The Concept Of Cultural Criminology And Its Functions

The concept of cultural criminology is strongly rooted within the phenomena of crime, deviance, and transgression, in which it positions itself as a response to the abject failure of mainstream criminology unprepared for the arrival of late modernity. Over the past two decades, the discipline itself has protruded as an esteemed perspective of crime and crime control, in which it stresses the importance of meaning, symbolism, and power relations in explaining crime and deviance. Including a heavy mix of distinct theoretical, methodological and interventionist approaches, it places criminality and its control squarely in the context of culture; that is, it views crime and the agencies and institutions of crime control as cultural products or as creative constructs. Given the idea that cultural criminology exists to challenge the more established criminological approaches, we must understand that its sole existence broadens the horizons of what constitutes committing a crime; but does it represent a new intellectual endeavour, or is it just a logical elaboration of previous work on deviant subcultures? In order to discuss this, we must look at cultural criminology’s key themes and values and how its core lies within elements of past criminology and present contemporary contexts.

At a fundamental level, cultural criminology explores the convergence of cultural and criminal processes in contemporary social life (Ferrell, 1999). This exploration is drawn from the crux of existing cultural studies that try to determine how and why crime may be impacted by culture. It seeks to bring back sociological theory to criminology; that is, to continue to reintegrate the role of culture, social construction, human meaning, creativity, class and power relations into the criminological project. This distinct blend of sociological criminology has been operative since the early 1970’s- originating as an amalgamation of two vital orientations; the work of the infamous Chicago school and the distinctive Birmingham School of Cultural Studies. These schools sprouted both Marxist-inspired studies of youth culture and moral panics alongside early work on the subcultures of prisons and delinquency (Young, 2011), becoming the root of reconsidering some of the many links between cultural and criminal processes. Scholars reconceptualised the nature of social control and resistance, documenting evidence of class, illicit subcultures plus media representations of crime and victimization, to argue that these factors significantly alter the way individuals behave. Crime itself morphed from a mundane activity to a polar reaction against the mundane. It was no longer a rational cost-benefit analysis when committing crime, but much rather an exploration of how committing crime made the individual feel. It was crucial for cultural criminology that the emotive nature of human actions and experiences had to be understood in the context of economic globalization, the rise of neoliberal ideologies, and increasing socio-economic insecurity. They are, however, also focused on conceptualising many transgressive behaviours and documenting the way meaning and power are negotiated and displayed through the efflorescence of mass-produced imagery.

A second starting point for cultural criminology was also emerging in the form of interactionist theory and labelling theory. It was argued that the nature and consequences of crime were not inherent to an individual criminal act; instead, they were largely determined by others’ reactions to it- that is, the perceptions and the meanings attributed to the act or individual. Reiterating Becker - “Deviance is created by society. Deviance is not a quality of the act the person commits, but rather a consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to an offender. ” Cultural criminology coincides with labelling theory by saying that there is a creation of power when characterising certain behaviour as deviant. There is also a suggestion that the powerful not only stigmatise the deviant but criminalise them through the use of the law. It involves the cultural process of criminalisation, where the powerful are seen to define through culture, how and what we see, and therefore impact how we view the behaviour of others by filtering these definitions down to law. These linkages between crime, culture, and power began to form a basis for ethnographic research later seen in the likes of “Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The creation of the Mods and Rockers”, “Ethnography at The Edge: Crime, Deviance and Field Research”, and “Outsiders”. All of these texts became crucial in explaining how situations of esteemed self-destruction (e. g. committing crime) incorporate cultural components of style, dress, and language and how popular cultures such as art and music are often criminalised by legal authorities and moral entrepreneurs. There is the suggestion that deviance is, in fact, impersonal and so succumbing to deviance is just an enforcement of a stereotypical deviant culture. Becker hints at disagreeing with the morals and reasoning of those who make and enforce the rules, using the term ‘outsider’ to describe a rule-breaker who accepts the ‘deviant’ label and therefore views themselves to be outside the mainstream society. Cultural criminologists became keen to escape the limitations associated with the existing scholarship on ‘crime and the media’ and so offered the explanation of crime as a rejection of deterministic ‘background theories’ in favour of the more emotive ‘foreground’ circumstances.

In regards to cultural criminology improving our understandings of crime and deviance, we must look at examples of criminal phenomena in which there are undeniable benefits occurring from this emergent criminology. Changing patterns of illicit drug use was rife in the 1990s, with a lifetime prevalence of drug-use by 16-29-year olds increasing from 28% in 1992 to 50% in 2000. A sense of ‘normalisation’ seemed to occur in which there was an accommodation, acknowledgment, or recognition of a minority group or minority behaviour within a larger group or society. Public opinion changed on drugs; you could no longer attain drug use to determinants such as socio-economic class, poverty, and unemployment, but much rather a leisurely weekend activity. This non-problematic use of drugs upturned many vital studies, incurring that drug use was down to individual pathology, peer pressure, and structural determinants, and as the move from deviant to mainstream happened, there was a realisation that drugs as a motive in everyday life had become and will remain normal. Cultural aspects of drug consumption began to take centre, in terms of cultural meanings, styles and representations of drug-related attitudes, behaviours and social groups- and how popular and subcultural worlds come to be problematised and criminalised. If you take Mike Presdee’s ‘Cultural Criminology and the Carnival of Crime’, heavy influence is placed on cultural criminology to explain the ongoing liberalisation of drugs and alcohol. It is said that, whilst proponents of normalisation argue that illicit recreational drug use is moving from subcultural to mainstream popular culture, and whilst critics of normalisation maintain the transgressive nature of drug use, the notion of carnival can facilitate accommodation for both in contemporary performative society. Cultural criminology manages to stress the role of collective experience and individual agency when understanding the motivations for consumption. Crime has little to do with level-headed decision-making or material gain, but a lot to do with combined emotionality and rationality. It can, therefore, push for a consideration of both historical and socio-cultural contexts and use emotional subjectivity to be accurate in research. Cultural criminology opens itself up to different realities when looking at more traditional stances of crime and applying them to current day society. It is useful because it is flexible.

One of the main criticisms of cultural criminology, persistent since its inception, is that this perspective pays insufficient analytical attention to the politics of gender. Although founders accepted heavy influence of feminist methodologies including the notion of criminological verstehen, gender often seems to be superficially added on. Its significance wavers as criminology has been more inclined to hold masculinity and activities associated with it at its centre. Although cultural criminology places great emphasis on emotion and experience, there is the suggestion that women are just mimicking the activities studied and associated with males. Such theories tend to overemphasize structure at the expense of agency and alone are insufficient to explain why women participate in organized crime. Feminist criminology should be seen as a chance for expansion; when actions are often seen uncritically underneath the male gaze, we must understand that there may not be too dissimilar motivations for women.

The need for cultural criminology is situated within understanding human social behaviour, in which behaviour is viewed as powerful, transgressive or deviant. The most vital piece of research on this is ‘The Chav Phenomenon’ in which a singular subculture is deemed to represent the decline of the ‘underclass’ in the UK and interlink with the rise of the so-called ‘chav’. The ‘chav’ represents a popular reconfiguration of the underclass idea. However, we are also keen to note the way in which the concept of social marginality is reconfigured in this substitution … the discourse of the underclass is turned crucially upon a pathology in the working classes’ relations to production and socially productive labour. Youth culture screens lots of individual factors such as hyperactivity and impulsive reactions, however, why are these groups constantly associated with threat? In appearance terms, this chav subculture observes that differentiates are; dress sense (mainly tracksuits); 'bling' jewellery; and basic loitering in public places. Fashion may be observed as exclusivity yet making fashion synonymous with criminality should not be the aim. Instead, once we move beyond the attire, we can see something more of the social structure. In keeping with Cohen’s ‘Moral Panic’ thesis (1972), British media heightened the threat via clothing and offered that something as simple as a ‘hoodie’ could be caught up with the likes of mugging, stealing and killing. Young men are exposed to aesthetic exclusion and so cultural criminology helps to distinguish between the youthful innocent and the youthful criminal. It is less about how your sense of style presents you as a criminal and more about the adrenaline-fuelled thrill of committing crime. An anecdote from Sutherland (1949) exclaims I know a ‘professional shoplifter’, his house is well maintained, his car is top of the range. He, like businessmen, wears a suit to work, but in his case not because his choice of employment demands it. Rather, he does it because it distracts CCTV operators and the security staff. He knows that few are likely to closely scrutinise well-groomed man, even if he is stealing thousands of pounds worth of property. ’ - Deviant leisure

Cultural criminology seeks to reconnect the roots of sociological criminology, to its origins in phenomenological sociology, and to develop a theory that can fully comprehend the conditions of late modernity in which we now find ourselves. It is useful when vast social problems such as illicit drug use come to head, opening new doorways for a cultural explanation. As mentioned previously, it is flexible in terms of social adaptation, however, it becomes difficult to explain crime through the lens of gender. This means that there needs to be a greater emphasis on differential factors that contribute to crime within the community. It does, however, make use of methodological approaches and techniques often thrown out by mainstream academic criminology such as ethnographies, participant observation, and discourse analysis. It encourages the nature of change and thus aids in the development of a broader criminology. With its interdisciplinary foundations and emphasis on meaning, mediated representation, and style, it may also hold out the possibility of significantly expanding the analytic range and substantive scope of future criminological scholarship.