Seduced by the Symbolism of Crime : Politicians Become the ‘Street Toughs’ of the Stump

It has become customary in an election year for politicians to ask criminologists what government can do about crime. This year the people who work at understanding crime must feel that the more pressing need is to explain what crime has done to national politics.

It has been a long time since the issue of crime control figured as much in a national campaign as it has this year, and its prominence this year is especially odd, given its low profile in national debate in recent years. The nationwide drop in crime rates, which were at an unusual high point in the early 1980s, has allowed everyone in a position of responsibility for crime control to take credit--Ronald Reagan/George Bush and Michael Dukakis alike. The windfall of political profit for incumbents in the ‘80s might have been expected to neutralize crime as a national campaign issue. Indeed, Dukakis seems to have been unable to grasp why his references to the decline in serious crime in his state did not suffice to take the issue out of the debate.

But if the prominence of the crime issue is odd, the relationship between the politicians’ rhetoric and the reality of street crime is almost perfectly absurd. Both candidates vaguely impute to street criminals a conventional, utilitarian perspective that better describes their own ways. And they attempt to demonstrate toughness and purpose by dramatizing an affinity for violence that, for street criminals, is the distinctive attraction of their way of life.

For at least 30 years politicians have struck an implicit, nonpartisan agreement to use a rhetoric that makes out street criminals to be materially calculating, utilitarian actors. From the right we have been offered a series of options for increasing the “costs” of crime, most recently “no furloughs” and “capital punishment.” From the left we hear that the poor turn to crime when more rewarding, legitimate alternatives are unavailable. The “liberal” theory of crime control was trumpeted most strongly in the War on Poverty, but today its echoes, however faint, can still be heard in policies that would improve education, expand employment opportunities and increase housing.

Despite its heated cross-fire, the conventional political debate sustains a mythology about street crime. We now know, from “career criminal” studies, that the most violent, persistent street criminals typically begin committing serious crimes in or before early adolescence, long before job opportunities could, or in a free society should, become relevant considerations. And qualitative evidence indicates that the spirit of their initial crimes is a pursuit of sneaky thrills in which the prospect of penalty, far from blocking motivation, is essential to the animating challenge.

Later on in their adolescence, would-be hardened criminals often become fascinated with peer-group violence (“gang-banging”), independent of any prospect for material gain, andthey take pride in building fearful reputations that are sustained by appearing to be not deliberate, rational actors but vato locos (“mad dogs”) and “hope-to-die” homeboys. At some point they learn the secret of all successful “bad-asses”--that their superiority comes not from superior physical or fire power, much less from well-wrought strategy, but specifically from not caring about the consequences to self in circumstances in which others who do will back off.

Few persist in violent street crime far into their 20s, but those who do usually have already confronted and transcended the sufferings of incarceration and the danger of physical injury or death. Why should we expect marginal increases in prison terms, or even the threat of capital punishment, with all the delay and uncertainty that inevitably characterizes its administration, to deter persistent, violent street criminals? They have not been deterred by the far more immediate, ubiquitous and very real threat of mortal attack by their innocent victims, by the police and, most of all, by the many people just like them who, in prison and out, are never far away from them.

For its part, the “liberal” side of political debate refuses to see that what drives persistent street criminals on is not the pressure of poverty--their crimes regularly create and sustain their poverty--but the attraction of overcoming the chaos of their lives in the guise of fearless hard men. Specifically by discounting enormous material costs, extreme physical danger and the almost certain loss of personal freedom, the vicious street criminal, sporadically and within very limited contexts, achieves the precious satisfaction of knowing, in a thoroughly aimless life, just what he is to do: anything he wants to.

If an image of prudent calculation and utilitarian cost/benefit analysis fits anywhere in the national political debates on crime, it fits the candidates themselves. But the politicians seem to be seduced by the symbolism of crime in much the same way as are street criminals, as a resource for showing themselves to be “tough” when others might doubt it, for superficially appearing resolute, for demonstrating that they “mean it” when it’s not at all clear to reasonable and earnest observers what the “it” is. So one candidate overcomes an early, seemingly devastating “wimp” image by embracing capital punishment--he will (direct other people to) kill street criminals--and by attacking his rival for being soft on crime. Meanwhile, the other fellow, figuratively and literally driven around by the symbolism of violence, jumps into a military tank, attacks his rival for being soft on drug dealers, and implies his support for deadly “undercover operations” against terrorists.

If the current campaign gives us no reason to expect any meaningful progress against street crime, it should provoke a serious consideration of how and why crime has so powerfully compromised our national political life. The symbolic meanings of crime are extraordinarily, almost uniquely, valuable in modern society for dramatizing purposiveness. It is almost as if the national leaders of our political debate, glimpsing the existential power that some ghetto males achieve by proudly embracing criminal identities, refuse to allow such disrespectable people that moral treasure. So they recast the mad bad-asses who terrorize our cities as calculating materialists, susceptible to influence by additional penalties or enhanced economic opportunities, and then, with the scene cleared of disreputable rivals, the politicians reappear as fearless manipulators of the state’s violence, people so comfortable with exercising violence that its use against a domestic criminal or a foreign terrorist would not just be the prudent thing to do, it would make their day.