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We Asked; You Said
Feedback From Communitarian Update
Number 61
We asked:
In response to a sharp rise in anti-social incidents ranging from public drunkenness to vandalism to verbal abuse, Britain recently passed a new set of measures that empower officials to crack down on citizens accused of repeated anti-social behavior. Does punishing transgressions in behavior further stigmatize already marginalized people who are often themselves victims of family breakdown, drug abuse, etc? Or should local law enforcement be permitted to use creative solutions including banning offenders from certain neighborhoods, prohibiting chronic shoplifters from entering shopping districts, or even preventing former partners in petty crime from coming into contact with one another? What other kinds of solutions exist to deal with "neighbors from hell?"
Here are the responses we received:
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The British response to anti-social behavior is the least bad measure that government can take. It
will not solve the problem. It will not prevent further anti-social behavior on the part of the
individuals subject to these prohibitions. It will not prevent the development of such behavior
patterns in other people. But the British response will contain the problem through two
mechanisms: (1) It will provide some limits beyond which offenders believe that they cannot go
and (2) it will give decent people the feeling that organized society is attempting to cope with the problem. It is a contemporary version of the James Q. Wilson-George Kelling "broken window"
approach to preventing the further disorganization of a community.
Jackson Toby
Professor of Sociology Emeritus
Rutgers University
New Jersey
This is an old solution to an old problem. Colonial American communities routinely used
banishment as punishment for their worst and/or habitual offenders. The rationale was that the
hostile American "wilderness" would seem like outer darkness for the average European colonist
and would provide a suitable deterrent to recidivism. In other cases where indigents were
involved, communities used the "warning out" system whereby the offender was told to become a
stable and productive member of society or face banishment. It may have worked in a sparsely
populated pre-industrial context. Newcomers in any community would face questions about their
pasts, and if there was a hint of impropriety, potential offenders would be forced to move on.
I am unsure if this approach can work effectively in our crowded, impersonal, modern societies.
The mass nature of Western societies leads to a certain amount of anonymity--we are usually
uncomfortable delving into our neighbors' lives in contrast to the way that 17th- and 18th-century
colonists would have been. Our respect for the private was not really a huge consideration for our
forebears. However, even more questionable is what happens when offenders are banished from
their home "turf." Won't many just move onto other marginal, stressed neighborhoods thereby
just pushing the problem into someone else's backyard?
J.F. Saddler
Ph.D. Candidate in History
Temple University
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
The legislative impact of British measures is not yet significant. There have been cases where the
laws have been used and some high profile reporting has ensured that people see that the laws
have been enacted. There is no doubt at all that the problem is widespread. Large numbers of
Britons apparently believe that they can behave in a loutish fashion and have no sanction applied
to them at all. Those affected are scared to remonstrate and the police and other authorities
seldom act quickly enough to suffocate an outbreak of anti-social behaviour, with the result that
people feel scared that criminality is running out of control. Hence these measures.
It is clear that the fear of crime can be as debilitating as the actual extent of it, in terms of the
impact upon victims. Where neighbours, for instance, suffer interminable problems from people
who wreck their peace and quiet, all hours of the day and night, who do no work, and whose
children roam the neighbourhoods, vandalising and bullying and harassing people with impunity,
they will surely feel victimised, even if no direct attack upon them or their property has occurred.
This anti-social behaviour has three roots: The cleaving of the post-war welfare state and its
social charter wrought by the Thatcherites and the consequent sewing of the "greed is good,
compassion is bad" seed among the generation that grew up in the 80s and 90s; the significance
of the illegal drug economy and its impact upon working class neighbourhoods; and, finally, the
longer-term loss of a communitarian perspective that religion and politics once offered, without a
replacement that adequately denies Thatcher's mantra of "There is no such thing as society".
Labour MP Frank Field, not someone to marginalise the poor, being a long term campaigner for
welfare benefit reform and improvement for vulnerable people, has been a central political figure
in campaigning against ant-isocial behaviour. He has proposed a number of legislative and other
moves that he believes will improve matters. See his website: http://www.frankfield.co.uk/.
Frank Field has even, with only partial polemic intent, argued that all the anti-social louts should
be herded into a housing estate occupied only by people like them, where they can victimise one
another as they please! His politics are complex, since he is a champion of the poor and of the
working class people in his constituency, and liberals feel that he is a reactionary.
It may be the case that, until we somehow complete the following steps, we will never really
begin to tackle the problem. First, take the crime out of drug-taking and make it uneconomic for
criminals to be involved (legalise all drugs for example); second, take the fear out of standing up
against loutishness by imaginative measures such as the introduction of professional witness
programmes that local authorities can invoke where outbreaks of anti-social behaviour have
begun, backed up by sanctions that actually mean something to perpetrators, like loss of income
unless work is produced, sequestration of assets, banning them from places and from association
with their fellows and, ultimately, loss of liberty.
The argument that such measures may further marginalise people who are already victims does
not hold water. People who behave in an anti-social fashion are, by their very acts, marginalising
large numbers of their victims: whole neighbourhoods decline as families leave in fear of crime.
Neighbourhoods become sinks where the worst kinds of anti-social behaviours are clustered. No
appeal to a sense of community is possible, such people think that those who work for a living
are fools who deserve their enmity and whose possessions are fair game. Thus a cycle of bad
behaviour, fear, intimidation, and flight occurs, which drags decent people into the nightmare
world where only draconian measures seem reasonable. As Frank Field would say to those liberal
professionals who argue that his ideas are reactionary: "You have the wherewithal to leave such a
neighbourhood, you don't have to suffer the problems".
Joe Hill
Northwest England
Regarding England's response to anti-social behavior, it is all in how you look at things. If you
look at them from a linear perspective, then directly punishing the behavior is right because it
comes directly after the behavior is exhibited. There is behavior and there is a consequence. The
question then is, does the consequence fit the behavior. Is the consequence for defacing public
property cleaning off graffiti, or is it something totally unrelated?
If you look at it from a systems perspective, then you know that these behaviors are the natural
effects of a system. You identify the system, look for the leverage points, and then change the
system. While this is logical, system's thinking is far from being common knowledge and it is
definitely not a part of the police training curriculum.
The other way to approach a systemic problem is to react on several levels: prevention, therapy,
or some type of intervention. This could mean identifying the cause of the behavior and stopping
it at the root plus taking preventative measures, for example teen programs to create graffiti
contests where entrants get their own "wall" to paint on.
If we look at the situation from the individual perspective, then we understand that there is a
range of behavioral responses in life and there are and will always be some people who are at the
edges of the spectrum of what is called "social." That makes anti-social behavior relative. The
person doing the behavior is not thinking about whether his or her behavior is anti-social, but
rather they are trying to fulfill an unfulfilled need. Are police the right part of the community to
work with defining needs? I doubt that they have the time, resources, or training to do that.
However, there is a group of people working with "Compassionate Communications" (Marshall
Rosenberg) which helps a person to define their needs. Maybe these people need to be sent to a
"Needs Definition Panel" that would use this technique to help the person define what they really
need. Acceptance and recognition often lie behind so called anti-social behavior.
Natalie Dian
Sweden
The English are unfortunately getting pay-back for several generations of social engineering,
including not only the years of Margaret Thatcher, but also the "slum clearance" programs of the
post-World War II period, right up to the designer-communities of the 1970s and 80s. Two
approaches I have observed which I think worthy of mention are: (1) Thomas Scheff's work on
Community Conferencing (http://www.soc.ucsb.edu/faculty/scheff/), and (2) A Western Sydney
housing project which moved a formerly unemployed Samoan family in and gave them
responsibility for security of the public spaces in the project. Within a couple of weeks vandalism
came to a halt, and one unemployed family had found their mission in life!
I think the key issue is giving people control over their lives through collective action in either
ethnic, work-based, place-based, (or whatever, it doesn't really matter) communities.
Governments always shy away from distributing power, but that is the key.
Andy Blunden
Melbourne, Australia
Among the many problems with the British provisions are the unintended consequences such
new forms of social control may bring about. As sociologists have found in other areas,
alternative forms of control often in fact lead to an expansion of control, a "widening of the net"
(to borrow a term from Stanley Cohen). Such control efforts may be presented as "creative
solutions" but their actual impact may be quite different from, and even contrary to, their stated
objectives, as an increasingly punitive society is formed. Also, the irony of these control efforts is
that they do not focus on dealing with the causes of anti-social behavior (assuming there is
evidence that such behavior occurs) but instead they merely manage its consequences in a
technocratic manner as if society can be engineered. Relatedly, people are taken out of their own
conflict situations and objectified in a new context in which none of the parties involved in the
conflict will feel satisfied, ironically leading to potentially escalated problem behavior than that
which was originally targeted.
Mathieu Deflem
Assistant Professsor of Sociology
University of South Carolina
Columbia, South Carolina
The British measure is an alternative to arresting people who are threatening their neighbors. In
what proportion and in what kind of cases does this system work?
Do the country's social services have the resources to offer counseling to some of these
marginalized people? Probably just a small number can be or are being offered help.
The civil liberties issue: The right of society to protect itself versus the right of the individual to
have her privacy protected. The latter cannot demand priority if this right is used by an offender
to harass others.
The British program warrants being watched. It may resolve some of the problems and therefore
it is valuable. Those cases that are not resolved will end up with an arrest warrant, which will
reduce the freedom of the offending person to protect his or her neighbors.
Society must have the capacity to protect itself against people who are threatening. In the United
States, people can be arrested or sent for observation in a mental hospital. The British program
gives the "out of control" offender another chance short of loss of liberty.
Joe Eaton
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Critics are right in their observation that the new "anti-social orders stigmatize and marginalize a
population that is already on the fringes of society, leaving offenders with little hope of
improvement or rehabilitation". While crimes and "anti-social" behaviour should be checked, it
looks as though the remedies are worse than the disease. Crime should never shadow an
individual, as depicted by Victor Hugo in his classic work Les Miserables. There should be
rehabilitation measures and no action by the state should be stigmatic.
P. Radhakrishnan
Professor of Sociology
Madras Institute of Development Studies
Chennai, India
I think we need some policies to demarginalize the marginalized persons. All marginalizing
policies will make the situation worst. We need to widen up all cultural facilities as much as
possible.
Saeid Zahed (Ph.D)
Head of Sociology and Social Planning Department
Shiraz University
Shiraz, Iran
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