Crime has become a prominent concern in the West over the last few years, both in the public sphere and in the domestic sphere. Public crime is now the dominant focus: street robberies and violence, gang conflicts, home invasions and freak public attacks which appear to have no motive. Many in the progressive-left sphere are wont to dismiss this as the usual fear tactics of the right-wing tabloid media, and/or the effects of greater visibility due to the total mutual surveillance digital panopticon in which we all live. That is undoubtedly part of the reason. Between 1965 and 1995, these types of crime were double what they are now. They fell precipitously in the late 1990s and hit a new level. Yet that level appears to be twice what they were before the ‘long 1960s’ began. Within that, the occurrence of specific crimes rises and falls, often in response to the attention paid. Knife crime rose in London until a few years ago, when it fell. It is now rising in Australian cities. Increased shoplifting has prompted the end of easy self-service in the United States, with many products locked up on the shelves. In hospitals and other institutions, abuse and assault of staff, unknown decades ago, is now a significant problem.
With the usual caveats about measurement and definition, the neatest encapsulation of what is going on would be that, beneath explanation for particular crime drivers—increasing inequality, poor urban environments, media mimicry and so on—the occurrence and visibility of ‘new crime’ is a product of second or third generation changes in social and cultural structure. In this conception, prior social forms—and the forms of subjectivity that went with them—have now eroded to the point where the changes come back into what one might call the ‘actually existing social sphere’. Neoliberalism and rising inequality play a role, especially in organised crime, which is now global and gig-economied; iPhones are stolen in London for Chinese markets, by kids on a piece rate.
Yet it is non-economic public crime that many find unnerving; increasingly violent and unpredictable gang conflicts, home invasions which appear to have more than economic motives, the relentless spread of graffiti, and so on.
What underlies both the economic and non-economic ‘new crime’ is, above all, a substantial change in the mobility, fluidity and what one might call ‘undermotivated’ nature of many occurrences.
Today’s gangs form and reform in increasingly anonymous suburbs and exurbs, and their connection and conflict are often through the abstracted networks of social media and messaging. One could say that their physical conflicts are often the ‘download’ of cyber conflicts and, in turn, intensify them in a cycle.
The occurrence is further transformed by the change in subjectivity, in the nature of persons, in this transformed frame. From the 1960s on, and especially since the 1980s, the individual has borne the onus of integrating the diverse streams of meaning and signification that come at them from an early age. This has formed a more self-managing subject—especially since the full cyber-revolution of phones and social media—with both a greater capacity for self-shaping, and a greater risk that such integration may not occur. In the pre-1960s, the social ‘lattice’ bound the individual, and crimes and pathologies were expressive of the tensions it engendered. The ‘long 60s’ was the transition period when this came into contradiction. The current period is one in which the power and reality of the pre-1960s structures have all but disappeared. Total state and self-surveillance have become a substitute for culturalised, internalised moral governance. The hope for ‘security’ and ground has been replaced by a demand for the guarantee of ‘safety’.
Decades ago, this was rolled over from child protection into the politics of culture and academia, attached to trauma, and is now returning to wider social life again, supercharged.
In being rolled back into questions of public safety, it has brought its absolute standard with it. No one should be at risk, ever, and all crime is an outrage.
The drive to achieve this often takes another right‒left split with calls for traditional, and ineffective measures, such as the limiting of bail, counterposed by the ‘smart’ solution of more technology and surveillance. In the wake of November’s knife attack on a train in the United Kingdom, by a disturbed man who had spent several days threatening people with knives, a call came for the use of facial recognition to be more fully integrated with the UK’s vast CCTV system. The latter, by the expansion of the circuit of abstracted collective self-surveillance, simply increases feelings of ungrounded lack-of-safety in a vicious circle. The proliferation of security guards and cameras in public spaces cannot help but further legitimate the subject position that made it necessary in the first place: one increasingly unmoored from social reciprocity but demanding of a perfect responsiveness from social institutions.
This is a genuine dilemma if one believes that the ‘new crime’ is a real phenomenon rather than simply an effect of perception. To address the social ungrounding beneath it in the longer term means the reconstitution of forms of stable face-to-face connection and community—most likely with different features and content to those preceding—within the wider abstracted webs of modernity, a task that requires the parallel return of forms of genuinely social thinking to collective reflection and policy formation. But in the ‘long interim’, it is precisely the mobility, fluidity and unpredictability of crime in its new form that compels people to demand new ways for the control of bodies and persons.
While the current notion of ‘safety’ may be a distorted response to risks of being human, the notion of security and ordered social spaces goes much deeper and is a fundamental driver of collective cultural reproduction. It is particularly so given that, in broader cultural-historical terms, a sense and reality of ground has been fundamentally transformed by the technoscientific revolution, which has made this world possible. The possible catastrophes of climate change, war, and technology made possible by this process are seeping back into the present, rendering the future as cancelled. Much crime, particularly youth crime, can be seen as a punk reaction to that extended situation.
A critical and radical approach to how things might change must be grounded in the recognition of the social conditions which guarantee ‘security’, as a legitimate demand. Labo(u)r parties have largely abandoned any interest in such a measure of the movement’s conversion to technocratic social management to the unquestioned ends of high-tech growth. ‘Progressive’ elements of it associated with the anti-violence movements have become as enthusiastically carceral as the traditional Right.
Simultaneously, a further Left has come to be dominated in its thinking on these matters by the notion of ‘abolition’, in matters of prison and police. Abolition arose within US race politics and was then taken up by decolonial politics. Looking at the deeply racist and colonialist application of policing and incarceration along racial and indigenous lines—everywhere, but especially in Australia’s North—one can understand. Yet from the outside, abolition appears to move between two positions: one, as an admitted impossible ideal, to steer current activism, and the other, as a real possibility, and an immediate demand.
That incarceration should be vastly reduced, and its form and conditions changed, is not in doubt. Currently, it uses both physical squalor and a ‘nihilist penitentiary effect’—the solitary contemplation of the unfilled time of one’s life passing by—as intensive punishment, conditions which are also applied to remand.
But the demand for state control of a space no longer governed by ‘the social’ will only increase as the abstracted conditions that produce it widen. Those not persuaded by abolition—which is, at its roots, arguably, anarchist in its implicit social theory—should not rely on it as an answer to the difficult question of justice and punishment in a society which is both reciprocal and real, and also oppressive and alienated. The alternative to having an argument as to what the forms of justice enforcement will be is to leave the space without critical engagement and specific proposals, thus ceding it to technocratic carceral and punitive measures. This technocracy will combine administrative bypassing of justice—such as Labor’s proposal to remove benefits from those who have been merely charged with crimes, or arrested—with hi-tech surveillance, eventually involving human microchipping, as a development from electronic ankle bracelets. A state-created insecurity of civic life will expand indefinitely in pursuit of safety, until the carceral is wholly extended and occupies the same space as that which it purports to protect.