29) warned nearly a century and a half later, in The Dangerous Classes of New York,that let but law lift its hand from them for a season, or let the civilizing influ- ences of American life fail to reach them, and, if the opportunity afforded, we should see an explosion from this class which might leave the city in ashes and blood. As Silver (1967:4) makes clear, the dangerous or criminal classes referred primarily to the unattached and unemployed, and to their associations with crime. Historians continue to write about conceptions of the dangerous and crimi- nal classes of earlier periods and places, while popular and scholarly discus- sions of contemporary affairs refer to the “underclass.” Myrdal (1963) introduced discussion of the underclass to draw attention to persons driven to the economic margins of modem society. Marks (1991) has detailed the development of the concept of the urban underclass, calling particular atten- tion to the place of crime within it. Marks (1991) notes that Auletta (1982:49) distinguishes four distinct ele- ments of the underclass: “hostile street and career criminals, skilled entrepre- neurs of the underground economy, passive victims of government support and the severely traumatized,” while Lemann (1986:41) characterizes this class in terms of “poverty, crime, poor education, dependency, and teenage out-of-wedlock childbearing.” Often race also is embedded in these charac- terizations, leading to debate about the extent to which the U.S.underclass is a black underclass. But what is most striking in these discussions is the extent to which the modem underclass, like its historical predecessors described by Silver (1967), is defined by the association of the unattached and unemployed with crime. Marks (1991:454) asks, “Is . criminality the major ingredient of. underclass status?” Her concern is that, “the under- class has been transformed from surplus and discarded labor into an exclusive group of black urban terrorists.” DECLASSIFYING CRIME There are scientific as well as ideological reasons to be skeptical of the modem linkage between class and crime in the concept of the underclass. Gans (1990:272) argues that this new concept is itself “dangerous” because by focusing on crime and other nonnormative behaviors in discussing the underclass, “researchers tend to assume that the behavior patterns they report are caused by norm violations on the part of area residents and not by the conditions under which they are living, or the behavioral choices open to them as a result of these conditions.” Gans concludes that the effect is to identify and further stigmatize a group as “the undeserving poor.” However, this criticism surely is unfounded in its association with William PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS 3 Julius Wilson’s (1987) discussion of the underclass in The Truly Disadvun- raged. This book focuses on concentrations of joblessness among the ghetto poor as explicit causes of crime and violence in these communities. Wilson (1 99 1: 12) is also careful to make clear that his thesis is not confined to black American ghettoes, noting that, “the concept ‘underclass’ or ‘ghetto poor’ can be theoretically applied to all racial and ethnic groups, and to different societies if the conditions specified in the theory are met.” Wilson’s work has stimulated important new research on urban crime and poverty (e.g., Mat- sueda and Heimer, 1987; Sampson, 1987), and he (1991:6) worries that “any crusade to abandon the concept of underclass, however defined, could result in premature closure of ideas just as important new studies on the inner-city ghetto, including policy-oriented studies, are being generated.” Wilson (1991) interchanges the term “ghetto poor” for “underclass” in his recent writing. Meanwhile, the scientific utility of some uses of the underclass concept is also open to question, at least for the purposes of theorizing about crime. Insofar as the conceptualization of the underclass includes within it the cul- tural (e.g., attitudes and values) and structural (e.g., joblessness) factors assumed to cause crime, as well as crime itself, it may be little more than a diffuse tautology. And it may indeed be this feature of some discussions of the underclass, like the dangerous and criminal class conceptualizations before it, that has engendered skepticism in criminology and limited our understanding of connections between class and crime. FROM CLASS AND CRIME TO STATUS AND DELINQUENCY Prominent theories of criminogenesis also emphasize the harsh class cir- cumstances experienced by the most desperate and disreputable segments of the population (see Hirschi, 1972; Matza, 1966), and they causally connect these adverse class conditions with serious crime (e.g., Cloward and Ohlin, 1960; Cohen, 1955; Colvin and Pauly, 1983; Merton, 1938; Miller, 1958; Shaw and MacKay, 1942). However, in so doing these theories separately identify class conditions and criminal behavior as distinct and independent phenomena. The correlation proposed in these theories is largely taken for granted in ethnographic research (Anderson, 1978; Hagedorn, 1988; Howell, 1973; Liebow, 1967; Monroe and Goldman, 1988; Rose, 1987; Sullivan, 1989), and it also. is observed in most if not all areal studies (e.g., from Chilton [ 19641 to Sampson and Groves [ 19891). But the correlation of class and crime is only weakly if at all reflected in self-report analyses based on surveys of individual adolescents attending school (e.g., Tittle et al., 1978; Weis, 1987), which has led to calls for the abandonment of class analyses of crime. Since the latter self-report studies 4 HAGAN are at variance not only with lay and scholarly theories of criminogenesis, but also with ethnographic and areal research, there might seem grounds to sim- ply reject the former method and its results as artifactual. However, doing so risks underestimating the valuable role that self-report studies have played in the advancement of criminological theory. Self-report methodology (e.g., from Nye and Short [1957] through Hindelang et al. [1981]) has facilitated systematic and extensive measurement of explanatory variables, while freeing researchers from reliance on official records of criminality; and this method- ology has underwritten classic contributions to theory testing in criminology (e.g., Hirschi, 1969; Matsueda, 1982). In such efforts, self-report survey researchers have usefully disentangled the concepts of class and crime. In doing so they implicitly have questioned the taken-for-granted nature of associations of crime and poverty in the densely descriptive ethnographic studies, as well as the mixtures of measures of poverty and crime that sometimes tautologically and ecologically have con- founded areal studies. Self-report survey researchers rightly insist on independent measures of class and crime that can provide the building blocks for testing explanations of crime. Literary or statistical descriptions of crime- prone areas, the modem sociological analogues to Dickens’s and Mayhew’s early depictions of the dangerous and criminal classes of London, are not enough for
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