On Matters Criminological: What say the Neo-Conservatives?

“Where there is discord may we bring harmony, where there is doubt may we bring faith, where there is despair may we bring hope”
(St. Francis of Asisi)

From its philosophical naissance, Neo-Conservatism repudiated and rejected the liberal democratic formulations that had theretofore permeated social scientific thought (such as moral relativism) and the belief that welfare-oriented social reform would significantly decrease the national crime rate: a result not of social inequality, but the growth of permissiveness and a dependency culture amongst those in reception of welfare benefits (Tierney, 2010). Capitol Hill’s atmosphere in the mid-1970s was of recrudescence in populist authoritarian ‘law and order politics’ that sought to restore the Neo-Classicist vision of a ‘voluntaristic criminality’, with its key concern of developing efficient crime control means, rather than questioning causality (McLaughlin, Muncie and Hughes, 2006). Criminality was seen as part of a group of prevalent social pathological phenomena, attributable to the ‘corrosive influence’ of the liberalist modern culture. In response to such nostalgic yearning for a return to a ‘Golden Age’, Horkheimer (1974) suggested that invocation of tradition was a demonstration that it had lost its substance: would returning to said ‘Golden Age’ not implicitly mean turning the clocks back on important social developments (e.g., the role of women in society, and family relationships)?

Neo-Conservatism elevated the moral culture of society to the status of ‘explanatory variable’ of long-term changes in the levels of criminality and disorder (McLaughlin and Muncie, 2008). The American political scientist and éminence grise James Q Wilson was one of the main exponents of Neo-Conservatism, and with George Kelling co-authored the ‘Broken Windows’ Thesis (Wilson and Kelling, 1982) which has become the sine qua non contribution to the debate on social disorganisation, informal social control and crime prevention (Crawford, 1998). This essay, through general comparison with Libertarianism (“Neo-Classicism”) and Left Realism, shall demonstrate the main principles of Neo-Conservatism, briefly outline the ‘Broken Windows’ thesis and attempt to highlight the main issues and controversies surrounding it.

1960s America saw two liberal democratic policy packages (New Frontier and Great Society) go through Congress as part of the ‘War on Poverty’, including measures to achieve equal opportunities, job training, and ameliorated housing conditions. Suffice it to say, without detailing the American Presidency, the 1970s saw the general shift to the left continue, Presidents Nixon impeached and Ford push through ‘moderate policies’ ad absurdum, thus setting the scene for the Neo-Conservative Reagan’s landslide victory. The 1980 defeat of Carter surprised no one, considering his loss of national and international support: many blamed his cautious leadership for the lack of economic improvement, but the Revolutionary Guard’s storming of the US embassy in Tehran and subsequent year long hostage situation (that only ended once he had lost the 1980 election) became his scandulum magnatum (Hirsch, Kett and Trefil, 1988). It is important to note that this jump to the right did not happen within a vacuum: the British political establishment had remained conservative for the better part of 30years, but the election of the (late) Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister in 1979 saw the Neo-conservative preoccupation with posited traditional morality and enforced social harmony take centre stage as she recited the prayer of St. Francis on her arrival at Downing Street, and slightly further afield, the controversial libertarian ‘Rogernomics’ of the New Zealand Labour government’s Finance Minister Roger Douglas: Newburn and Sparks (2004) drew attention to this ‘lively theoretical and practical export trade in crime control measures from across the Atlantic that had been blatantly obvious for decades’.

Margaret Hilda, Lady Thatcher

Rt Hon The Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven
LG OM PC FRS
(13 October 1925 – 8 April 2013)

Neo-Conservatism’s definition of crime developed Libertarianism’s violation of the ‘natural rights’ to include violations of law and acts that offend morality (White and Haines, 2008). It must be mentioned at this point that, like Classicism and to a certain extent Left Realism, the main focus was on street crime. Punishment was to act as a deterrent from breaking the law, and to be proportionate. It was recognised however, that not everyone would be deterred so, occasionally, the ‘deterrent’ would end up being the punishment: there had to be variables determining the decision to offend, concern with which leads us into Positivism as it held that crime could not be understood without taking into account the biological aetiology of offender predispositions to criminality, and that be it the theological ‘Original Sin’ or a secular Hobbesian theory of human nature, people are ‘inherently evil’ or flawed and that the criminal was the individual that, after a rational thought process, turned an open window into a window of opportunity for crime, but accepted that neither the ‘individual’s propensity to commit crimes’ nor his interior commitment to self control was homogenous (Gottfredson and Hirschi, 1987; Hobbes, 1651; Wilson and Hernstein, 1985; McLaughlin, Muncie and Hughes, 2006; Barlow, 1993; McLaughlin and Muncie, 2008).

Punishment, according to this approach, had also to be seen in regards of its impact on the establishment of moral harmony through treating ‘undesirables’ as pariahs: in this context, punishment was synonymous with retribution and, through implication, disproportionate to the offence as it was felt that punishment had a vital, symbolic role in community cohesion.

The concept of relative deprivation championed by the Left was ignored, but it was accepted that ineffective methods of policing had some degree of culpability. In view of a variety of more or less objective biological, socio-economic, political and technical constraints, any attempt at removing criminality’s root causes were depicted as utopian, despite the manufactured nature of many of these constraints, which made them, in principle, solvable. As a result there was a shift in focus away from such utopian pursuits towards ‘marginal gains’ that were compatible with the socio-economic constraints (McLaughlin and Muncie, 2008). Wilson and Kelling’s (1982) ‘Broken Windows’ thesis was no attempt at cutting the Gordian knot, but they argued that if ‘disorder’ was stamped out, (serious) crime could be prevented and, a priori, communities would be nicer, which meant fear of crime would diminish and would result in an increase in informal social controls (Carr, 2007). Lewis and Salem (1986) reminded us however, that community perception of crime is heterogeneous, dependent on the social and political resources available. ‘Broken Windows’ suggested that the pre-eminent indicators of the spiral of decline into criminal degradation were the growth of incivilities and a fanning of the flames of disorder, but not crime itself: wherein lies the implication that areas of high anti-social behaviour is where action is needed most, and from which we can infer that high crime areas should be considered irredeemable. Put simply, ‘Broken Windows’ was an exploration of urban degeneration and antithesis of gentrification, that suggested if cultures and climates of disorder were permitted to develop and normalise, then serious crime would grow ‘as certainly as night follows day’ ,but Taylor and Covington (1988) found that areas undergoing the gentrification process suffered increasing violence during the transition period (Hughes, 2007).

Kelling (1987) defined ‘disorder’ as a breach of the community’s expectations of appropriate social behaviour. Unlike the Libertarian belief in natural rights and support for the decriminalisation of victimless crimes (demonstrated in UK by Leo Abse’s Sexual Offences Act 1967 legalising homosexuality, and David Steel’s Abortion Act 1976 and in the USA by Republican Congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul), Neo-Conservatism held that individual choice, and conduct that had social ramifications ought not to be dealt with according to the liberal theory of ‘moral neutrality’, but an affirmative moral position (McLaughlin and Muncie, 2008), to which Van den Haag (1975: 1985) argued that civil liberties and even justice become collateral damage in a desultory ‘War on Crime’. Interestingly both Neo-Conservatism and Left Realism argued for more effective policing, and greater community control over Criminal Justice agencies, which, coincidentally, was supported by Etzioni (1993) the Communitarian that highly influenced the British Labour leadership (Crawford, 1996). Wilson and Kelling (1982, p.36) argued for a return to the old fashioned community-oriented ‘order maintenance’ policing in neighbourhoods where a qualitative difference could be made , but gone are the days of ‘Dixon of Doc Green’ and even so, without local community trust, and the potential risk of further alienation from the police due to the punitive government policies, and increasingly pervasive nature of law enforcement ‘order maintenance’ efforts, those Halcyon days would never again dawn (Lord Scarman, 1981).

It is important to remember that in multicultural societies such as UK and USA, there are major problems if the concept of agreement in moral standards is defined in the narrow terms that Neo-Conservatives tend to use, and concerns about racial divisions in society aren’t addressed. As expected from a Right-Wing school of thought, borderline racism is evident in some of the literature coming out of Neo-Conservatism: demonstrated by Wilson when, addressing the American government, he stated that according to the average man in London, the increase in crime (violent and acquisitive) was down to the increased presence of West Indians (Wilson, 1977:69), and in the Bell Curve, that argued an increased inherent criminality in Negros and Latinos, which is tantamount to racial discrimination: though no one can deny the disproportionate representation of those particular groups in the Criminal Justice System in both the UK and USA. Stewart (1998) felt that pro forma police intervention in neighbourhoods had to be considered problematic, writing that the principal weakness of the approaches advanced by Wilson and Kelling rested in their mutual blindness to the potentially detrimental impact of broad police discretion on minority communities; they did concede, however, that there was concern that people would be arrested for the 'crime' of undesirability which supports the argument that low-level police intervention often acts to cover racially discriminatory conduct (Stewart, 1998). Fundamentally, much New Right criminology simply ignored issues of race, gender, and class prioritising the individual, his choices and values (McLaughlin and Muncie, 2008).

Neo-Conservatism, Right Realism, Neo-Positivism: however it’s labelled, its definition as a criminological theory is both problematic, and clumsy. McLaughlin and Muncie (2008) suggest that Neo-Conservatism would be better understood as the specific application of a broader social engineering perspective’ held by a particular political orientation utilising theoretical knowledge in the service of the State and economy, running the gamut of theoretical perspectives (McLaughlin and Muncie, 2008). It takes a moral stance maintaining the status quo, and the authoritarian right of the political élite to dictate what constitutes the moral consensus: human nature is flawed; society needs to clearly define right from wrong, and then to punish wrong, as if Portia had never made her plea. Without such an approach it was felt that a general breakdown in law and order would result: if children need boundaries and clear chastisement when in breach thereof, does not society?

Elliot Currie (1991) damned much of the rhetoric found in Neo-Conservatism with faint praise by suggesting that just because such views appealed to common sense and were commonly agreed with among the general populations, this did not mean they were correct, in the sense that a functional understanding and use of values does not provide legitimation: other ethically, and theoretically legitimate reasons for trying to renovate faded moral standards was necessary (Stenson and Cowell, 1991; Tierney, 2010).

Ironically, considering the liberal nature of Dutch society, Keizer, Lindenberg and Steg (2008) of the University of Groningen carried out a series of controlled experiments to investigate the ‘Broken Windows’ effect: several urban locations where selected which were then arranged and divided into two conditions: ordered and disordered (to suggest they had begun the ‘spiral of decline’) and at different times. The researchers then covertly observed the locations to see if people behaved differently when the environment was disordered. Their results confirmed the theory and they concluded in support of Wilson and Kelling (1982): disorder and incivility, can indeed encourage criminality (Keizer, Lindenberg and Steg, 2008).