Changing Representations of the Criminal

Abstract

I claim that, in the specific social-theoretical domain of‘crime and punishment’ (as well as in other areas of the social sciences), we should aim at overcoming both the de-coupling of concepts of‘structure’ and‘culture’, often lamented in post-Marxist social theory, and the sterile and uninteresting counterappositon between qualitative and quantitative styles of analysis. In this paper I suggest that we can achieve such a result by introducing the concept of‘representations’ of crime and criminals. Representations of crime and criminality are not random and unpredictable results of creative endeavours (though they are also this). Rather, they are conceptualizations deeply embedded within the main patterns of social relationships in a given society in a given period. I hypothesize that, in a somewhat cyclical fashion, at least since the inception of modernity and criminological thought in the nineteenth century, representations of crime and criminals have been oscillating between two different social attitudes. A sympathetic attitude toward criminals has emerged in social periods when good economic conditions, optimism, a tendency toward liberalism and low imprisonment rates, tended to prevail. At such juncture (at least some) criminals were seen as innovators fighting against an unjust and suffocating social order, and punishment as playing a rehabilitative and experimental role. In other periods, criminals were seen instead with antipathy, and portrayed as monstrosities, evil forces fighting the very foundations of a social fabric and a moral order that should be defended at all cost. In these periods of prevailing conservatism, social theorists saw their mission in responding against situations of socio-economic crisis, characterized by the necessity to‘tighten the belt’, and by higher imprisonment rates and harsher penalties. I give illustrations of such oscillating attitudes, as far as the domain of criminological thought is concerned, by considering more specifically: the Italian Positive School, the Chicago school of sociology and differential association theory, the‘labelling’ theorists of the 1960s/1970s, and what I term the‘revanche criminology’ of the‘crisis decades’ after 1973.