Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [283]
Bland theories of “differential association” or the rather arid statistical demonstrations of how crime intersects with poverty and the like, hardly convey this “thrill” or “zest.” Jack Katz, a sociologist, writes that the closer one looks at crime, “the more vividly relevant become the moral emotions.” People do not commit crimes because they want or need money, Katz argues. There have been times, of course, when people stole just to stay alive. But today, for many people who steal and ravage, crime is a “way of life.” Violent or criminal acts can produce a real high; there are “emotional processes” going on that “seduce people to deviance.”18
No theory of crime can ignore the social background of criminals; crime is the statistical and social companion of poverty, unemployment, social disorganization. But these factors cannot explain individual behavior; this is one reason why Katz’s thesis has a certain dark attractiveness. It also fits in with the notion of crimes of the self. The exaltation of the self does not conflict with the idea of the gang. The self is horizontally organized; it rejects, in whole or in part, the vertical authority of family, law, elites. It seeks out the like-minded. “Conformity” is not, paradoxically, inconsistent with the idea of radical individualism. To the contrary, it is part of its essence. What people conform to is fashions and fads. Traditional societies never talked about conformity; it was taken for granted. The concept is distinctly modern. It implies the possibility of not conforming. Conformity recognizes choice: choice is inherent in selecting the group, the gang, the peers. When the conformist sees everybody around him wearing a certain style of sneakers, or certain cuts or colors of clothes, he is seized with a passion to do the same. The conformist is a sheep; but he chooses (or thinks he chooses) his flock.19
Against crimes of the self, the criminal justice system may be singularly impotent. The creaky machinery of justice assumes two things: a strong system of socialization, which does most of the work, leaving only some odds and ends and bits and pieces to be taken care of by criminal process; and a stem, efficient system of punishment to teach a lesson to those few who have not gotten the point. A narcissistic, rootless social order, in which even a small fraction of the population does not swallow and embody traditions of morality, is more than it can handle. Such a social order overwhelms the loose, disjointed system of criminal justice whose development this book has tried to describe.
American society exalts the individual; but human beings are inherently social. People are animals that live in families, packs, and clans. They are not solitary hunters—they are wolves, not panthers on the prowl. Wolf packs produce a good deal of modern crime. As the family weakens, as horizontal authority replaces vertical authority, some people, especially young males, detach from the larger society and reattach to wolf packs—to groups much more prone to that behavior which the rest of us label as crime. Crime and antisocial behavior also come from the packless wolves, from the loners, the unattached, the drifters and grifters of society. These, too, as we have seen, are particularly liable to be victims of the system as well.
Criminal Justice and Popular Culture
Crime is endlessly fascinating