Law and Order: Arguments for Socialism

256 Pages·1981·0.2 MB·English

by  Ian Taylor (auth.)

Law and Order: Arguments for Socialism
Also by Ian Taylor
The New Criminology: for a Social Theory of
Deviance (with Paul Walton and Jock Young)
Critical Criminology (co-editor and contributor
with Paul Walton and Jock Young)
Politics and Deviance (co-edited with Laurie Taylor)
Deviance and Control in Europe (co-edited with
Herman Bianchi and Mario Simondi)
Law and Order
Arguments for Socialism
Ian Taylor
Senior Lecturer in Criminology, Centre for Criminological
and Socio-Legal Studies, University of Sheffield
M
© Ian Roger Taylor 1981
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1981 978-0-333-21442-8
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission.
First published 1981 by
THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
London and Basingstoke
Companies and representatives throughout the world
ISBN 978-0-333-21444-2 ISBN 978-1-349-16643-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-16643-5
Typeset in Great Britain by
STYLESET LIMITED
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Reproduced from copy supplied
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To Jean and Anna
Contents
Introduction
IX
1 The Reality of Right-Wing Criminology 1
Criminologists of the Right 5
The basis for 'dangerousness' 9
Progressive education and the working class 12
A mistaken realism 17
Retributive and remoralising measures: juvenile
justice since 19 79 24
The attack on social democracy 29
2 The Failure of the New Jerusalem: Post-War
'Social Democracy' and the Social Order 36
Social democracy in 1945 36
Social democracy and social order 43
Social democracy and the enforcement of law 62
The elaboration of treatment 71
Social democracy and social control in the later
post-war period 74
3 The Reconstruction of Socialist Social Policy 86
Socialism and the professionals 91
Socialism and the authoritarian state 96
Socialism and reform 101
Socialism and an alternative social strategy 105
(a} The family 105
(b) Youth 114
vm Contents
4 Reconstructing Socialist Criminology 123
The prison movement: rehabilitation, abolition,
justice 125
The police critics: accountability and popular
demands for policing 146
The legal critics: taking the people to the law 164
The women's movement and law enforcement 180
Democratisation and social reconstruction 204
Right-wing criminology: class rhetoric and
social disorder 207
Bibliography 224
Introduction
Prior to the summer of 1981 the concerns of this book
- with the political preconditions of social order - might
have appeared a little abstract or hypothetical. But the events
of July 1981 have made these concerns immediate and tan
gible. For many people living in Britain's urban centres they
have often been a matter of frightening personal experience.
The riots of 1980 in Brixton and Bristol- which had been
authoritatively explained as resulting from peculiarly local
conditions - were now followed by a series of major distur
bances in Southall, Toxteth, Brixton (on several separate
occasions), Moss Side, and elsewhere. Massive amounts of
property damage and looting occurred and large numbers of
police and the public were injured. On 13 July 1981 the
Merseyside police became the first force in mainland Britain
to make use of rubber bullets and the notorious CS gas on
civilians, and, in the same week, the government announced
that army camps would be used to house those who received
prison sentences as a result of the riots. The government also
announced its intention to legislate for a new Riot Act and
generally proclaimed its support for more aggressive police
responses in any future situation where there was 'a threat
to public order'. As in Ireland, and as over the question of
soccer violence at home, the social violence of the inner-city
under-class was to meet with the force of intensified penal
discipline.
But the riots in English cities were clearly rather more
alarming, for the popular press, than even the troubles in
Ireland or the 'aggro' of the soccer grounds. The rioters had
been seen to be white and black, and adult as well as youth
ful. They were normal residents of the English inner city,
x Introduction
which was now obviously in an abnormally depressed and dis
traught condition. They were not untypical of the readership
of the English popular press itself. So The Daily Star, which
had urged its readers to vote for the Tories in 1979, now
responded to Margaret Thatcher's moral denunciations of the
riots with the angry headline 'Work, not Talk, is the Answer'
(The Daily Star, 7 July 1981). Nearly all editorial writers in
the popular press supported some reversal of the government's
policy of cutting public expenditure, especially in so far as
these policies affected the inner city. Margaret Thatcher spoke
of the riots as her most difficult ten days in office, and
although community leaders in Toxteth and Manchester
deplored the government's complete failure to understand
the resentments which fuelled the attacks of property and
police, it seemed as if the events of the summer were going
to force some mitigation of the unremitting monetarism of
the Thatcher government. A fundamental assumption in
British society - that the underclass will acquiesce in the
housing, the work and the social facilities it is offered, as well
as in the place it is assigned in the class structure - was
obviously at risk.
Whether or not a reversal in government policy does occur,
the riots unambiguously achieved one other object. They
decisively undermined the claim of the radical-right leader
ship of the Conservative Party to be offering a politics of
social order. From the moment of achieving power within
the Tory Party in 1975, this radical-right leadership has
carried out a campaign against liberal and progressive politics
generally, insisting that the educational, welfare and crime
policies of both Labour and liberal Tory governments were
the cause of a breakdown in social order. Throughout 1978,
and during the election campaign of 1979, the Tory leadership,
with the implicit or explicit support of senior members of
the judiciary and the police, proclaimed that the victory of
the new Conservative Party would result in a restoration of
a real sense of order in social life. This renewed orderliness
in social life would emerge, it was asserted, out of a combina
tion of both morality and discipline. The freeing of the
market from excessive interference by the state would