Progressive Justice in an Age of Repression: Strategies for Challenging the Rise of the Right 9780815374497, 9780815374503, 9781351242059

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PROGRESSIVE JUSTICE IN AN AGE OF REPRESSION

Progressive Justice in an Age of Repression provides a much-needed engagement with questions of justice and reform within the current phase of global capitalism, one that is marked not only by significant social inequality, but also political bifurcation. It offers guidance on progressive strategies for resistance. It also extends criminological analysis by situating these contemporary challenges as globalized and inextricably linked to questions of political economy, law, and society. Bringing together an international selection of scholars, this book draws on a range of issues, such as immigration, street crime and the renewed push for “law and order,” violence against women, environmental injustice, assaults on health care and social services, and the unleashing of private corporate exploitation of natural resources. It is a clarion for strategic thinking, a call for action fuelled by informed analysis, and a reimagining of the progressive society that is under attack by Trumpism, populism, and a rising right. This is an important read for those who teach and study criminology, deviance and social control, social problems, legal studies, political science, and policy studies. It is also a useful resource for practitioners, community-based activists, and policy makers seeking new ways of thinking critically about crime, law, and social control. Walter S. DeKeseredy is the Anna Deane Carlson Endowed Chair of Social Sciences, Director of the Research Center on Violence, and Professor of Sociology at West Virginia University, USA. Elliott Currie is Professor of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California, Irvine, USA.

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PROGRESSIVE JUSTICE IN AN AGE OF REPRESSION Strategies for Challenging the Rise of the Right

Edited by Walter S. DeKeseredy and Elliott Currie

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Walter S. DeKeseredy and Elliott Currie; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Walter S. DeKeseredy and Elliott Currie to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: DeKeseredy, Walter S., 1959- editor. | Currie, Elliott, editor. Title: Progressive justice in an age of repression : strategies for challenging the rise of the right / edited by Walter S. DeKeseredy and Elliott Currie. Description: First Edition. | New York : Routledge, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018051731| ISBN 9780815374497 (hardback) | ISBN 9780815374503 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781351242059 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Discrimination in criminal justice administration–United States. | Social justice–United States. | Masculinity–United States. | Right and left (Political science)–United States. | Trump, Donald, 1946Classification: LCC HV9950 .P76 2019 | DDC 364.30973–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018051731 ISBN: 978-0-8153-7449-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-8153-7450-3 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-24205-9 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Swales & Willis, Exeter, Devon, UK

CONTENTS

List of contributors Acknowledgments Introduction: responding to repression Walter S. DeKeseredy 1 But why this man?: challenging hegemonic masculinity in an age of repression Walter S. DeKeseredy 2 Why the left must change: right-wing populism in context Simon Winlow, Steve Hall and James Treadwell

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3 Social change and drugs: rural America and the rise of Donald Trump Joseph F. Donnermeyer

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4 Getting crime right: framing everyday violence in the age of Trump Elliott Currie

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5 The limits of police reform Alex S. Vitale

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Contents

6 What would a just justice system look like? Sandra Walklate 7 Corporate criminality and resisting financial and securities frauds Gregg Barak 8 Beyond the ricochets: unpacking the modern gun culture and its political stalemate Peter Squires 9 Abortion politics and the persistence of patriarchy Meda Chesney-Lind

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10 Resisting ecocide: engaging in the politics of the future Rob White

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11 Youth for social justice in an age of youth expendability Randy Myers and Tim Goddard

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12 What’s wrong with American criminal justice reform? Sonya Goshe

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13 Continuity of American xenophobia under Trump and plausible alternatives James Diego Vigil and Nativo Lopez Vigil Epilogue: pitfalls and possibilities Elliott Currie

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CONTRIBUTORS

Gregg Barak is Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Eastern Michigan

University, a former Visiting Distinguished Professor in the College of Justice & Safety at Eastern Kentucky University, and a 2017 Fulbright Scholar in residence at the School of Law at Pontificia Universidade Catholica do Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre, Brazil. In 2003 he became the 27th Fellow of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, and in 2007 he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Critical Division of the American Society of Criminology. Prof. Barak is the author and editor of more than 20 books on crime, justice, media, violence, criminal law, homelessness, and human rights. These include three award-winning books, Gimme Shelter: A Social History of Homelessness in Contemporary America (1991) and Theft of a Nation: Wall Street Looting and Federal Regulatory Colluding (2012). His most recent book, Unchecked Corporate Power: Why the Crimes of Multinational Corporations Are Routinized Away and What We Can Do about It (2017), was the recipient of the Outstanding Book Award from the Division of White Collar and Corporate Crime of the American Society of Criminology. Meda Chesney-Lind is Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of

Hawaii at Manoa. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Hawaii, and a BA Summa Cum Laude from Whitman College. Nationally recognized for her work on women and crime, her books include Girls, Delinquency and Juvenile Justice (with Randall G. Shelden, 2014), The Female Offender: Girls, Women and Crime (with Lisa Pasko, 2004), Female Gangs in America (with John M. Hagedorn, 1999), Invisible Punishment (with Marc Mauer, 2002), Girls, Women and Crime (with Lisa Pasko, 2012), Beyond Bad Girls: Gender Violence and Hype (with Katherine Irwin, 2007), and she has just finished an edited collection on trends in girls’ violence, Fighting for Girls: New Perspectives on Gender and

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Violence (to be published by SUNY Press). Dr. Chesney-Lind is a Fellow of the American Society of Criminology and the Western Society of Criminology. Elliott Currie is Professor of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California, Irvine, USA, and Adjunct Professor at the School of Justice, Faculty of Law, Queensland University of Technology, Australia. He is the author of Confronting Crime (1985), Crime and Punishment in America (1998), Reckoning: Drugs, the Cities, and the American Future (1993), The Road to Whatever: Middle Class Culture and the Crisis of Adolescence (2005), and The Roots of Danger: Violent Crime in Global Perspective (2009). Walter S. DeKeseredy is Anna Deane Carlson Endowed Chair of Social Sciences, Director of the Research Center on Violence, and Professor of Sociology at West Virginia University. He has published 24 books, 96 scientific journal articles, and 80 scholarly book chapters on violence against women and other social problems. In 2008 the Institute on Violence, Abuse and Trauma gave him the Linda Saltzman Memorial Intimate Partner Violence Researcher Award. He also jointly received the 2004 Distinguished Scholar Award from the American Society of Criminology (ASC) Division on Women and Crime and the 2007 inaugural UOIT Research Excellence Award. In 1995 he received the Critical Criminologist of the Year Award from the ASC’s Division on Critical Criminology (DCC), and in 2008 the DCC gave him the Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2014 he received the Critical Criminal Justice Scholar Award from the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences (ACJS) Section on Critical Criminal Justice, and in 2015 he received the Career Achievement Award from the ASC’s Division on Victimology. In 2017 he received the Impact Award from the ACJS’s Section on Victimology and the Robert Jerrin Book Award from the ASC’s Division on Victimology. Joseph F. Donnermeyer is a Professor Emeritus in the School of Environment and Natural Resources at Ohio State University and an Adjunct Professor at the Center on Research on Violence at West Virginia University. Dr. Donnermeyer’s specialization is rural criminology. He is the author/co-author of over 100 peerreviewed publications on issues related to rural crime and rural societies. He was the editor of The Routledge International Handbook of Rural Criminology (2016), is currently preparing The Criminology of Food and Agriculture (a monograph for Routledge), and is editor of the new Routledge Monograph Series in Rural Criminology. Dr. Donnermeyer received the Ohio State University (OSU) Alumni Association Award for Distinguished Teaching in 2004, and the North Central Regional Teaching Award from the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities in 2011. From 2005 to 2010 he served as Chair of the Executive Council for the OSU Academy of Teaching. He currently serves as Chair-Elect of Steering Committee for the OSU Emeritus Academy. Dr. Donnermeyer is a graduate (with both an MA and a PhD in Sociology) from the University of Kentucky.

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Tim Goddard in an Associate Professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Florida International University. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley, a Master’s degree from the University of California, Irvine, and earned a PhD in Criminology, Law and Society from the University of California, Irvine – a distinguished graduate program of criminology studies. Dr. Goddard’s research has focused on the governance of crime and offending, particularly offending by young people. He has studied the governance of young people via community-based interventions and through his research of the practitioners in the community who work with young offenders and “at-risk” youth. He has presented his research at the conferences of the American Society of Criminology, the Law & Society Association, the American Anthropological Association, and at the Critical Criminology and Justice Studies conference. Sonya Goshe is an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice. She obtained a PhD

in Criminology, Law, and Society from the University of California, Irvine, where her dissertation focused on the philosophy of juvenile justice policy. Prior to the PhD, she earned a JD from Ohio State University Moritz College of Law and a Master’s degree in Clinical and School psychology from the University of Virginia. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from Ohio Wesleyan University. In addition to her academic training, she has extensive experience working with people involved in the criminal justice system, especially young people, who are often involved in multiple systems of justice. Her current research and teaching interests center on the meaning and practice of “justice,” especially for young people, as well as the link between social injustices, such as racial oppression, and the philosophical and practical problems of punishment in a democratic society. Steve Hall is an Emeritus Professor of Criminology. He worked at the universities of Northumbria, Teesside, and Durham. With Professor Simon Winlow, he is the architect of the new ultra-realist perspective in criminology. Randy Myers is an Associate Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Washington, Tacoma. He received his doctorate in Criminology, Law, and Society from the University of California, Irvine in 2012. His work examines the relationship between inequality and violence, community-derived alternatives to the criminal legal system, and the lived realities of juvenile justice. His work has appeared in Theoretical Criminology, Critical Criminology, Punishment & Society, and the British Journal of Criminology, among other outlets. His book Youth, Community and the Struggle for Social Justice, co-authored with Tim Goddard, was published by Routledge in 2018. Peter Squires is a Professor of Criminology and Public Policy at the University

of Brighton in the UK. He has been researching firearms, crime, gang-involved violence, and gun control issues since the mid-1990s. His most recent book,

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Gun Crime in Global Contexts, was published by Routledge in 2014. He is a co-opted member of the UK Police Advisory Group on the Criminal Use of Firearms. Between 2015 and 2019 he was President of the British Society for Criminology. James Treadwell is Professor of Criminology at Staffordshire University. He is

an ethnographer and qualitative researcher whose books include Rise of the Right: English Nationalism and the Transformation of Working-class Politics (with Simon Winlow and Steve Hall, 2017), Riots and Political Protest: Notes from the Post Political Present (with Simon Winlow, Steve Hall, and Daniel Briggs, 2015), Football Hooliganism, Fan Behaviour and Crime: Contemporary Issues (with Matt Hopkins, 2014) and Criminology: The Essentials (2013). James Diego Vigil is Professor of Social Ecology at University of California, Irvine. As an expert on street gangs and ethnic minority cultures in the United States, especially Latino groups, Prof. Vigil is regularly invited by various local and national organizations and agencies to lecture and consult on, and evaluate, urban youth problems. Prof. Vigil is an anthropologist who is recognized as a “public intellectual” because of his work that brings him close to communities and vulnerable social groups, like street gangs, and this constant and weekly interaction keeps him abreast of the rhythms and routines of urban youth. He received his PhD in Anthropology from University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and has held various teaching and administrative positions before coming to UC Irvine in 2001. Before his present position, he taught at Harvard University, and for longer periods, UCLA and the University of Southern California. As an urban anthropologist focusing on Mexican Americans, he has conducted research on ethnohistory, education, culture change and acculturation, and adolescent and youth issues, especially street gangs. In sum, Prof. Vigil has brought academic knowledge to the streets and affected public policy, especially for low-income families, schools and teachers, and the criminal justice system. Nativo Lopez Vigil studied political science and Spanish literature at UCLA and California State University at Dominguez Hills. He has worked as a political and immigrant rights organizer for 45 years with the Hermandad Mexicana Nacional – La Original, and currently serves as its Senior Political/Legal Advisor. He shared the national organizing leadership with others in the 2006 immigrant rights mega-marches. He was born in Los Angeles and grew up in Norwalk, California. His family is from Mexico, and its heritage can be traced to Asturias, Spain in the 1400s. Alex S. Vitale is Professor of Sociology and Coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College. He is the author of City of Disorder: How the Quality of Life Campaign Transformed New York Politics (2008) and The

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End of Policing (2017). His essays on policing appear regularly in The Nation, New York Daily News, USA Today, and The New York Times. Sandra Walklate is currently Eleanor Rathbone Chair of Sociology at the

University of Liverpool, UK, and conjoint Chair of Criminology, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. She also holds an adjunct professorial position at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane. She is internationally recognized for her work on criminal victimization, particularly focusing on gender and violence in a range of different contexts. Her recent publications include Gender, Crime and Criminal Justice (with Kate Fitz-Gibbon, 2018) and an edited collection, Intimate Partner Violence, Risk and Security: Securing Women’s Lives (with Kate Fitz-Gibbon, Jude McCulloch, and JaneMaree Maher, 2018). Rob White is Professor of Criminology at the University of Tasmania, Australia.

He has written extensively in the areas of criminology, youth studies, and ecojustice. Among his recent books are Media and Crime (with Katrina Clifford, 2017) and Climate Change Criminology (2018). Simon Winlow is Professor of Criminology at Northumbria University, UK. He

is the author of Badfellas (2001) and co-author of Bouncers (with Dick Hobbs, Philip Hadfield, and Stuart Lister, 2003), Violent Night (with Steve Hall, 2006), Criminal Identities and Consumer Culture (with Craig Ancrum and Steve Hall, 2008), Rethinking Social Exclusion (with Steve Hall, 2012), Revitalizing Criminological Theory (with Steve Hall, 2015), Riots and Political Protest (with Steve Hall, Daniel Briggs, and James Treadwell, 2015), and Rise of the Right (with Steve Hall, 2017).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The seeds for this book were sown shortly after the November 8, 2016 US presidential election. Like millions of progressives around the world, we were – and rightfully so – greatly alarmed by this event, and we knew that the consequences would be grave. As noted in the Introduction, the rise of right-wing populism is not restricted to the US, which is why we invited scholars from other countries to contribute to this anthology. A key objective of this volume is to provide innovative answers to the question “What is to be done?” Obviously, this volume does not have all the possible solutions, but regardless of which approach you think is best, as critical thinkers, what we do know for sure is what Simon Winlow, Steve Hall, James Treadwell and Daniel Briggs state in their 2015 book Riots and Political Protest: “Things cannot go on as they are.” Hopefully, the world will be a better place when you finish reading this book. We must first thank our friend and editor Tom Sutton for encouraging us to take on this project. We were also greatly aided by Andrea DeKeseredy and Robert Nicewarner, who spent many hours of their lives reading each manuscript for grammar/spelling and conforming to the required citation and bibliographic style. On top of contributing a chapter to this book, Joseph F. Donnermeyer spent some of his valuable time proofreading some of the chapters. Needless to say, this book is the product of a collective effort. We would like to give a very special thanks to all our colleagues who took time away from their loved ones, leisure activities, and academic schedules to write innovative chapters for this anthology. It was a pleasure to read their offerings, and we are sure that readers will be inspired by their insights and suggestions for progressive change. It is impossible to mention all of those who inspired us to edit this book, but special thanks to some whose support was especially important: Alberto Godenzi, Rosemary Gido, Peter Kraska, Jill Rosenbaum, and Martin D. Schwartz.

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Walter DeKeseredy is again deeply appreciative of the ongoing support of Pat and Andrea DeKeseredy and that of his “fur children,” Bennie, Captain, Higgins, Jinksie, Noodle, and Pheobe. He also thanks these members of the West Virginia University community for their friendship and for creating a stimulating supportive intellectual environment: Lynne Cossman, Gregory Dunaway, Gordon Gee, Trevor Harris, Cris Mayo, Joyce McConnell, Melanie Page, M. Cecil Smith, and the good folks affiliated with the Research Center on Violence at West Virginia University. Acknowledgements, too, go out to the American Society of Criminology’s Divisions on Critical Criminology, Rural Criminology, Victimology, and on Women and Crime. Many members of these organizations helped shape the early years of Walter’s career. Elliott Currie is, as always, deeply grateful to Rachael Peltz, Sonia Peltz-Currie, and Susannah, John, Luke, Henry, and Lucy Maddock. He would also like to take this opportunity to thank his graduate students, past and current, for the fine work they are doing and for enriching his own intellectual and political life. A special acknowledgement is due, too, to Kerry Carrington and her colleagues at the School of Justice at Queensland University of Technology, Australia, for helping to create a vibrant and thriving international community of progressive scholars. His chapter “Getting crime right” in this volume is based in part on a talk given at the conference on Critical Intersections of Crime and Social Justice at Old Dominion University in April 2017: special thanks to Randy Myers and his colleagues for providing the opportunity.

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INTRODUCTION Responding to repression Walter S. DeKeseredy

Turning it around: strategies for justice in an age of repression1 Six years ago, my good friend and colleague Elliott Currie (2013) published a piece titled “The Sustaining Society” that is still relevant today. In this scholarly book chapter, he states, I have a lot of friends who have told me lately that they no longer read newspapers. This isn’t because they get their news on the Internet now, but because they can’t stand to read the news at all because the news is so grim. (p. 3) A rapidly growing number of people are following suit. Such selective inattention is due, in large part, to a major event that occurred on November 8, 2016 – Donald Trump was elected the 45th President of the United States. One of the key results of what was widely perceived as a highly unlikely victory for Trump is also noted in the above chapter: “a kind of deep resignation – a profound pessimism, even among many progressive people about the possibilities of a better society” (p. 3). This pessimism is well-founded, given the radical neoliberal policies and laws passed since Trump got elected, and it seems, from a progressive standpoint, that things are getting worse every day. In my own case, I repeatedly hear the phrase “What next?” The movement toward a harsher, more unequal and less secure society, however, is not confined to the United States – though its expression there may be the most extreme and glaring. As Simon Winlow, Steve Hall, and James Treadwell correctly point out in Chapter 2 of this anthology, “right-wing populism has risen significantly across the West.” In many countries of the advanced industrial world, powerful movements are at work that seek to

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dismantle long-won protections for working people while tilting social and economic resources to those who already enjoy positions of privilege. Harsh demands for a crackdown on crime and for draconian restrictions have surfaced – and in some places dominated public discourses – in countries from the UK to France to Australia and the Netherlands. Even in Canada, where I was born (I am still a Canadian citizen), there is growing anti-immigrant sentiment, as reflected by the June 2018 Ontario provincial election. Right-wing populist Doug Ford was elected Premier by a landslide, and his thinly veiled racist statement “Ontario has to take care of our own” garnered him much support. As well, like Donald Trump, Doug Ford embodies hegemonic masculinity, and there is a very strong relationship between this type of masculinity and right-wing populism as described by me in Chapter 1. In fact, you cannot understand the election of these two politicians without understanding the concept of hegemonic masculinity. Related to this point is Kimmel’s (2018) empirically based observation that you can’t understand right-wing extremists, such as those mentioned in Chapter 2, without examining masculinity and gender: It is the specific ways that specific groups of men understand and enact masculinity that help us navigate between the macro and micro, between the structural and the psychological. It’s within the gendered connection between humiliation and violence where we will find the key to understanding how some young men get into extremist politics and, therefore, how we, as policy makers, civil and community leaders, parents, religious leaders, and citizens, can provide a route they can use to get out. (p. 11) What Meda Chesney-Lind’s Chapter 9 and mine clearly have in common is that they both focus heavily on gender, patriarchy, and harmful consequences of the antifeminist backlash in the US. What makes Chesney-Lind’s offering distinct, though, is her examination of Trump’s assault on girl’s and women’s reproductive rights, including abortion. She makes explicit that “it is the most prominent anti-woman initiative launched by the Trump administration.” Some feminist criminologists might also consider it a form of state-perpetrated violence against women. Victoria Collins (2016), one of the world’s leading experts on this type of state crime, would agree, and asserts that “Women’s bodies and their lives are subject to different types of violence than that of men” and “the state has historically sanctioned violence against women in varying forms. Despite ‘progress’ over the centuries, the institution of law has been instrumental in normalizing gender relations that award rights to men and simultaneously deny these same rights to women” (p. 23). There is a large criminological literature showing that the state, too, facilitates corporate criminality, an issue addressed by Gregg Barak in Chapter 7. Here, following Clinard and Quinney (1973), corporate crimes are defined as “offenses

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committed by corporate officials for their corporation and the offenses of the corporation” (p. 159), and what Michalowski (1985) stated over 30 years ago still holds true: “corporate crime represents the most widespread and costly form of crime in America” (p. 325). The same can be said about corporate crime in other parts of the world, such as Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom. For example, some sociologists estimate that the rate of employees dying from unsafe work conditions is more than six times greater than the street crime death rate (DeKeseredy, 2011; DeKeseredy, Ellis, & Alvi, 2005). Not only does Barak provide striking examples of corporate criminality, but he also makes a compelling case for, as he puts it, “moving beyond those wellworn tinkering efforts in criminal enforcement, regulation or self-regulation, such as enhanced self-monitoring, upgraded ethical conduct, or greater social responsibility.” Will the progressive strategies he proposes ever materialize? Many readers are likely to be skeptical in this current era. The same can be said about numerous readers’ responses to all the leftist initiatives advanced in this book. We can always us a healthy dose of skepticism, but thus far, there has been much less by way of hard analysis of what has gone wrong in the age of Trump and of tough-minded thinking about what concrete strategies might work to challenge and ultimately reverse these developments. That task has never been more urgent. Actually, what Winlow et al. (2015) state below is one of the key reasons for putting together this anthology: It is now incumbent upon the political Left to rejuvenate its discourse and transform itself into something that inspires young people to believe that something better can actually be brought into existence. What the Left really needs is a realistic utopianism, a utopianism that connects a genuine faith that a better world can be connected to a doggedly realistic understanding and appreciation of just how difficult this task is and the scale of the work needed to make it possible. (pp. 204–205, emphasis in original) Mass shootings are frequently in the news. They are also associated with gender and masculinity, and these killings are briefly examined by Peter Squires in Chapter 8 and by me in Chapter 1. Indeed, the recent spate of school shootings in the US, the rise of right-wing populism across the globe, and other major social problems spawned by neoliberalism and patriarchy strongly indicate that we are witnessing the latest devastating consequences of the “slow apocalypse” spawned by anti-social capitalism (Harrington, 1989, p. 284). Let’s also not forget that it is not only human beings who are experiencing the slow apocalypse. As Rob White describes in Chapter 10, “the existing planetary environment is rapidly being destroyed. This is because the four elements that sustain life – earth, air, water and sun (energy) – are under severe adverse pressures.” Even more environmental harm will occur soon because of the Trump

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administration’s major assaults on environmental regulations and moves to open public lands to private exploitation. Elliott Currie lives in a metropolitan southern California neighborhood, and in his aforementioned “The Sustaining Society” he states that the slow apocalypse exists only a few miles from his house. What is the dominant left-wing response to what Currie (2016) refers to as “ordinary violence” (e.g., predatory street crimes and domestic violence) that plague communities like the one near his residence and in other disadvantaged areas around the world? Unfortunately, in this current era, we are witnessing, in Currie’s (2016) words, a “new brand of idealist complacency” (p. 24). He and other left realists like me and Martin D. Schwartz (see DeKeseredy & Schwartz, 2018) worry about the left’s selective inattention to the problem of inner-city violence in the US, especially in dispossessed urban African-American communities. This is troubling, since Chicago reported 781 homicides in 2016, which was this city’s highest number since 1996. There are other US cities that are among the most violent urban areas in the world, including Oakland and Baltimore. The consequences of this “stunning silence” are alarming. Returning to Currie (2016): [W]hat is clear is that it results in the ceding of concern about American violence to others whose agendas are usually a lot less progressive, and the implicit tolerance of a level of human suffering and inequality in the likelihood of death that no one should accept – least of all the people who purport to be in the business of studying crime. (p. 25) Currie has paid his dues studying ordinary violence, and it is what he appropriately expresses that he knows most about. He also reminds us that “ordinary violence in the 21st century is a human crisis of devastating proportions, one that, like many other contemporary human disasters, is savagely unequal in its impact” (2016, p. 12). What, then, is to be done about such violence in the age of Trump? In Chapter 4, Currie provides much-needed answers to this question, and his solutions are realistic. Fast-forwarding to Chapter 12, readers will soon discover after reading Sonya Goshe’s offering that she and Currie think alike. Both are deeply concerned about targeting the root causes of ordinary violence and other types of crime. Prime examples of such causes are poverty, unemployment, and child abuse. Goshe’s chapter is yet another progressive reminder that, in her words, “American criminal justice reform is disconnected from its knowledge on root causes of social harm and the depth of punitive norms in a society that does little more than punish to keep people safe.” Like Currie’s contribution to this volume and his earlier work on violence, Goshe’s chapter also sensitizes us to the problem of again travelling down the well-worn path of what Currie (1985) views as “compartmentalizing social problems along

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bureaucratic lines” (p. 18). Rarely, if ever, will you find a politician who manages economic problems that contribute to ordinary violence considering how her or his economic decisions could affect crime rates. Nor will you find her or him discussing issues such as factory closures, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), or cuts in benefits for low-income people with politicians responsible for criminal justice issues, or police chiefs or officers. Consequently, many policies are adopted without taking into account the ultimate effect on crime. Thus, police, prison employees, and other criminal justice personnel are called in to “clean up the mess” made by the rest of society (Currie, 1985). Most of the policies outlined in this book will seem somewhat out of place in a traditional criminology or social problems textbook. For example, many social scientists feel that job creation is a topic that belongs in urban policy, political sociology, or public administration. The problem is that real life does not play itself along the bureaucratic lines set up by universities and government agencies. What you eat can affect how you behave, and the fact that the nutrition department is located in a separate university building from the criminology department does not affect that truth. In real life, jobs, child care, nutrition, welfare, and many other events affect our lives, together and at the same time. It is mainly in textbooks that they are segregated. I would be remiss if I didn’t state that Alex S. Vitale, author of Chapter 5, also points out the limits of criminal justice reform. More specifically, he focuses on the limits of police reform. As a part of the state, the police are required to serve its interest, and in capitalist countries characterized by much race/ethnic, gender, and class inequality, this means shoring up a harmful status quo. I couldn’t agree more, then, with Vitale’s assessment of the current mode of policing in the US: “As a result, a whole host of liberal police reforms are doomed to failure …. We must look instead to fundamental changes to the police role in society.” Like Currie, Goshe, and the other authors in this volume, Vitale emphasizes the importance of eliminating racism and economic inequality rather than traditional liberal measures such as better training and community policing. In his words: “We don’t need empty police reforms; we need a robust democracy that gives people the capacity to demand of their government and themselves real, nonpunitive solutions to their problems.” Indeed we do! James Diego Vigil and Nativo Lopez Vigil also examine racism in Chapter 13. This is a timely piece because it addresses the Trump administration’s recent separation of children from their parents as a cruel means to discourage undocumented migrants from seeking refuge in the US. Defined by the American Academy of Pediatrics to be a form of child abuse, the separation of children received much international attention in the summer of 2018 and sparked mass outrage around the world because, as noted by Vigil and Lopez Vigil, it was, to say the least, “morally reprehensible.” Vigil and Lopez Vigil provide context for the current dire strait of immigration policy in the US, pointing out that although Trump’s language and policies

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on immigration have been particularly egregious, they are rooted in choices made by virtually every previous US administration, and the authors also suggest some elements of a progressive strategy to break this self-defeating pattern. One the key points made in their chapter is that “It appears … Trump is desperately searching for an immigration problem that … doesn’t require fixing.” The authors of Chapter 11, Randy Myers and Tim Goddard, concur with Currie, Goshe, and Vitale. In synch with these four scholars, when it comes to thinking about improving the lives of young people, Myers and Goddard convincingly show us that we need to think “far beyond the justice system” and that they are correct to state that the left “must think about justice for youth rather than youth justice or juvenile justice reform.” But they don’t stop there. Based on their fieldwork with US social justice youth-serving organizations, they show us what youth justice should look like. What is particularly interesting, at least to me, is their call for strategically using neoliberalism to challenge neoliberalism. It is beyond the scope of this Introduction to provide examples, but I’m sure you will find their ideas innovative. So far, the bulk of the criminological research on violence, drugs, and other types of crime, including corporate criminality, is urban-biased. Ignoring the plight of rural people is not only problematic for political reasons outlined by me in Chapter 1, but also for the fact that rates of rural crime in general may be higher than urban and suburban rates in particular types of rural places and for specific kinds of crimes (Donnermeyer, 2016b; Donnermeyer & DeKeseredy, 2014). We now know this is definitely the case for intimate violence against women in the US and in the Global South (DeKeseredy, in press; DeKeseredy & Hall-Sanchez, 2018). However, rural crime has, until recently, ranked among the least-studied social problems in criminology. As Donnermeyer, Jobes, and Barclay (2006) put it in their review of the extant rural crime literature available at that time: If rural crime was considered at all, it was a convenient “ideal type” contrasted with the criminogenic conditions assumed to exist exclusively in urban locations. Rural crime was rarely examined either comparatively with urban crime or as a subject worthy of investigation in its own right. (p. 199) Joseph Donnermeyer, author of Chapter 3, is a pioneering rural criminologist. Though his contribution is about drugs in rural parts of the US and the rise of Trump, he has a few things in common with Rob White, who is a green criminologist. Defining green criminology is the subject of debate (DeKeseredy & Dragiewicz, 2014), but here, following South and Brisman (2013), it is defined as “the term that criminologists most frequently employ to describe the exploration and examination of causes of and responses to ‘ecological,’ ‘environmental,’ or ‘green’ crimes, harms, and hazards” (p. 2). Six chapters in Donnermeyer’s (2016b) The Routledge International Handbook of Rural Criminology confirm his (2016a) claim that “rural criminology and

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green criminology are so tightly intertwined as to make it impossible to ascertain where their respective borders begin, and to what extent those borders, if they exist at all, have any significance” (p. 285). It should be noted that Rob White has a chapter in Donnermeyer’s handbook and that many severe green crimes occur in rural communities, as documented by a rapidly growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship.2 Donnermeyer’s Chapter 3 speaks to us on many levels, but one of his most important points is that rural sections of the US are not experiencing a drug epidemic, but rather substance use in these places has a long history. He provides evidence showing that “the story of drugs today is not about an epidemic, but about a concomitant progression of drugs abuse associated with economic, social, and cultural change.” His brief historical analysis begins with moonshine and then moves to marijuana, methamphetamine, oxycontin, heroin, and other highly addictive drugs. Where we are today with drugs in the rural US, as demonstrated by Donnermeyer, is a function of broader structural forces combined with high levels of unemployment, poverty, and other forms of inequality. These rural social problems are also briefly examined by me in Chapter 1. This books talks a lot about justice, but what would a just justice system look like? Using case studies of decisions made in the name of justice in England and Wales during 2017–2018, in Chapter 6 Sandra Walklate examines what she coins “the challenges, pitfalls and possibilities for the delivery of justice in the 21st century.” It is a very theoretically sophisticated offering, which makes it difficult to summarize here. What especially stands out, however, is her critique of risk assessment, which, as she notes, is not a new feature of the criminal justice system. She shows us that risk assessment practices are becoming more sophisticated and complex, and are now endemic to the criminal justice system. This is highly troublesome, and Walklate contends that criminologists must challenge the “endemic embrace of risk” to generate meaningful and effective debates about what a just justice system should look like. Walklate also briefly addresses the importance of engaging with “southern criminology,” a new critical criminological school of thought that draws heavily on the work of Australian scholar Raywen Connell (2007). Connell asserts that the theories and methods of the North American social sciences are generally seen as valid and applicable around the world. Southern criminologists like Carrington, Hogg, and Sozzo (2015), though, challenge criminology’s northern colonialism, which, as Walklate observes, contributed to the use of risk assessment practices for Indigenous peoples. Needless to say, these practices are culturally biased, and therefore contribute to the unequal administration of justice. More specifically, the implication for Indigenous people is that they may be overidentified as being at risk, and not surprisingly, most people who administer risk assessment tools to them are white. Documented by Tanya H. Lee (2016) in Indian Country Today, in the US, risk assessment instruments are definitely “turning Native kids into criminals” (p. 1).

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In addition to summarizing all the chapters in this book, I have articulated some commonalities. But all the contributors have at least one thing in common, and that is they agree with this statement made a few years ago by Elliott Currie (2016): We need … to develop ways of fostering a criminology that is more than a relatively passive witness to the destruction wrought by contemporary global forces – much less an accomplice – and instead vigorously steps up to take on the job of combatting those forces and dedicating itself unapologetically to the reduction of needless pain, fear, and injustice around the world. That is the kind of criminology I want to be doing for as long as I’m capable of doing it. And the more people who join me, the happier I will be. (p. 29)

Why this book? The main objective of this project is to both join Elliott and to answer Winlow et al.’s (2015) call for rejuvenating the political left by providing probing answers and progressive initiatives aimed at successfully challenging the destructive impacts of “capitalism with the lid off” and other forms of inequality like patriarchy and racism (Currie, 2016, p. 10). All the contributors seek to develop the kind of analysis that can underpin both short- and long-term strategies for change in a time when this kind of visionary but pragmatic thinking is desperately needed. A considerable amount of space is devoted to these three themes: the nature and dimensions of the deepening assault on progressive values and institutions in the current age; the roots of that stunning and largely unpredicted success of extreme right-wing parties and agendas in many countries around the world (especially in the US); and bold, creative strategies to challenge those agendas and restart the movement toward a sustaining and humane world order. Together with the other contributors, Elliott and I want to offer readers a book that illuminates the social, cultural, and economic forces that have taken us to this point, to sketch out the damage that the new regressive trends have already brought and threaten to accelerate in the future, and to outline steps toward a genuinely effective movement for a better and more just society. Developing a new progressive agenda is fundamentally necessary because “critical discourse divorced from critical practice degenerates into mere literary criticism, the value of which is a purely scholastic question” (Currie, DeKeseredy, & MacLean, 1990, p. 50). Maybe, if we eventually achieve this goal, watching or reading the news will again be a routine part of people’s daily lives. In the age of Trump, we are also witnessing the rapid corporatization of institutions of higher learning and the influx of neoliberal university administrators.

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Consequently, professors are being asked to do more with less, and this causes much stress. My colleagues frequently tell me that they would like to get more involved with broader political movements, but they don’t have the time and all their energy is eaten up by the growing number of classes they must teach and the administrative tasks they are required to perform, plus the number of publications and grant proposals they are mandated to churn out. Maybe, then, it might be a good idea to contemplate these words included in Simon Winlow’s (2018) obituary for Steve Redhead,3 whose book Trump Studies will be published later this year by Emerald: “[W]e should think about how much time we waste on pointless tasks foisted upon us by our employers, and those we willfully take up to the detriment of those who deserve our time and care” (p. 35). We must always remember that the political agenda we are calling for is not only “about us.” It is for making the lives of our loved ones, our friends, and our community members healthier and happier. It is about carving out a better world for our grandchildren and the grandchildren of people who would like to see them live in what Currie (2013) coins a “sustaining society.” Winlow asks us to think about “how we will use the few years of our life still available to us.” To all my academic friends: let’s divert our energy away from the pointless tasks Winlow talks about, and use the years we have left to help achieve the dream advanced in this book.

Notes 1 This Introduction includes revised sections of work published previously by DeKeseredy (2000, 2011) and DeKeseredy and Schwartz (1996, 2018). 2 That South and Brisman (2013) put together the Routledge International Handbook of Green Criminology is a powerful statement on the development of the field. Since then, scores of scholarly works have been published, and we will definitely see even more coming out in the next few years. 3 Steve was a prolific author, and he specialized in these fields: cultural studies, social and cultural theory, law and popular culture, critical criminology, sport and media cultures, political economy, and physical cultural studies. I had the pleasure of working with him at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology from the fall of 2011 to the fall of 2012. Please go to www.steveredhead.zone/profile/ for more information on this highly influential scholar.

References Carrington, K., Hogg, R., & Sozzo, M. (2015). Southern criminology. British Journal of Criminology, 56, 1–20. Clinard, M. B., & Quinney, R. (1973). Criminal behavior systems: A typology (3rd Ed.). New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Collins, V. E. (2016). State crime, women and gender. London: Routledge. Connell, R. (2007). Southern theory: The global dynamics of knowledge in the social sciences. Sydney, Australia: Allen and Unwin. Currie, D. H., DeKeseredy, W. S., & MacLean, B. D. (1990). Reconstituting social order and social control: Police accountability in Canada. Journal of Human Justice, 2, 29–54.

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Currie, E. (1985). Confronting crime: An American challenge. New York: Pantheon. Currie, E. (2013). The sustaining society. In K. Carrington, M. Ball, E. O’Brien, & J. Tauri (Eds.), Crime, justice and social democracy: International perspectives (pp. 3–15). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Currie, E. (2016). The violence divide: Taking “ordinary” crime seriously in a volatile world. In R. Matthews (Ed.), What is to be done about crime and punishment? Towards a “public criminology” (pp. 9–30). London: Palgrave Macmillan. DeKeseredy, W. S. (2000). Women, crime and the Canadian criminal justice system. Cincinnati, OH: Anderson. DeKeseredy, W. S. (2011). Contemporary critical criminology. London: Routledge. DeKeseredy, W. S. (in press). Intimate violence against rural women: The current state of sociological knowledge. International Journal of Rural Criminology. DeKeseredy, W. S., & Dragiewicz, M. (2014). Introduction: Advances in critical criminology theorizing. In W. S. DeKeseredy & M. Dragiewicz (Eds.), Critical criminology, volume II (pp. 1–12). London: Routledge. DeKeseredy, W. S., Ellis, D., & Alvi, S. (2005). Deviance and crime: Theory, research and policy. Cincinnati, OH: LexisNexis. DeKeseredy, W. S., & Hall-Sanchez, A. (2018). Male violence against women in the Global South: What we know and what we don’t know. In K. Carrington, R. Hogg, J. Scott, & M. Sozzo (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of criminology and the Global South (pp. 883–900). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. DeKeseredy, W. S., & Schwartz, M. D. (1996). Contemporary criminology. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. DeKeseredy, W. S., & Schwartz, M. D. (2018). Left realism: A new look. In W. S. DeKeseredy & M. Dragiewicz (Eds.), Routledge handbook of critical criminology (2nd Ed.) (pp. 30–42). London: Routledge. Donnermeyer, J. F. (2016a). The intersection of rural and green criminologies. In J. F. Donnermeyer (Ed.), The Routledge international handbook of rural criminology (pp. 285–287). London: Routledge. Donnermeyer, J. F. (Ed.) (2016b). The Routledge international handbook of rural criminology. London: Routledge. Donnermeyer, J. F., & DeKeseredy, W. S. (2014). Rural criminology. London: Routledge. Donnermeyer, J. F., Jobes, P., & Barclay, E. (2006). Rural crime, poverty, and community. In W. S. DeKeseredy & B. Perry (Eds.), Advancing critical criminology: Theory and application (pp. 199–218). Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Harrington, M. (1989). Socialism: Past and future. New York: Arcade Publishing. Kimmel, M. (2018). Healing from hate: How young men get into – and out of – violent extremism. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Lee, T. H. (2016, August). Turning Native kids into criminals. Indian Country Today. Retrieved from https://newsmaven.io/indiancountrytoday/archive/turning-native-kids -into-criminals-FSdT9NN0vk-jdgDwo3ooWQ/ Michalowski, R. J. (1985). Order, law, and crime: An introduction to criminology. New York: Random House. South, N., & Brisman, A. (Eds.). (2013). Routledge international handbook of green criminology. London: Routledge. Winlow, S. (2018). Steve Redhead, 1952–2018. British Society of Criminology Newsletter, 82, 35–38. Winlow, S., Hall, S., Treadwell, J., & Briggs, D. (2015). Riots and political protest: Notes from the post-political present. London: Routledge.

1 BUT WHY THIS MAN? Challenging hegemonic masculinity in an age of repression Walter S. DeKeseredy

Introduction1 Despite numerous progressive changes spawned by the feminist movement that have occurred over the past several decades, and even with 2016 US presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton embracing parts of conservative policies, yet again, a man was elected President of the United States. But why Donald Trump? Why not another man? One answer is that “the desire for a strong, virile man in the White House runs deep in the American DNA” (Katz, 2016, p. ix). Related to this point is that there remains a strong anti-feminist backlash, one fueled in part by “the desire to return to aspects of an idealized past in which structured inequality was normalized” (Dragiewicz, 2018, p. 336). Unfortunately, many on the Left did not foresee the possibility of a Trump victory and were blind to the fact that thousands of men across the United States are feeling what Kimmel (2013) identified three years prior to the presidential election. He uncovered a “new breed of angry white men” who are experiencing aggrieved entitlement: It is that sense that those benefits to which you believed yourself entitled have been snatched away from you by unseen forces larger and more powerful. You feel yourself to be heir to a great promise, the American Dream, which has turned into an impossible fantasy for the very people who were supposed to inherit it. (p. 18, emphasis in original) Many angry white men (and angry white women) live in rural communities and were ignored by Democratic presidential candidates because of “the assumption … that rural white voters are racist and illiberal and intolerant” (Pruitt,

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cited in Kaori Gurley, 2015, p. 1). Another major error was to blatantly insult angry white men. For instance, Hillary Clinton told supporters at a September 2016 New York Fundraiser that “half” of Trump supporters fit into a “basket of deplorables.” Similar words are used today in many progressive circles, and the left continues to be out of sync with those whom Hochschild (2016) refers to as “strangers in their own land.” Still, there are progressives who now contend that “We need to not close ourselves off to how the other side thinks” (a letter writer cited in Pitts, 2018, p. 6A). Will understanding anti-feminist, racist men makes things better compared to ignoring and insulting them? Certainly, we need to know the causes of social problems otherwise we will be “poorly equipped to talk about remedies” (Currie, 2016, p. 26). What much, if not most, of the Left failed to do, however, was understand the gendered nature of the 2016 presidential election and that Trump embodies hegemonic masculinity (Connell, 1995), which is the dominant form of masculinity in the United States and elsewhere (Katz, 2016). The basic components of such a masculinity are: (a) avoid all things feminine; (b) restrict emotions severely; (c) show toughness and aggression; (d) exhibit selfreliance; (e) strive for achievement and status; (f) exhibit nonrelational attitudes toward sexuality; and (g) actively engage in homophobia (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005; DeKeseredy, 2017; Levant, 1994; Schwartz & DeKeseredy, 1997). Masculinities studies show that men are encouraged to live up to these ideals and are sanctioned for not doing so (West & Zimmerman, 1987), and as Katz (2016) correctly points out, “the qualities considered ‘presidential’ – with the notable exception of Barak Obama’s blackness – track closely with those associated with hegemonic masculinity” (p. 28). Having a gendered understanding of Trump’s style of governance, his supporters, and the antifeminist backlash is essential for creating effective strategies for social justice in an age of repression (Dragiewicz, 2018). Gender should not be confused with sex, even though both terms are often incorrectly used interchangeably (DeKeseredy, 2015). Within communities of feminist and masculinities scholars, gender is commonly referred to as “the socially defined expectations, characteristics, attributes, roles, responsibilities, activities and practices that constitute masculinity, femininity, gender identity, and gender expressions” (Flavin & Artz, 2013, p. 11). Sex, on the other hand, refers to the biologically based categories of “female” and “male” that are stable across history and cultures (Dragiewicz, 2009). The 2016 presidential election demonstrates that angry white men striving to meet the standards of hegemonic masculinity can be more dangerous than is often realized, and they are not completely disingenuous. They truly feel hurt and slighted, as amazing as that sounds. In the words of Kimmel (2017), it is difficult to tell these men: that their feelings are wrong. Their feelings are real. They cannot be dismissed with a casual wave of the hand. But at the same time, their feelings

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may not be true – they may not provide an accurate assessment of their situation …. With angry white men, we need to … offer an alternative way to understand their situation. (pp. x–xi, emphasis in original) There are alternatives to hegemonic masculinity, and there are what Messerschmidt (2018) sees as “promising prospects for gendered social change” (p. 134). Though there are a wide variety of suggestions in the literature on how to challenge hegemonic masculinity, many of them conflict with each other. As the journalist H. L. Mencken is reputed to have written many years ago, “For every problem, there is a solution which is simple, neat, and wrong” (cited in Schwartz & DeKeseredy, 1997, p. 137). It is impossible to describe the vast array of progressive policy proposals advanced by academics, activists, community groups, practitioners, and others in one chapter. Instead, I will concentrate primarily on a few recommendations that are informed by contemporary left realist ways of knowing and the work of some masculinities scholars. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to describe left realism in its entirety,2 but it is a critical criminological perspective3 that pays constant attention to the short-term, anti-crime policies aimed at alleviating much pain and suffering (DeKeseredy & Schwartz, 2018). The study of masculinities is the gendered study of men (Messerschmidt, 2018; Morgan, 1992).

Economic policies We may be approaching a new decade, but some things don’t change, including the popular view that the best way to stimulate economic growth and create new jobs is to give more to the rich, which the Trump administration quickly did with its large tax cuts for the wealthy. Often referred to as the “trickledown” theory, advocates of this neoliberal approach call for cutting business taxes, keeping wages low, cutting social programs, reducing benefits like welfare, and eliminating public sector jobs. Contemporary governments seem obsessed with trickle-down strategies because they assume, as Galbraith (1992) notes, “If one feeds the horse enough oats, some will pass through the road for the sparrows” (p. 108). However, trickle-down economics will not improve the lives of angry white men or anyone else at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. In fact, a wealth of poverty and unemployment data show that the “trickle down has fizzled out” (Hurtig, 1999, p. 103). Not surprisingly, however, the wealthy continue to benefit greatly from low wages, government cutbacks, and the rapid growth of the “precariat”4 (Wacquant, 2011). Male privilege is “persistent but precarious” (Sernau, 2006, p. 69). Due to the above and other destructive economic transformations, 20 years ago Susan Faludi (1999) observed that many US men “lost a useful role in public life, a way of earning a decent and reliable living” (p. 40). They experienced what Young (2007) coined the “vertigo of late modernity,” and were suffering from

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a “sense of insecurity, insubstantiality, uncertainty, and fear of falling” (p. 35). Today, more US men feel humiliated and emasculated than ever before because, in the words of Marxist scholar Vegh Weis (2017), “it is the first time in which the American Dream has entirely fallen apart: it is not enough for parents to work hard to provide their children with a better life” (pp. 194–195). Again, we know that numerous rural males are angry white men who voted for Trump and feel “stiffed” (Faludi, 1999). Kimmel (2017) reminds us that their anger is directed at the wrong people, but they have every right to be angry because: Economic restructuring has hit rural men particularly hard, resulting in high levels of unemployment, chronic underemployment, and declining wages …. The loss of stable male employment has also tested the fortitude of the masculine ideal (i.e., the notion that men’s identity and success is linked to their ability to provide economically for their family). (Smith, 2017, p. 120) There is a major decline in the number of family-owned farms because many people cannot make a reasonable living from them. Moreover, numerous rural US towns that had to rely on a small number of industries for employment have been economically devastated by the closing of sawmills, coalmines, and other key sources of income (Nelson, 2011; Sherman, 2011; Stoll, 2017). Note, too, that an increasing number of rural women are seeking employment or getting jobs due to the loss of stable male employment (Smith, 2017). Transitions like these often generate marital instability because many economically displaced men cannot meet what they see as the responsibilities of “being the man of the household,” and thus must cope with their perceived failed masculinity (DeKeseredy et al., 2007; Sherman, 2011; Smith, 2017). Further, a sizeable portion of unemployed rural men who strongly adhere to the ideology of familial patriarchy compensate for their lack of economic power by exerting more control over their wives (DeKeseredy & Schwartz, 2009) – a problem that can influence these women to consider leaving or actually exiting their relationships (Sherman, 2011). This ideology is a discourse that supports male domination over women in domestic settings. Relevant themes of this ideology are an insistence on women’s obedience, respect, loyalty, dependency, sexual access, and sexual fidelity (Barrett & McIntosh, 1982; Dobash & Dobash, 1979; Smith, 1990; Schwartz & DeKeseredy, 1997). There are plenty of other major social and economic transformations that have spawned the “crisis in the rural gender order” and that have helped create the aforementioned new breed of angry rural white men (Hogg & Carrington, 2006, p. 181). These changes include women’s rights to own property and inherit wealth, an increase in the number of rural women’s associations, the “delegitimation” of some forms of rural hegemonic masculinity (e.g., harsher drinking and driving laws), and the rise in rural women’s employment that coincided with the rise of the service sector (DeKeseredy et al., 2007; Smith, 2017).

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Of course, there are also unemployed rural men who have “managed to remake masculinity” in ways that do not involve becoming angry and engaging in patriarchal practices. For instance, Sherman’s (2011) study of families harmed by the closure of sawmills in a rural California community reveals that some unemployed men became active, progressive fathers and enjoyed spending much time with their children while their wives worked. Too many other unemployed men, however, deal with the above “masculinity challenges” in negative ways, such as drinking with men in similar situations, abusing female intimate partners (DeKeseredy & Schwartz, 2009), and joining far right groups (Kimmel, 2017). What is to be done? There are no easy answers to this question in this current era. Meaningful job growth appears to be a pipe dream thanks to the devastating effects of Trump imposing heavy trade tariffs on imported goods such as steel and aluminum from Canada, Mexico, and the European Union (EU). For example, in late June 2018, iconic US motorcycle producer Harley-Davidson announced that it is moving some production overseas because, in response to Trump’s actions, the EU increased US motorcycle tariffs from 6% to 31%, which adds roughly US$2,200 to the cost of the average motorcycle (Kessler, 2018). This, perhaps, is just the tip of the iceberg, since the Trump tariffs could result in job losses for hundreds of thousands of US workers (Tuttle, 2018). And just when one thinks that things could not get worse, factor in the effects of robots and artificial intelligence. A Pew Research Center study (see Smith & Anderson, 2014) asked 1,896 experts about the consequences of these new technologies and found that: Half of these experts (48%) envision a future in which robots and digital agents [will] have displaced significant numbers of both blue- and whitecollar workers – with many expressing concern that this will lead to vast increases in income inequality, masses of people who are effectively unemployable, and breakdowns in the social order. (p. 1) Lately, I frequently hear these words made famous by the late soul singer Sam Cooke: “A change is gonna come.” We do need some optimism, but we must not ignore the fact that capitalism has historically been remarkably resilient, if brutally efficient. Further, there is likely to be continued and even increased suffering if the economic system is left to its own devices. Thus, the “wait for the end strategy” is flawed since it is difficult to imagine when the end will come and what will happen in the meantime. Also, simply replacing Republican federal leadership with a Democratic president is not likely to turn things around because the Democratic Party remains a slight variation within a dominant social order committed to perpetuating and legitimating capitalist relations. One vital strategy, then, is to develop ways of generating the political will to motivate governments and industries to create new social and economic policies that essentially involve rethinking the nature and purpose of work (DeKeseredy

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et al., 2003). Several of the following possibilities informed by left realist thinking could occur in this scenario:5 • • • • • •

Government, industry workers, and their representatives could cooperate to shorten the work week, thereby increasing employment opportunities for those currently experiencing unemployment or underemployment. Jobs could be rationed. Earlier retirement could be made a condition of employment. A value added tax (already in place in many Western countries) could be created, thus increasing the tax revenue base to create or sustain social programs that act as a buffer for those who fall through the employment tracks. Since technology is replacing jobs, there may be some positive social outcomes available in taxing industries employing such labor-saving technologies again to increase the tax base. North America and other industrialized nations may have reached a stage in their development where it is imperative to rethink what it means to work. In other words, it may no longer be possible to think of work only as something that we do to put food on the table, but to think of it as something we do to contribute to the communities in which we live. In this regard, some progressive policy analysts suggest that we need to create a social economy consisting of volunteer, community service, for which governments pay a “shadow wage.”

Returning to the plight of rural communities, businesses should help build a more diverse rural economy through developing and supporting small, community-based businesses and small industrial districts. These initiatives can be created with the help of small business loans, tax incentives, and government– private sector partnerships (DeKeseredy & Schwartz, 2009; Jensen, 2006). As well, new jobs can be created because of the expansion of tourism, recreation, and retirement in rural places. In fact, retirement income now constitutes the economic base for many rural communities (Bishop & Gallardo, 2011; Smith, 2017). Rethinking the nature of work may also involve rural men embracing more flexible gender roles to avoid falling into poverty. This might entail, due to the disappearance of male jobs in rural areas, men accepting their partners’ entry into the service sector labor force or men periodically doing most of the domestic work while they seek employment and while their partners are working (Smith, 2017). There is evidence that improving economic equality results in greater social equality (Kimmel, 2017). Consider Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway. These are, according to the World Economic Forum’s 2017–2018 global competitiveness rankings (Schwab, 2017), among the top 12 countries, and yet they still adhere to strong social democratic principles (Currie, 2013). The US, on the other hand, ranks above these countries (number 2), but a Thompson Reuters Foundation (2018) survey found that out of 193 United Nations member

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states, the US was ranked the tenth most dangerous country for women. This is not surprising, given the alarmingly high rates of male-to-female physical and sexual assaults in the US. For instance, 34% of the female students based at one college located in a South Atlantic region of the US reported experiencing at least one type of sexual assault, and the national female college average sexual assault rate is 25% (DeKeseredy, Hall-Sanchez, & Nolan, 2018). Based on these data, it is appropriate then to quote Currie (2013). He notes that not only have the above Nordic social democracies “done a remarkably good job of creating a skilled, capable, and healthy workforce,” but they have also managed to: achieve this fusion of global competitiveness and the highest level of social well-being in human history despite the fact that there really are enormous pressures in the external global economy that push against the maintenance of … generous policies, like storm waves pounding against a fragile shore. Imagine, then, what might be possible in a global economy, most of all of which was in the hands of other social democratic governments pursuing social ends. (p. 10) Imagine, too, what the US would be like if most men in that country had meaningful jobs and were protected by a social safety net comparable to those in the aforementioned Nordic countries. I suspect that Kimmel’s (2017) hypothesis would garner considerable empirical support: “[A]t the end of the day, they can look back at their lives and smile with pride that their hard work, dedication, and sacrifice will have earned them the dignity and respect to which they are, indeed, entitled” (p. 285). What’s more, reducing unemployment and creating decent jobs helps reduce rates of male violence against intimate female partners, and it is an important means of “chipping away” at patriarchal practices and discourses that exist beyond family/household settings (DeKeseredy, 2011b; DeKeseredy et al., 2003).

Creating a culture of support and inclusion in schools Because of staggering youth unemployment rates in the US, thousands of young people have little, if any, hope for the future. Hence, many of them are on the “road to whatever” (Currie, 2004). “Whatever” is a word that many of Elliott Currie’s teenage interviewees used to describe how they felt before committing dangerous or self-destructive acts. It is, according to Currie, “an emotional place in which they no longer cared about what happened to them and that made trouble not only possible but likely” (p. 14). Contributing to this problem are what Klein (2012) coins “pecking orders” endemic to most, if not all, US middle and high schools. Typically at the top of these orders are male athletes who “often have the most power to declare who should be ‘saved’ from daily

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harassment and who should become the school’s targets of abuse” (p. 38). And it is the boys and young male adults who are perceived as not living up to the principles of hegemonic masculinity who are often the targets (Messerschmidt, 2000, 2018). As we have repeatedly seen over the past few years, the consequences of being marginalized or rejected by one’s peers can devastating. For instance, boys that fall into the category of marginalized masculinity (Connell, 1995) may turn to extreme forms of violence, such as mass shootings, to “claim their patriarchal dividend” (Klein, 2012, p. 48). Moreover, the bulk of those who do such shootings are “angry white boys” (Kimmel, 2017). Consider Elliott Rodger. On May 23, 2014, after uploading a YouTube video entitled “Elliott Rodger’s Retribution,”6 he murdered six people and injured 14 others near the University of California, Santa Barbara before killing himself. Below are parts of his misogynistic diatribe: Girls gave me their affection and sex and love to other men, but never to me. I’m 22 years old and still a virgin. I’ve never even kissed a girl. I’ve been through college for two and a half years, more than that actually, and I’m still a virgin. It’s not fair. You girls have never been attracted to me. I don’t know why you girls aren’t attracted to me, but I will punish you all for it. It’s an injustice, a crime, because I don’t know what you don’t see in me. I’m the perfect guy, and yet you throw yourselves at all these obnoxious men instead of me – the supreme gentleman. I will punish all of you for it. If I can’t have you girls, I will destroy you. You forced me to suffer all my life, and now I’ll make you suffer. I’ve waited a long time for this. I’ll give you exactly what you deserve, all of you. All you girls who rejected me and looked down upon me and, you know, treated me like scum while you gave yourselves to other men. And all of you men, for living a better life than me – all of you sexually active men, I hate you. I hate all of you and I can’t wait to give you exactly what you deserve: utter annihilation. Elliott Rodger, like most white boy school shooters, felt emasculated and humiliated, and extreme violence was the means of restoring his masculinity (Kimmel, 2017). Though deceased, he garners much praise from many members of the Incel Rebellion (CNN US, 2018). Incel is short for “involuntarily celibate,” and this movement is made up of men who assert they can’t have sex.7 An Incel, according to Incels.Me (2018), is a “person who is not in a relationship nor has had sex in a significant amount of time, despite numerous attempts” (p. 1). Incels are anti-feminist men who also have sharp disdain for “Chads” and “Stacys.” Chads are, as Incels.Me defines them, “sexually satisfied men, charismatic, tall, good looking, confident, muscular,” while Stacys are attractive women who reject Incels’ sexual advances (p. 1). Further, the Incel movement consists mainly of angry white men who are experiencing aggrieved entitlement (DeKeseredy & Rennison, 2019; Yang & Gillis, 2018).

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A recent example of an Incel-related mass murder is one committed by Alek Minassian in Toronto, Canada on April 23, 2018. That day, he drove a rented van on a curb on Young Street south of Finch Avenue and deliberately ran down pedestrians, “leading to the worst mass murder in Toronto’s history” (Yang & Gillis, 2018, p. 1). His rampage left ten people dead (eight of whom were women) and 16 people injured. The solution is not simply more social control (Kimmel, 2017), but this is what we are seeing. Since the 1990s, lawmakers in the US, Canada, and other advanced industrial nations have passed draconian laws aimed at regulating youth deviance, and zero-tolerance policies are now common approaches to dealing with minor transgressions and incivilities in schools across North America. What are needed instead are progressive means of creating an atmosphere in which students show more respect for each other. Equally important is the development of school curricula that make gender, healthy relationships, and sexuality core subjects in schools (Messerschmidt, 2012). Part of the problem of programs that have not worked in the past is that they operated on a “haphazard, one-classroom-at-a-time approach” (Jaffe et al., 1992, p. 131). The challenge is that while any single teacher or counselor may be very effective and deeply committed to creating what Messerschmidt (2018) refers to as “counterhegemonic practices that critique, challenge, or actually dismantle hegemonic masculinities” (p. 142), it is very difficult to counteract the broad variety of negative influences that students encounter on a daily basis. If only one or very few teachers are engaged in programming against hegemonic masculinity and its adverse effects, then the influence of the students in other classes, when combined with parents, new and older technologies, and broader societal influence will weaken the effectiveness of these programs (DeKeseredy & Schwartz, 2013). This is why “whole-school efforts” are necessary (Klein, 2012). Only when all of the teachers, counselors, and administrators at the school are in complete agreement, providing a consistent and regular message over a long period of time, supported by the parents and other members of the family, is there a hope that many of the students will begin to seriously engage with counterhegemonic practices. Many schools contribute to boys’ destructive behavior by promoting an environment that resembles “America’s cutthroat economic culture” (Klein, 2012). As well, Social Darwinism guides the techniques that many helping professionals and teachers use to respond to troubled teenagers, and statements made by Currie’s (2004) interviewees show that “there is no help out there” for many youth today. Currie is not the only scholar to uncover this widespread problem. Klein (2012) has much experience with high school guidance programs, and the following statement is based on her experience working with young people: “Students are given few if any arenas to speak with responsible and compassionate adults about their questions, concerns, fears, and/or anxieties regarding their own and others’ sexualities” (p. 227). Social Darwinist environments need to be replaced with what Currie (2004) defines as a “culture of support.” Klein’s term for this is a “compassionate

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community.” Regardless of what label is used, schools need to be more inclusive and offer troubled youth places to go and people to speak to in their time of need. In this era of constant demands for evidence-based practice,8 there is considerable empirical support for such strategies (DeKeseredy, 2011a). Still, schools today make many people uncomfortable because of their strong belief in punitive strategies and opposition to open discussions of sexuality and gender in school settings. Nevertheless, defenders of the status quo should heed Klein’s (2012) warning, which is still relevant today: Yet in a historical moment, when, as a result of sexual slurs and related attacks, students are being killed, committing suicide, and perpetrating massacres – as well as enduring high levels of depression, anxiety, and other emotional breakdowns – we can no longer afford to keep these issues out of schools. Policies are needed to support discussion and respect among community members, especially around difficult issues related to gender and sexuality. Students don’t need more punishment and criminal charges: they need guidance, support, and education. (pp. 227–228) Masculinities scholar James Messerschmidt (2012) strongly concurs with Klein’s call for progressive school policies. To prevent bullying, which is strongly associated with school shootings (Kimmel, 2017), he calls for a policy that focuses on the relationship between bullying violence and “embodied (hetero)masculinities/ femininities” (Messerschmidt, 2012, p. 183). He also recommends that such a policy should make explicit that the whole community will not tolerate bullying and it should be published and distributed to parents, teachers, students, and politicians. Additionally, included in the policy should be a clear statement about the importance of respecting diversity. A public statement like the above is, of course, only the first step. If there is anything that targets of bullying have learned, it is the slogan that “talk alone is cheap.” It will do little, if anything, to overcome the lack of confidence among students that school teachers and administrators care about their well-being. For many youth abused by their peers, action speaks louder than words. School officials must begin to not only formulate policies, but also implement specific and direct ones to curb the destructive consequences of hegemonic masculinity. There are, to be sure, other progressive school policies that could be suggested here and are found elsewhere (e.g., Messerschmidt, 2012). What they all have in common is emphasizing the importance of community, inclusion, and supporting others (DeKeseredy, 2011a; Klein, 2012). These strategies work (Currie, 2004; DeKeseredy, 2011a). Simply going down the well-worn paths of punitive action and increased surveillance, on the other hand, will not stop rampages like the recent school shootings in the US (Kimmel, 2017). As Klein (2012) reminds us, “Such efforts will be limited as long as our surrounding culture clings to hypermasculine values driven by a super capitalist economy” (p. 242).

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Conclusion Leading experts on masculinities will surely find this chapter incomplete. It is, but all chapters must come to an end. This is not to say, though, that progressive resistance to hegemonic masculinity is a finished product. We definitely have a long way to go and lots of work to do. We cannot give up or wait for new political leadership, which is what a growing number of people are starting to do, especially in the US. Many progressives, too, have given up watching, listening to, and reading the news because it “seems to be full of almost nothing but accounts of the various crises that afflict much of the planet” (Currie, 2013, p. 3). These are routes we can’t afford to travel, and thus we need listen to the advice of Winlow et al. (2015) and “rediscover in our intellectual life something concrete to aspire to and campaign for” (p. 207). Yes, we need to be fully aware of the tremendous damage done by hegemonic masculinity and by men throughout the world today. Yet we must also recognize that much of what is good in the world is produced by men (Bowker, 1998). What’s more, every day we see and hear of more men engaging in counterhegemonic practices. We could definitely use a few more of them (Katz, 2006). The long, hard journey to an egalitarian society is worth it, and I encourage all men to be fellow travelers. Some critical scholars, occasionally referred to as “idealists,” contend that the problems identified in this chapter and in related works (e.g., Kimmel, 2017) will not eliminated until there is a fundamental change in the structure of society as a whole. To a certain extent, I agree with this position. Nevertheless, a major social transformation is not likely to occur in the near future, thus various short-term strategies like those suggested in this chapter are required now. It is essential to achieve short-term goals as a way of maintaining momentum and commitment, because dealing with hegemonic masculinity is a “never ending and constantly evolving issue” (Ledwitz-Rigby, 1993, p. 9).

Notes 1 This chapter includes revised sections of work published previously by DeKeseredy (2011a), DeKeseredy et al. (2003, 2007), DeKeseredy and Rennison (2019), and DeKeseredy and Schwartz (2013). 2 See DeKeseredy and Schwartz (2018) for an in-depth review of the extant literature on left realist criminology. 3 Critical criminologists view hierarchical social stratification and inequality along class, racial/ethnic, and gender lines as the major sources of crime (DeKeseredy & Dragiewicz, 2018). 4 This new sector of workers has precarious and temporary low-paying jobs (Vegh Weis, 2017). 5 This list is informed by the work of Alvi, DeKeseredy and Ellis (2000), Currie (1985, 1993), DeKeseredy et al. (2003), DeKeseredy and Schwartz (1991), Messerschmidt (1986), and Michalowski (1983). 6 See www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-gQ3aAdhIo. 7 The term “Incel” was originally created in the 1990s by a Canadian woman who developed a site for lonely singles (Yang & Gillis, 2018).

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8 See DeKeseredy and Dragiewicz (2013) and Gondolf (2012) for critiques of the conceptualization and implementation of evidence-based practice.

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Katz, J. (2016). Man enough? Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and the politics of presidential masculinity. Northampton, MA: Interlink Books. Kessler, C. (2018, June 26). Why Harley-Davidson is moving production overseas. Fortune. Retrieved from http://fortune.com/2018/06/26/harley-davidson-moving-productionoverseas/ Kimmel, M. (2013). Angry white men: American masculinity at the end of an era. New York: Nation Books. Kimmel, M. (2017). Angry white men: American masculinity at the end of an era (revised Ed.). New York: Nation Books. Klein, J. (2012). The bully society: School shootings and the crisis of bullying in America’s schools. New York: New York University Press. Ledwitz-Rigby, F. (1993). An administrative approach to personal safety on campus: The role of a president’s advisory committee on women’s safety on campus. Journal of Human Justice, 4, 85–94. Levant, R. (1994). Male violence against female partners: Roots in male socialization and development. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, Los Angeles, CA. Messerschmidt, J. W. (1986). Capitalism, patriarchy, and crime: Toward a socialist feminist criminology. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield. Messerschmidt, J. W. (2000). Nine lives: Adolescent masculinities, the body, and violence. Boulder, CO: Westview. Messerschmidt, J. W. (2012). Gender, heterosexuality, and youth violence: The struggle for recognition. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Messerschmidt, J. W. (2018). Hegemonic masculinity: Formulation, reformulation, and amplification. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Michalowski, R. J. (1983). Crime control in the 1980s: A progressive agenda. Crime and Social Justice, 19, 13–23. Morgan, D. H. J. (1992). Discovering men. London: Routledge. Nelson, M. K. (2011). Between family and friendship: The right to care for Anna. Journal of Family Theory & Review, 3, 241–255. Pitts, L. (2018, May 7). No need to “understand” Trump backers. The Dominion Post, 6A. Schwab, K. (2017). The global competitiveness report 2017–2018. Geneva, Switzerland: World Economic Forum. Schwartz, M. D., & DeKeseredy, W. S. (1997). Sexual assault on the college campus: The role of male peer support. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Sernau, S. (2006). Global problems: The search for equity, peace, and sustainability. Boston, MA: Pearson. Sherman, J. (2011). Men without sawmills: Job loss and gender identity in rural America. In K. Smith & A. R. Tickamyer (Eds.), Economic restructuring and family well-being in rural America (pp. 82–102). University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Smith, M. D. (1990). Patriarchal ideology and wife beating: A test of a feminist hypothesis. Violence and Victims, 5, 257–273. Smith, A., & Anderson, J. (2014, August 6). AI, robotics, and the future of jobs. Pew Research Center. Retrieved from www.pewinternet.org/2014/08/06/future-of-jobs/ Smith, K. (2017). Changing gender roles and rural poverty. In A. R. Tickamyer, J. Sherman, & J. Warlick (Eds.), Rural poverty in the United States (pp. 117–140). New York: Columbia University Press. Stoll, S. (2017). Ramp hollow: The ordeal of Appalachia. New York: Hill and Wang.

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Thompson Reuters Foundation. (2018, June 25). Exclusive: U.S. among 10 most dangerous countries for women amid #MeToo campaign – poll. Retrieved from www.reuters. com/article/us-women-dangerous-poll-usa-exclusive/exclusive-u-s-among-10-most-dan gerous-countries-for-women-amid-metoo-campaign-poll-idUSKBN1JM02G Tuttle, B. (2018, June 26). Here’s how many jobs America could lose because of the Trump tariffs. Time. Retrieved from http://time.com/money/5322347/trump-tariffsjobs/ Vegh Weis, V. (2017). Marxism and criminology: A history of criminal selectivity. Boston, MA: Brill. Wacquant, L. (2011). The precariat, the new dangerous class. London: Bloomsbury Academic. West, C., & Zimmerman, D. H. (1987). Doing gender. Gender & Society, 1, 125–151. Winlow, S., Hall, S., Treadwell, J., & Briggs, D. (2015). Riots and political protest: Notes from the post-political present. London: Routledge. Yang, J., & Gillis, W. (2018, April 28). Shadowy online subculture in spotlight after Toronto van attack. Toronto Star. Retrieved from www.thestar.com/news/gta/2018/ 04/28/shadowy-online-subculture-in-spotlight-after-toronto-van-attack.html Young, J. (2007). The vertigo of late modernity. London: SAGE.

2 WHY THE LEFT MUST CHANGE Right-wing populism in context Simon Winlow, Steve Hall and James Treadwell

Introduction In recent years, right-wing populism has risen significantly across the West. In 2017, Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Front, came very close to winning the French presidential election. She eventually lost out to Emanuel Macron, a man dedicated to maintaining the neoliberal consensus, but smart enough to voice the usual progressive liberal platitudes during his election campaign. If this was a victory for liberalism over an increasingly virulent and regressive nationalism, it rang rather hallow. The huge strides made by the National Front under Le Pen, quite clearly, do not augur well for the continuation of liberal values in Europe. However, it seems quite important to ask why a representative of the dominant yet ailing politico-economic order was presented to the electorate as the alternative to the ethnocentric nationalism currently pulling France to the right. Is it feasible that Macron’s unmitigated neoliberalism can assuage the anger and anxiety that underpin the new French nationalism? Does the invidious choice between Le Pen and Macron not tell us something about the parlous state of liberal democracy and the chains that have been placed upon our collective political imagination? Might the continued dominance of neoliberal capitalism – which has throughout the West concentrated wealth in the hands of an oligarchic elite and permeated economic insecurity throughout the rest of the population – have in some way influenced the development of this new rightwing populism? Could the current crisis in fact be an outcome of neoliberalism’s continued political dominance? And perhaps more to the point, shouldn’t we be asking searching questions about why the political right has been the principal beneficiary of post-crash economic insecurity, stagnating wages, declining lifestyles, austerity and the gradual breakup of the West’s welfare states? Why has there not been a resurgence of interest in traditional left-wing politics rooted in

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political economy and committed to advancing the interests of the multi-ethnic working class? Why have we not seen a new generation of strident leftist politicians, keen to control the brutal excesses of market society, bursting onto the stage? There is no doubt that the new right has prospered in the vacuum created by the traditional left’s decline. Focusing on “Brexit Britain,” the task we have set ourselves here is to identify why the historical relationship between the working class and left-wing politics has become fragile, strained and at risk of coming to an end altogether. Marine Le Pen’s rise is an interesting place to start. Unlike her father, Jean-Marie, the founder of the National Front, she is media-savvy, coldly strategic and comfortable in front of the camera. She is the perfect embodiment of the new right-wing nationalism emerging across the Continent. We should keep in mind that France has the second largest economy in Europe and remains at the centre of the European Union and its integration project. This is not a ‘marginal’ state at the edges of the Europe, always at risk of being overwhelmed by extremist politics. The far right has, quite clearly, achieved successes even in those nations usually judged progressive, inclusive, liberal and tolerant. To further illustrate this point, in a recent election in Germany, which has the largest and most efficient economy in Europe by some distance, the nationalist party Alternative for Germany (AfD) secured almost 13% of the popular vote. The surge of support for the AfD is tied to the declining fortunes of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union and Shultz’s Social Democratic Party, which, in 2017, achieved its worst electoral result since the end of the World War II. These parties represent a political mainstream fully committed to neoliberalism. Since 2008, they have advocated austerity, the general curtailment of welfare provision and employmentgenerating public spending, and an obsessive and destructive concern with reducing deficits and ‘balancing the budget’. These fundamental neoliberal policies have inflicted more social damage on the eastern regions that were part of the German Democratic Republic, and it is there that support for the resurgent right has been at its strongest. Throughout Europe, similar parties are feeling increased pressure as antiestablishment populism has taken hold. In the Netherlands, the Dutch Freedom Party (PVV) also received around 13% of the popular vote in 2017, which made it the nation’s second largest party. The Dutch electoral system made it possible for other parties to form a coalition government without the involvement of the PVV, but again the gains made by a party led by the openly Islamophobic Geert Wilders give cause for concern. Elsewhere in Europe, right-wing nationalist parties have achieved even greater success. In 2017, Austria’s Freedom Party entered a coalition government in which they secured control of the ministries of defence, the interior and foreign affairs. In Hungary, Viktor Orban won his third consecutive election in 2018. Orban’s campaign focused solely on the issue of immigration. He won with a significantly increased majority and now has the power to effect far-reaching policy changes.

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We could go on for quite some time compiling a list of electoral victories and the gains made by right-wing nationalist parties across the West. What we are talking about here is not a slight turn to the right in the views of an electorally significant number of swing voters in some Western states, which might, in a year or two, be followed by a similar movement in the opposite direction. We are talking about a radical shift to the right in the political and cultural attitudes of many millions of people who were once attached to social democratic politics or the neoliberal centrism personified by Clinton, Blair, Merkel and Hollande. Many liberals seem confident that because right-wing nationalists are still to make a major breakthrough in the larger democracies of Europe, the repugnant politics of the far right will eventually be rejected. Some notable liberal commentators are also convinced that the rise of the right has not been precipitated by a shift in real material circumstances and sentiments. Instead, it is simply a temporary discursive-cognitive accommodation engineered by right-wing media disinformation. Russia, Cambridge Analytica, and the shadowy corporate interests that control the right-wing press have, apparently, manipulated the more gullible and ignorant amongst the electorate. Not to worry, a new round of elections and referenda will swiftly reveal the long-term primacy of liberalism in the hearts and minds of ordinary people; the spirit of liberal hegemony, as Hegel (1979) might have said, is in our bones. Of course, when we make such arguments, we are simply searching for an expedient explanation that allows us to keep on ignoring the troubling reality of the fundamental social antagonisms and shifting political forms and allegiances that now underpin the cultural field. Nationalist parties have received a good degree of popular support. Their anti-immigrant policies and desire to bolster traditional national cultures really are winning over a lot of voters dissatisfied with their current economic situation, their cultural dissolution and the direction of mainstream politics. While there has yet to be a major right-wing electoral breakthrough in any of the major European states, we should keep in mind that many of the far-right political parties mentioned above were only quite recently formed, or else they have rapidly moved from the margins of the political scene to the very centre. Make no mistake, the politics of social and economic liberalism could recede quite quickly in the years ahead. Radical political movements have throughout history seized upon and utilised popular anger, fear and resentment to overcome seemingly immoveable political orthodoxies. Despite the denials of many liberal academics (see, for example, Antonucci, Horvath, Kutiyski & Krouwel, 2017), it’s perfectly clear that anger, fear and simmering resentment exist in abundance out there in the real world and people are looking for someone to blame (see Garland & Treadwell, 2012; Treadwell, Briggs, Winlow & Hall, 2013; Winlow, Hall, Briggs & Treadwell, 2015; Winlow, Hall & Treadwell, 2017). For years in Europe it seemed perfectly obvious that fascism and ethnocentric nationalism were dead and buried, never to return. Now, it seems perfectly reasonable to suggest that new forms of fascism will play a significant role in the Continent’s future. We should not underplay this

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remarkable political shift, and nor should we shirk the challenge of understanding and combating it. The central tasks of this volume are to identify why this shift has occurred and to formulate strategies that might enable the left to respond to what is, quite frankly, the most important political challenge of our time. We have spent three years researching the ‘far right’ in England, using ethnographic methods to uncover the motivations, fears and hopes of white working-class men and women drawn to new right-wing activist movements such as the English Defence League and Britain First. One of our fundamental motivations was to dig underneath the standard refrain that the far right is principally the discursive object created by a set of ideas and attitudes reproduced over time by middleclass ethnocentrists dreaming of Empire, national greatness and racial or cultural purity (see Bhambra, 2017). We have little doubt that such people show up in demographic attitudinal surveys, but this method is replete with problems in sampling, operationalisation and interpretation that are yet to be resolved. Using the ethnographic and extended interview method allowed us to uncover sociopolitical affiliations and sentiments that survey respondents are reluctant to express and, more importantly, gain access to individuals who do not usually take part in surveys. The vast majority of individuals who participated in these ‘far right’ protest groups or sat back in the associated milieu offering muted support were poor white men and women clinging on to the mainstream economy by their fingertips. They lived in what used to be the heartlands of Britain’s sprawling industrial economy. Their cities and towns of birth were once the seedbeds of a labour movement that from 1905 to 1979 had altered the structure and tone of British politics and secured significant advances for the industrial proletariat. Now, no industrial employment exists in these places, and the remnants of the political project that once attempted to create political solidarity amongst the disparate cultural groups that constituted the proletariat are increasingly rare. For us, the deindustrialised zones of the north have a rather ghostly aspect. The postmodern political silence is punctuated by the faint echoes of a forgotten history; memories of cultures, codes, hopes and dreams that seek to intrude upon the present, demanding to be remembered, reawakened and manifested as politics. But with every passing year the ghosts of history fade and their resurrection becomes less likely. All they communicate to today’s post-industrial, dispersed, fractured, atomised and politically homeless working class is a vague but constant sense of lack: something is missing; something important has been lost, stolen or destroyed. Some members of this class more attuned to the spirit of the political past search for something to fill the gap. Others have lapsed into despondency, passively awaiting a change, a reckoning, a settling of scores; a vaguely imagined transformation of their circumstances that would shock life back into the inert interpassive landscape with its unexpected arrival. We spoke at length to these men and women, and we wanted, as much as we could, to maintain a degree of academic objectivity in our account of their lives, views

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and behaviours. We wanted to do justice to them and their circumstances, and rather than following the regrettable tendency to dismiss them as xenophobic racists – or, where liberals invoke the explanation that allows them to soften their demonization, as ‘subjects of a xenophobic racist discourse’ – we wanted to understand the feelings, emotions, structures and experiences that underpin their embryonic political activity. So who were these men and women who had drifted to the right?

A basket of deplorables In recent years, most of our contacts had seen their standards of living precipitously fall, and they had watched as the cultures and communities upon which they once relied moved gradually closer to the point of nonexistence. They were angry. Of course, they were not angry all the time, but when we discussed issues related to politics, economics or culture, anger quickly came to the fore. They felt abandoned and left to rot. They felt set apart from history, mere observers of a passing blur of hyper-consumerism and technological innovation; locked out, uncompetitive, irrelevant, judged by those who they see as ‘running things’ to have nothing positive to contribute. So distant was the world they saw on television or read about in newspapers – the world they were told was vital, dynamic, interesting, progressive and sophisticated – that they felt as if they were inhabitants of another planet. The world they saw through their windows seemed devoid of the perpetual positivity trotted out in the entertainment media. Instead, they saw crime, decrepitude, obsolescence, fragmentation, disintegration. For some, the only jobs available were unstable and paid mere subsistence wages. For others, especially those who had managed to maintain some connection to the manual trades, the competitive pressure to undercut prices and produce more for less seemed to increase by the day. Wages were down, competition was up, and the future seemed decidedly uncertain. Many worried for their children. If things kept heading in this direction, how would their sons and daughters find work? How would they be able to afford a house of their own? How would they be able to raise a family? How would they survive and prosper in an increasingly competitive economy and society, without the security once provided by the traditional culture and labour market? Some of our contacts were astute enough to know that people just like them had once been at the heart of the productive economy. Aside from a few working-class Tories, the vast majority were rooted in the Labour Party tradition. They had once benefited from dedicated political representatives in unions, local authorities, constituencies and the Parliamentary Labour Party, and there had existed a general sense that together they were building something better for future generations. Now they believed that the trajectory for the working class had shifted from incline to decline, and there seemed to be nothing that could slow their descent. Our contacts felt like they were at the back of every queue; waiting, always waiting, for the array of everyday pressures to recede and for

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some of consumer society’s rich bounty to be bestowed upon them. They saw themselves being out-competed and rapidly overtaken by recently arrived immigrants and, worse, the liberal middle classes. These liberals, rather than capitalism or the ruling elite, were the new primary enemy. Our contacts saw them as propagandists controlling all key institutions in politics, labour markets, media, education and cultural production in order to circulate the belief that immigrants were without exception beacons of progressive cultural diversity, while the old white working class were brainless bigots, too ignorant to move with the times, deserving of nothing but contempt. In the following pages, we will draw upon our findings (see Winlow, Hall & Treadwell, 2017) to offer a perspective on what can be done to challenge the far right. However, we feel compelled to begin by drawing attention to the shallow, parochial and often quite absurd accounts of this problem that have been offered by some of our academic colleagues. While we are convinced that it behoves critical academics to proceed cautiously, constantly seeking more information and slowly cultivating more precise and revealing accounts of social reality, others have simply rushed in. Brandishing no new data or theory, they have armed themselves solely with a flimsy sense of moral superiority and the absolute certainty that their own political views represent the only civilised and progressive route forwards for humanity. As the heirs to Orwell’s sheep, they wander the field bleating ‘liberals good, fascists bad’ without bothering to find out whether all those attracted to vague ‘far-right’ causes are actually committed subjects of fascist discourses. Many of these academics position themselves on the political left, or in some cases the radical left, yet they display a surprising willingness to denounce ordinary men and women caught up in this historic sea-change as slow-witted racists, xenophobes and sexists obsessed with defending their own elevated social position from the growing power of a mythical rainbow alliance of marginalised social groups, populated mostly by women, immigrants, and sexual and ethnic minorities. They are blind to the fact that many of those who have voted for nationalist parties or supported right-wing causes in recent years were once attached to the political institutions that formed part of the political left’s broad church. They flatly deny the suggestion that the political left has become, since the dawning of the neoliberal age, increasingly middle-class, and blithely unaware of the diverse problems faced by the rapidly fragmenting, downwardly mobile and unrepresented traditional English working class. They deny the allegation that the left abandoned many of its core principles as, from the 1960s onwards, post-structural liberalism moved in to colonise it. They refuse to acknowledge that, when we on the left see a nationalist protest, we are in fact looking at the reflection of our own political failure. They block from consciousness the realisation that the men and women who support nationalist movements could have been recruited to the cause of socialism. They refuse to even think critically about the left’s history and the obvious gap that has opened up between the left and the working class. Instead, they present these angry men and women

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as, to use Hillary Clinton’s evocative phrase, deplorables: bigots, sexists, homophobes, racists, obsessed with their own mythical history, angry because they’re losing control and their putative ‘privileges’ are under threat. Mass denunciations of this sort, based on the sort of stereotypes that are outlawed when speaking of any other social group, teach us nothing of value. Many of these academics fail to acknowledge that millions of ordinary people now find themselves in a perilous economic position, and they cannot find a shred of sympathy for those who look at our increasingly plutocratic socioeconomic system and yearn for something better. Worse, they have created a vacuum into which the media-savvy alt-right can move in to adopt a quite convincing anti-oligarchic and anti-war posture that might expand their audience and broaden its composition. They also make the rather obvious mistake of positioning white working-class voters as an elite keen to defend their ‘privileges’. We saw precious little of the fruits of privilege on display on the housing estates of the Midlands and Northern England. Nor did our respondents seek to return to an age of Empire; for the most part, our respondents knew little or nothing about the British Empire. They didn’t talk longingly of it because they didn’t talk about it at all. Their concerns were about the present and the future. What sense does it make to suggest that a white man queuing at a food bank is privileged when the top 0.1% of the population are worth as much as the bottom 90% (Monaghan, 2014)? What sense does it make to talk of ‘white people’ as if they possess shared interests, cultures, aspirations and dispositions? What sense does it make to connect a white homeless man asleep in a shop doorway with a white super-rich investment banker? Are these two individuals who share nothing more than a similar skin pigmentation really bonded together in cultural and political solidarity? Do they speak with one voice on political, economic and cultural issues, always with the interests of the white race at the forefront of their minds? Are we incapable of constructing a slightly more nuanced account of the dynamics that underpin contemporary cultural enmities and the disintegration of the multiculturalist project? Are we unable to draw out the rather obvious antagonisms that exist within those people born with white skin in the hope that we might more accurately identify who is truly privileged, and whose privilege disempowers, excludes and immiserates all of those without capital? In focusing on the antagonisms of the cultural field, these authors tend to overlook the economy. However, if we ignore the economy, we ignore the fundamental battleground upon which the left must win if any significant historical progress is to be made. These authors seem to look down through the class system, towards those at the very bottom, before identifying the myopic, defensive and inward-looking cultural concerns of working-class whites as the principal reason for the rise of the right. Very rarely do they turn their heads to look up through the class system to the true locus of power and concentrated privilege – oligarchs, corporate executives, bankers and their puppet politicians in all mainstream parties. Academic researchers are constantly accosted with the Marxist truism that capitalism is a matrix of objective and institutionalised social power relations, which blurs the

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focus on the subjective class-conscious elite who have more than enough wealth and influence to ensure the constant reproduction of the capitalist system – or for that matter any system – in a form that serves their own interests. Of course, the incessant demand to strip traditional English cultural groups of their ‘unearned privilege’ does not help working-class immigrants to equalise access to prosperous occupations in any concrete way, but simply bolsters the currently dominant market ideology dedicated to the diffusion of unforgiving social, cultural and economic competition throughout all spheres of life. Most who pursue such intellectual dalliances are not against privilege as such, and in most cases, they have little or nothing to say about concentrated power. Rather, they believe everyone should earn their privilege; privilege shouldn’t simply be an accident of birth, ceded to those who possess the requisite cultural or material signifiers. This endorsement of earned rather than unearned privilege, currently enjoying great popularity on the left, is just a sanitised manifestation of the endlessly repeated Calvinist saga of the entrepreneur who works hard and uses his or her skills to accumulate great wealth. Challenging unearned privilege while leaving earned privilege firmly in place legitimises parliamentary capitalism and reinforces the myth that, once stripped of unearned privilege, capitalism can become truly fair and meritocratic. It ignores entirely the broader context in which privilege is accumulated and retained. It ignores the dynamics of capitalist markets and one of the left’s traditional observations – in order that some become rich, others must become poor – to reassert the sanctity of the American Dream. For these liberals, brutal competition for upward social mobility and the myriad losers it produces are unproblematic; they just want to strip competitors of any unearned privilege before the starting pistol is fired. This saga of the entrepreneur who earns his privilege by overcoming the odds to make it to the top is simply an inverted account of the disreputable poor who fail to avail themselves of opportunities for upward social mobility and consequently bring all their problems upon themselves. The shared philosophical commitments of left-wing liberals and right-wing liberals are there for all to see, should we care to look. The only real difference between the two groups is the degree of welfare support they’re willing to offer those who lose out in capitalism’s unforgiving competition. The shrill condemnation of ordinary men and women who have voted for nationalist political parties in the last decade – in the forlorn hope that these parties will reduce immigration and address job insecurity and declining lifestyles while protecting what remains of traditional community life – makes matters considerably worse. We cannot fight the rise of the right by daubing ordinary men and women with the symbols of absolute evil. We cannot recruit ordinary men and women to the cause of socialism if we first dismiss them as idiotic, racist Neanderthals. Nor can we in good conscience encourage millions of ordinary people, struggling to make ends meet, to vote for political parties that promise nothing other than the continued reproduction of what already exists. People look at the track we are on and they look at their own position in the

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system and conclude that something new must be brought into existence. It is saddening that the political right-wing have benefited most from this popular desire for change. Things could have been so different. When millions among the working class look at the left and decide that it is run by middle-class metropolitan liberals who look down their noses at ordinary working people; who proclaim the benefits of multiculturalism despite living in high-income, allwhite enclaves, and who only encounter recently arrived immigrant groups in the most sanitised and commercialised environments; who know nothing of the fault lines opening up in our inner cities; who don’t care how difficult it is to get and keep a reasonably remunerated working-class job; who suggest that mass immigration has not placed downward pressure on wage levels or increased competition for insecure working-class jobs, and that immigration has in fact invigorated the economy and boosted productivity and tax revenues, we begin to see the huge mistakes that have been made. Rather than attempting to persuade and convince ordinary people to support the cause of socialism, too often our strategy has been to condemn them and dismiss their fears and anxieties as selfish, regressive and irrelevant. Since the 1960s, the left has shown progressively less interest in political economy. The economic interests of the multi-ethnic working class have been relegated in significance, and this stark fact goes some way to explaining why the political left has been haemorrhaging working-class support in recent years. The liberal left has attenuated its critique of capitalism and now focuses almost exclusively upon the cultural field. It is happy to fight the good fight for cultural freedom and inclusivity, and against racism and sexism, but it has nothing to say about the continued economic immiseration of huge swathes of the population who still identify as ‘working-class’. As Nancy Fraser (2013) claims, many on the liberal left now simply advocate a ‘progressive neoliberalism’ that accepts the primacy of the market and the grotesque inequalities of the economic sphere. Their progressivism is restricted to the cultural field, and consequently, their agenda acts as the perfect foil for a resurgent market ideology concerned principally with reallocating power and resources upwards towards a deified and antisocial business elite. The traditional drive to control or dispense with capitalism is now very difficult to identify in the manifestos of supposedly leftist political parties, and the traditional critique of capitalist ideology tends now to be considered passé, even at ‘radical’ academic conferences. The left has taken a prolonged cultural turn and shows no sign of reprioritising political economy. It makes no sense to deny it. We acknowledge that this cultural turn has occasionally taken us to places of genuine importance to our collective project, but it has also taken us further and further away from the lifeworlds of the multiethnic working class and the economic structures and processes that underpin their experience of reality. The rise of the right that we see all around us today is inextricably tied to the failures of the cultural left. Now is the time for a thorough intellectual stockcheck. The longer we postpone it, the closer we move toward the precipice.

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We need to change track, and fast. While many of our colleagues believe that now is the time to confront the ‘fascists’ who voted for Brexit, Trump or Le Pen, for us it is time to trawl through the left’s recent political and economic history in the hope of identifying points at which wrong turns were made. Only when we are honest enough to acknowledge that we have made mistakes and that the current parlous state of the left is, at least in part, the result our decision to abandon fundamental principles, can we begin to make any progress with the crucial task of repairing the relationship between the left and the working class and returning to the popular struggle against neoliberalism and its poisonous effects. We find it galling that so many of our colleagues on the political and academic left feel it necessary to identify themselves and their personal middleclass micro-communities as the carriers of all that is good and noble while pointing at those who have voted for right-wing parties – or even those who have become circumspect about mass immigration and multiculturalism – and thoughtlessly dismissing them as fascists, racists and misogynists. Good guys and bad guys, white hats and black hats. This febrile situation prevents us from creating the nuanced perspectives for which the social sciences are traditionally known, and it constructs a range of barriers that prevent access to the truth. It makes no sense at all to claim that the 17.4 million people who voted for Brexit are simply bigots, racists and absurd Little Englanders motivated principally by the desire to return to the ‘glory days’ of the British Empire (see, for example, Bhambra, 2017; Virdee & McGeever, 2017). We must urgently construct new accounts of the rise of the right that look beyond the standard repertoire of liberal-left accounts of racism, colonialism and a popular xenophobia discursively whipped up by corporate elites and their mass media, when we should know that it is impossible to sell such ideas without a preceding need for change grounded in real experience and the absence of a feasible political alternative. We will win the historical fight that has been thrust upon us during the course of neoliberalism by understanding accurately the causes of this crucial political shift and producing new accounts of the future that transcend the malign problems of the present. We will win the fight not with identitarian arguments about who suffers most, or shaming those who once had more secure lives, or by demanding that the neoliberal state does more to maintain a fractious truce on the cultural field, but with traditional unifying politics that encourages the people to see that we all suffer when the market is given free rein. We will win the fight not by deifying difference, but by recognising sameness. We must acknowledge the shared interests that cut across ethnic lines, and we must construct political projects that seek to advance these shared interests. We will win the fight not by restricting ourselves to cultural analysis, but by returning to the field of political economy. The left sorely needs to return to traditional unifying politics and construct a new economic model that allows ordinary men and women of all ethnic backgrounds to imagine a better world for themselves and their families. The very first step, for academics in particular, is to return to the concept of social class.

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Brexit and social class Nigel Farage’s UK Independence Party received almost 4 million votes in the 2015 general election, a result that portended the decision of the British electorate to leave the European Union in the momentous 2016 referendum. What was, on the face of it, a rather banal plebiscite on membership of a panContinental union geared mostly to ensuring tariff-free trade between neighbouring states actually succeeded in mobilising many millions of voters in a way that parliamentary elections today cannot. It also sparked a great deal of contentious debate that still rumbles on throughout mainstream and social media. The vote itself and the eventual result now seem indicative of a particular historical moment. The Brexit campaigns, the media coverage, the arguments, the protests, and of course the eventual result, will be written about for many years to come. The referendum, even as we were living through it, seemed pregnant with meaning waiting to be interpreted. The eventual result was a genuine event that has shifted the trajectory of British politics and history. It brought to the surface a broad range of antagonisms that had simmered away quietly in British culture since the 2008 economic crisis. Many of these cultural antagonisms are simply displaced and distorted socioeconomic antagonisms. The almost total abandonment of class as an analytical category and the continued absence of any positive alternatives to our current economic model in mainstream politics and academic life have allowed regressive identitarianism to advance unchecked. The grand ideals of early multiculturalism seem dead and gone, and the cultural field is defined by permanent internecine struggle and increasingly hostile competition. Academic and political debate about Brexit seems to reflect this general trend. There has been very little dialectical intellectual or political movement. Rather, commentators have simply repeated their identitarian claims and denounced their opponents in a cacophonous and often quite aggressive atmosphere that seems to indicate the erasure of any shared foundation in values and ideals, replaced by the principle that they who shout loudest and longest will carry the day. The referendum effectively acted as a blank screen onto which various interest groups might project their desires and dissatisfactions. It continues to fulfil this function. Many in the mainstream media, and liberal academia, believe the Brexit result – which, to reiterate, comes from a poll on Britain’s continued membership of the European Union – is an indication of growing racism among the white working class and the over-sixties. Alternatively, the right duped the gullible and fearful amongst us with the help of Cambridge Analytica and the Russians; it seems that the normally scorned hypodermic model and conspiracy theory can be rolled out when it suits the liberal elite. The European Union – before the referendum a sprawling and alien bureaucracy that failed to generate even a modicum of passion among the liberal intelligentsia – has now in the liberal imagination been transformed into the institutional embodiment of progressivism, especially with regard to the free movement of people and the EU’s

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supposed commitment to anti-racism, economic development and social justice. The EU’s role in the immiseration of Greece and other southern European nations has been forgotten. The EU’s commitment to hardcore neoliberal restructuring and competitive disinflation among its member states (see Mitchell & Fazi, 2017), and especially the counter-productive austerity measures forced upon debt-laden and unemployment-ridden member states by the Troika (Varoufakis, 2016), barely warrants a mention in the left-leaning press these days. Those who voted to leave the EU are usually portrayed in much social science research and the mainstream liberal media not as victims of a European neoliberal economic project hitting the rocks, but as narrow-minded bigots, opposed to change and obsessed with a mythical image of old England. Now, a year on from the referendum and with the terms of Brexit still being negotiated, the European Union is often presented to the people – on nightly news broadcasts, in the liberal broadsheet press and in social science journals – as an institution that has these past years sustained our lifestyles and protected us from economic catastrophe. The economic catastrophe that took place on the EU’s watch in the years leading up to the referendum has been forgotten, and it has been forgotten because the deleterious consequences – the debt, the insecurity, the unemployment and under-employment, the constant undercutting of wages, the enforced mobility and dissolution of traditional communities – of this catastrophe were not experienced by the journalists, broadcasters and liberal academics, firmly ensconced in the superannuated metropolitan middle classes, who write comment pieces in national newspapers and articles in scholarly journals. Many angry middle-class liberals are quite clearly blind to the suffering of those who occupy neoliberalism’s areas of permanent recession and have fallen through the holes in the welfare state’s moth-eaten safety net. They also seem quite anxious that their own elevated lifestyles may fall as the economies and administrative systems of Britain and the Eurozone are decoupled and the trading relations and labour market rendered less open and fluid. For many of those who voted to leave, however, the catastrophe doesn’t await them in the future, when Britain finally leaves the EU’s supposedly warm and protective embrace; it has already happened, and they have been living with its consequences for some time. Reasonably secure and remunerated jobs have almost disappeared from the deindustrialised zones of the north. The traditional support systems offered by the old welfare state had, at the time of the referendum, already been stripped back and sold off. The use of food banks had sky-rocketed (see Butler, 2017; Garthwaite, 2017), and diseases associated with destitution (see, for example, Savage & Lee, 2017) had returned to a country that still has the fifth largest economy on the planet. But more important than these catastrophic changes were the disappearance of the traditional cultures associated with industrialism, and all hope that things might improve. Our research (see Winlow, Hall & Treadwell, 2017) revealed that many men and women from the old working class feel not simply out of place, but without a place in the cold and hyper-competitive world of twenty-first-century global neoliberalism. The security of culture and community were nowhere to be

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found. They had not changed. The world had changed around them. Their neighbourhoods had changed. Their jobs had either disappeared or changed beyond recognition, and their traditional political representatives had apparently died off, never to be replaced. Everything that was once stable and dependable was now gone. All that was solid had not melted into air or turned to liquid, but collapsed into a pile of rubble around them. Many of our respondents felt anxious and alone. And our data demonstrated beyond doubt that because of all this, they felt angry. This popular anger has fuelled a populist backlash against mainstream politicians, a backlash that mirrors developments across the Continent, but it has also fuelled growing resentment of a technocratic liberal elite who seem to have floated away from the real world and its pathologies, but who retain the capacity of look down from their lofty perch and tell those struggling to get by how to live, what to believe in, and ultimately, how the problems they face result from their own regressive attitudes, their own absurd attachment to dead communities and cultures, and their lack of skill, fortitude, optimism and tolerance. The prospect of things getting worse is only a concern for those with something to lose. When our liberal elites tell us that leaving the EU will make us all poorer and jobs harder to find, many Brexit voters can barely comprehend what they are hearing. Do these elites occupy a different world? It is already almost impossible to find serious, stable and rewarding working-class work in the neoliberal dead zones of England and Wales. Why should those suffering in such desperate conditions worry about the economic consequences of leaving the EU? Many of our contacts could not imagine how the Brexit vote could represent a threat to their lifestyles. To them it represented an opportunity. They did not love or hate the EU. Rather, they saw the referendum as an opportunity to change direction. And when you cannot get a job, and your children cannot get jobs, and when everything of any value appears to be disappearing or disintegrating, any change of direction is to be welcomed. They really did not care too much about where this change would take them. They just knew that they did not want to stay on the current track. They wanted something that was not this. During our research, we encountered many men and women with racist attitudes. They loathed recently arrived immigrants, but it was Muslim immigrants who were the most common targets for hatred and condemnation. The demonization of the Muslim in Britain today is roughly equivalent to the demonization of the Jew in 1930s Germany. Muslim immigrants were blamed for almost every social problem our contacts encountered. The scarcity of jobs was the result of immigration. The destabilisation of neighbourhoods and communities resulted from immigration. Difficulties finding a house resulted from immigration. Drug problems and crime problems resulted from immigration. A weak and often contradictory narrative about the threat of Islamic extremism often sat alongside the demonization of Muslims and the establishment of the Muslim as a pariah responsible for the nation’s ills. All of this was often quite difficult to listen to. However, for us the goal was to understand where this drive to demonise

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Muslims comes from. For us it was never enough to simply condemn those whose views we found repugnant. The character of racism in Britain has changed. During the age of Empire, white racism in Britain tended to be structured in relation to a myth of superiority. Britain’s white population were encouraged by dominant educational and media discourses to imagine themselves as superior in civilizational and moral terms. Gradual improvements in their wages and material conditions, which contrasted with images of poverty abroad, provided the essential ‘reality test’ that seemed to confirm this myth. Darker-skinned populations around the world were positioned as barbarians in need of our assistance and leadership. But the age of Empire is no more, and with it died the specific mode of racism it encouraged. White racism in Britain today is very different: pernicious, harmful and increasingly common, but different. Rather than a myth of superiority, there now exists a myth of inferiority. White racists from today’s working class, looking upon the social mobility of some immigrants, are prone to express the view that they are treated worse than other ethnic groups currently accruing and benefiting from privileges handed to them by the liberal elite. It is true that they are treated poorly and locked out of the great advantages that seem to be on offer in mainstream consumer culture, but they are certainly not locked out because of their skin colour. They are locked out because there simply aren’t enough reasonably remunerated jobs to go around. They are locked out because the neoliberal state has actively sought to relinquish any control it once had over the labour market and allowed the free market to advance unchecked. They are locked out because of the dominance of neoliberal ideology at the heart of government, and throughout its key institutions. They are locked out because political elites decided to abandon industrialism, welfare and the traditional commitment to full employment. The reasons why our respondents were excluded from the cultural and economic mainstream are complex and multifaceted, but possessing white skin has certainly not added to the problems they face. Our respondents articulated a rather basic narrative of class, in which people like them suffered because they were undervalued, abandoned and ignored, but this class narrative tended to ignore the fact that men and women from other ethnic backgrounds suffered similarly. They could not see those things they shared with impoverished immigrants and underemployed men and women from other ethnic backgrounds, and they could not see those things because the leftist political institutions that once fulfilled the task of convincing the working class that capitalism is the fundamental disruptive force that commodifies and destroys all traditional sources of value, and that unifying politics and class solidarity were the only ways to combat it, were simply absent from their lives, neighbourhoods and communities, and the mass media that now dominates their world of ideas. White racists have adopted the language and conceptual framework of contemporary identity politics. They are unable to locate the fundamental forces that have disrupted their lives, cultures and jobs, unable to see the connections

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and interests that cut across ethnic lines and concerned only with advancing the interests of the local working-class white population at the expense of everyone else. But why do these men and women think this way? In our book The Rise of the Right (2017), we offer a detailed investigation. There is not enough space here to address this question in detail, but we can say this: our respondents were right to be angry. They really have been forgotten and ignored, and the problems they face are very real. However, blaming Muslims for their parlous condition is absurd, counterproductive, and ensures that those who truly deserve to be blamed and vilified, and the neoliberal system they actively reproduce, escape critical attention. Underneath the contemporary vilification of Muslims lies a standard scapegoating mechanism. The white working class search for an explanation for their present circumstances. They hope to bring to justice those who have destroyed their traditional culture and reduced their lifestyles. They seek a reckoning. The absence of the traditional left ensures that capitalism cannot be identified as the fundamental force that has ripped apart the relatively stable structures of modernity and caused such widespread suffering. Thus the search continues. Rage does not abate. The search becomes more frantic, and anger intensifies. Throughout history, the energy of popular anger at injustice has been dragged off course and used to fuel the regressive politics of ethnocentric nationalism and xenophobia. Today, for right-wing nationalists in Britain, the immigrant Muslim is an empty signifier: denied subjective substance, denied the complexities of a fully social identity, simply a vessel into which they can unload their misplaced anger and frustration. The Muslim is presented in the discourse of the populist right as the source of society’s ills, totally without redeeming features, a pathological presence that must be expelled from the nation so that order, peace and prosperity can return. Walter Benjamin was right to claim that every fascism bears witness to a failed revolution. Had the left not abandoned its universalist principles and reconstituted itself, things could have been so much better. For everybody.

Conclusion How do we combat the rise of the right? We have hinted at possible strategies throughout this chapter, and we answer this question directly in our book. For us, the first step is for the left to return to the traditional principles of solidarity and universality. Rather than holding difference on high as a marker of cultural vitality and openness, we should attempt to render it relatively unimportant. We should focus on sameness and those things we have in common, those things that cut across the social field and bond seemingly diverse ethnic groups together. We are all subject to the vicissitudes of capitalist markets. Tens of millions of people across the UK are becoming gradually poorer, and their lives more unstable. At the core of capitalism lies the basic principle of unequal exchange. The capitalist system will exploit anyone without guilt, regardless of their skin colour, their gender, their nation of birth or the god they worship. All that is required is for the general population to recognise this fact. Once that

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happens, we will again be able to see that our lifestyles are declining for precisely the same reasons that our neighbours’ lifestyles are declining. Our traditional culture is disappearing in tandem with the disappearance of all traditional cultures. Capitalist universalism awaits all who believe they continue to inhabit an organic culture free from market predation. Only when we accept reality and look to the future with honesty, and entirely free of romanticism and idealism, will we be able to forge a truly progressive multi-ethnic world. Only when we accept that our traditional cultures are dead and gone, and that when we continue to enjoy them we are merely enjoying a commodified facsimile, will we be able to build something new in their place. Only when we move beyond the politics of identity and difference to construct a new politics of sameness, a politics built on the recognition of shared subordination to the profit motive and the destructiveness of neoliberal capitalism, can we begin to make genuine progress.

References Antonucci, L., Horvath, L., Kutiyski, Y., & Krouwel, A. (2017). The malaise of the squeezed middle: Challenging the narrative of the ‘left behind’ Brexiter. Competition and Change, 21(3), 211–229. Bhambra, G. (2017). Locating Brexit in the pragmatics of race, citizenship and empire. In W. Outhwaite (Ed.), Brexit: Sociological responses (pp. 91–101). London: Anthem Press. Butler, P. (2017). Biggest ever study of food banks warns use likely to increase. The Guardian, 29 June. Retrieved from www.theguardian.com/society/2017/jun/29/biggestever-study-of-food-banks-warns-use-likely-to-increase Fraser, N. (2013). The fortunes of feminism. London: Verso. Garland, J., & Treadwell, J. (2012). The new politics of hate? An assessment of the appeal of the English Defence League amongst disadvantaged white working class communities in England. Journal of Hate Studies, 10(1), 123–141. Garthwaite, K. (2017). Hunger pains: Life inside foodbank Britain. Bristol, UK: Policy Press. Hegel, G. W. F. (1979). Introduction to aesthetics. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Mitchell, W., & Fazi, T. (2017). Reclaiming the state: A progressive vision of sovereignty for a post-neoliberal world. London: Pluto Press. Monaghan, A. (2014). US wealth inequality – top 0.1% worth as much as the bottom 90%. The Guardian, 13 November. Retrieved from www.theguardian.com/business/2014/ nov/13/us-wealth-inequality-top-01-worth-as-much-as-the-bottom-90 Savage, M., & Lee, D. (2017). ‘I regularly see rickets’: Diseases of Victorian-era poverty return to UK. The Guardian, December 23. Treadwell, J., Briggs, D., Winlow, S., & Hall, S. (2013). Shopocalypse now: Consumer culture and the English riots of 2011. British Journal of Criminology, 53(1), 1–17. Varoufakis, Y. (2016). And the weak suffer what they must? London: Vintage. Virdee, S., & McGeever, B. (2017). Racism, crisis, Brexit. Ethnic and Racial Studies, DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2017.1361544 Winlow, S., Hall, S., Briggs, D., & Treadwell, J. (2015). Riots and political protest: Notes from the post-political present. London: Routledge. Winlow, S., Hall, S., & Treadwell, J. (2017). Rise of the right: English nationalism and the transformation of working-class politics. Bristol, UK: Policy Press.

3 SOCIAL CHANGE AND DRUGS Rural America and the rise of Donald Trump Joseph F. Donnermeyer

Introduction In the age of Trump, there seems to be a new moral panic every day – too many immigrants, onerous environmental regulations that supposedly destroy jobs, especially for working-class men, and so on, and so on, and so on. To remind the reader, a “moral panic” is a type of collective anxiety, very often over-inflated and framed in a very biased manner by politicians and the media, about a problem that seems to threaten the moral order of a society (Cohen, 1972; Young, 2009). Consider, for example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Public Health Matters Blog (Noonan, 2017) from 28 November, that shouts out: “Rural America in Crisis: The Changing Opioid Overdose Epidemic.” Beyond the headline for this post is a narrative that actually conflates “three waves” of drug misuse among rural peoples by labeling it as a single epidemic, starting in 1999 with prescription opioids, followed in 2010 with heroin, and now a full array of addictive substances, including synthetic opioids manufactured with fentanyl. Perhaps a less alarming view would also be more scientifically (sociologically speaking) insightful. This view would see rural regions as a part of an America that always has been and will continue to be confronted with serious problems of crime (Donnermeyer, 2015), including illicit drug manufacturing, trafficking, and abuse. These drug-related crimes are long rooted in the economic, political, and cultural histories of rural America, and exacerbated by past administrations (both Republican and Democrat) and the present Trump administration’s hyperneo-liberal policies that have eroded and continue to erode the ability of rural communities to sustain locally owned business enterprises and funding of local schools, among other things that promote civic engagement (Lee, 2008). Long ago, outside ownership of timber, mining, and other natural resource enterprises

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created tremendous environmental degradation and unhealthy boom and bust cycles which first offered economic hope that soon turned sour. Even farming communities, perceived to be the final bastions of stable rural places, are succumbing to a long-term decline of the family farm and the ascendancy of largescale factory farms that continually find ways to replace labor with technology and ignore to a considerable degree their negative impacts on the environment (Lobao, 2014; Slack, 2014).

An anecdote Let’s begin this chapter with an anecdote about drug use in a rural region of Ohio, and then address the issue more systematically within the context of an ever-changing, and many would say ever-declining, rural America. The anecdote is personal. The location was southwest Ohio in a county called “Highland.” This is Trump land. It voted 75.4 percent for Donald Trump (Leip, 2016). A claim could be made that it is the archetypical Trump country. It is a hilly county, less than an hour’s drive east and slightly north from the Cincinnati metropolitan area. Its population is estimated at slightly over 43,000, about 600 less than the count in 2010 (Census Bureau, 2018). Its poverty rate is substantially above (19.8 percent) the state average (14.6 percent), and various economic measures say it falls below all the median values for economic health (such as median family income) when compared to the state of Ohio. Ninety-six percent of its population are white, non-Hispanic, and less than 1 percent are foreign-born. To the immediate south of Highland County is Adams County, a county that advertises itself for tourist purposes as on the “edge of Appalachia.” Its social and economic profile is much the same as Highland County, as well as its support for Trump. In the county is a delightful lodge and refuge for upper-middleclass folks from nearby cities where my wife (Diane) and I often rent a cabin for extended weekends of hiking, great dinners, and many drinks by the outside fire pit long into the night. It is only a two-hour drive from Columbus, where the Ohio State University is located, but that estimate depends on the charity of traffic lights in several small towns on the way down. Next to the lodge is an Amish community, and demographic change among the Amish is a research “hobby” of mine. For several months I was aware of a possible new Amish community near a town called Marshall, just over the border in the southwest corner of Highland County. After a very tasty breakfast, including satisfaction of my coffee addiction (about five cups), my wife and I covered the 15-minute drive northward into Highland County to pin down its location. We soon found evidence of the Amish in that area – namely, horse poop on a county road. Only a few minutes later, we drove past an Amish man who was working in the front yard area outside his small business. We turned the car onto his property. A relatively brief 15-minute conservation provided most of the information I needed for my database of new Amish communities – when they arrived, where they came from, how many

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families presently make up the community, and how many more they expect over the next couple of years. Happy with the results of our Amish sleuthing, we drove east, approaching the small, unincorporated village of Marshall, passing a sign proudly proclaiming that it is the home of the boy’s state champion basketball team of 1928. Today, Marshall consists of several dozen residential and other kinds of structures, quite a few of which are dilapidated, but with several well-kept homes and yards, and a flashing yellow light at an intersection where a pair of two-lane state highways meet. It is the only traffic light in town. Needing to use a restroom, I pulled the car into the gasoline station and convenience store located on the southwest corner of the state routes (and from what I could tell, about the only business in Marshall). Shiny in resplendent blue and white, it also looked to be the only new structure built there any time recently. Walking inside, I bought a snack and a bottle of water, and as I paid, I asked where the restrooms were located. The women behind the counter had never met me before, and did not know that I make a living as a rural criminologist (plus Amish research). From her viewpoint, I was just another tourist from a big city, like Cincinnati, driving about the back roads of southern Ohio on a sunny day. Her reply disappointed me: “Sorry, but its closed.” Slightly out of desperation, I inquired why, planning to ask if it would be okay to step outside and avail myself of the hide-from-view advantage of a nearby propane tank. Her reply startled me. “Why?”, she asked, and then promptly answered, “Health reasons.” “Oh,” I replied in sympathy, “septic problems.” “No,” she said in a long-drawn-out voice with shades of deep-set exasperation. “So many local people here were using both our men’s and women’s bathrooms to shoot up heroin. They drop their needles on the floor. It’s a health hazard.” I was stunned: “local people,” “shooting up,” “dropping needles,” I realized that what she said to me is exactly what Elliott Currie meant when he wrote in Reckoning (1993, p. 121): “the saturation of communities by drugs makes quitting drugs especially difficult, simply because the addict is surrounded by so many people who are still using.” Certainly, the cashier was not identifying people from the outside, a common misperception for everyone who wants to believe their rural community is a good place to live, even if crime exists there. It is easier to blame outsiders, especially city folks, as the perpetrators of rural crime, like an infectious virus. But that is merely another variant of moral panic! We can assume, although we really do not know, that the local users communicated with each other about the advantages of using those bathrooms. After all, these are rural people, and rural people generally have a higher density of acquaintanceship, according to rural sociologists (Liepins, 2000). Regardless, what appears to be the only active business in a crossroads village must react to a serious drug issue by shutting down its bathrooms!1 Yet, because we travel often to Adams County, my wife and I frequently hear stories about drug abuse and death without the necessity

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of actively seeking out these kinds of stories. These tragedies are told matter-offactly (my interpretation) to us by waiters, waitresses, and domestics who work at the lodge where we stay about their family members, friends, and neighbors, as if these stories of overdose are simply another patch in the social and cultural quilt of the community. Currie’s book was about widespread drug use in many neighborhoods of urban America, examining more than the psychological-level and biophysical characteristics of drug abuse, but also the community psychology – or, as I like to describe it, the localized collective consciousness (Durkheim, 1964) or community-mindedness (Stallwitz, 2012) that is so influential in the formation and sustainability of attitudes and behaviors of people on an everyday basis at the places where they live – of simultaneously using drugs and voting for Trump. When applied to community and crime, Durkheim’s (1964) form of collective consciousness and mechanical and organic solidarity are misapplied by many criminologists, and in two ways. The first is to assume mechanical solidarity refers to rural, and organic solidarity to urban. The second is to apply both forms of solidarity as a characteristic of a locality, large or small, in a unidimensional way. Hence, each place has a single sociological trait or dimension rather than a complexity of characteristics. In this way, a specific rural community or urban neighborhood can be described as poor without considering related dimensions of inequality and social class divisions. Stallwitz (2012) developed a concept of community-mindedness, which she defines as location-specific conditions or context based on the intersection of social, cultural, and economic factors that are agreed upon by all or by a share of the people who live there that both create and reinforce its social networks. With this concept, she was able to examine how a subculture of heroin usage was brought largely to the Shetland Islands by workers from Great Britain and continental Europe at the port where North Sea oil is off-loaded, but partially blended into a centuries old socio-cultural context of alcohol use and abuse that was already there. What she described is a mixing of social networks and cultural values, instigated by ever-changing and globalized economic conditions, creating a revised version of localized social organization, something that a unidimensional accounting of places based on functionalist, mainstream criminological notions of social disorganization and collective efficacy cannot do. As well, Stallwitz’s (2014) work is able to account for how, behind these localized expressions of behaviors, norms, and values are larger, structural forces that affect not just a single small place like Marshall, Ohio or the Shetland Islands, but many thousands of rural localities throughout the United States and other countries.

The big three Today, we are inundated by stories of the methamphetamine, heroin, and opioid abuse at many places in rural America, so the questions we must ask are: How did this happen? When did this happen?

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As the criminological specialty we now know as rural criminology developed (a development, by the way, that parallels in time the changing infrastructure – economic, social and cultural – of many parts of rural America), a full range of harmful crimes and forms of deviance have been examined in their non-urban context (Donnermeyer, 2016). They range from bullying to violence against women to environmental crimes and unusually high rates of farm victimization. Often, I refer to the “big three” of rural crime as farm crime, violence, and the manufacture, trafficking, and misuse of drugs. I shall focus, however, on only one – drugs (as a shorthand expression for “manufacture, trafficking and misuse of drugs”). Why not talk extensively about farm crime? It too is associated with the growth of neo-liberal agricultural policies that both encourage agricultural industrialization and subsidize it to some extent (Lobao & Meyer, 2001). Farm crime has increased greatly as agricultural operations have grown in size, and the costs of farm inputs (machinery, equipment, fertilizers, and other supplies) have increased in their monetary value, thereby creating very attractive targets for theft and other criminal activities (Barclay, 2016). Farm operations now display a bi-modal distribution, with many small, part-time family-based operations that do little to affect commodity markets, and less than 70,000 (out of 2 million-plus) large agricultural operations that produce close to 70 percent of the market value of all food products in the US. Farm crime itself is representative of the transformation of US society, not from rural to urban, but from agrarian to industrial and post-industrial. The farm population today is a miniscule 1.4 percent of US society, illustrating how far we’ve come from a 1790 census that showed that a vast share of the population were food producers, even if only at a subsistence level. The farm population itself is about one-tenth the size of the rural population (which is about 15 percent of the US population), belying images of so many Americans (and criminologists) that rural and farming mean mostly the same thing. Through most of the 19th century, all of the 20th century, and up to the present time, the economic base of much of rural America became increasingly industrial, from mechanized forms of mining, timbering, and manufacturing to the commuting patterns of rural workers living on the urban fringe (Lobao, 2014; Slack, 2014). Why talk extensively about interpersonal violence? Much work on violence has been done with reference to rural America beyond nonsensical and nonscientific allusions to the “Wild West” and a culture of honor. A great amount of this is about violence against women (DeKeseredy, Hall-Sanchez, Dragiewicz, & Rennison, 2016), plus bullying (Evans, Smokowski, & Cotter, 2016) and homicide (Lee & Stevenson, 2006), among others. We know that there are rural communities with strong, patriarchal normative systems and cultures of hyper-masculinity that facilitate violence against women and violence in general, but we also know that violence is part of the historical reality of rural America (the nonromanticized version, not the fake “Wild West” reality depicted in John Wayne and Clint Eastwood-type movies), and for that matter urban America. For example, Downey’s (1992) account of violence against women on the American

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frontier suggests an intersectionality of poverty, selective immigration/migration, and both physical and social isolation that rings true with rural scholarship today (DeKeseredy & Schwartz, 2009). Kimmel’s (2013) book Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era is not exclusively focused on rural men and the kinds of economic, social, and cultural factors that promote all varieties of interpersonal violence; but, indeed, his book speaks to rural circumstances because there are so many rural regions of the US where the conditions described as the “end of an era” exist. In all of these rural regions, machines replace labor, mostly in male-dominated industries, and when labor is displaced, a series of other consequences occur, such as a loss of men’s self-esteem and their engagement in the civic life of the community (Sherman, 2005). Of the three classes of crime, it is substance abuse that is most intimately connected with the transformation of rural America, especially in Appalachia, the Ozarks, and other regions that are frequently portrayed in the media as “backwaters.” These images of underdevelopment are not true because what is happening in rural America is a reflection of changes and challenges over the many decades since the US became a majority urban society, an event that happened sometime in between the 1910 and 1920 censuses of the population. The boundaries of these so-called backwater regions are very porous, and a great deal of the story behind their association with drugs today is a reflection of a sustained economic, social, and cultural interconnectedness between rural and urban America; interconnections that explain the high and sustained poverty of resource-dependent and former manufacturing-based rural communities, the diffusion of drugs into rural America, and the conditions that created such strong support for Trump and other conservative politicians.

Elegies and efficacies Everyone, or nearly so, is aware of J. D. Vance’s (2016) book Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, about the culture of poverty and abuse centered on Appalachia America. It is a book embraced by both conservatives and progressives, but for different reasons. Conservatives like it because it puts the blame on individuals and families, rather than structural inequalities and economic exploitation. People who identify as progressives are attracted to the book because it describes the lives of a family and, by extension, of a people, on the bottom rungs of America’s social class ladder, struggling to ascend to and remain in the middle class. It is a journalistic account with a much stronger patina of science than similarly-styled books like Angela’s Ashes (McCourt, 1996) whose focus was on urban poverty in Ireland, told also as a memoir of the author’s experiences while growing up there in the 1930s and 1940s. Progressive and conservative criminologists alike know enough not to believe much of anything depicted in reality television, even though some may find it entertaining, hence the attractiveness of Hillbilly Elegy is its semi- or fauxethnographic style. They can peek out of the keyholes of their university offices

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into a supposedly real world as constructed by Vance. Especially for those who adhere to a branch of critical criminology known as cultural criminology (Muzzatti, 2012), the book has the appearance of offering an ethnographic illusion of complexity and nuance rather than stereotype and bias. Hillbilly Elegy ignores social structure, a fact alluded to by a growing cadre of other journalistic books depicting rural America, especially rural Appalachia, in the 21st century. Catte’s (2018) What We Are Getting Wrong about Appalachia has the virtue of emphasizing the region’s diversity. Ramp Hollow (Stoll, 2017) tells a multi-level story about how a culture develops and how it comes to be destroyed by outside economic interests. Dreamland by Sam Quinones (2015) focuses on a small city (Portsmouth, Ohio) situated in a vast rural hinterland, and the transformative social forces of deindustrialization and the development of drug addiction through the spread of oxycontin and links to organized drug-dealing.2 The reader may well wonder why I used such a positive adjective like “transformative” to describe Quinones’s (2015) narration of social change. It is because the story about rural America and drugs is not about decline, decay, and other pedestrian words for what in criminology is called social disorganization that helps promote a moral panic-like framing of many crime issues. Social disorganization theory itself is as flawed in its logic and how it is used in both statistical and qualitative studies as much as the lack of validity enveloped in any reality show about rural culture, such as those depicting moonshiners or Amish youth who self-describe themselves as like a mafia (Donnermeyer, 2015). My approach to interpreting rural America in the age of Trump is to discard completely that what has happened as a type of decline. What has happened, instead, is a re-structuring or re-organization – that is, a transformation of economic relationships, social organization, and normative structure. It is not a fast change, but a deeply embedded change spanning generations of rural Americans. There is a whole lot of “collective efficacy” in rural America today, but not in the flawed ways that phrase is used by Sampson and others who are codependent on (i.e., addicted to) notions of social disorganization to spin out convoluted statistical studies that associate crime with disorder. As place-based forms of social control that influence the behaviors of people where they live, work, and socialize with others, collective efficacy is defined correctly, but applied terribly. For example, if people are reluctant to call the police, that is considered “anti-collective efficacy” by Sampson (2012) and social disorganization theory addicts. Applying this kind of grotesque reasoning to informal networks by which drugs are trafficked in rural areas (or anywhere), or the tight-knit relationships found among members of gangs (both urban and rural), we could reach the conclusion that anti-collective efficacy outweighs collective efficacy today in many urban neighborhoods and rural communities; this is a wholly silly conclusion reminiscent of the resurgence of “anti-science” advocates who today believe the world is flat, or at least frisbee-shaped, and those who pay money to see exhibits that claim the dinosaurs were vegetarians before Adam and Eve acquired a liking for apples.

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The fact of the matter is that people participate simultaneously in multiple networks, as the rural sociologist Ruth Liepins (2000, p. 30) pointed out in her re-conceptualization of community, and as Stallwitz (2012, 2014) documented in her study of the Shetland Islands. To quote (Liepins, 2000) (perhaps my favorite quote because I use it so often when I write): “moreover, people within a ‘community’ can be individually or collectively treated as diversely positioned … as a set of heterogenous figures who constantly locate themselves in multiple positions and groups.” Hence, it is possible that a local Boy Scout leader may abuse his wife and belong to a church that reinforces the idea that men rule the household and can do whatever they want to their wives and children; or, the extra helpful next-door neighbor who may also be someone who spends several hours a day engaged in social media networks associated with child pornography; or, that favorite uncle who drives his nieces and nephews to the zoo, but also has a personalized license plate that includes the number “88” because he belongs to a neo-Nazi group, and is rarely sleeveless so that his SS-bolt tattoo is not visible to other members of the extended family who think differently than him. In essence, we galavant about our lives in multiple social networks, participating in multiple mini-cultures created within those social networks, and sometimes are involved in more than one network at about the same time and at the same place. Social disorganization theory, the theory of collective efficacy, and other mainstream criminological theories of place cannot account for the true complexity of conformity and deviance at the local level, whether urban or rural (Donnermeyer, 2015). Hence, they have limited utility for examining how neoliberalism, from Reagan through Trump, has transformed rural America in ways that aid in a real understanding of contemporary patterns of drug use.

The rural America of today There is nothing about various changes in rural America that did not begin before the Trump years. Not only is history ignored, but criminologists, the media, and policy makers alike ignore contemporary facts about rural America, focusing only on the pathology, but not social structure. One is that about one in six Americans live in rural areas, no matter how rural is defined. This represents over 45 million Americans, a population rich in cultural diversity and population complexity. Some rural localities are thriving, or at least keeping pace with national averages for jobs growth and employment levels, such as areas on the urban/suburban fringe that benefit from spillover of population, small towns where institutions of higher learning are located, and tourist/recreation areas (Economic Research Service, 2017a). These tend to be rural areas that fit with the direction of America’s economy in the 20th and 21st centuries, and are areas with strong links to urban economies. Declining areas in terms of economic health and population loss are those with an historic and contemporary dependency on agriculture, mining, and manufacturing, and areas where machinery aided

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by computer technology takes the place of labor. As well, something new is happening insofar as continued outmigration of young adults (especially those with college degrees),3 fewer births and an aging population (and with it, health-related issues and higher mortality) creates a demographic death-grip on many rural communities. In Japan, where similar demographics affect many rural communities, they are called “villages of death” (Takahashi, 2016). Yet instead of helping with economic development initiatives, educational funding for local schools, and basic welfare assistance to needy families, federal and state governments have continuously reduced support over the past half-century. According to the most recent profile of rural America, 1,351 rural counties lost population from 2010 through 2016, while 487 counties had positive population growth but below the US average of 5 percent, and only 138 counties grew at a higher rate. Almost all of the nearly 500 positive-growth rural counties that fell below the national growth rate were located in either the “Mountain West” or “Southern Appalachia” regions with “scenic areas” that benefit from tourism, the purchase of seasonal homes, and become attractive locations for urban retirees. Almost all of the 138 rural counties with higher than average growth were located in the “oil and gas boom” areas of the “northern Great Plains, western Texas/southeastern New Mexico, and south Texas” (Economic Research Service, 2017a, p. 2). These counties are based on economies, however, notorious for boom-and-bust cycles that in turn are dependent on world prices for oil and gas and the development of new technologies for natural resources extraction (Fernando & Cooley 2016), and nowadays for a host of crime-related issues, such as prostitution, drugs, and violence (Ruddell, 2017). Overall, however, on an aggregated level, employment growth across all rural counties in America is due almost entirely to sectors of the economy associated with education, health, and leisure/hospitality, not oil and gas. Rural median income is about 75 percent of the national median income, and rural poverty is much higher. Manufacturing continues as the largest sector for employment in rural counties of the US, and in general, rural counties are more reliant on manufacturing when compared to urban counties. The largest sub-sector of manufacturing in rural counties in terms of employment is food manufacturing, followed by transportation equipment manufacturing, metal fabricating, machinery manufacturing, and wood products (Economic Research Service, 2017c). “Persistent-poverty counties” is a term that refers to those with 20 percent or more of their population living below the poverty line based on the censuses of 1980, 1990, 2000, and estimates during 2007–2011 from the American Community Survey, a nationally representative survey of people in the US and of their demographic, economic, and social characteristics. Of the approximately 350 persistent-poverty counties in the US, 301 are rural. As well, there are 71 rural counties that are “new high poverty” counties, where rates exceed 20 percent, but never had before. Most are located in the Southeast, the Midwest and northern California, all rural regions where either manufacturing, agricultural, or extractive industry jobs have been lost (Economic Research Service, 2017a).

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Selective migration can be seen in the 2015 percentage of the population in rural counties without a high school degree (15 percent) compared to urban counties (13 percent), and the percentage with a four-year college degree in rural counties (19 percent) compared to urban counties (33 percent). Further, this gap is growing. Plus there is a gender gap in rural America. Women (20 percent) in the rural counties of America with college degrees now exceed men (18 percent), and the proportion of rural women without a high school degree (13 percent) is now lower than rural men (16 percent) (Economic Research Service, 2017b). And poverty rates are always higher in rural counties with lower educational attainment, although it can be argued: “What came first, the chicken or the egg?” Finally, related to the importance of information in America’s 21st-century economy is broadband access and use. Since questions about internet use were first asked in the American Community Survey of 2001, households in rural counties lag behind households in urban counties. The sterile statistics from the Economic Research Service of the US Department of Agriculture paints a generally dismal picture of economic and population loss, but a portrait that shows diversity as well (also a theme of the book by Catte, 2018). So how is this all related to rural America and justice in the era of Trump, an era that actually began with the steady adoption of neo-liberal economic policies long before the current president was anything other than a reality show host, womanizer, and a ruthless declarer of bankruptcy when things do not go well for one of his businesses? Take one of the poorest counties in rural America today (ranked at #20), McCreary County, Kentucky (population = 17,465; poverty rate = 39.3 percent). It too, like Adams County, Ohio, is on the edge of Appalachia. It voted nearly 87 percent for Trump in the 2016 election. Gilmer County, West Virginia (population 8,005; poverty rate = 27.1 percent), ranked as the 38th poorest county and located in the middle of the state, voted nearly 74 percent for Trump. Van Buren County (population = 5,742; poverty rate = 19.1 percent) of eastern Tennessee is 97th on the list and voted 75 percent Republican. Among the 100 poorest counties in the US (there are about 3,150 counties or county equivalents), nearly three-fourths are rural, and all but a few voted for Trump. It could be argued that these declining (in population size and economically) rural counties voted for Trump as a form of protest – that is, an expression of anger at being left behind. But that argument is a type of moral panic by criminologists and rural sociologists who rarely see issues through a critical lens, and mostly think of decline as a type of disorganization rather than a form of reorganization. In fact, most persistent-poverty rural counties long ago flipped both to voting for conservative candidates and developing a culture of drug use, and a critical view accounting for long-term structural change would acknowledge those factors (Donnermeyer & DeKeseredy, 2008). A critical approach also recognizes the relationship of social class to crime, as well as to voting patterns. In many rural counties, especially those that are persistent-poverty counties, it seems there is mostly only two social classes. It is

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almost like two countries with two distinctive cultures situated at a single place within many rural counties of America: exactly what is described above in the quote about community by Liepins (2000). One is a relatively small proportion of people who are well-off and likely college-educated, connected economically, socially, and culturally. Their financial and social capital extends out well beyond where they live. Then there are the economically dispossessed, with limited education and even more limited employment opportunities, who are caught, perhaps trapped both economically and physically, subsisting on the bottom rungs of the social class ladder. In social disorganization theory, high poverty is an indicator of disorganization. However, poor rural places are not now and never were disorganized, and in fact, like the social organization found in ethnographic studies of urban ghettos (Sanchez-Jankowski, 2008; Venkatesh, 1997; Wacquant, 2008), the rural poor can be shown to possess strong social networks (Beaver, 1986; Stephenson, 1968). But to what end?

Opioids and other drugs in rural America: an evolution, not an epidemic Rural America’s association with illegal substances has metamorphosed from moonshine to marijuana to a contemporary buffet of methamphetamines, oxycontin, heroin, and other highly addictive substances. The story of drugs today is not about an epidemic, but about a concomitant progression of drugs abuse associated with economic, social, and cultural change. The so-called drug epidemic as described today by Noonan (2017) has deep historic roots. In many rural areas, it is the normal – that is, an ever-changing series of expressions of community-mindedness among some of the social networks that exist there. This allows many people living in rural America to be heterogeneously located (Liepins, 2000). A thorough history would begin with moonshine and how it came to be associated with the Appalachian region of the US as the first addiction, and as a system mostly of “mom-and-pop” operations making alcohol and distributing it without paying taxes. In fact, the word “moonshine” goes back to 15th-century Britain and covert activities associated with smuggling under the light of a full moon (Joyce, 2014; Peine & Schafft, 2012). From there, the development of marijuana becomes embedded in parts of rural society and culture (Warf, 2014; Weisheit, 1992), as well as in urban America. As Weisheit and Brownstein (2016) point out, marijuana production in rural America accelerated about 50 years ago with attempts to crack down on drug trafficking across the US–Mexico border, the spraying of marijuana fields in Mexico, and the growing popularity of marijuana during the Vietnam War era. With growing marijuana easier outdoors than indoors, and with the ability to grow large amounts with limited chances of detection in rural areas, especially in areas where rainfall is abundant, production increased as demand increased, especially in Appalachia and the Ozarks. One particularly large and organized

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effort, with grow operations in at least nine states, was under the leadership of a group from central Kentucky that was nicknamed “The Cornbread Mafia,” a moniker that today can symbolize other kinds of organized crime with strong rural dimensions. At the time, these modes of drug production had developed and had begun to blend, community-mindedness style (Stallwitz, 2014) into the rural fabric, where a greater share of social relationships and networks are personal or primary, and the cultural and political ethos is of greater individualism and a greater disdain for centralized varieties of government, other changes were taking place. Timbering, mining, and other extractive industries on which so many rural areas were dependent, and where absentee ownership could be interpreted as a form of colonialism, were on the decline. Shifting sources for energy in an increasingly globalized economy and greater efficiencies wrought by machinery and computer technologies created extensive job loss (Lobao, 2014; Slack, 2014; Walls & Billings, 1977). These same forces were also transforming agricultural regions, and have had, and continue to have, similar consequences for rural counties dependent on agriculture (Lobao & Meyer, 2001). But how did these so-called “hard” drugs arrive in rural America, even though moonshining and marijuana both have a strong rural heritage? One hint is a story titled “Hard Times in Harlan” by Bill Bishop, a short two-page narrative inserted between a host of statistics and bar graphs about the prevalence of drugs in a Carsey Institute report, Substance Abuse in Rural and Small Town America (Van Gundy, 2006). He described the dispensing of painkillers at mining camps by doctors employed by coal companies to maintain worker productivity during the days of deep mine extraction. Stooping all day in a deep-shaft coal mine can be painful, and the pills helped. Some of the more inventive miners figured out ways to increase potency. Self-medication became part of their lifestyle. Later on, these doctors became the target for pharmaceutical sales representatives pushing oxycontin. Dispensed freely at one time, oxycontin soon spread to the general population, with many “locals” again experimenting with ways to increase potency by mixing it with other drugs and medications that could be obtained, either over-the-counter or underground. Its strong presence of abuse in rural areas earned it the name “hillbilly heroin.” Meanwhile, adoption of methamphetamines by rural users spread during the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century throughout many parts of the Midwest and Appalachian regions (Herz, 2000). As a stimulant, it was used in World War II by members of the military, and a form of it called methedrine was used by many ex-servicemen in the 1950s and 1960s. During the 1970s, as its abusive properties became better known, methamphetamine became a banned or controlled substance (Kraman, 2004; National Center on Addiction and Drug Abuse, 2000). Regardless, its use continued, especially on the west coast, and eventually it spread eastward and into many rural localities, with “smaller groups of friends and family … using low-tech labs to produce limited amounts” (Garriott, 2011, p. 24). Its diffusion was often through truck drivers,

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an occupation with many rural workers, and biker gangs. Spreading through primary group networks, namely family and friends, methamphetamines soon acquired a strong rural identity. Even though Mexican drug cartels, operating like the Walmarts of methamphetamines, produce and traffic the drugs in both urban and rural communities, there are always one or more local dealers who are vertically linked to this underground global economy, and there are always one or more local producers who find it a lucrative way to make money for themselves and to have enough for their own addictions (Shukla, 2016). Van Gundy (2006) describes the development of a small but tight-knit gang in Kirksville, Missouri. The organizer was someone from the county who had moved back and taught others how to “cook.” Nowadays, the Web provides easy access to anyone who wants to experiment with various recipes (Weisheit and Brownstein, 2016). Remember, community borders are porous, and even if broadband use lags in rural communities, there are still plenty of rural folks who can look up recipes and share with their good friends, neighbors, and family members. With restrictions in place to limit the acquisition of over-the-counter ingredients to make methamphetamines, parties of tight-knit local users fan out to various pharmacies, then come together to “shake and bake” and party (Shukla, 2016; Weisheit & Brownstein, 2016). Hence, we can see the strong collective efficacy of drugs in rural America. One study of methamphetamines and their effects on families in a rural region of a Midwestern state found addicted adults teaching their children to alert them to any police car that might drive by as they play outside and their parents are inside cooking and using the drug (Haight et al., 2005). Shukla’s (2016) ethnographic study of addicted rural adults describes in detail, and in their own words, how in rural Oklahoma producers, distributors, and users are enmeshed in networks that are as strong in expressions of collective efficacy as any application of this concept to explain conformity, control, and law-abiding behaviors. Meanwhile, crackdowns on methamphetamine networks have spurred an increase in heroin use in some rural areas (Kuehn, 2014). The abuse of specific drugs today ebbs and flows with supply, demand, price, and enforcement efforts. It is like the child’s game of “wack-a-mole”: the criminal justice system cracks down on one type only to have another kind pop up. All of these dynamics add up statistically. For example, the Monitoring the Future Study (Johnston et al., 2018) has been tracking substance use and abuse among adolescents and young adults for several decades through its school-based surveys. Examining long-term trends in drug use reveals how drug use was more frequent among urban youth at first (even though the differences were never very substantial), but then some time in the 1990s and into the first decade of the 21st century, the rural and urban trend lines converged, and ever since, for some types of illicit drugs and for some years, the urban rates are higher, and for other years, the rural rates are higher (Johnston et al., 2018). As well, the rate of deaths and hospitalizations from drug overdoses is now consistently higher in rural America (Noonan, 2017).

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In essence, Haight et al. (2005), Garriott (2011), Shukla (2016), and Weisheit and Brownstein (2016) are all referring to saturation (Currie, 1993), especially in many rural counties where poverty rates are high, economic opportunities are limited, and local cultures emphasize self-reliance and individualism. Networks are close-knit and often family-based, and even though the source of a drug may be from outside the community, the distributors are mostly locals. A new culture not dissimilar to Stallwitz’s (2012) description of what happened on the Shetland Islands develops and ultimately becomes noticeable to most everyone else in the community. For example, Garriott (2011) described not only the emergence of a drug economy (from sale and distribution of methamphetamines to addicts who resort to thievery to maintain their addictions), but the ways that it shifts the attention of non-addicted locals and law enforcement and their views of the places where they live. None of Garriott’s (2011) nor Shukla’s (2016) descriptions depict a moral panic, but they do describe a blending of cultures, both the past and an ever-developing present, and therefore the heterogeneous statuses people can occupy and the networks in which they can participate (Liepins, 2000).

Conclusion The Trump era is the present, but representing an accelerated version of the past because the transformation of many regions of rural America began a very long time ago. The histories of rural communities in America, if read from a critical criminology or critical sociology perspective, presents a picture where economic autonomy in the past was more mirage than reality, even though rural cultures often emphasized individualism and self-reliance to a greater degree than populations in America’s cities. Even though the destructive nature of accelerated deregulation during the Trump era (from the weakening of water quality regulations and other rules meant to protect the environment, to fewer restrictions on what owners of various extractive industries can do, including rules about worker safety) will be costly for rural communities and rural environments, many of those costs are hidden in the present because their consequences will not be visible until many years to come, just as the consequences of past exploitations affect the conditions of many regions of rural America today (Stoll, 2017). Perhaps the biggest cost – past, present, and future – is the way the social and normative structures in many parts of rural America have transformed to support drugs, and where drug use among its populations is evident in above-average rates of hospital/emergency room admissions and drug overdose deaths. An epidemic? The Dictionary of Epidemiology (Porta, 2008) defines an epidemic as the sudden appearance of a disease that spreads rapidly through a healthy population. That is not what has happened in rural America! A critical view would see the current situation as a series of a mostly evolutionary set of changes in the social and cultural fabric of rural America, sustained

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by an economic base of dependency, and conditions associated with job loss and high rates of poverty and inequality.4 The past development of moonshining and marijuana production was shaped by an intersection of economic forces, the role of the state in defining and enforcing laws designed to reduce crime and deviance, and of rural regions where value orientations include a strong sense of independence, individualism, and self-reliance – characteristics of areas in the US first settled by peoples from the British Isles and a tradition of smuggling by the light of a full moon (Salamon, 1992; Walls & Billings, 1977). Likewise, the present abuse of everything from oxycontin to methamphetamine to heroin is based on the shifting organization of social networks in largely deindustrialized, depressed, and persistent-poverty regions of rural America with a cultural lag whereby an older normative system of values (individualism and self-reliance) has long outlived whatever economic autonomy used to be there. Again, an epidemic implies a so-called healthy population – that is, one which is rather suddenly struck by some kind of malady that threatens its very health and vitality. The interpretation presented here is different. The development and continuously changing nature of a drug-using culture in rural America is normal (and not even a new normal) – that is, embedded deeply as one part of its social organization. As the type of illicit substance changes, so too do localized forms of social structure related to its introduction and use. Indeed, drugs like methamphetamine are debilitating and create many, many individual stories of tragedy, but that does not justify the framing of it as an “epidemic.” When approached from this point of view, therefore, policy and practices to address drug abuse in rural America in a Trumpish age of regressive criminal justice policies say that the militarization of the police, drug rehabilitation, and other reactive practices will not solve social structural problems associated with economic dependency, unemployment, and inequality. They may be necessary to address very real needs to enforce criminal laws and maintain safety and very real physical and mental health needs associated with drug abuse, but they also misdirect attention from the embeddedness of a drug culture and related social networks that exist alongside, and in many ways intertwined (Garriott, 2011) with, the social organization of everyone who lives in rural America, whether they are among the many who are poor or the few who are rich, or the networks that enable illicit substance abuse or the networks that do not. Today, in many parts of rural America there exists a form of inverse socialism. These communities contain a small percentage of the population that are well off, with the remainder left behind, working in seasonal and low-wage jobs, with many being paid in cash to avoid taxes, and of course, saving their local elite customers money, with few opportunities for better jobs and little incentive for new employers to relocate highly paid and skilled jobs to an area where many in the potential labor pool did not graduate from high school and could not pass a drug test, and with poorly funded schools and other government services because of opposition to increases in property taxes by the local elite who

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control the political agenda. Hence, those young people who do aspire to achieve university degrees and professional careers never come back (mostly) except to visit family on holidays. Local elites live well, enjoying the benefits of depressed wages and prices, while the working class and poor struggle for everything. If there is something swanky that cannot be bought by local elites, they simply drive to the nearest suburban shopping mall or order it on-line. Delivery trucks and drones can go anywhere today! It would almost seem that a postindustrial form of feudalism is just around the corner if these trends continue. Solving the problems associated with the highly addictive drugs of today, and whatever the next wave of chemicals shall bring, requires finding structural-level solutions to poverty and inequality, and to forms of localized economic development that are not based on absentee-ownership and urban dependency. The real war should not be waged on drugs, but on rural inequality, deindustrialization, job loss, and persistent poverty. Unfortunately, this requires a progressive agenda of federal and state-supported programs for rural re-development – programs less likely supported by populations who blindly vote conservative and against their own self-interests, but certainly serve the elite, locally and nationally. A rural revival will not occur until the Trump legacy is long past.

Notes 1 For the extra-curious reader, the end of the story goes like this: I asked the cashier if the bathrooms were now needle-free. She said “Yes,” and consented to allow me the relief I so urgently sought, even though the signs on the bathroom doors still shouted a loud “CLOSED.” On another note, only a stone’s throw from Marshall was an incident in 2016 when eight members of a family, likely involved in drug manufacturing and other illegal activities, were assassinated. Originally, it was suspected that possible connections to organized drug gangs, possibly from Mexico, that went awry was the cause of the murders. This would illustrate the very porous boundaries between rural communities and outside influences and the idea that understanding drug distribution networks must include consideration not only of its global dimensions, but how vertically integrated networks include local dealers who are mostly long-term members of their rural communities. But, as it turns out, based on recent arrests, the murders were committed by another family living nearby, who held a grudge against their victims. This illustrates how the tight-knit nature of rural communities – that is, Gemeinschaft-like qualities – enhance crime as much as constrain crime. In other words, the criminological theory of social disorganization and latter-day concepts like collective efficacy are conceptually flawed because they define cohesion within localities only as constraining crime, and not the opposite. 2 Coincidentally, a great deal of Vance’s (2016) Hillbilly Elegy takes place based on events in Middletown, Ohio, an old steel city in between Dayton and Cincinnati. Quinones’ Dreamland set in Portsmouth seems to be about halfway geographically between Middletown and the location of Ramp Hollow, which not too far from the home of one of the editors of this book, namely, Morgantown, West Virginia area. 3 When I teach a large enrollment section (about 150 students) at the Ohio State University of Rural Sociology 1500 (“Introduction to Rural Sociology,” a course that fulfills a general education requirement), I ask those who are rural to raise their hands. Then I ask them to keep their hands up if they intend moving back to the rural places they came from once they earn their four-year degree. Only a few keep their hands raised.

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When I ask them why, almost inevitably those few say that a family-owned farm or non-farm business motivates them to return. 4 By using “evolutionary,” I risk the perception in the mind of the critically oriented reader that I am referring to a Parsonian (Parsons, 1951) explanation of change. I am not. Instead, I selected the word “evolutionary” to refer to the way local social organization responds to larger structural forces. This is the classic C. W. Mills (1959) approach of “public issues” and “personal troubles,” with additional sociological considerations for place as conceptualized by Liepins (2000) and utilized by Stallwitz (2012, 2014).

References Barclay, E. M. (2016). Farm victimisation: The quintessential rural crime. In J. F. Donnermeyer (Ed.), The Routledge international handbook of rural criminology (pp. 107–116). London: Routledge. Beaver, P. D. (1986). Rural community in the Appalachian South. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky. Catte, E. (2018). What you are getting wrong about Appalachia. Cleveland, OH: Belt Publishing. Census Bureau. (2018). Quick facts. Retrieved from www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/ table/highlandcountyohio,OH/PST045217 Cohen, S. (1972). Folk devils and moral panics: The creation of the mods and rockers. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell. Currie, E. (1993). Reckoning: Drugs, the cities, and the American future. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. DeKeseredy, W. S., & Schwartz, M. D. (2009). Dangerous exists: Escaping abusive relationships in rural America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. DeKeseredy, W. S., Hall-Sanchez, A., Dargiewicz, M., & Rennison, C. M. (2016). Intimate partner violence against women in rural communities. In J. F. Donnermeyer (Ed.), The Routledge international handbook of rural criminology (pp. 171–180). London: Routledge. Donnermeyer, J. F. (2015). The social organisation of the rural and crime in the United States: Conceptual considerations. Journal of Rural Studies, 39, 160–170. Donnermeyer, J. F. (2016). Introduction. In J. F. Donnermeyer (Ed.), The Routledge international handbook of rural criminology (pp. 1–10). London: Routledge. Donnermeyer, J. F., & DeKeseredy, W. S. (2008). Toward a critical rural criminology. Southern Rural Sociology, 23, 4–28. Downey, B. (1992). Battered pioneers: Jules Sandoz and the physical abuse of wives on the American frontier. Great Plains Quarterly, 12, 31–49. Durkheim, E. (1964). The rules of the sociological methods. New York: The Free Press (Original work published 1895). Economic Research Service. (2017a). Rural America at a glance, 2017 edition (USDA-ERS, Economic Information Bulletin 182). Washington, DC: Economic Research Service. Economic Research Service. (2017b). Rural education at a glance, 2017 edition (USDA-ERS, Economic Information Bulletin 171). Washington, DC: Economic Research Service. Economic Research Service. (2017c). Rural manufacturing at a glance, 2017 edition (USDAERS, Economic Information Bulletin 177). Washington, DC: Economic Research Service. Evans, C. B. R., Smokowski, P. R., & Cotter, K. L. (2016). Rural bullying: An overview of findings from the Rural Adaptation Project. In J. F. Donnermeyer (Ed.), The Routledge international handbook of rural criminology (pp. 201–210). London: Routledge.

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Fernando, F. N., & Cooley, D. R. (2016). Socioeconomic system of the oil boom and rural community development in western North Dakota. Rural Sociology, 81(3), 407–444. Garriott, W. (2011). Policing methamphetamine: Narcopolitics in rural America. New York: New York University Press. Haight, W., Jacobsen, T., Black, J., Kingery, L., Sheridan, K., & Mulder, C. (2005). “In these bleak days”: Parent methamphetamine abuse and child welfare in the rural Midwest. Children and Youth Services Review, 27, 949–971. Herz, D. C. (2000). Drugs in the heartland: Methamphetamine use in rural Nebraska. Washington, DC: National Institute of Justice, US Department of Justice. Johnston, L. D., Miech, R. A., O’Malley, P. M., Bachman, J. G., Schulenberg, J. E., & Patrick, M. E. (2018). Monitoring the future national survey results on drug use: 1975–2017: Overview, key findings on adolescent drug use. Ann Arbor, MI: Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan. Joyce, J. (2014). Moonshine: A cultural history of America’s infamous liquor. Minneapolis, MN: Zenith. Kimmel, M. (2013). Angry white men: American masculinity at the end of an era. New York: Nation Books. Kraman, P. (2004). Drug abuse in America – rural meth. Lexington, KY: Council of State Governments. Kuehn, B. M. (2014). Driven by prescription drug abuse, heroin use increases among suburban and rural whites. Journal of the American Medical Association, 312(2), 118–119. Lee, M. R. (2008). Civic community in the hinterland: Toward a theory of rural social structure and violence. Criminology, 46, 447–478. Lee, M. R., & Stevenson, G. D. (2006). Gender-specific homicide offending in rural areas. Homicide Studies, 10(1), 55–73. Leip, D. (2016). 2016 Presidential General Election results. Retrieved from https://uselec tionatlas.org/RESULTS/ Liepins, R. (2000). New energies for an old idea: Reworking approaches to “community” in contemporary rural studies. Journal of Rural Studies, 16, 23–35. Lobao, L. (2014). Economic change, structural forces, and rural America: Shifting fortunes across communities. In C. Bailey, L. Jensen, & E. Ransom (Eds.), Rural America in a globalizing world: Problems and prospects for the 2010s (pp. 543–555). Morgantown, WV: West Virginia University Press. Lobao, L., & Meyer, K. (2001). The great agricultural transition: Crisis, change, and social consequences of twentieth century US farming. Annual Review of Sociology, 27, 103–124. McCourt, F. (1996). Angela’s ashes: A memoir. New York: Scribner. Mills, C. W. (1959). The sociological imagination. New York: Oxford University Press. Muzzatti, S. L. (2012). Cultural criminology: Burning up capitalism, consumer culture and crime. In W. S. DeKeseredy & M. Dragiewicz (Eds.), Routledge handbook of critical criminology (pp. 138–149). London: Routledge. National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse. (2000). No place to hide: Substance abuse in mid-size cities and rural America. New York: Columbia University Press. Noonan, R. (2017). Rural America in crisis: The changing opioid overdoes epidemic. Atlanta, GA: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Retrieved from https://blogs.cdc.gov/pub lichealthmatters/2017/11/opioids/ Parsons, T. (1951). The social system. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press. Peine, E. K., & Schafft, K. A. (2012). Moonshine, mountaineers, and modernity: Distilling cultural history in the Southern Appalachian mountains. Journal of Appalachian Studies, 18(1/2), 93–112.

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Porta, M. (Ed.). (2008). A dictionary of epidemiology. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Quinones, S. (2015). Dreamland: The true tale of America’s opiate epidemic. New York: Bloomsbury. Ruddell, R. (2017). Oil, gas and crime: The dark side of the boomtown. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Salamon, S. (1992). Prairie patrimony: Family, farming, and community in the Midwest. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Sampson, R. (2012). Great American city: Chicago and the enduring neighborhood effect. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Sanchez-Jankowski, M. (2008). Cracks in the pavement: Social change and resilience. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Sherman, J. (2005). Men without sawmill: Masculinity, rural men, poverty, and family stability. Corwallis, OR: Rural Poverty Research Center. Shukla, R. K. (2016). Methamphetamine: A love story. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Slack, T. (2014). Work in rural America in the era of globalization. In C. Bailey, L. Jensen, & E. Ransom (Eds.), Rural America in a globalizing world: Problems and prospects for the 2010s (pp. 573–590). Morgantown, WV: West Virginia University Press. Stallwitz, A. (2012). The role of community-mindedness in the self-regulation of drug cultures: A case study from the Shetland Islands. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer. Stallwitz, A. (2014). Community-mindedness: Protection against crime in the context of illicit drug cultures? International Journal of Rural Criminology, 2(2), 166–208. Stephenson, J. (1968). Shiloh: A mountain community. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press. Stoll, S. (2017). Ramp hollow: The ordeal of Appalachia. New York: Hill and Wang. Takahashi, Y. (2016). Crime and response in rural Japan. In J. F. Donnermeyer (Ed.), The Routledge international handbook of rural criminology (pp. 45–54). London: Routledge. Van Gundy, K. (2006). Substance abuse in rural and small town America. Durham, NH: Carsey Institute, University of New Hampshire. Vance, J. D. (2016). Hillbilly elegy: A memoir of a family and culture in crisis. New York: HarperCollins. Venkatesh, S. A. (1997). The social organization of street gang activity in an urban ghetto. American Journal of Sociology, 103(1), 82–111. Wacquant, L. (2008). Urban outcasts: A comparative sociology of advanced marginality. Cambridge: Polity Press. Walls, D. S., & Billings, D. B. (1977). The sociology of southern Appalachia. Appalachian Journal, 5(1), 131–144. Warf, B. (2014). High points: An historical geography of cannabis. Geographical Review, 104 (4), 414–438. Weisheit, R. (1992). Domestic marijuana: A neglected industry. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Weisheit, R., & Brownstein, H. (2016). Drug production in the rural context. In J. F. Donnermeyer (Ed.), The Routledge international handbook of rural criminology (pp. 235–243). London: Routledge. Young, J. (2009). Moral panic: Its origins in resistance, ressentiment and the translation of fantasy into reality. British Journal of Criminology, 49, 4–16.

4 GETTING CRIME RIGHT Framing everyday violence in the age of Trump Elliott Currie

In this chapter I’d like to talk about how we can best go about the task of framing the issue of crime—or more specifically, what I’ll call “everyday violence”—in this deeply troubling and often perplexing political time. By “everyday violence” I mean the routine interpersonal harm that is suffered by people on the streets and in their homes. That’s not, of course, the only kind of violence, or the only kind of harm that’s inflicted on people around the world: but it is an important one, and one that profoundly impacts the lives of many of the people who are also most dispossessed and disadvantaged in other ways. I want to focus on everyday violence partly because it is the kind of violence that I know most about, but more importantly, because I am deeply worried about the way we are often framing our response to this issue. By “we,” I mean not just progressive criminologists and other scholars— but also others who think of themselves as liberals or progressives (I will focus here mostly on the United States, since that is the country I know best, but I think the issues I’ll raise are relevant for other countries as well), most of whom are appalled by the recent political turn in the country and want to be able to envision a different future. I worry that a lot of us in that broad progressive “we” are getting crime wrong—by which I mean that, to the extent that we are actually tackling the issue of everyday violence head-on at all, we are framing it in ways that are at once empirically misleading, morally and socially troubling, and politically tonedeaf—and that deprive us of one important lens through which to expose the failings and the fundamental unsustainability of an essentially predatory, neglectful, and disruptive social order. We are also often out of sync with some of the most encouraging and vital progressive political action we’ve seen in many years. I realize that that’s a pretty sharp and pretty comprehensive criticism. And I also realize that not everyone would agree with it. But I want to put my own

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perspective on the table in the hope that we can develop an honest dialogue about how we talk about crime. My sense of urgency about that dialogue escalated during the American presidential campaign of 2016. Frankly, the talk about crime—on both sides, not just the Republican side—left me both scratching my head and very discouraged. I was scratching my head because I just didn’t recognize the country that either side was describing when they talked about crime. On the one hand we had Donald Trump making wildly inaccurate claims about a country overrun with unprecedented levels of violence—murder rates “higher than they’ve been in 47 years!” and painting a picture of inner cities in particular that was obviously over the top—so much so that many people who actually live in the communities Trump was talking about were both bewildered and insulted. But the liberal response, and the response of much of the mainstream of the Democratic Party, was at least equally perplexing. Liberals often tried not only to deny that what I’m calling “everyday” violence was much of a problem any more in America, but also implied—or even said outright—that to say it was a problem made you a little suspect—actually, a lot suspect: it defined you as an alarmist with an agenda that was both vaguely un-American and intrinsically racist in its implications. Democratic candidates and their supporters in the media heaped scorn on Trump for having a “dark” and “dystopian” vision of America and, particularly, of the inner cities. Now what was remarkable about this response was, first, the level of sheer denial that it represented. The same newspapers that editorialized against Trump’s “dark” view that violence was a serious problem in American cities reported regularly about the persistence of devastating levels of gun violence in places like Chicago, Baltimore, and St. Louis, as they had been doing for—well, pretty much forever. So there was an almost schizophrenic split between the daily reportage of real life in the most troubled parts of the country and the strident ideological insistence that what they were reporting on … wasn’t real. But there was also a deeper and more perplexing aspect of this denial. The emerging liberal ideology about crime—as well as a number of other issues in the 2016 campaign—also flipped the traditional political stances on social issues on their head. Suddenly—and quite surprisingly—it was liberals who were vehemently insisting that things were just fine in America, thank you very much, and it was the Right saying that no, there were actually deep social problems, especially in the struggling inner cities, or in the wasted industrial heartland of the country, that urgently needed to be addressed, and that those problems disproportionately affected some of the most vulnerable people in America—who deserved better. Now it practically goes without saying that the Right’s view on these problems was both inadequate in its explanation of their causes—to the extent that there was an explanation of their causes—and also completely lacking in anything approaching an intelligible strategy to do anything about them. But the liberals and the Democratic Party mainstream weren’t offering one either—nor

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could they, since they were insisting that the problems were largely mythical and that the United States, after all, was the greatest country on earth. The result was that extremist Republicans came off in the campaign months as being the ones who actually cared about an issue that was of great concern to many Americans and that adversely impacted their lives—mostly the lives of low-income or working-class people, who are, and have always been, the most vulnerable to everyday violence—as well as others, often in precarious economic circumstances themselves, who were frightened by things like gang violence, apparently senseless shootings, and the ravages of the drug trade. And so this became one more example of liberals and mainstream Democrats ignoring the concerns of the bottom 70 percent or so of the social and economic spectrum, and helping to deliver their allegiance, and their votes, to a party, and a candidate, who surely cared little about their well-being and whose policies, in fact, were a principal source of the troubles that wracked their communities. As with many other of the social ills of an out of control capitalism, liberals came off as either comfortably insulated from everyday violence or remarkably desensitized to it. So both on the programmatic or policy level, and perhaps even more importantly on the emotional level, liberals not only “dropped the ball” on this issue, but, to shamelessly extend the sports metaphor, literally passed it to the opposing team. And what is so frustrating is that this wasn’t the first time this had happened in American politics. It reprises a similar default in the late 1960s and early 1970s, at a time when “crime in the streets” was, for good reason, a pressing concern for much of the public. Some liberals responded to that concern by pooh-poohing it as nothing more than a code for racist attitudes; others abandoned any kind of progressive analysis or strategy around crime at all, and began to talk very much like pale reflections of the Right. The result was a vacuum of genuinely progressive analysis of what was behind the very real increases in serious violence in the United States and what it would take to address its causes in enduring and humane ways. Make no mistake: that liberal default, that failure to put forward an honest and strong progressive response to the tough reality of everyday violence, facilitated the dominance of conservative ideas about crime right up to the present, thus helping to usher in the era of mass incarceration that still defines us as a society, and to transform the landscape of urban America in ways that we all know to have been terribly destructive. Let’s look a little more closely at the internal structure of this kind of argument—what I’ve sometimes called “liberal minimalism”—because I think this perspective has become so stylized and unreflective that no one puts it up to the light to see if it holds together logically, or reasonably reflects the empirical reality. I think that on both counts it fails, and it’s important to understand why— especially if we want to offer a more honest and effective alternative to a conservative paradigm that has dominated our social life for more than a generation—and if we’re not careful, may continue to do so. Often the liberal

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perspective I’ll discuss is actually more of a visceral reaction against right-wing views about crime than it is an articulate argument. But there are some frequent themes that I think are important to examine critically. One of them is that the minimalist argument focuses on the fact that there is less everyday violence in America than there used to be, while sidestepping the fact that there is still a lot of it—especially in some places. It’s true, of course, that violent crime has fallen from its peaks in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But stopping with that uncontroversial observation is also terribly misleading, in a couple of ways. First, the “great American crime drop” is often overstated— sometimes wildly overstated. Just about every week during the first years of this century, for example, you could read in the mainstream news that violent crime was “plummeting.” But the crime drop actually stopped in 1999, and the American homicide rate barely budged for most of the next decade. It dropped some thereafter—but has now risen back to just about where it was throughout most of the early years of this century. Nevertheless, readers of the New York Times would have learned from a column in that newspaper a few years ago that violent crime has been in a “steady downward spiral” for “decades.” Well, it hasn’t. But the less celebratory and more complex reality rarely made it to the mainstream media. But more fundamentally, the focus on the period of decline deflects our attention from the continuity of everyday violence in America. In that sense, it involves a simple but common kind of logical fallacy. Let me explain what I mean. A few years ago I read a column in the Los Angeles Times which was called “There’s No Carnage in California” (Males, 2017). The author was responding to Trump’s use during his campaign of the very strong word “carnage” to describe the state of violence in some inner-city communities—and, sometimes, to describe other American crises, as well, like the loss of manufacturing jobs. Trump was roundly attacked by liberal commentators for talking about “carnage” in this sense (having used that word myself sometimes to describe American violence, I confess that I was a little taken aback by that response). This opinion piece adopted that same frame, arguing that Trump’s “alarmist” and “dystopian” response was absurd—because crime had actually fallen in California from its peaks many years before. Again, that’s true, as far as it goes. But it also doesn’t really support the idea that there was no “carnage” in California, because nowhere in the piece was there a discussion of the actual level of everyday violence right now, in the places in the state that had traditionally suffered it the worst—only the statistics showing that the state now suffered less violence than it once did. We can perhaps see what’s wrong with this kind of argument more clearly if we leave the subject of violence for a moment and instead look at, say, health. Recently, a relative of mine died of complications of diabetes. He’d been diabetic for a very long time and hadn’t really done much to tackle the underlying systemic causes of his illness. So a few years ago he was rushed to the hospital

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with a terrible infection that nearly killed him. The doctors fixed that infection, and he came home and was in far better shape for most of the next year than he had been at his worst, when he was flat on his back in the intensive care unit. But of course he was not in good shape, because the underlying systemic disease had not been altered. And when the next massive infection came around, they couldn’t fix it. The point is that no one in their right mind would have said that my relative was actually doing well in between those medical crises. In fact, everyone knew he wasn’t: and that, again, the underlying systemic problems had not even been seriously addressed, much less cured. But the minimalist argument about violence does in fact commit that mistake—the mistake of assuming that improvement in a problem means that it is no longer a problem: that having a reprieve from an extreme crisis means that things are pretty much OK. This kind of thinking is distressingly common in the liberal framing of crime today, and it was a signal feature of the Democratic response to Trump during his campaign. One of the turning points in my own sense of how much of a political threat Trump actually was came about, indeed, because of this issue. It took place in a television interview during the campaign when Jake Tapper of CNN was interviewing Paul Manafort—now the beleaguered subject of a criminal investigation, but then still Trump’s campaign manager. The talk turned to crime: Jake Tapper was grilling Manafort about Trump exaggerating the problem of urban violence, since crime had, after all, fallen dramatically. Manafort said, basically, that he didn’t know what Tapper was talking about: Tapper responded that “FBI statistics” show that crime has dropped to historic lows. Manafort looked at him rather pityingly and said “I don’t know what statistics you’re talking about, but the people we talk to are worried about crime.” That’s when I thought, uh-oh, we could be in trouble here: Manafort is on to something that Tapper and many mainstream liberals don’t get: statistics charting a national crime “decline” tell you nothing about how people actually experience the threat of crime where they are, and they cannot suffice as a political response to the genuine worries of a big part of the American population. So one feature of the liberal framing of violent crime is that the actual concerns of ordinary people are denigrated—or ignored. But it’s important to emphasize again that the liberal perspective is deeply misleading empirically as well. The reality of everyday violence is obscured—or ignored—in ways that are very consequential in terms of both our credibility and our ability to connect with people in the real world. One source of obfuscation is that the tendency to focus on the crime decline leads liberals to fail to acknowledge—or perhaps fail to understand—that the United States remains an “outlier” when it comes to everyday violence. It is indeed true that there are fewer homicides in this country today than there were in 1992. But our homicide rate still towers above that of every other advanced industrial country—at last count, in the neighborhood of six times the

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western European average and 10 to 15 times the rate in the lowest-rate countries. When it comes to gun homicides, these disparities are, of course, even greater (Grynshteyn & Hemenway, 2016). These differences are not marginal ones, and they are not peripheral to an understanding of the differential quality of life across modern societies. Progressives, above all people, should be making it our business to point out that this tells us something important about our country and how it needs to change. By failing to point out that startling American exceptionalism in interpersonal violence, we are missing the chance to engage in a teachable moment about the structural failings of our social order. To put it another way, when we deny the seriousness of American violence, we are letting predatory capitalism off the hook. To accept the minimalist argument is to reject what many criminologists—progressive and otherwise—have said for generations about the connections between unfettered capitalism and violence. At least since Marx and Engels—and actually before them—we’ve been saying that capitalism, especially in its most naked forms, breeds violence. And not just in material ways: though some of that connection does stem from capitalism’s inherent tendency to produce extremes of inequality, deprivation, and economic insecurity, socialist thinkers in particular have pointed out that capitalism also has cultural and psychological effects that are profoundly “criminogenic”—that it fosters a mind-set of predatory competition, and a culture of callous disregard for the well-being of other people: in Willem Bonger’s famous words, capitalism “destroys the social instincts.” A fundamental part of the Left’s critique of extreme capitalism is that it is a system that predictably inflicts enormous human costs. And one of those costs is crime. And in fact that connection has been demonstrated again and again, not just by socialist thinkers, but also by mainstream criminologists working from very different perspectives. So unless we’re ready to throw out several generations of careful argument and reams of credible research, how exactly could it be that a country like the United States would have no significant violent crime problem? In suggesting that the most deregulated of advanced capitalist nations does not show this expected consequence, we’re breaking that link—and seeming to imply that maybe this system isn’t so bad after all. (Of course, if the empirical argument were actually true, then that larger exoneration of capitalism would be an argument we’d need to reckon with. But the empirical assertions aren’t even remotely true: the links between the extreme degree of inequality and deprivation in America and our outsized rates of violence are both highly visible and thoroughly documented; see, for example, Currie, 2015). And that raises another disturbing aspect of the liberal minimalist frame. By denying that everyday violence is much of a problem—by becoming morally indignant that Donald Trump used the word “carnage” rather than morally indignant that something very much like carnage really does exist in some places in America—that perspective turns our eyes away from the “excess” harm and human suffering that violence inflicts on some of the country’s most abandoned and disadvantaged people. This is a deeply troubling default that, as I’ve said

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before, represents a failure of both the moral and the sociological imagination. It represents not only a particularly egregious form of denial, but also what I would call a failure of solidarity. It’s a form of denial because it whitewashes some of the most glaring disparities in living conditions in America. It ignores that there are American cities where the homicide death rate beats that of any place on the planet except a handful of the most violent places in the most violent countries of the Third World (see Currie, 2017), and that things haven’t really been any different for decades—that the hardest-hit communities in places like Chicago and New Orleans and Detroit and Baltimore and Newark and St. Louis were the most violent places in America half a century ago, and they still are. And it turns its head away from the equally glaring reality that these disparities are, and always have been, deeply structured by race. At age 21, almost half of all deaths of young black men in the United States result from homicide: for white 21-year-olds, the figure is one in 24. During the 21st century, black men have lost more years of life from violence than from cancer, diabetes, and stroke combined (Currie, 2017, pp. 27–28). These numbers represent fundamental differences in the chances of life or death between the races. They are stark reminders that our country has never righted the wrongs of slavery, Jim Crow, and the current era of neoliberal neglect of the minority poor. They ought to be regarded as intolerable in a just and civilized society. Yet in the face of these damning numbers, we still see liberal writers disparagingly describing the public’s “senseless fear of crime.” I was reminded of that phrase as I was reading about the death of an 11-yearold girl, Takiya Holmes, in a shooting in Chicago in February of 2017. Takiya had been sitting in a van with her mother, her aunt, and her baby brother when someone walked up and started shooting at some young men who were selling marijuana on the street in their neighborhood. He missed his intended targets completely, but one bullet went through a window in the van and hit Takiya in the head. She was taken off life support three days later (Lee, 2017). Takiya was the second young girl within a couple of days to die by gunshot in her neighborhood—the other was a young mother pushing a baby in a stroller down the street. All told, there had been more than 41 shootings in her housing project, Parkway Gardens, in about the past five years. As it turns out, Parkway Gardens is within a couple of miles of where I grew up—a couple of miles in geographic terms, but light years in other respects. Two reporters went there after Takiya’s shooting to look around. It was an unseasonably warm day for Chicago in the winter, and they expected to see a lot of kids out playing. But there were only a handful of children outside, out of more than a thousand who lived in the complex. One young mother told the reporters that it was because of the violence: you don’t bring your kids outside, at least not for very long, because you never know when gunfights will break out and catch your child in the crossfire (Caputo & Bergen, 2017). Those sentiments are not, of course, confined to Parkway Gardens. There is by now a large and growing literature in psychology, criminology, and public

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health describing the consequences for communities and individuals of living with the levels of pervasive and unpredictable violence that exist in some American neighborhoods, most of which are inhabited by people of color, all of which are inhabited by people of little means and multiple stresses. Exposure to those levels of violence—whether or not you have been personally victimized by it—has been linked to a variety of physical ills, from elevated rates of cardiovascular disease to obesity and sleep problems (Umlauf et al., 2015; Wright et al., 2017). It contributes to the high levels of toxic stress that generally pervade these communities as a result of extreme deprivation, low support, and economic insecurity. For some of the young, it can generate a kind of desensitization to violence that makes further violence more likely (see, for example, Gaylord-Harden et al., 2017). Exposure to violence on the level that exists in these American communities can interfere with children’s school performance and set their education back even behind their peers in generally poor and badly resourced public schools (Burdick-Will, 2016). In all of these ways, pervasive, endemic violence contributes to its own perpetuation across the generations and constitutes a significant source of the overall persistence of economic and racial inequality in the United States. So the story of Parkway Gardens is a tragically familiar one in some parts of urban America, but that’s just the point. “Senseless” fear of crime? In Parkway Gardens the fear of crime is actually very sensible: it’s grounded in the hard social reality of a community that has been at the bottom of the American social and economic ladder for almost as long as anybody now living there can remember. To not acknowledge that reality represents not only a peculiar sort of intellectual failure, but, as I said, a failure of solidarity. A failure, that is, to be able to put ourselves in the shoes of people facing that kind of routine harm, and to commit ourselves to saying that is simply not tolerable—that is a kind of inequality that, as progressives, we refuse to accept. And then commit ourselves to fighting the conditions that create that reality. Right now, it is, oddly enough, mostly the Right who are sounding the alarm about violence in places like Parkway Gardens. And that is just mind-boggling. Our analysis, and our sense of solidarity, need also to extend beyond our own borders. One of the most important lessons that we have to offer as progressives involves global interconnectedness—the understanding, for example, that the fact that countries like El Salvador and Honduras have the highest rates of everyday violence in the world is not by chance, but a reflection of the complex enmeshment of their societies in a disruptive and impoverishing international social and economic order. That understanding comes naturally to the people who live in those countries: we need to bring their voices in to our own scholarly and strategic thinking (cf. Carrington, Hogg, & Sozzo, 2016). Why have so many people to the left of center—especially in the United States—opted for this kind of minimalist denial instead of using everyday violence as a key part of a broader argument about the need for fundamental social change? I’m sure the reasons are complex, and some of them are clearly rooted

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in understandable concerns. There’s no denying that a distorted specter of crime has often been deployed to justify the worst excesses of an intrinsically punitive society, in ways that have, in the United States and elsewhere, been inextricably entwined with race. And certainly it’s crucial for progressives to debunk exaggerations and false claims about crime wherever they’re found—as, for example, in the case of Trump’s repeated insistence that immigrants from Mexico and Central America are “rapists and murderers.” But what progressives need to understand is that the right-wing view of crime flourishes in our silence—in the absence of a strong and widely disseminated left-wing analysis of why we have the very real problem of everyday violence that we do. Let me sum up by saying what I think this implies for us going forward. I think it’s our job to take back this issue and “own” it. That means facing up to the depth and persistence of everyday violence in America, not whitewashing it or denying it—and then developing the ability to explain that reality better than anyone else and to be the first out there with convincing and progressive strategies to confront it—as opposed to the failed and regressive strategies that the Right will offer, and in fact is offering right now. So we should be saying: yes, we hear you. We get your worry. We don’t think, in the world’s most violent and drug-ridden developed country, that your fears are “senseless.” And we think we know how to make this situation better. We know where endemic violence comes from. We know what causes it. We know it’s not accidental that the country with the worst inequality is the one with the worst problem of everyday violence. We know that the same heedless economic policies that have made so many Americans’ lives precarious and that have kept their standard of living stagnant for decades are those that have pushed entire communities to the margins, cutting them off from opportunities for stable work and meaningful participation in society and thus sowing the seeds of entrenched violence. We know that the predatory and heedless marketing of firearms has added an explosive dimension to long-simmering endemic violence in the United States—and that it is part and parcel of the larger prioritization of corporate profit over human life and health. We know that to do the things that would actually make your lives safer, we need to make some crucial social investments that we’ve put off for too long—well, put off forever. We know that reducing violence isn’t the only reason for making those investments, isn’t the only reason why we should be fighting for a more equal and less depriving society. But it’s one more reason for doing so. And we also know that failing to make those investments is itself much more costly, even in sheer fiscal terms, over the long run—in wasted human potential and the costs of “mopping up” the consequences of endemic violence. In short, a genuinely progressive approach looks violence squarely in the face, refuses to deny or back away from what that violence represents in terms of needless human suffering, insists that that suffering is just one aspect of a much bigger pattern of inequality in America, links it to the more fundamental, overarching pathology of a predatory and heedless social order, and folds it into

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a broad overall strategy for progressive structural change. That’s the general frame that I think we need to develop, to refine, and to deploy as the groundwork for a new kind of national debate. And, again, putting that frame forward is a matter of considerable urgency. It is urgent first of all in human terms: it is humanly imperative that we put an end to the excess injury, death, and fear that unaddressed violence brings, especially to the most vulnerable, who continue to live in what would be considered a state of ongoing emergency if, in fact, we cared very much about their lives. But it is also urgent because things could get considerably worse if the current rightward shift continues. The social and economic policies of the Trump administration, coming on the heels of decades of longer-term social disinvestment and growing inequality, are virtually guaranteed to exacerbate what is already an intolerable level of everyday violence in the United States. The degree to which these policies have moved forward just in the relatively brief time Trump has been in office is usually obscured by the tendency of our mainstream media to ignore them. But make no mistake: policies designed to tilt the economic playing field even farther toward the richest, to cut back income support programs like food stamps and housing assistance and make it harder for low-income people to access them, to shrink health and mental health care availability in the poorest communities, and to further deregulate the labor market for low-wage workers are policies that seem almost designed to grow the conditions in which everyday violence thrives. A particular concern here is the systematic assault on public sector employment through budget cuts and court decisions that aim to hobble the ability of public sector unions to organize. The growth of stable and reasonably well rewarded public sector jobs has long been one of the most important, if often unsung, violence-prevention measures in the United States, providing unparalleled opportunities for decent and meaningful livelihoods—especially for workers of color. The labor market envisioned by the ascendant Right, characterized by soaring inequality, pervasive insecurity, and a permanent sector of extreme deprivation, is not only a recipe for stress and overall misery, but a highly predictable breeding ground for everyday violence. If the Right is successful, and that vision becomes our future, we could see a rise in violence and disorder followed by an equally unsurprising punitive reaction—one that could easily undo the halting steps toward reducing incarceration that we’ve seen in the last few years (see Goshe, Chapter 12 in this volume). We need to be ready with a countervailing analysis and a strategy for resistance if that should happen—or we’ll find ourselves once again rolled over by a tide of punitive sentiment, cheered on by a regime whose commitment to human rights and compassion is minimal. It is not a pleasant prospect. A progressive analysis that focuses on the structural roots of everyday violence, on the other hand, is not only empirically credible, but also meshes seamlessly with a range of broader progressive goals. The progressive analysis says that violence flourishes in the absence of opportunity, dignity, and livelihood. So some core progressive proposals—like a federal job guarantee and a massive public

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investment in “green” infrastructure—are not only compelling on their own terms, but as essential parts of a real and enduring violence-prevention strategy. And they are proposals that also sit well with the majority of Americans. Recent opinion polls suggest that three-quarters of Americans would support more federal spending to improve infrastructure; nearly as many support a federal law to “spend government money” on a program to create more than a million new jobs (Jones, 2013; Reinhart, 2018). Moreover, it shouldn’t escape our attention that some of the most significant expressions of progressive social action in America in years have been directed against entrenched and unaddressed forms of violence: the #MeToo movement against sexual violence and harassment and the youth-led protests in response to the unending epidemic of mass shootings across the United States. Americans have taken to the streets in numbers we haven’t seen since the antiwar protests of the 1970s—and they are protesting against violence. These movements are works in progress, to be sure: in particular, there is work to be done to fully involve a broad and diverse constituency across lines of class and race. But the speed and energy with which they’ve appeared on a relatively somnolent American political scene is impressive and revealing. They tell us that large numbers of Americans are tired of living with the constant threat of violence, angry with having to cope with a level of fear and personal insecurity that has no match anywhere in the advanced industrial world, and angry at the corporate-government collusion that has provided impunity for the reckless marketing of firearms. For much too long, they had fallen into regarding those things as givens—as a taken-for-granted part of the social landscape. Increasingly, their eyes are opening as they realize that violence is not, and should not be, a fact of “everyday” life. Our job is to help build that awareness, link it to the myriad other destructive consequences of a toxic social order, and harness it to a broad movement for change.

References Burdick-Will, J. (2016). Neighborhood violent crime and academic growth in Chicago: Lasting effects of early exposure. Social Forces, 95(1), 133–157. Caputo, A., & Bergen, K. (2017). Violence endures at Parkway Gardens, even with a deep-pocketed owner. Chicago Tribune, February 25. Carrington, K., Hogg, R., & Sozzo, M. (2016). Southern criminology. British Journal of Criminology, 56(1), 1–20. Currie, E. (2015). The roots of danger: Violent crime in global perspective. New York: Oxford University Press. Currie, E. (2017). Confronting the North’s South: On race and violence in the United States. International Journal for Crime, Justice, and Social Democracy, 6(1), 23–34. Gaylord-Harden, N., So, S., Bai, G., & Tolan, P. (2017). Examining the effects of emotional and cognitive desensitization to community violence exposure in male adolescents of color. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 87(4), 463–473.

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Grynshteyn, E., & Hemenway, D. (2016). Violent death rates: The US compared with other high-income OECD countries. American Journal of Medicine, 129(3), 266–273. Jones, J. (2013). Americans widely back government job creation proposals. Gallup, March 20. Retrieved from https://news.gallup.com/poll/161438/americans-widelyback-government-job-creation-proposals.aspx. Lee, W. (2017). Hundreds say goodbye to 11-year-old Takiya Holmes, killed by stray bullet. Chicago Tribune, February 25. Males, M. (2017). There’s no carnage in California. Los Angeles Times, February 21. Reinhart, R. (2018). In the news: Public backs more infrastructure spending. Gallup, February 12. Retrieved from https://news.gallup.com/poll/226961/news-public-backsinfrastructure-spending.aspx. Umlauf, M. G., Bolland, A., Bolland, K., Tomek, S., & Bolland, J. (2015). The effects of age, gender, hopelessness, and exposure to violence on sleep disorder symptoms and daytime sleepiness among adolescents in impoverished neighborhoods. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 44, 518–542. Wright, A. W., Austin, M., Booth, C., & Kliewer, W. (2017). Systematic review: Exposure to community violence and physical health outcomes in youth. Journal of Pediatric Psychology, 42(4), 36–378.

5 THE LIMITS OF POLICE REFORM Alex S. Vitale

Introduction Much of the official debate around police reform in the wake of Ferguson has revolved around a series of procedural reforms that are unlikely to be effective because they misunderstand the fundamental nature of policing. These “liberal” reforms, as embodied in President Obama’s Task Force on 20th Century Policing (COPS Office, 2015), seek to restore public trust in the police without directly addressing the injustices at the heart of American policing. Instead, we need to directly question the basic missions given to police by the state. Real justice can only be achieved by replacing the “War on Drugs,” school policing, gang suppression policing, and the policing of the homeless and mentally ill, with mechanisms for community-based problem solving that treat people with dignity. Liberals think of the police as the legitimate mechanism for using force in the interests of the whole society. For them, the state, through elections and other democratic processes, represents the general will of society as well as any system could; those who act against those interests, therefore, should face the police. The police must maintain their public legitimacy by acting in a way that the public respects and is in keeping with the rule of law. For liberals, police reform is always a question of taking steps to restore that legitimacy. This is not to say that liberals believe that US policing is without problems. They acknowledge that police sometimes violate their principles, but see this as an individual failing to be dealt with through disciplinary procedures or improvements to training and oversight. If entire police departments are discriminatory, abusive, or unprofessional, then they advocate efforts to stamp out bias and bad practices through training, changes in leadership, and a variety of oversight mechanisms until legitimacy is reestablished.

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They argue that racist and brutal cops can be purged from the profession and an unbiased system of law enforcement reestablished in the interest of the whole society. They want the police to be better trained, more accountable, and less brutal and racist—laudable goals, but they leave intact the basic institutional functions of the police, which have never been primarily about public safety or crime control. Liberals, according to Murakawa (2014), want to ignore the profound legacy of racism. Rather than admit the central role of slavery and Jim Crow in both producing wealth for whites and denying basic life opportunities for blacks, they prefer to focus on using a few remedial programs—backed up by a robust criminal justice system to transform black people’s attitudes so that they will be better able to perform competitively in the labor market. The result, however, is that black Americans start from a diminished position that makes them more likely to come into contact with the criminal justice system and to be treated more harshly by it. What is missing from this liberal approach is any critical assessment of what problems the state is asking the police to solve and whether the police are really the best suited to solve them. The reality is that the police exist primarily as a system for managing and even producing inequality by suppressing social movements and tightly managing the behaviors of poor and nonwhite people: those on the losing end of economic and political arrangements. Bayley (1998) argues that policing emerged as new political and economic formations developed, producing social upheavals that could no longer be managed by existing private, communal, and informal processes (p. 67). This can be seen in the earliest origins of policing, which were tied to three basic social arrangements of inequality in the 18th century: slavery, colonialism, and the control of a new industrial working class. This created what Allan Silver (1976) calls a “policed society,” in which state power was significantly expanded in the face of social upheavals and demands for justice (p. 61). As Kristian Williams (2015) points out, “The police represent the point of contact between the coercive apparatus of the state and the lives of its citizens” (p. 119). In the words of Mark Neocleous (2000), police exist to “fabricate social order,” but that order rests on systems of exploitation—and when elites feel that this system is at risk, whether from slave revolts, general strikes, or crime and rioting in the streets, they rely on the police to control those activities. When possible, the police aggressively and proactively prevent the formation of movements and public expressions of rage, but when necessary, they will fall back on brute force. Therefore, while the specific forms that policing takes have changed as the nature of inequality and the forms of resistance to it have shifted over time, the basic function of managing the poor, foreign, and nonwhite on behalf of a system of economic and political inequality remains. As a result, a whole host of liberal police reforms are doomed to failure. Adjustments to training, diversifying police forces, and community policing are designed to restore police legitimacy rather than address their role in maintaining

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the inequalities at the center of American society. We must look instead to fundamental changes to the police role in society.

Training The videotaped death of Eric Garner for allegedly selling loose cigarettes immediately spurred calls for additional training of officers in how to use force in making arrests. Officers were accused of using a prohibited chokehold and of failing to respond to his pleas that he couldn’t breathe. In response, Mayor Bill de Blasio and Police Commissioner William Bratton announced that all New York Police Department (NYPD) officers would undergo additional useof-force training so that they could make arrests in the future in ways that were less likely to result in serious injury, as well as training in methods to de-escalate conflicts and more effectively communicate with the public. Such training ignores two important factors in Garner’s death. The first is the officers’ casual disregard for his wellbeing, ignoring his cries of “I can’t breathe,” and their seeming indifferent reaction to his near lifelessness while awaiting an ambulance. This is a problem of values and seems to go to the heart of the claim that, for too many police, black lives don’t matter. The second is “broken windows”-style policing, which targets low-level infractions for intensive, invasive, and aggressive enforcement. This theory was first laid out in 1982 by criminologists James Q. Wilson and George Kelling. They presented existing behavioral research that showed that when a car is left unattended on a street it is usually left alone, but if just one window of the car is broken, the car is quickly vandalized. The lesson: failure to indicate care and maintenance will unleash people’s latent destructive tendencies. Therefore, if cities want to establish or maintain crime-free neighborhoods, they must take action to ensure that residents feel the pressure to conform to civilized norms of public behavior. The best way to accomplish this is to use police to remind people in subtle and notso-subtle ways that disorderly, unruly, and antisocial behavior are unacceptable. When this doesn’t happen, people’s baser instincts will take hold and predatory behavior will reign, in a return to a Hobbesian “war of all against all.” The emergence of this theory in 1982 is tied to a larger arc of urban neoconservative thinking going back to the 1960s. Wilson’s former mentor and collaborator, Edward Banfield, a close associate of neoliberal economist Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago, parented many of the ideas that came to make up the new conservative consensus on cities. In his seminal work The Unheavenly City, Banfield (1970) argues that the poor are trapped in a culture of poverty that makes them largely immune to government assistance: Although he has more “leisure” than almost anyone, the indifference (“apathy” if one prefers) of the lower-class person is such that he seldom makes even the simplest repairs to the place that he lives in. He is not troubled by dirt or dilapidation and he does not mind the inadequacy of

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public facilities such as schools, parks, hospitals, and libraries; indeed, where such things exist he may destroy them by carelessness or even by vandalism. (p. 72) Unlike Banfield, who in many ways championed the abandonment of cities, Wilson decried the decline of urban areas. Wilson pointed at the twin threats of failed liberal leadership and the supposed moral failings of African Americans. All three of them argued that liberals had unwittingly unleashed urban chaos by undermining the formal social control mechanisms that made city living possible. By supporting the more radical demands of the later urban expressions of the civil rights movement, they had so weakened the police, teachers, and other government forces of behavioral regulation that chaos came to reign. Wilson, following Banfield, believed strongly that there were profound limits on what government could do to help the poor. Financial investment in them would be squandered; new services would go unused or be destroyed; they would continue in their slothful and destructive ways. Since the root of the problem was either an essentially moral and cultural failure or a lack of external controls to regulate inherently destructive human urges, the solution had to take the form of punitive social control mechanisms to restore order and neighborhood stability (Wilson & Herrnstein, 1985). What was needed to stem this tide of declining civility, they argued, was to empower the police to not just fight crime, but to become agents of moral authority on the streets. The new role for the police was to intervene in the quotidian disorders of urban life that contributed to the sense that “anything goes.” The broken-windows theory magically reverses the wellunderstood causal relationship between crime and poverty, arguing that poverty and social disorganization are the result, not the cause, of crime, and that the disorderly behavior of the growing “underclass” threatens to destroy the very fabric of cities. Broken-windows policing is at root a deeply conservative attempt to shift the burden of responsibility for declining living conditions onto the poor themselves and to argue that the solution to all social ills is increasingly aggressive, invasive, and restrictive forms of policing that involve more arrests, more harassment, and ultimately more violence. As inequality continues to increase, so will homelessness and public disorder, and as long as people continue to embrace the use of police to manage disorder, we will see a continual increase in the scope of police power and authority at the expense of human and civil rights. The order to arrest Eric Garner came from the very top echelons of the department, in response to complaints from local merchants about illegal cigarette sales. Treating this as a crime requiring the deployment of a special plainclothes unit, two sergeants, and uniformed backup seems excessive and pointless. Garner had experienced over a dozen previous police contacts in similar circumstances, including stints in jail; this had done nothing to change his behavior or

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improve his or the community’s circumstances. No amount of procedural training will solve this fundamental flaw in public policy. Many advocates also call for cultural sensitivity trainings designed to reduce racial and ethnic bias. A lot of this training is based on the idea that most people have at least some unexamined stereotypes and biases that they are not consciously aware of but that influence their behavior. Controlled experiments consistently show that people in the aggregate are quicker and more likely to shoot at a black target than a white one in simulations. Trainings such as “Fair and Impartial Policing” use roleplaying and simulations to help officers see and consciously adjust for these biases (Fair and Impartial Policing, n.d.). Unfortunately, such so-called “implicit bias training” is based on research that has never been able to show a connection between individual-level bias and actual behavior. They also lack evidence that the training does anything to change police behavior. This is the perfect liberal reform, in that it gives the appearance of addressing racism in policing while avoiding any accusations of intentional racism or addressing systemic racism in any way. In some ways, training is actually part of the problem. In recent decades, the emphasis has shifted heavily toward officer safety training. Seth Stoughton (2015), a former police officer turned law professor, shows how officers are repeatedly exposed to scenarios in which seemingly innocuous interactions with the public, such as traffic stops, turn deadly. The endlessly repeated point is that any encounter can turn deadly in a split second if officers don’t remain ready to use lethal force at any moment. When police come into every situation imagining it may be their last, they treat those they encounter with fear and hostility and attempt to control them rather than communicate with them—and are much quicker to use force at the slightest provocation or even uncertainty This includes the use of independent training companies that specialize in inservice training, staffed by former police and military personnel. Some of these groups serve both military and police clients, and emphasize military-style approaches and the “warrior mentality.” The company CQB (Close Quarters Battle) boasts of training thousands of local, state, and federal police as well as American and foreign military units such as the US Marines, Navy Seals, and Danish, Canadian, and Peruvian special forces. Its emphasis is on “battle-proven tactics” (Singh, 2001). Trojan Securities trains both military and police units, and offers police training in a variety of weapons in numerous settings, including a five-day “Police Covert Surveillance and Intelligence Operations” course (Trojan Securities International, n.d.). This problem is especially acute when it comes to SWAT teams. Initially created in the early 1970s to deal with rare acts of extremist violence, barricaded suspects, or armed confrontations with police, these units now deal almost exclusively with serving drug warrants and even engage in regular patrol functions armed with automatic weapons and body armor. These units regularly violate people’s constitutional rights, kill and maim innocent people—often as a result of being in the wrong location—and kill people’s pets (Balko, 2013). These

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paramilitary units are increasingly being used to respond to protest activity. The militarized response to the Ferguson protests may have served to escalate the conflict there; it’s probably no accident that the Saint Louis County police chief’s prior position had been as head of the SWAT team. These units undergo a huge amount of in-service training, funded in part by seizing alleged drug money. The federal government also began to fund training and equipment for SWAT teams in the 1970s as part of the last round of major national policing reforms, which were intended to improve police–community relations and reducing police brutality through enhanced training. These reforms instead poured millions into training programs that resulted in the rise of SWAT teams, drug enforcement, and militarized crowd control tactics.

Diversity There is no question that the racial difference between the mostly white police and the mostly African American policed in Ferguson, Missouri contributed to the intensity of protests over the killing of Mike Brown. Reformers often call for recruiting more officers of color in the hopes that they will treat communities with greater dignity, respect, and fairness. Unfortunately, there is little evidence to back up this hope. Even the most diverse forces have major problems with racial profiling and bias, and individual black and Latino officers appear to perform very much like their white counterparts. Nationally, the racial makeup of the police hews closely to national population figures. The US population is 72 percent white; 75 percent of police nationally are white. Blacks make up 13 percent of the population and 12 percent of police. Asians and Latinos are somewhat less well represented relative to their numbers but not dramatically so (Reaves, 2010). In the largest departments, only 56 percent of officers are white. The disparities seem greater in communities of color because of the deep segregation there. In these cases, there are invariably large numbers of white officers patrolling primarily nonwhite areas. This contrast stands out more than its converse, because whites are rarely concerned about being policed by nonwhite officers and because white communities tend to have fewer negative interactions with the police. There is now a large body of evidence measuring whether the race of individual officers affects their use of force. Most studies show no effect (Cohen & Chaiken, 1972; Sun & Payne, 2004, pp. 516–541; Brown & Frank, 2006, pp. 96–126). More distressingly, a few indicate that black officers are more likely to use force or make arrests, especially of black civilians (Friedrich, 1977; Garner et al., 1994, pp. 146–68; McElvain & Kposowa, 2004, pp. 265–279; Terrill & Mastrofski, 2002, pp. 215–248; McCluskey et al., 2005, pp. 19–37; Lawton, 2007, pp. 163–184). One new study suggests that small increases in diversity produce worse outcomes, while large increases begin to show some improvements; but only a handful of departments met this criterion. In the end, the

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authors conclude, “There’s no evidence to suggest that increasing the proportion of officers that are black is going to offer a direct solution” (Martin, 2017). At the department level, more diverse police forces fare no better in measures of community satisfaction, especially among nonwhite residents. These departments are also often just as likely to have systematic problems with excessive use of force, as seen in federal interventions in Detroit, Miami, and Cleveland in recent years. Both New York and Philadelphia have highly diverse forces (though not as diverse as their populations), yet both have come under intense scrutiny for excessive use of force and discriminatory practices such as “stop and frisk.” This is in large part because departmental priorities are set by local political leaders, who have driven the adoption of a wide variety of intensive, invasive, and aggressive crime-control policies that by their nature disproportionately target communities of color. These include broken-windows policing, with its emphasis on public disorder, and the War on Drugs, which is waged almost exclusively in nonwhite neighborhoods. Having more black and brown police officers may sound like an appealing reform, but as long as larger systems of policing are left in place, there is no evidence that would give cause to expect a significant reduction in brutality or overpolicing.

Procedural justice Procedural justice deals with how the law is enforced, as opposed to substantive justice, which involves the actual outcomes of the functioning of the system. President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing report focuses on procedural reforms such as training and encourages officers to work harder to explain why they are stopping, questioning, or arresting people (President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, 2015). Departments are advised to create consistent use-of-force policies and mechanisms for civilian oversight and transparency. The report implies that more training, diversity, and communication will lead to enhanced police–community relations, more effective crime control, and greater police legitimacy. Similar goals were set in the late 1960s. The Katzenbach report of 1967 argued that the roots of crime lie in poverty and racial exclusion, but also argued that a central part of the solution was the development of a more robust and procedurally fair criminal justice system that would uphold the rights of all people to be free of crime. In keeping with this, it called for a major expansion of federal spending on criminal justice. Just as local housing and social services programs needed federal support, so too did prisons, courts, and police: “Every part of the system is undernourished. There is too little manpower and what there is not well enough trained or well enough paid” (President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration Justice, 1967). The Commission called for improved training, racial diversity in hiring, programmatic innovations, and research. The Kerner Commission on Civil Disorders reached similar conclusions, calling for “training, planning, adequate intelligence systems,

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and knowledge of the ghetto community” (National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, 1968). By conceptualizing the problem of policing as one of inadequate training and professionalization, reformers fail to directly address how the very nature of policing and the legal system served to maintain and exacerbate racial inequality. By calling for colorblind “law and order,” they strengthen a system that puts people of color at a structural disadvantage and contributes to their deep social and legal estrangement. At root, they fail to appreciate that the basic nature of the law and the police, since its earliest origins, is to be a tool for managing inequality and maintaining the status quo. Police reforms that fail to directly address this reality are doomed to reproduce it. Well-trained police following proper procedure are still going to be arresting people for mostly low-level offenses, and the burden will continue to fall primarily on communities of color because that is how the system is designed to operate—not because of the biases or misunderstandings of officers.

Community policing Everyone likes the idea of a neighborhood police officer who knows and respects the community. Unfortunately, this is a mythic understanding of the history and nature of urban policing. What distinguishes the police from other city agencies is that they can legally use force. While we need police to follow the law and be restrained in their use of force, we cannot expect them to be significantly more friendly than they are, given their current role in society. When their job is to criminalize all disorderly behavior and fund local government through massive ticket-writing campaigns, their interactions with the public in high-crime areas will be at best gruff and distant and at worst hostile and abusive. The public will resist them and view their efforts as intrusive and illegitimate; the police will react to this resistance with defensiveness and increased assertiveness. Community policing is not possible under these conditions. Another part of the problem lies in the nature of community. Steve Herbert (2006) shows that community meetings tend to be populated by long-time residents, those who own rather than rent their homes, business owners, and landlords. The views of renters, youth, homeless people, immigrants, and the most socially marginalized are rarely represented. As a result, they tend to focus on “quality of life” concerns involving low-level disorderly behavior rather than serious crime. Across the country, community police programs have been based on the idea that the “community” should bring concerns of all kinds about neighborhood conditions to the police, who will work with them on developing solutions. The tools that police have for solving these problems, however, are generally limited to punitive enforcement actions such as arrests and ticketing. Community policing programs regularly call for increasing reliance on Police Athletic Leagues, positive nonenforcement activities with youth, and more focus on getting to know community

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members. There is little research, however, to suggest that these endeavors reduce crime or help to overcome overpolicing. Low-level drug dealing and use generates a tremendous number of calls for police service. Criminalizing these activities has done nothing to reduce the availability and negative effects of drugs on individuals or communities. It has produced substantial negative consequences for those arrested, however, and has been a major drain on local and state resources. The research shows that community policing does not empower communities in meaningful ways. It expands police power, but does nothing to reduce the burden of overpolicing on people of color and the poor. It is time to invest in communities instead.

Body cameras Reformers have pointed to body cameras as a way to deter and hold officers accountable for improper behavior. The Obama administration embraced this reform and put tens of millions of dollars into police budgets for it. Dash cameras, which have been around for longer, are becoming widespread; police departments like to keep an eye on officers, and the cameras seem to have reduced the number of civilian complaints and lawsuits against officers. In some cases they have also aided in prosecutions. There is a problem of officer compliance. In numerous shooting cases, officers have failed to turn on their cameras. For example: one of the officers present at the shooting of Walter Scott in Charleston did not have his camera turned on. Not a single one of the officers present at a shooting in Washington, DC in 2016 had their camera on. Eighteen-year-old Paul O’Neil was killed by police in Chicago who did not have their cameras on (Meyer, 2016). One study actually found that departments using cameras had higher rates of shootings (Pang & Pavlou, 2016). Ultimately, body cameras are only as effective as the accountability mechanisms in place. If local district attorneys and grand juries are unwilling to act on the evidence cameras provide, then the courts won’t be an effective accountability tool. Giving local complaint review boards access to the tapes could aid some investigations, but often these boards have only limited authority. Body cameras also raise important privacy and civil liberties concerns. What will happen to the videos? In the past, police have used the information they gather to establish gang databases, “red files” of political activists, and huge databases on individuals who are not accused of engaging in criminal behavior. Who will have access to these images? In some cases the public may have access to this material. In Seattle, where Washington State has strong sunshine laws, police have started posting videos on YouTube with the images of individuals blurred. While this provides some sense of anonymity, people familiar with the circumstances involved may find it quite possible to identify individuals. If the primary reason for public support of body cameras is to enhance accountability, then perhaps the footage should be under the control of an independent body, and not the police (Vitale, 2017).

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Police role More than anything, however, what we really need is to rethink the role of police in society. The origins and function of the police are intimately tied to the management of inequalities of race and class. The suppression of workers and the tight surveillance and micromanagement of black and brown lives have always been at the center of policing. Any police reform strategy that does not address this reality is doomed to fail. We must stop looking to procedural reforms, and critically evaluate the substantive outcomes of policing. We must constantly reevaluate what the police are asked to do and what impact policing has on the lives of the policed. A kinder, gentler, and more diverse war on the poor is still a war on the poor. And as long as the police are tasked with waging simultaneous wars on drugs, crime, disorder, and terrorism, we will have aggressive and invasive policing that disproportionately criminalizes the young, poor, male, and nonwhite. We need to push back on this dramatic expansion of police power and its role in the mass incarceration at the heart of the “New Jim Crow.” What we are witnessing is a political crisis. At all levels and in both parties, too many of our political leaders have embraced a neoconservative politics that sees all social problems as police problems. They have given up on using government to improve racial and economic inequality, and seem hellbent on worsening these inequalities and using the police to manage the consequences. For decades, they have pitted police against the public while also telling them to be friendlier and improve community relations. They can’t do both. A growing number of police leaders are speaking out about the failures of this approach. In the wake of the tragic deaths of five police officers in Dallas, Chief David Brown said: We’re asking cops to do too much in this country. We are. Every societal failure, we put it off on the cops to solve. Not enough mental health funding, let the cops handle it …. Here in Dallas we got a loose dog problem; let’s have the cops chase loose dogs. Schools fail, let’s give it to the cops … That’s too much to ask. Policing was never meant to solve all those problems. (Dennis et al., 2016) We are told that the police are the bringers of justice. They are here to help maintain social order so that no one should be subjected to abuse. The neutral enforcement of the law sets us all free. This understanding of policing, however, is largely mythical. American police function, despite whatever good intentions they have, as a tool for managing deeply entrenched inequalities in a way that systematically produces injustices for the poor, socially marginal, and nonwhite. Part of the problem is that our politicians, media, and criminal justice institutions too often equate justice with revenge. Popular culture is suffused with revenge fantasies in which the aggrieved bring horrible retribution down on

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those who have hurt them. Often this involves a fantasy of those who have been placed on the margins taking aim at the powerful; it’s a fantasy of empowerment through violence. Police and prisons have come to be our preferred tools for inflicting punishment. Our entire criminal justice system has become a gigantic revenge factory. Three-strikes laws, sex-offender registries, the death penalty, and abolishing parole are about retribution, not safety. Whole segments of our society have been deemed always-already guilty. This is not justice; it is oppression. Real justice would look to restore people and communities, to rebuild trust and social cohesion, to offer people a way forward, to reduce the social forces that drive crime, and to treat both victims and perpetrators as full human beings. Our police and larger criminal justice system not only fail at this, but rarely see it as even related to their mission. There are police and other criminal justice agents who want to use their power to improve communities and individuals and protect the “good” people from the “bad” ones. But this relies on the same degraded notion of punishment as justice and runs counter to the political imperatives of the institutions in which they operate. There are growing numbers of disgruntled police officers across the country who are deeply frustrated about the mission they’ve been given and the tools they’ve been told to use. They are sick and tired of being part of a system of mass criminalization and punishment. This is especially acute among African American officers, who see the terrible consequences of so much that police do in their communities. Some are beginning to speak out, such as the NYPD Twelve, who filed suit against their department for its use of illegal quotas (Knafo, 2016). Many more, however, fear speaking out. But not all police mean well. Too many engage in abuse based on race, gender, religion, or economic condition. Explicit and intentional racism is alive and well in American policing. We are asked to believe that these incidents are the misdeeds of “a few bad apples.” But why does the institution of policing so consistently shield these misdeeds? Too often when biased policing is pointed out, the response is to circle the wagons, deny any intent to do harm, and block any discipline against the officers involved. This sends an unambiguous message that officers are above the law and free to act on their biases without consequence. It also says that the institution is more concerned about defending itself than rooting out these problems. Is our society really made safer and more just by incarcerating millions of people? Is asking the police to be the lead agency in dealing with homelessness, mental illness, school discipline, youth unemployment, immigration, youth violence, sex work, and drugs really a way to achieve a better society? Can police really be trained to perform all these tasks in a professional and uncoercive manner? Any real agenda for police reform must replace police with empowered communities working to solve their own problems. Poor communities of color have suffered the consequences of high crime and disorder. It is their children who are shot and robbed. They have also had to bear the brunt of aggressive, invasive, and humiliating policing. Policing will never be a just or effective tool for

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community empowerment, much less racial justice. Communities must directly confront the political, economic, and social arrangements that produce the vast gulfs between the races and the growing gaps between the haves and the havenots. We don’t need empty police reforms; we need a robust democracy that gives people the capacity to demand of their government and themselves real, nonpunitive solutions to their problems.

References Balko, R. (2013). Rise of the warrior cop. New York: Public Affairs. Banfield, E. (1970). The unheavenly city: The nature and the future of our urban crisis. Boston, MA: Little, Brown. Bayley, D. (1998). The development of modern policing. In L. Gaines (Ed.), Policing perspectives: An anthology (pp. 67–68). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Brown, R., & Frank, J. (2006). Race and officer decision making: Examining differences in arrest outcomes between black and white officers. Justice Quarterly, 23(1), 96–126. Cohen, B., & Chaiken, J. (1972). Police background characteristics and performance: Summary. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation. COPS Office. (2015). President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing implementation guide: Moving from recommendations to action. Washington, DC: Office of Community Oriented Policing Services. Dennis, B., Berman, M., & Izadi, E. (2016, July 11). Dallas police chief says “we’re asking cops to do too much in this country.” Washington Post. Retrieved from www.washing tonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/07/11/grief-and-anger-continue-after-dallasattacks-and-police-shootings-as-debate-rages-over-policing/ Fair and Impartial Policing. (n.d.) Retrieved from https://fipolicing.com/ Friedrich, R. (1977). The impact of organizational, individual, and situational factors on police behavior. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, PhD dissertation. Garner, J., Schade, T., Hepburn, J., & Buchanan, J. (1994). Measuring the continuum of force used by and against the Police. Criminal Justice Review, 20, 146–168. Herbert, S. (2006). Citizens, cops, and power: Recognizing the limits of community. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Knafo, S. (2016, February 18). A black police officer’s fight against the N.Y.P.D. New York Times. Retrieved from www.nytimes.com/2016/02/21/magazine/a-black-policeofficers-fight-against-the-nypd.html Lawton, B. (2007). Levels of nonlethal force: An examination of individual, situational, and contextual factors. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 44(2), 163–184. Martin, R. (2017, February 27). Having more black officers not a “direct solution” for reducing black killings by police, IU research shows. IndyStar. Retrieved from www.indys tar.com/story/news/crime/2017/02/27/having-more-black-officers-not-direct-solutionreducing-black-killings-police-iu-research-shows/98164296/ McCluskey, J., Terrill, W., & Paoline, E. (2005). Peer group aggressiveness and the use of coercion in police–suspect encounters. Police Practice and Research, 6(1), 19–37. McElvain, J., & Kposowa, A. (2004). Police officer characteristics and internal affairs investigations for use of force allegations. Journal of Criminal Justice, 32(3), 265–279. Meyer, R. (2016, September). Body cameras are betraying their promise. The Atlantic. Retrieved from www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/09/body-camerasare-just-making-police-departments-more-powerful/502421/

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Murakawa, N. (2014). The first civil right: How liberals built prison America. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. (1968). Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. New York: Bantam Books. Neocleous, M. (2000). The fabrication of social order: A critical theory of police power. London: Pluto Press. Pang, M., & Pavlou, P. A. (2016, September 8). Armed with technology: The impact on fatal shootings by the police. Fox School of Business Research Paper No. 60-020. President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice. (1967). The challenge of crime in a free society: A report by the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice. Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office. President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing. (2015). Final report of the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing. Washington, DC: Office of Community Oriented Policing Services. Reaves, B. A. (2010). Local police departments, 2007. Washington, DC: US Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics. Silver, A. (1976). The demand for order in civil society. In D. J. Bordua (Ed.), The police: Six sociological essays (pp. 1–24). New York: John Wiley & Sons. Singh, K. R. (2001). Treading the thin blue line: Military special operations-trained police SWAT Teams and the Constitution, William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal, 9(3), 673. Retrieved from http://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmborj/vol9/iss3/7 Stoughton, S. (2015). Law enforcement’s “warrior” problem. Harvard Law Review, 128(6), 225–234. Sun, I., & Payne, B. (2004). Racial differences in resolving conflicts: A comparison between black and white police officers. Crime and Delinquency, 50(4), 516–541. Terrill, W., & Mastrofski, S. (2002). Situational and officer-based determinants of police coercion. Justice Quarterly, 19(2), 215–248. Trojan Securities International. (n.d.) Retrieved from http://trojansecurities.com/military. html Vitale, A. S. (2017, May 2). A new approach to body cameras. Gotham Gazette. Retrieved from www.gothamgazette.com/opinion/6899-a-new-approach-to-police-body-cameras Williams, K. (2015). Our enemies in blue: Police and power in America. Oakland, CA: AK Press. Wilson, J. Q., & Herrnstein, R. (1985). Crime and human nature: The definitive study of the causes of crime. New York: Simon & Schuster. Wilson, J. Q., & Kelling, G. (1982, March). Broken windows: The police and neighborhood safety. The Atlantic. Retrieved from www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/ 1982/03/broken-windows/304465/

6 WHAT WOULD A JUST JUSTICE SYSTEM LOOK LIKE? Sandra Walklate

Introduction This chapter explores the challenges, pitfalls and possibilities for the delivery of justice in the twenty-first century. It does so by offering two examples of decisions made in the name of justice in England and Wales during 2017–18. It offers a brief overview of these cases, analyses the spectre of the victim they each generated, and discusses the relationship between this spectre and the changing nature of the wider political and cultural context in which this has emerged. In extrapolating from these examples, the chapter reflects on the logic underpinning the response to these cases and explores the concept of risk as the motif informing contemporary victim-informed justice responses. The chapter notes the shift in the deployment of risk in clinical to actuarial to algorithmic justice, and comments on both the progressive and regressive potentialities embedded in the latter. The view developed suggests that it is the regressive tendencies of algorithmic justice which will take a hold on the delivery of justice if criminology and criminologists fail to challenge its rise and the faulty presumptions of the risk society thesis on which it is based. Before going on to consider these developments, first a brief word on justice

Thinking about justice In asking the question “What would a just justice system look like?”, a number of dilemmas emerge, one of which is: what does the concept of justice actually mean? For the Greeks, justice was rooted in the logic that gave the world its order. In this sense, justice is seen as opposite to chaos: an interesting bifurcation returned to at the end of this chapter. For others, like, for example, Immanuel Kant, justice is inexplicably tied to morality, that is, questions of right and

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wrong. More recent commentators sidestep the question of morality and suggest that what is understood by justice is constituted by consensual politics. Alasdair MacIntyre (1988) is one such observer, who makes the case that there are ‘justices rather than justice’ (p. 9). Feminist interventions add to this complexity by pointing out that Western criminal justice systems in particular take the middleclass, entrepreneurial, white male, as their yardstick for delivering justice, and as a consequence cannot hear or deliver justice for other voices (like, for example, women, ethnic minority groups, working-class people, non-heterosexual people and so on: see, inter alia, Naffine, 1990). So, as this brief overview suggests, justice and the delivery of criminal justice are highly contested. Yet at the same time, modern Western liberal democratic societies spend a good deal of time and energy concerned with the delivery of justice. For liberal democracies, adherence to the principles of justice and the delivery of those principles are seen to be a ‘public good’ (Waldron, 1993, p. 358), that is, something ‘irreducibly social’ (p. 358) and in the collective interests of society as a whole. Simultaneously, the well-documented connections between criminal justice and social justice (Cook, 2006) clearly illustrate that the most marginal groups in many Western liberal democracies are also those who are both the subjects and objects of (criminal) justice. Put simply, these groups comprise those most likely to find themselves in the receipt of punishment from such justice. So tensions persist between societal aspirations towards justice and the capacity for its delivery. The question remains: where does the victim of crime fit in the process of the delivery of justice?

Enter the victim of crime Since the early 1970s, in those same Western liberal democracies, there has been a remarkable growth and development in groups proclaiming to speak for the victims of crime. This growth has been matched by governmental pre-occupations with criminal justice policies designed to make the victim the centre of the justice process. These developments have not been even or the same everywhere. (The details of these developments are not of concern here, but see, inter alia, Barker, 2007; Ginsberg, 2014; McGarry & Walklate, 2015; Rock, 2004, and Walklate, 2016.) For some, the growth and development of these groups can be aligned with the increasingly powerful presence of neo-liberalism (Ginsberg, 2014). This presence characterises a process first illuminated in Garland’s (2001) masterly analysis of the culture of control marking the (further) politicisation of the victim (Miers, 1978) as a mode of responsibilisation. However, as McGarry and Walklate (2015) argue, the growth and development of these victims’ organisations and their influence on policy cannot solely be explained by the neo-liberal turn since their influence is uneven, as is the nature of the groups themselves. Cultural and political processes have also played their part. One key element of these processes has been the increasing presence of the 24 hour media encouraging ‘us’ to feel ‘their’ pain (Berlant, 2004). Whilst within all of these changes there is always the potential for progressive

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politics as well as regressive ones (these different possibilities perhaps best exemplified by the different feminist voices in relation to the role of criminal justice for the ‘treatment’ of sex offenders), at this juncture what is of particular interest is the shape and role of such victims’ voices as regressive and repressive voices within criminal justice policy. In what follows, two case studies will be used to illustrate the different ways in which such voices manifest themselves.

So what about the victim? Two cases On 25 September 2017, HHJ Pringle QC sentenced Lavinia Woodward to ten months imprisonment suspended for 18 months for a Section 20 assault of actual bodily harm (with a bread knife) on her boyfriend whilst under the influence of drugs and alcohol. Ms Woodward had become angry at him for contacting her mother as he was concerned about her drinking. Ms Woodward began to throw things, at which point her boyfriend contacted the police. She then picked up the knife and attempted to assault him and herself. Her boyfriend endeavoured to restrain her. During the course of these events, the boyfriend received cuts to two fingers and a cut to his lower leg requiring three stitches. Ms. Woodward was given leave to appeal her sentence in December 2017. Her appeal was turned down on 27 March 2018. It could be said that the incident described above might be any story from any town any night of the week. Except that this event occurred in Oxford between two students, one of whom (Ms Woodward) came from a wealthy background and was said to have a bright future. The social/online and mainstream media were not slow to run with this story, featuring headlines such as ‘“CAN’T EVEN GO CLUBBING” Lavinia Woodward, Oxford University slasher spared jail for being “clever” moans she can’t go out to a nightclub without being recognised as she walks free’ (The Sun, 26 September 2017); ‘“Extraordinary” student Lavinia Woodward who was spared jail after stabbing her ex-boyfriend could return to Oxford University’ (The Telegraph, 21 October 2017); ‘The Lavinia Woodward case exposes equality before the law as a myth’ (The Guardian, 27 September 2017); ‘An Oxford student who stabbed her boyfriend is getting a second chance that most women never get’ (qz.com, 11 December 2017); and finally, ‘No, Lavinia Woodward didn’t avoid jail because she was posh, clever and pretty’ (The New Statesman, 26 September 2017). There are a number of issues that come to the fore in considering what a just justice system might look like when reflecting on the debate this case generated and the coverage given to it. First, it is evident from the coverage cited above, when compared with the actual sentencing statement of the judge in question, that there is a degree of slippage in terms of accuracy between these two sources of data (indeed, only the New Statesman article referred to above cites the sentencing statement with some accuracy). Such slippage is not surprising since online, print and mainstream media are more focused on audience and ratings than necessarily on accuracy.

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However, it is important not to be flippant in this regard since social media especially have been demonstrably powerful in judging any accused before they reach the courts. This is particularly the case in relation to what might be called ‘celebrity justice’: the recent #MeToo campaign is a case in point. The power of such voices carries consequences for the victim and offender alike at both the level of the individual and at the structural level for what might be understood as justice. These kind of mediated processes are one ingredient posing a challenge for what a just justice system might look like. Digging a little deeper, the case referred to above clearly lit the blue touch paper in relation to what might count as equality or fairness in respect of appropriate punishment for the crime committed. Several commentators were quick to argue that a young woman with a drink (and drug) problem from an ethnic minority background may not have been treated so sympathetically by the court, nor would she have had access to or funding for the kind of accomplished defence barrister Ms Woodward did. These observations raise the perpetual question of whether or not justice is about procedure, outcome, or some mixture of the two, and/or whether or not justice is about punishment fitting the crime (questions of proportionality) or the offender (previous criminal history and/or likelihood of recidivism). In the Woodward case, her status as a first offender showing remorse and willingness to engage in rehabilitation, and the fact she suffered some mental instability partly as a result of a previous abusive relationship were all taken as factors in mitigation (the latter factor is a common feature of many women’s routes into crime). In addition, in relation to her boyfriend’s injuries, Judge Pringle commented: ‘Whilst this was clearly a case where your behaviour must have been extremely intimidating to your partner, the actual injuries were relatively minor and certainly less serious in the context of this offence’ (R v. Lavinia Woodward, sentencing remarks of HHJ Ian Pringle QC, 25 September 2017). The victim in this case is a further layer of important analysis in making sense of it. From the media coverage, very little attention is afforded to the victim in this case. This is interesting insofar as since the turn of the twenty-first century, the focus of much criminal justice policy in England and Wales and elsewhere has been centred on the victim of crime. In this case, the victim was a young male, also a student, who it would appear from the court reports was endeavouring to assist Ms Woodward and was injured as a consequence. He thus bears some of the characteristics of Christie’s (1986) seminal concept of ‘ideal victim’. There may, of course, be a wide range of reasons for his voice being absent, some of which may well relate to his own personal choices. This is not known. However, in relation to both contemporary policy and the media coverage cited here, it is worth pondering on the question: had the roles been reversed (had he been the offender and she the victim), would the silences have been the same? It might be reasonable to suggest not. The pertinence of this point becomes more apparent in the second case to be discussed here.

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On 4 January 2018, the Parole Board for England and Wales took the decision to release (on licence) John Worboys (also known as the ‘black cab rapist’: black here refers to the colour of the cab, not the driver). The case of John Worboys, as with the case above, has provoked an equally vociferous online and mainstream media response, and it is worth establishing some of the details of this case for the purposes of comparison. In April 2009, Worboys was found guilty of one rape, five sexual assaults, one attempted assault and 12 drugging charges committed from July 2007 to February 2008. A further 80 (and some reports suggest a total of 93) victims came forward after his arrest, many of whom had not previously reported what had happened to them (Walklate & Brown, 2011, p. 3). This case was the subject of an Independent Police Complaints Commission investigation which established there was a ‘mind-set’ amongst the police officers on this case that a ‘black cab’ driver could not be responsible for these attacks given the prestige associated with such drivers. In addition, it established that a series of similar complaints had not been collated, and basically the victims had not been believed (though it should also be noted that, as he drugged many of his victims, many could not remember the details of what has happened to them, so their reliability as witnesses and the associated questions of evidence were also taken into account in whether to proceed or not with their complaints). At the time of his sentencing, it was recommended his term be indefinite, but that he must serve at least eight years in prison. He will have served ten years if his recommendation for parole succeeds. Since the decision of the Parole Board was announced, there have been various moves (from online petitions to voices of the victims’ movements) to prevent this taking place. On 28 March 2018, the High Court ruled that the Parole Board must look again at this decision, with the resultant consequence that Worboys remains in prison and the Chair of the Parole Board resigned. The resistance to his release took one of two forms. The first focused attention on the lack of consultation with his victims prior to the Parole Board decision. The second focused on reviewing the cases against him which had to date never been tested in the courts. Many of the responses to this case are as emotive as the response to the Woodward case discussed above. For example, The Sunday Times (14 January 2017) quotes one victim as saying: If he is allowed into Greater London, I and the other hundreds of victims will have to spend the rest of our lives looking over our shoulders in fear. Ten years ago I was assured he would never be let out of prison, and now that he is I am being given zero assurances that he won’t reoffend. This isn’t justice, this is terrifying. I can’t sleep at night – I’m worried sick. Sian Norris (New Statesman, 4 January 2018) further explains: We’re [women] angry because when we see Worboys leave jail, we think about all our sisters who have reported and not been believed; who have

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not reported because they don’t trust they’ll be believed. We think about the men who raped our friends and family who never saw the inside of a police station let alone a courtroom or cell. We think about the thousands of women every year who known they will never get justice for the violence committed against them. Resonant with these voices are the concerns raised by some of the legal profession and politicians that the Parole Board failed to consult with the victims on the question of Worboys’ parole (which, under the Victims’ Code of Practice, they are required to do) alongside questioning the efficacy of the original sentence of the court. At the time of writing (January 2018), all of these issues are still under some debate, with some initial ‘success’ being reported on the part of the voices resisting his release. What is of particular interest here are the deeper questions in relation to justice and its delivery that this case and the response to it touches on. In contrast to the first case, the focus of attention here is on a male offender with female victims. Moreover, these are victims of rape and sexual assault, many of whom felt ‘let down’ by the criminal justice system when this case first came to light and arguably feel doubly let down now. In many ways, it is in cases such as these that the feminist movement has had significant influence in affording the space for victims to be heard and for pointing to the critical ways in which experience of the criminal justice process adds to the violation of the initial sexual assault. All of this is well documented (see Polletta, 2006; Walklate, 2016). Those same voices have both progressive and regressive tendencies. On the one hand, such voices have made significant contributions in encouraging justice processes to be delivered for the victim in more appropriate ways. On the other hand, such voices have also been harnessed, particularly politically, in the interests of retribution rather than reconciliation. This is exemplified in the Worboys case and the outcry that has followed it. These two cases taken together illustrate the way in which justice and its delivery might be conceived in the abstract as a public good, but in its practice is a complex trade-off between fairness and risk. In the case of Lavinia Woodward, it is possible to suggest that the judge, taking all things into consideration, particularly the factors in mitigation, judged the offender to be ‘low-risk’. From a point of view of this case, fairness to the offender (given the evidence in mitigation pointing to her as low-risk) took precedence over her risk of potential dangerousness to the wider public. The wider public response, however, has been pre-occupied with the fairness of this decision in comparison with other offenders committing like offences. Interestingly, the victim has not featured at all. In the case of John Worboys, whilst the Parole Board have judged him to be low risk in terms of re-offending, the wider public response has taken the opposite view and has been dominated by the question of fairness to the victims. In this case, fairness to the offender has been absent from this discourse. Moreover, the tenor of the public response to both cases, the trade-off between risk

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and fairness notwithstanding, has been one of punitiveness characterised in Garland’s (2001) culture of control. Thus it is possible to suggest it is in the space between fairness and risk that punitiveness grows. However, in the ever-increasing presence of risk-informed justice within Western liberal criminal justice systems, the space for regressive (punitive) justice grows alongside the possibilities for progressive justice, and it is in these spaces that the question of what a just justice system might look like needs to be more closely interrogated.

The ‘risk turn’ in the delivery of justice Feeley and Simon (1994) coined the term ‘actuarial justice’ as one way of capturing the increasing inflection towards risk in criminal justice decision making. The delineation of ‘risk factors’ has informed ‘the use of predictive statistical knowledge linked to techniques of harm prevention’ (O’Malley, 2010, p. 3) which have themselves come to feature in policy debates from imprisonment, to victimization, to policing. The silent presence of such risk factors is clearly discerned in the two cases discussed above. In each of these cases, the presumed ‘low risk’ of both the offenders provoked different though no less public responses. This evident ‘risk creep’ within criminal justice conflates agency and structure (Walklate & Mythen, 2011) and reflects an acceptance of risk as a forensic concept separating ‘causal theory and research from social policy in both areas [and] condemns the latter to the treatment of symptoms’ (Short, 1984, p. 713). This forensic assumption renders risk measurable and actionable. However, such measures and actions are rooted in a theory which has embedded within it a curtailed vision of power and power relations, a partial view of human agency with the concept of risk itself reflecting tendencies for being overstretched and misapplied (Mythen, 2014). As O’Malley (2004) has observed, risk is structured: it is neither uniform nor unifying. Who is deemed at risk and who is deemed risky are mediated by global geo-politics (Aas, 2012), locality (Evans et al., 1996) and gender (Walklate, 1997), amongst other global and local factors. Such criticisms notwithstanding, risk creep, and particularly its operationalisation in terms of risk assessment practices, has grown apace within criminal justice and carries consequences irrespective of the level of risk assigned to offenders through professional practice.

Risk assessment: clinical, actuarial and algorithmic Risk assessment practices are not a new phenomenon to criminal justice. In many ways, criminal justice has always been pre-occupied with both the repeat/ habitual offender and/or the recidivist offender, and criminal justice professionals have always sought ways of making decisions about these kinds of offenders with a view to protecting the public. However, these kinds of practices have become increasingly more sophisticated and complex as they have become an increasingly endemic feature of managing criminal justice for both victims and

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offenders. Such tools are many and varied, and there is no intention to discuss all their different properties, strengths and weaknesses in the space provided here. Taken together, they are used to prevent ‘wildness breaking out’ (Bernstein, 1996, p. 334): a desire to control the consequences of criminal behaviour. Briefly, clinical risk assessments are rooted in individual diagnostic techniques based on an historical appreciation of an individual’s behaviour. They have a poor record of prediction, and can result in both falsely predicting that behaviour will occur and it does not, or can falsely predict behaviour will not occur and it does (Kemshall, 1996). Actuarial risk assessment emanates from the insurance industry and its use of probability statistics in relation to groups of people or types of behaviour. Thus, actuarial risk assessments are good for making predictions about groups, but not so good for predicting the behaviour of individuals. Algorithmic risk assessment tools arguably take the use of probability statistics and other statistical methods to the next level. Using the techniques of machine learning, these risk assessment tools can manage a wide range of variables in complex models to inform decision making. All of these different tools in various combinations are used to predict/prevent future behaviour within the context of criminal justice, and they are defended in terms of their respective capacities to offer the public protection from dangerousness. Yet, as Bernstein (1996) has argued, such practices, logically, can never provide more than hypotheses about what might happen in the future. Human beings, whether ‘risky’ offenders or ‘at risk’ victims, can always behave otherwise (see also Mythen, 2014). Nevertheless, the concept of risk and the practices of risk assessment not only prevail in criminal justice, their presence, particularly in relation to the use of algorithms, grows apace. It will be of some value to comment on this latter development in a little more detail. In the context of risk assessment practices, it is not only the risky or those at risk who can behave otherwise. Criminal justice professionals in their use of such tools can also distort, resist and draw on knowledge not reflected in the particular tool they are using in order to make a decision about a particular offender or victim. Ansbro (2010), Broadhurst et al. (2010), Kemshall (2010) and Robinson (2010), in their different ways, cast some light on these processes of ‘doing’ risk assessment, with Werth (2017) suggesting (in the context of parole) that ‘field personnel devalue actuarial tools and instead privilege experiential expertise and moral judgement of personhood’ (p. 809). Thus, Walklate and Mythen (2011) suggest, it is possible that ‘risk, and those deemed at risk, are not forensically measured at all: they are constructed within a logic of norms and values that are felt’ (p. 109). In other words, professionals make judgements based on their feelings and intuition, in the context of the case with which they are dealing. Algorithmic risk assessments, on the surface, have the potential to erase the kinds of errors that might accrue from ‘doing’ risk assessment as suggested above. Indeed, Berk (2017) states that at every juncture at which risk assessments can take place (from bail decisions to parole decisions), algorithmic risk assessments need to be better than human assessments. However,

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in order to do this, he goes on to say, the bar is not very high. So perhaps it is easy to see why liberal criminal justice systems, particularly in the US and the UK, have embraced the opportunities afforded by machine learning algorithms. Whilst perhaps rather more in its infancy in the UK than in the US, it is evident that the use of algorithmic risk assessment is proving to be both contended and contentious. The Wisconsin case of Eric Loomis is illustrative of this, with Loomis challenging his sentence on the basis that his defence had not been party to the algorithmic information about him (produced by a private firm, Compas) used by the court to inform its decision (Markou, 2017). Indeed, the Compas algorithm seems to have been the subject of wider-ranging criticism (Dressel & Farid, 2018). This particular case notwithstanding, it is evident that biases of all kinds (like those that might be present in professional judgements) are not necessarily removed from such algorithms. Indeed, the opposite may be the case. These are biases that can be compounded by the statistical techniques underpinning these tools (Berk & Bleich, 2013). Indeed, Hannah-Moffat (2018) points out: ‘the presumption is that these technological developments can enhance safety, efficiently analyse data and limit error. Thus big data technologies, like risk instruments, simultaneously appear neutral and authoritative, which can make them powerful tools of governance’ (p. 7). More specifically, Brennan and Oliver (2013) point to the intrinsic tension in their use between forecasting and understanding. This is a tension endemic in the criminological and criminal justice professional embrace of risk as a uniform and unifying category commented on earlier and critiqued some time ago by O’Malley (2004). Importantly, whilst algorithms might forecast likely outcomes, in criminal justice their use is not hypothetical. They carry real consequences for real lives (Berk & Bleich, 2013). Thus, the requirement for understanding the individual offender and/or victim remains if the delivery of justice appropriate to them matters. However, the patent ‘invisibility’ (see also Hannah-Moffat, 2018) of the algorithms on which decisions within criminal justice are increasingly being made affords added warning signals about the delivery of justice in this way, including its unreflective embrace of risk. Interestingly, this observation, along with the Loomis case, returns us to the question of the trade-off between risk and fairness discerned within the two cases with which this chapter began. However, within the algorithms of machine learning, this trade-off is both less visible and privatised. As a result of both of these features, algorithms are less likely to be subjected to the same kind of public scrutiny (as illustrated by the cases with which this chapter began) and thereby are less accountable. Thus, they are also highly unlikely to contribute to justice as a ‘public good’ (Waldron, 1993) whatever the future shape and form the dialogue about algorithmic justice takes. Taken together, these factors mark the trade-off gap between risk and fairness in such a way that the danger of only repressive responses remaining becomes very real indeed. The question remains: what, if anything, might be done to resist such developments?

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Concluding thoughts: towards resistance This chapter has suggested that it is neither the neo-liberal turn nor the everpresent voice of the victim on which the politics of this neo-liberal turn has been built that constitute the source of contemporary unease with the repressive turn within criminal justice policy and the search for justice. Rather, the implication of the views expressed here is that it is in the faulty foundations of the concept of risk and the risk society thesis, and their embrace within criminal justice policy and practice, that the greater threat to justice is to be found. This requires further explication. Over ten years ago, Connell (2007) pointed to the reification of Northern theorising as though its claims and the concepts generated by them were equally applicable across the globe. More recently, De Sousa Santos (2014) has made similar observations, arguing for an epistemologically democratic imagination. Both of these commentators are concerned about the ways in which the hegemony of Northern theories and concepts erases other voices and other ways of thinking and doing. The consequences of such theorising are nowhere more pertinent than in the deployment of risk and risk assessment practices in criminal justice. Interestingly, these consequences were recently put to the test in the case of Ewert v. Canada (Hart, 2016). This case tested efficacy of risk assessment practices for indigenous peoples, and Hart (2016) argued it has implications for the use of such tools for all indigenous peoples. This is a point further endorsed by Cunneen and Tauri (2016) and Blagg (2016). The link between this concern with the validity of risk assessment practices for indigenous peoples and the capacity for such practices in general to embed inherent biases, as suggested above, could not be more evident. This degree of conceptual failure (Lewis & Greene, 1978) not only carries profound consequences for individual victims and offenders, as the cases cited here illustrate, but carries profound consequences for how justice itself might be conceived. Elsewhere, I have used Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s (2016) deployment of the ‘occupation of the senses’ (see Walklate, 2018) to articulate the extent to which criminology and criminologists are implicated in the hegemonic embrace of risk and risk assessment. At the same time, it is evident that, as the presence of different criminological voices grows in the form of ‘southern criminology’ (Carrington et al., 2016), it is possible to see ways in which the risk creep endemic in the practices in which regressive politics can flourish can also be challenged and harnessed differently. This returns us to the bifurcation between order and chaos commented on at the beginning of this chapter. For the Greeks, chaos did not mean an absence of order. Chaos is perhaps more accurately understood as ‘void’. However, in the Western world, the view persists that chaos equates with disorder. In the late twentieth century, risk became the motif for mediating the dichotomy between order and chaos. It is through risk, risk management and risk assessment we avoid stepping into the void. Yet to hold on to the possibilities of progressive rather than regressive justice criminology, criminologists must step into

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this void and challenge the endemic embrace of risk in order to reach out and effectively debate what a just justice system would look like. Algorithmic risk assessment and the big data on which it rests do not render the critical social scientist powerless. As Hannah-Moffat (2018) points out, and as many data breaches of different kinds routinely illustrate, technologies of all kinds are vulnerable, can be manipulated, and can and do produce errors. The role for criminologists might be to emulate the parole officers studied by Werth (2017), and on the one hand continue to make the case for complexity and specificity, and on the other seek to render algorithms and their associated data transparent. However, the discipline needs to be ready for the risk of politics in making such a challenge, since the politics of risk run very deep indeed (Mythen & Walklate, 2008). Nevertheless, the possibilities for progressive justice are to be found in the spaces between these politics. Such a progressive justice might be configured around a concept of human agency that can and does make choices and that is capable of behaving otherwise (both good and bad). Centring these qualities centres the qualities possessed by everyone, albeit not always within circumstances over which we have influence or control or that will be the same everywhere. Justice, whether pursued through online activism (as featured in the Worboys case) or more conventionally through the courts, is a complex product. Going back to Waldron (1993), if progressive justice is to be sustained, then its value as a social good, as something that is in all of our interests, needs to be asserted in the claims made by the discipline of criminology.

References Aas, K. F. (2012). ‘The earth is but one but the world is not’: Criminological theory and its geopolitical divisions. Theoretical Criminology, 16(1), 5–20. Ansbro, M. (2010). The nuts and bolts of risk assessment: When the clinical and actuarial conflict. Howard Journal of Crime and Justice, 49(3), 252–268. Barker, V. (2007). The politics of pain: A political institutionalist analysis of crime victims’ moral protests. Law & Society Review, 41(3), 619–663. Berk, R. (2017). Using ML in criminal justice risk assessments: The frontiers of machine learning. Retrieved from www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdEPPRhNu34 Berk, R., & Bleich, J. (2013). Statistical procedures for forecasting criminal behavior: A comparative assessment. Criminology and Public Policy, 12(3), 513–544. Berlant, L. (2004). Compassion and withholding. In L. Berlant (Ed.), Compassion: The culture and politics of an emotion (pp. 1–14). London: Routledge. Bernstein, P. L. (1996). Against the gods: The remarkable story of risk. New York: Wiley. Blagg, H. (2016). Crime, Aboriginality and the decolonisation of justice (2nd Ed.). Sydney, Australia: Federation Press. Brennan, T., & Oliver, W. L. (2013). The emergence of machine learning techniques in criminology implications of complexity in our data and in research questions. Criminology and Public Policy, 12(3), 551–562. Broadhurst, K., Hall, C., Wastell, D., White, S., & Pithouse, A. (2010). Risk, instrumentalism and the humane project in social work: Identifying the informal logics of risk

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management in children’s statutory services. British Journal of Social Work, 40(4), 1,046– 1,064. Carrington, K., Hogg, R., & Sozzo, M. (2016). Southern criminology. British Journal of Criminology, 56(1), 1–20. Christie, N. (1986). The ideal victim. In E. A. Fattah (Ed.), From crime policy to victim policy (pp. 17–30). London: Tavistock. Connell, R. (2007). Southern theory: The global dynamics of knowledge in social science. London: Allen and Unwin. Cook, D. (2006) Criminal and social justice. London: SAGE. Cunneen, C., & Tauri, J. (2016). Indigenous criminology. Bristol, UK: Policy Press. De Sousa Santos, B. (2014). Epistemologies of the South: Justice against epistemicide. London: Routledge. Dressel, J., & Farid, H. (2018). The accuracy, fairness, and limits of predicting recidivism. Science Advances, 4, eaao5580. Evans, K., Fraser, P., & Walklate, S. (1996). Whom can you trust? The politics of grassing on an inner city estate. Sociological Review, 44(3), 361–380. Feeley, M., & Simon, J. (1994). Actuarial justice: The emerging new criminal law. In D. Nelken (Ed.), The futures of criminology (pp. 173–201). London: SAGE. Garland, D. (2001). The culture of control. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Ginsberg, R. (2014). Mighty crime victims: Victims’ rights and neoliberalism in the American conjuncture. Cultural Studies, 28(5–6), 911–946. Hannah-Moffat, K. (2018). Algorithmic risk governance: Big data analytics, race and information activism in criminal justice debates. Theoretical Criminology. DOI: 10.1177/ 1362480618763582 Hart, S. D. (2016). Culture and violence risk assessment: The case of Ewert v Canada. Journal of Threat Assessment and Management, 3(2), 76–96. Kemshall, H. (1996). Reviewing risk: A review of research on the assessment and management of risk and dangerousness: Implications for policy and practice in the Probation Service. London: Home Office. Kemshall, H. (2010). Risk rationalities in contemporary social work policy and practice. British Journal of Social Work, 40(4), 1,247–1,262. Lewis, R., & Greene, J. R. (1978). Implementation evaluation: A future direction in project evaluation. Journal of Criminal Justice, 6(2), 167–176. MacIntyre, A. (1988). Whose science? Which rationality? London: Duckworth. Markou, C. (2017). Why using AI to sentence criminals is a dangerous idea. The Conversation, 16 May. McGarry, R., & Walklate, S. (2015). Victims: Trauma, testimony, justice. London: Routledge. Miers, D. (1978). Responses to victimisation. Abingdon, UK: Professional Books. Mythen, G. (2014). Understanding the risk society. London: Palgrave. Mythen, G., & Walklate, S. (2008). Terrorism, risk and international security: The perils of asking what if? Security Dialogue, 39(2–3), 221–242. Naffine, N. (1990). Law and the sexes. London: Allen and Unwin. O’Malley, P. (2004). Risk and uncertainty. London: Glasshouse Press. O’Malley, P. (2010). Crime and risk. London: SAGE. Polletta, F. (2006). It was like a fever: Storytelling in protest and politics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Robinson, A. L. (2010). Risk and intimate partner violence. In H. Kemshall & B. Wilkinson (Eds.), Good practice in risk assessment and risk management (pp. 119–138). London: Jessica Kingsley.

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Rock, P. (2004). Constructing victims’ rights: The Home Office, New Labour and victims. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Shalhoub-Kevorkian, N. (2016). The occupation of the senses: The prosthetic and aesthetic of state terror. British Journal of Criminology. DOI: 10.1093/bjc/azw066 Short, J. (1984). The social fabric of risk: Towards the social transformation of risk analysis. American Sociological Review, 49(6), 711–725. Waldron, J. (1993). Liberal rights: Collected papers 1981–91. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Walklate, S. (1997). Risk and criminal victimisation: A modernist dilemma? British Journal of Criminology, 37(1), 35–45. Walklate, S. (2016). The metamorphosis of the victim of crime: From crime to culture and the implications for justice. International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, 5 (4), 4–16. DOI: 10.5204/ijcjsd.v5i4.280 Walklate, S. (2018). Criminology, gender and risk: The dilemmas of northern theorising for southern responses to intimate partner violence. International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, 7(1), 4–16. DOI: 10.5204/ijcjsd.v7i1.444 Walklate, S., & Brown, J. (2011). Introduction. In J. Brown & S. Walklate (Eds.), Handbook on sexual violence (pp. 1–12). London: Routledge. Walklate, S., & Mythen, G. (2011). Beyond risk theory: Experiential knowledge and ‘knowing otherwise’. Criminology and Criminal Justice, 11(2), 99–113. Werth, R. (2017). Individualizing risk: Moral judgement, professional knowledge and affect in parole evaluations. British Journal of Criminology, 57(4), 808–827.

7 CORPORATE CRIMINALITY AND RESISTING FINANCIAL AND SECURITIES FRAUDS Gregg Barak

Introduction The socially regressive policies and trends of neoliberalism, privatization, and austerity that have been receiving political and economic capital since the 1980s, as well as the recent political successes of right-wing parties and agendas in both the global south and the global north, are reflective of and in response to, or result from, the financialization and the securitization of international capital, the usurping of debt-driven economies over demand-driven economies, and the worldwide slowdown, if not crisis, in capital formation and accumulation (Akkerman et al., 2016; Barak, 2015; Epstein, 2006; Wills, 2017). At the same time, most of the financial, securities, and multinational corporate crimes that plague the contemporary world are structurally related to the criminogenic conditions of unsustainable political economies that are overly dependent on speculative capitalism and on the contradictory necessitates of having to expand capital exponentially (Barak, 2017; Harvey, 2014). These economic relations do not decrease in any way the importance of the vocational context or of the cultural processes involved in complex organizations and transgressive behavior (Braithwaite & Fisse, 1985; Ermann & Lundman, 1978; Schrager & Short, 1977). These latter archetypical organizational relations are especially genuine in terms of those critically holistic and integrated approaches to crime and social control that assume “macro” and “meso” levels of analysis are reciprocal to or complementary of each other and their interactions with apparatuses of the capitalist state (Barak, 2012). Ten years after the 2008 financial implosion, everyone knows that not one of the Wall Street bankers that was collectively responsible for the biggest financial crime spree in United States history was ever charged, let alone prosecuted or convicted, for having violated those customary criminal laws against securities

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fraud, including an epidemic of false information, withholding of key information, offering advise based on insider information, and acting in bad faith. In addition, there were the exempted violations of former financial crimes and regulatory constraints that were legalized through acts of decriminalization and deregulation, such as the repeal of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act with the signing into law of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, otherwise known as the Financial Services Modernization Act. Both of these prosecutorial erasures and the legislative actions in combination with the underperforming enforcement of the 2002 SarbanesOxley Act, designed especially to rein in accounting fraud, as well as the failure of the 2010 Wall Street Financial Reform and Consumer Protection Act to outlaw so-called TBTF banking institutions, credit default swaps, and other conflict-ofinterest derivative instruments, or to even attempt to regulate the vast shadow banking industry, have helped to normalize securities violations of capitalist control so that these legally prohibited offenses remain beyond incrimination (Barak, 2012; Hagan & Parker, 1985). Similarly, there have been the noncriminal responses to the Libor (London Interbank Offered Rate) violations that came to public attention in 2014, entailing organized and systemic rate-rigging among a cartel of some 16 banks, authorized to submit rates for calculating an average interest rate used as a measure for establishing the cost of borrowing between banks as well as for setting worldwide interest rates. These types of criminal collusion reveal the extent of impunity in relation to the costs and losses involved in these fraudulent financial transactions. Before, during, and after the Wall Street meltdown, these fraudulent interest rate submissions exceeded by significant magnitudes any financial scam in the history of “free” markets. During the course of one decade, these fraudulent Libor rates not only underpinned some $350 trillion in derivative trades, but they also established phony rates on some $10 trillion in loans, bilking investors out of their rightful rates of return while providing traders with billions of dollars in ill-gotten gains. At the other end of this financial sleight of hand, hundreds of thousands of borrowers whose loans were tied to the Libor had their homes foreclosed on because of the colluded price-fixing and inflated adjustable-rate mortgages and subprime mortgage rates. Nevertheless, only a small handful of securities traders were ever prosecuted worldwide. There were no CEOs or chairmen of the boards at these banks who faced any type of criminal indictments, even with the testimonial evidence presented from subordinates during their trials about employers’ complicity with and support of the interest rate rigging practices (Brush & Mattingly, 2012). Other financial, economic, and environmentally related harms, injuries, and crimes that have been habitually engaged in, year in and year out, by multinational and other large-scale corporations also find themselves estranged from criminal prosecutions, not unlike those securities violations committed by traders working allegedly for TBTF banking institutions (Barak, 2017). Nevertheless, for a short period of time early in the 21st century in response to an outbreak of Enron-era corporate scandals involving such industry goliaths as Health South, Adelphia, WorldCom, Global Crossing, Xerox, and Waste Management, a number

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of corporate leaders were caught up in various types of control fraud, and they were subject, as powerful white-collar offenders, to comparatively long prison sentences (Leighton & Reiman, 2004; Reiman & Leighton, 2016). However, with the reelection of President George W. Bush to a second term in 2004, and after an absence of less than four years, the rule of criminal leniency for corporate misbehavior returned to its previously anointed high-ranking position (Barak, 2012). In this vein, a sampling of multinational corporations with some typical offenses that ordinarily receive a great deal of criminal leniency from the capitalist state are shared here. In fact, the companies identified below were the 2016 top ten nominations for the Corporate Hall of Shame awards, which are annually given out by the not-for-profit organization Corporate Accountability International, based in Boston, Massachusetts: Chevron—for suing those who speak out about its toxic dumping in the Ecuadorian Amazon—where it hid details of its pollution—and for spending millions to elect industry-friendly candidates to local office; Citigroup—for drafting legislation to use taxpayer-backed money for banks’ high-risk trading while committing felony collusion to fix currency prices with other banks in a price-fixing scheme; Dow Chemical—for heavily lobbying for its toxic products, including the herbicide used in Agent Orange, and spending millions to defeat genetically modified organism (GMO) labeling laws. Halliburton—for merging with Baker Hughes (maker of the shameful pink drill bit) in order to dominate US fracking, and for driving devastating environmental consequences including water contamination and increased earthquake activity. Koch Industries—for flooding US elections with millions of dollars to undermine environmental protections and enrich giant corporations, and for denying climate change while being the top foreign leaseholder of Canadian tar sands; McDonald’s—for driving a public health crisis, sourcing ingredients high in pesticides and other dangerous contents, and lobbying (both individually and with the National Restaurant Association) to continue paying poverty wages to its workers; Monsanto—for mass-producing toxic chemicals, threatening the livelihoods of small farmers, and suing states and individuals who attempt to label or regulate GMOs; Nestlé—for extracting and bottling hundreds of millions of gallons of water in California on expired permits while residents suffered through one of the worst droughts in decades; Nike—for aggressively lobbying to “fast-track” the Trans-Pacific Partnership while earning record profits from the sweatshop conditions in which its products are made;

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Shell—for pursuing drilling in some of the world’s most biologically sensitive areas, from tar sands to the Arctic, while aggressively lobbying to block progress on climate policy.1 The ultimate means for reining in the crimes of powerful corporations and multinationals in particular, whether they are engaged in finance, extraction, production, or retailing, resides not with criminal sanctions, but with the power to wipe out the legal and political privileges that enable these corporate formations to organize impunity (Barak, 2015; Tombs & Whyte 2015). In the meantime, and in conjunction with the goal of eradicating the harmful consequences of exploitative corporate power, there are numerous strategies for resisting these crimes as well as a plethora of cultural, economic, and political reforms that are worth struggling for. The rest of this chapter is divided into three sections. The first section provides an overview of the impunity of high-powered financial and securities crimes. The middle section outlines the long-term goals for checking the power of humongous corporations and the short-term goals for the better enforcement and regulation of the financial crimes committed by these global actors. The final section provides a rationale for moving from an unsustainable to a sustainable global economy.

Beyond incrimination: a contemporary view of the global impunity of high-powered financial and securities crimes In the case of the now decade-old financial implosion, neither the securities instruments old or new were subject to criminal or even to civil adjudication, not to mention judicial review on the merits rather than on the settlements. Instead, at the end of the day, the US banking oligarchy with its capitalist state allies were and still are the ones deciding what constitutes a “crime” in the world of securities-based market transactions. Subsequently, the US Department of Justice usually responds by complying with their determinations. Over time, in the worlds of both corporate and financial capitalism, size or magnitude matters: “Scale has always defined the winner in banking,” as JP Morgan Chase CFO Marianne Lake explained in February 2015 to her company shareholders at their annual investor day meeting after answering “no” to the question of whether they would not be better off if the company were smaller or broken up (Popper, 2015). Historically, benefits have always accrued to the giants of any capitalist industry. In the case of the megabanks of Wall Street, when they got into trouble of their own making in 2008, the “winners” simply lined up at the federal trough for their share of the corporate bailouts. Meanwhile, some 1,500 smaller “loser” banks disappeared, either declaring bankruptcy or being absorbed by those larger banking institutions left standing after Wall Street imploded (Barak, 2012). For some kind of perspective on the size and impact of the relative concentrations of capital involved in the largest financial scams over the past 40 years,

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contemplate, if you will, the non-comparative damages for the criminal sanctions that did occur with respect to both the failing Savings and Loans (S & L) of the late 1980s and early 1990s as well as to the crimes and subsequent bankruptcy of the powerhouse Enron in 2001 with those same criminal sanctions that were all but totally missing with respect to both the Wall Street implosion and the rigged Libor interbank interest rates with its associated and widespread insider trading: • • • •

S & L’s estimated losses were some $28 billion plus a bailout costing the taxpayers another $500 billion (this bailout was paid back to taxpayers); Enron cost investors an estimated $60 billion plus $2 billion in lost retirement savings for its employees; Wall Street losses and costs to the global economy are estimated to be around $22 trillion; Libor was tied to more than an estimated $360 trillion in derivatives and mortgage loans, where the estimated lost revenues to the United States alone were $6 billion plus another $4 billion in governmental expenses to unwind their positions.

Now juxtapose these financial fines or settlements of more than $800 billion paid out by the nine largest Wall Street banks between 2008 and 2017 to regulatory agencies, wealthy investors, and/or corporate shareholders who brought forth a number of highly successful civil fraud lawsuits. Also, think about the $6 billion that Bank of America spent on legal fees just to settle the allegations that the bank “misled” mortgage lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac leading up to the housing crisis (Mosendz, 2014). A sampling of resolved Libor cases, mostly for suppressing interbank rates, includes: (1) the Barclays Capital settlement in July 2012 with US and UK regulators, in which BCS paid out $453 million as it admitted that its traders had submitted fraudulent bank rates for its costs of borrowing between 2005 and 2008; (2) the two settlements in December 2012, one between the US Department of Justice and HSBC Holdings, a British multinational banking and financial services company based in London, the fourth largest financial institution in the world with total assets of $2.67 trillion, that agreed to forfeit $1.25 billion and to pay $665 million in civil penalties for violating the Bank Secrecy Act, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, and the Trading with the Enemy Act, and the other settlement between UBS and the US, UK, and Swiss regulators for a sum of $1.5 billion for manipulating interest rates and also for criminal charges against two of its former traders; and (3) by the end of 2015, the half-dozen of the world’s biggest banks that had paid out combined more than $10 billion to a diversity of plaintiffs, ranging from mutual funds to the city of Baltimore (Barak, 2017). Despite the investigation of hundreds of fraudulent interest rate fixers and inside traders across the world for price-fixing among their other securities

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violations, very few prosecutions ultimately occurred of those violators representing the multinational banking concerns of Bank of America, JP Morgan, Credit Suisse, HSBC, Citigroup, RBS, BCS, UBS Financial Services, Deutsche Bank, and Citibank, located within the geographies of North America, Europe, Southeast Asia and Japan, as well as India and South America. And, despite the lack of difficulty in convicting those handful of multinational financial criminals prosecuted for their habitual violations of Libor procedures, pretty much like the history of high-finance crime in general, these fraudulent interest rates and associated insider trading have for all intents and purposes been criminally forgotten about. Not dissimilar to the state’s response to the epidemic of securities frauds in the financial services industry both before and after the Wall Street meltdown, the social control of these criminalities has been subject primarily to conciliatory settlements with the Feds or to compensatory civil relief for select groups of investors, and rarely have the benefactors of these defrauding schemes been subject to any kind of penal sanction (Barak, 2017). One study by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse on US federal prosecutions of financial fraud between 1999 and the end of 2011 found that as a trend, the number had “gotten smaller and smaller as the banking oligopoly” in the nation had “gotten bigger and bigger” (quoted in Barak, 2012, p. 3). The study also revealed that the US Department of Justice was on track in 2011 to file just 1,365 prosecutions for financial institutional fraud, the lowest number since 1991. The Securities and Exchange Commission also filed in the same year a record-high 735 enforcement actions, going to trial in a mere 19 cases and settling as many cases as possible with fraudulent defendants who neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing while they agreed to pay fines generally worth a fraction of the losses to their sought-after investors. Similarly, an analysis conducted by the New York Times in 2011 of big banks, market advantages, and state subsidies allegedly reserved for the most dependable companies, and not for those who have been habitually settling fraud cases, counted nearly 350 exemptions to laws and regulations over the previous decade, with the number of SEC waivers granted far exceeding the number of waivers denied. For several decades now, “wrangling over waivers” has been “an important part of the negotiations when companies accused of fraud discuss a settlement with the S.E.C.,” amounting to a “form of corporate plea bargaining to a lesser charge” (Wyatt, 2012). Since 2000, the New York Times counted 91 waivers granting immunity from lawsuits and 204 waivers related to raising capital funds. The newspaper also found 11 instances since 2005 “where companies that had settled fraud cases actually lost the special privilege for fast-track stock or bond offerings, versus 49 times that S.E.C. granted waivers from the punishment to Wall Street firms” (Wyatt, 2012). In parallel fashion, the past 15 years have also witnessed a dramatic upturn in the Department of Justice’s use of both deferred prosecution agreements (DPAs) and nonprosecution agreements (NPAs). Originally created as a form of diversion for individual offenders, DPAs and NPAs have now “substantially usurped

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the dichotomous choice of pursuing a civil or criminal case against a major corporation” (Ramirez & Ramirez, 2017, p. 53). During the period 2001–2012, 2,000 corporations were convicted of federal crimes while 255 large public corporations received DPA and NPA agreements allowing them to avoid criminal convictions. Prior to 2001, Garrett (2014) was only able to locate a total of 14 DPA and NPA cases. Since 2012, the number of these agreements has continued “to swell, with fewer than a third of the 434 agreements” identified in Brandon Garrett and Jon Ashley’s 2016 database occurring before 2009 (Ramirez & Ramirez, 2017, p. 53).

Fighting to resist high-powered corporate and financial crimes: long- and short-term goals Unless there are some basic or structural changes in the need for and in some of the ways in which capital is accumulated and reproduced locally and globally, and similarly, unless there is also a reordering in the democratic roles and power relationships between markets, governments, and the people, then there is no reason to believe that the typically “noncriminal” treatment of many of the illegalities and harms entrusted to multinational corporations will not continue. On the contrary, to stay the neoliberal course of capital accumulation and financialization will only exacerbate the inequalities between and within nations, sustain the contradictions of unsustainable economic development, and reinforce the reproduction of corporate harm and criminality. For example, neoliberal policy stratagems to address the growing poverty, inequality, and low consumption and productivity in the US as well as in many other developed and emerging economies of the world call for cutting social benefits as well as corporate and individual income taxes as the means for stimulating stagnating economies with growth rates comparable to or worse than those in the United States that were barely 2 percent in 2016. The neoliberal strategies are also for raising the age of retirement, expanding regressive sale taxes, eliminating entitlements where possible, and securing more privatization— pretty much the same counterproductive agenda that shares responsibility for the current set of contradictory relations of secular stagnation. Moreover, over the past 35 years, staying the economizing course of neoliberalism has meant that state activities, including the non-enforcement of criminal malfeasance, reinforce the power of those who own capital while at the same time increasing worker subordination to a market type of discipline rather than offering individuals more freedom from the growing demands of global capitalism. In terms of financial and securities crimes, so long as there are no real negative consequences or penal sanctions for doing so, which has been and will be the case without any kind of structural transformation of the prevailing relations of the global political economy, then these crimes of speculative finance will continue essentially unfettered and unimpeded. Moreover, their lack of criminal enforcement is especially logical in an age of financialization coupled with its

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unsustainable expansionism of capital accumulation and reproduction, where at least since the global financial crisis of 2008, trade growth has been collapsing everywhere, overall rates of consumption have been shrinking, and rising debts have been the driving forces of the political economies in developed and emerging nations alike. Adding to these contradictory forces of a global capital slowdown is the slowdown of the growth in the world’s working-age population as well as in the rise of contingent workers with their growing collective fears, anxieties, and vulnerabilities. Both the contractions in the economic workforces and in regressive tax policies further expand the gaps in inequality worldwide and stimulate the less secure irregular economies that only intensify the asymmetries of social, political, and economic power. As these contradictory forces of accumulation and reproduction continue, the probability is that the crimes of multinational corporations will be even less controllable in the future than they are presently, assuming that the noncriminal enforcement policies persist in the area of financial and securities offenses. Therefore, the question becomes: what is the best way to pursue, among other things, the effectiveness of demarginalizing the crimes of the most powerful corporations? Steve Tombs and David Whyte (2015) have concluded from their numerous examinations of corporate criminals that corporations ultimately must be abolished since they cannot be rational and reasonable “citizens” who will refrain from their habitual and routine offending. As I have also underscored, in an age of global capital, radical changes require moving beyond those well-worn tinkering efforts in criminal enforcement, regulation, or self-regulation, such as enhanced self-monitoring, upgraded ethical conduct, or greater social responsibility. For decades now, these and other banal ideas and bankrupt practices have proven themselves inadequate for addressing all forms of corporate misbehavior. In short, these types of sanctions are of little value beyond their ideological or obfuscating appeal. Accordingly, I am interested in long-term revolutionary efforts that, on the one hand, resist those pathways to unsustainable capital expansion and, on the other hand, are supportive of social transformation, involving such changes as breaking up and/ or turning those allegedly too big to fail megabanks of the global economy into public utilities or to simply nationalizing these oligopolies as state-owned and state-operated (Barak, 2016). In the rest of this section, I elaborate on the kinds of policy changes required to address the structural conditions underpinning the unchecked corporate power and the routinizing crimes of the powerful. Following the identification of these long-term policy goals and changes, I ascertain that there are specific “white-collar” prosecutorial policies and practices that could be immediately employed and/or adopted to resist and/or reduce the current trends of criminal impunity enjoyed by the perpetrators of a myriad of “high-end” financial frauds and securities crimes. Of course, the structural-long term strategies and organizational short-term objectives recognized here should be pursued concurrently.

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Long-term strategies The vision of the possible understands that the material expansion of financial wealth for the sole intent of maximizing capital within the contemporary political and economic arrangements, rather than for the intent of expanding sustainable economies, is not only globally harmful to all earthly environments, but is also contributing worldwide to human deprivations. Nearly all of the social, political, and economic policy changes shared here are borrowed from my Unchecked Corporate Power (Barak, 2017, pp. 183–185). These have either been implemented in one form or the other, or they currently have some kind of organized political support. Finally, these advocated policies should be viewed as consistent with a coherent strategy for addressing the overarching crises (e.g., climate, economic, health, inequality) of our time. While most of these policies apply globally, some are specific to the United States: • • • • • • • •

• • • • • • • • • • •

Upgrade social programs for the nonworking poor. Improve family-friendly benefits, including paid family leave and childcare assistance. Impose tougher labor protection and benefit laws in general. Overturn, amend, or repeal Citizens v. The United States as well as those rulings of the legal fiction that a corporation is a person. Reform, if not end, private financing of public elections. Institute enforceable protections for whistleblowers in the private and public sectors as well as public recognition for their service. Limit further or eliminate the use of the filibuster in the US Senate. Nationalize or turn all multinational corporations (MNCs) worth more than $50 billion into state-owned corporations, in addition to stronger, transparent, anti-trust enforcement measures, the adoption of public interest standards for enforcement actions, and the establishment of placing the burden on merging companies to prove no harm to consumers. Break up the too-big-to-fail banks and/or turn them into public utilities. Ban the speculative use of credit default swaps. Exempt securities trading, insurance operations, and real estate transactions from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Rein in or increase regulation of equity traders. Standardize derivatives and trade them openly on public exchanges. Institute a financial transaction tax to discourage excessive trading and risk. Tax earned, unearned, and carried interest income at the same rates. Establish independent auditing and rating systems of corporate financial affairs. Develop high-tech tagging systems able to monitor and track algorithmic trades. Make companies and individuals admit wrongdoing as a condition of settling all civil charges or be forced to fight the charges in court. Initiate the empowerment of the Financial Stability Oversight Council under Dodd-Frank to rein in the problem of excessive risk-taking by the

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“shadow banking” industry or by those non-banking financial institutions like AIG. Institute tougher restrictions and require more long-term debt, vis-à-vis the Volcker Rule, on speculative trading throughout the banking industry, especially those which include securities and derivatives trading as a part of their “casino banking” activities, to further prevent banks from engaging in proprietary trading or making risky bets with their own money. Amend the Volcker Rule adopted on December 10, 2013, which now positively makes it more difficult for banks to buy and sell securities on behalf of clients, to trade with their own cash, and restricts them from investing in risky hedge and private equity funds, but it also needs to require bank executives not only to guarantee that their firms are in compliance with the Rule, but to hold them liable for such assurances. Resurrect a modernized version of Glass-Steagall and/or build stronger firewalls around insured deposits involving commercial banking. Integrate financial market incentives with climate change adjustments. Support environmental defense organizations like the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies or the American Sustainable Business Council. Form state-owned banks and create Benefit or not-for-profit “B” corporations. Pass a comprehensive infrastructure-human development fund and Americans’ Job Act, appropriating $1 trillion over the next decade. Pass a student loan debt forgiveness and/or payback schedule based on income and/or ability to pay. Establish for all working people a livable (minimum) wage and affordable housing combined with an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit—better yet, establish a universal basic income. Establish a single-payer health care system in which the government rather than private insurers pays for all health care costs. International criminal law should adopt and formalize a doctrine of corporate liability for corporate complicity with the committing of international crimes.

Short-term objectives In an attempt to restore the rule of law and legal accountability for financial elites, I recommend the use of both the corporate death penalty and the career death penalty. Both criminal and regulatory law can be used to dissolve, by divisions or in whole, banks and brokerage firms to their shareholders or other financial institutions. As in The Case for the Corporate Death Penalty, the argument has been made that the full range of the Wall Street securities violations could, but not in all instances, be criminally enforced without dire consequences coming to fiscal organizations, to the global economy, or to nations at large. As Ramirez and Ramirez (2017) claim, there are typically no reasonable justifications for not criminally

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indicting the perpetrators of these offenses. In framing their affirmative argument in opposition to the too-big-to-jail orthodoxy for the uses of investigative, prosecutorial, and judicial tools, they explain: “if the size of some financial institutions creates problems with applying the rule of law to the Wall Street megabanks,” then the power of disqualification would operate “to fragment the financial services industry through spin-offs to shareholders with little or no harm to the economy” (p. 10). At the same time, under existing law, managers who allow criminality to fester could also face severe sanctions such as permanent barring from working in the securities industry even if they themselves did not commit any offenses. The time is also well past due for the United States to establish a Corporate Fraud Division within the Department of Justice (DOJ). As Ramirez and Ramirez (2017) argue, one ticket to holding criminally accountable the concentrated power of those individuals acting as the stewards of our huge megabanks or giant corporations is through the creation of a depoliticized and permanent legal apparatus for proactively pursuing the crimes of capital. An independent unit within the DOJ specializing in the investigation and prosecution of financial crimes committed by large public firms “would exercise autonomy over major white-collar cases from the grand jury investigation through appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court” (p. 220). This unit would also “collect expertise within a single division drawing its litigation team from experienced criminal prosecutors and financial fraud experts, including forensic accountants and tax experts who could aid in both locating fraud and assessing financial information concealing fraud” (p. 221). Finally, in the spirit of this new division, the over-reliance by the DOJ on deferred prosecution agreements (DPAs) and nonprosecution agreements (NPAs) with powerful corporate and financial firms should be curbed with respect to the former and eliminated in the case of the latter. In the case of NPAs, no charges are ever filed and no court oversight exists, charges are only rendered when the DOJ finds that noncompliance has occurred, but none of this is transparent. In the case of DPAs, charges are filed and deferred subject to reforms and judicial oversight. These should be carefully reviewed periodically with regular reports and assessments occurring every 6–12 months.

Struggling for a just and sustainable world order: how we get there from here In the not too distant future, overcoming or succumbing to the crimes of capital and environmental pollution in particular—from ecocide to global shortages of water to fracking to electronic waste disposal to moving beyond fossil fuels to the unsustainable expansion of consumption—may very well come to a showdown between unencumbered private capitalism versus a reconstructed public capitalism on the one hand, and the contested territories of uneven civilized versus barbarized landscapes on the other. As Naomi Klein (2014) maintains, the task has become to articulate both an alternative set of policy proposals

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and an alternative worldview to rival the dominant worldview at the heart of the ecological crisis—a “new” paradigm based on an “old” cooperative model, one based on interdependence rather than on hyperindividualism, reciprocity rather than dominance, and empathy rather than alienation. It also means struggling to disperse power into the hands of the many rather than consolidating it into the hands of the few, as well as struggling to expand the social commons for all rather than privatizing them for the propertied plush. As envisioned, the replacement of for-profit MNCs with state-owned MNCs should provide for more transparent, accountable, and responsible economic systems—local, national, and international—that are characterized by social rather than private and by democratic rather than oligopolistic control of the means and relations of production. Social ownership can be inclusive of public ownership, cooperative ownership, citizen ownership of equity, or any combination of these. All of these forms of collective ownership are synergistic with the spirit of the greater good and the commonwealth as well as with the practices of reclaiming the public commons and other shared communities, virtual and otherwise. Some might argue that working for democratic capitalism is an oxymoron. Why not democratic socialism, especially assuming that global socialism is the desired transformative objective? The answer I give is because the present political and economic arrangements of global capitalism, though begging for some kind of radical change, are not ready without a great deal of resistance to go there anytime soon. In preparation for that time and in the transition to democratic socialism, winning governmental power by means of organizing, mass popular support, and direct participation in the affairs of state will help to shift the balance of political influence away from capital and toward people, which in turn should undermine rather than reinforce market and corporate discipline. In the meantime, during what I see as a prerequisite period of gestation for moving from democratic capitalism to democratic socialism, nation-states need to be weaned off the policy teats of austerity, financialization, corporatization, and neoliberalism. At the same time, these newly forming social democratic states will need to ratchet up their ecological techniques of sustainability while ratcheting down the various formations of material privilege and inequality. Democratic capitalism and state-owned multinational corporations (SOMNCs) are political necessities for the transition away from an early 21st-century global capitalism of “free” enterprise, which currently revolves around the contradictions of post-industrial, debt-driven financial economies typified by strategies of monetary contraction and privatization. These economic policies further driven by speculation foreshadow more deterioration of civil societies, basic infrastructure, and ecosystems alike. By contrast, democratic capitalism and SOMNCs could help move us towards a 22nd century of sustainable political economies. These ideals of Jeffersonian communitarianism and those popular practices of anti-elitist democracy are not only the means for recognizing and addressing the fundamental contradictions of global capitalism while staving off possible human extinction and

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establishing a genuine commonwealth here on earth, but they also hold out the promise for halting the dangerous consequences of the oligopolies of capital. Lastly, a nonviolent social revolution in the relations of production as well as in the social control and democratic ownership of the commons would go a long way toward resisting the rising capitalist states of securitization and building new institutions to push back against human-produced global warming and climate change. These collective changes are also in the spirit of mutualism over adversarialism, and they are committed to undoing the harmfulness of the privatization of education, incarceration, policing, and other social services.

Note 1 Personal communication from Kelle Louaillier, President of Corporate Accountability International, 2016.

References Akkerman, T., de Lange, S., & Rooduijn, M. (Eds.). (2016). Radical right-wing populist parties in Western Europe: Into the mainstream? Oxford, UK: Routledge. Barak, G. (2012). Theft of a nation: Wall Street looting and federal regulatory colluding. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Barak, G. (Ed.). (2015). The Routledge international handbook of the crimes of the powerful. Oxford, UK: Routledge. Barak, G. (2016). Alternatives to high-risk securities fraud control: Proposing structural transformation in an age of financial expansionism and unsustainable global capital. Crime, Law, and Social Change, 66, 131–145. Barak, G. (2017). Unchecked corporate power: Why the crimes of multinational corporations are routinized away and what we can do about it. Oxford, UK: Routledge. Braithwaite, J., & Fisse, B. (1985). Varieties of responsibility and organizational crime. Law & Policy, 7, 315–343. Brush, S., & Mattingly, P. (2012). UBS $1.5 billion Libor settlement signals more to come. Bloomberg Business, July 19. Retrieved from www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/201212-19/ubs-1-5-billion-libor-settlement-signals-more-to-come Epstein, G. (Ed.). (2006). Financialization and the world economy. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing. Ermann, M., & Lundman, R. (1978). Deviant acts by complex organizations: Deviance and social control at the organizational level of analysis. Sociological Quarterly, 19, 56–67. Garrett, B. (2014). Too big to jail. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hagan, J., & Parker, P. (1985). White-collar crime and punishment: The class structure and legal sanctioning of securities violations. American Sociological Review, 50, 302–316. Harvey, D. (2014). Seventeen contradictions and the end of capitalism. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Klein, N. (2014). This changes everything: Capitalism vs. the climate. New York: Simon & Schuster. Leighton, P., & Reiman, J. (2004). A tale of two criminals: We’re tougher on corporate criminals but they still don’t get what they deserve. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon. Mosendz, P. (2014). Here’s how much America’s biggest banks spent on legal bills this quarter. The Atlantic, April 17. Retrieved from www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/

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2014/04/heres-how-much-americas-biggest-banks-spent-on-legal-bills-this-quarter/ 360773/ Popper, N. (2015). JPMorgan Chase insists it’s worth more as one than in pieces. Deal Book, February 24. Retrieved from www.nytimes.com/2015/02/25/business/dealbook/ jpmorgan-pushes-back-against-suggestion-of-split.html Ramirez, M., & Ramirez, S. (2017). The case for the corporate death penalty: Restoring law and order on Wall Street. New York: New York University Press. Reiman, J., & Leighton, P. (2016). The rich get richer and the poor get prison: Ideology, class, and criminal justice, 10th Ed. New York: Routledge. Schrager, L., & Short, J. (1977). Toward a sociology of organizational crime. Social Problems, 24, 407–419. Tombs, S., & Whyte, D. (2015). The corporate criminal: Why corporations must be abolished. Oxford, UK: Routledge. Wills, J. (2017). Tug of war: Surveillance capitalism, military contracting, and the rise of the security state. Montreal, Canada: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Wyatt, E. (2012). S.E.C. is avoiding tough sanctions for large banks. New York Times, February 3. Retrieved from www.nytimes.com/2012/02/03/business/sec-is-avoiding-toughsanctions-for-large-banks.html

8 BEYOND THE RICOCHETS Unpacking the modern gun culture and its political stalemate Peter Squires

Introduction: from tragedy to policy change? Another mass shooting. Another set of platitudes, prayers and condolences. Perhaps this time they will not be enough. They never are enough, even uttered from the White House. At home, the phone rings and the emails start to arrive. The same questions are asked, posed by the very same news networks that asked them before. Often, especially in the wake of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, the questions focussed upon the British experience after Dunblane, Scotland, when 16 five-year-old children, and their teacher, were killed by a lone, deranged gunman. The contemporary media agenda often insists on the emotional ‘human interest’ angle, the reflections of the bereaved within a narrative of ‘tragedy’, rather than a more evidence-centred, social scientific or policy focus. This can frequently neutralise, unless one is careful, the more political messages about the necessity of gun law reform. My colleague in the UK Gun Control Network, Mick North, is especially familiar with these issues and dilemmas. He has been a relentless and indefatigable campaigner – and a true inspiration – for firearms control, nationally and internationally, since the terrible day in March 1996 when his daughter fell amongst the victims killed at Dunblane Primary School by an aggrieved and unhinged loner in legal possession of four handguns. Mick has told his story, from achieving handgun prohibition in the UK to making great strides towards global oversight in the UN Programme of Action on Small Arms and Light Weapons (SALW) and what became the Arms Trade Treaty, in Dunblane: Never Forget (North, 2000, 2013). And who could forget? Yet every year the questions come and more reminders are needed about this very particular aspect of ‘American exceptionalism’. For, as Lankford (2016a, 2016b) has demonstrated,

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while the USA might not have an absolute global monopoly upon mass shooting incidents, they are overwhelmingly concentrated there. Yet, while mass shootings grab the lion’s share of media attention by the simple scale of their inhuman offence, like punctuation marks in the more routine and prosaic litany of gun-related violence, they are still dwarfed by the daily death toll (Younge, 2016). The grand tectonic plates of public opinion through which the US gun debate is conducted at times move rather slowly, at other times the press of events reveals fissures, shifts and opportunities for more fundamental change. This chapter sets out to show that now might be such a moment. As we shall see, recent scholarship has shown that the idea of the gun as a timeless and inevitable component of American history and culture is largely a fabrication. The construction of a ‘gun culture’ has been shown to be a consequence of industrial modernisation and, in particular, mass consumption marketing techniques (Haag, 2016). Drawing upon this analysis, the chapter explores more recent phases of firearm marketing which have had the consequence of reorienting the focus of firearm ownership around personal defence whilst augmenting the firepower available to private citizens. These are very much developments of the past three decades. The argument follows that a ‘gun culture’ so rapidly reconstructed around personal defence (Carlson, 2015), and in many respects so consciously orchestrated, might with equivalent readiness be deconstructed. The analysis points the way, in the wake of recent shooting tragedies, to recent signs that the current impasse over gun policy reform might yet be broken. For instance, in their own ways, Carlson (2015) and Melzer (2009) each point to gun rights and firearm carriage as a form of psychosocial compensation for a diminished and aging white masculinity, and a broadly shared sense of social crisis. Other developments, reflecting significant demographic shifts in US cultural politics are captured in developments as diverse as: the youthful challenge to the political establishment over its failure to target gun reform in the wake of the Parkland School shooting in February 2018; the disavowal of police use of lethal force, especially against African Americans, that triggered the #BlackLivesMatter protests (Lowery, 2017); and the troubling historical connections drawn between gun rights, policing, authority and order and genocide and slavery in America’s past (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2018). We will return to these issues.

But not jumping the gun? Firearm regulation is a complex, multi-level process, all the more so in a historically embedded ‘gun culture’ with more firearms than people: a large, active and highly motivated, gun lobby, reflecting a strong, albeit aging, demographic base (Melzer, 2009), a powerful firearms and firearms advertising industry (Diaz, 1999; Haag, 2016). This lobby maintains a tight, seemingly unshakeable, grip upon the legislative process (Brown & Abel, 2003), its traditional reverence for ‘freedom’ and self-determination being closely associated

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with gun ownership and righteous violence (Brown, 1991), and a historical affinity with violent redemption which is deeply intertwined with dominant conceptions of masculinity and the ‘true man’ (Gibson, 1994; Somerset, 2015), and a longstanding propensity for violent self-defence in what is perceived to be a dangerous and threatening world (Light, 2017). We have to combine this with the accretion of legal endorsements, the systematic reinterpretation, from the 1970s onwards, of the Second Amendment to the state-by-state-level endorsement of ‘Concealed-Carry’, ‘Open Carry’, ‘Castle Doctrine’, ‘Make my day’ and ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s, which were premised upon a highly racialised perception of contemporary crime threats (Miller, 2008), culminating in the Heller and McDonald Supreme Court rulings of 2008 and 2010 (Winkler, 2011; Squires, 2014, pp. 146–156). Delivering gun law reform in this frenzied, hyperactive and apparently polarised environment, already littered with apparently premature pronouncements regarding the predicted end of America’s anachronistic gun culture, seems a tough call. Few have prophesied the ending of the gun culture with as much conviction as Kennett and Anderson, who, ironically, just as the tides of opinion were turning, foretold in 1975 the ending of widespread gun ownership. ‘In the long run,’ they predicted, drawing upon a variant of Elias’s ‘civilising thesis’, ‘time works against the gun … the city is the enemy of the gun, and the city is growing … the gun as necessity seems doomed’ (Kennett & Anderson, 1975, pp. 255–256). Only six years later, Franklin Zimring was suggesting, ‘the next thirty years will bring a national handgun strategy’ (Zimring, 1981), but such expectations have been summarily dashed. Subsequently, however, Stephen Pinker’s own peculiarly metropolitan version of Elias’s ‘civilising story’ recounts a tale apparently more in keeping with National Rifle Association (NRA) rhetoric. His ‘better angels’ (or modern civilised citizens) may travel around forever ‘locked and loaded’ and ready to ‘stand their ground’, but an armed society is now presumed a polite society (Pinker, 2011). If only. In fact, the development of a supposedly ‘civilised’ contemporary gun culture may bear stronger comparison to Garland’s parallel story of death penalty abolitionism and civilisation (Garland, 2005), for on both counts, it might seem that American progress has been, in some ways, held in check. Although time, in Kennett and Anderson’s terms, may still be working, slowly, inexorably, against the gun, this seems just a little more slowly than originally presumed. Unfortunately, however, despite their rich and separate histories, in either case, both tough and deterrent law and order and lethal self-defence have also been sustained by a uniquely modern combination of combative neo-liberal individualism, a new racism and a resurgent punitiveness. Yet it is precisely in acknowledging the very modernity of the self-defence gun culture, a largely recent political and ideological construct, that an alternative can be fashioned. This is where some recent scholarship has proven helpful.

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Fabricating tradition Previous commentators have certainly made the point, despite a beguiling sense of tradition, enshrined in law and fanned by Hollywood and war: firearms have not always been so prevalent in North America. The argument has been controversial and contested (Bellesiles, 2000; Lindgren, 2002), but Pamela Haag’s recent book, The Gunning of America (Haag, 2016), develops the case in an insightful and specific fashion. Bellesiles (2000) had argued: ‘America has not always been subject to a gun culture. It has not always been this way … America’s gun culture is an invented tradition’ (p. 13). Bellesiles based his case, in part, on some (some say flawed, some ‘selective’ and others ‘fraudulent’: Lindgren, 2002) research on wills and household inventories which, he claimed, revealed competent, well-maintained firearms to be a relatively infrequent feature of early colonial households. By way of contrast, Haag bases her case on the rather stronger ground provided by the promotional activities of leading firearm producers seeking to create the markets – and therefore the demand – upon which their ambitions for mass production would depend.1 The significance of the American Civil War in fundamentally accelerating the production and distribution of firearms (arguably, a function of all wars: Haag, 2016, p. 110) is not overlooked. Yet for Haag (2016), the Civil War, just as it added to the weaponisation of American life, also exposed the commercial unreliability of military contracts during peacetime and the corresponding need to generate demand in order to seduce purchases from ‘otherwise indifferent customers who had little need for rifles as tools’ (p. xviii). Haag contends that the marketing exploits of the firearm entrepreneurs help dismantle two foundational myths of the US gun culture and the role of the American firearms industry within it. The first concerns the myth that in the USA guns ‘just sold themselves’ – in fact, she argues, there was no ‘pristine demand unsullied by the need for promotion’ (2016, p. xv) – and the second concerned the myth of the ‘hidden hand’ of the free market, for ‘the creation, discovery, invention and reinvention of gun markets – the visible hand of the gun industrialist at work – was a recurrent, bedrock project of the gun business’ (p. xiv). The seeming paradox that the firearm, which served as such an iconic totem of American individualism and western frontier spirit, was itself a product of eastern mechanised mass production and carefully calculated marketing was overlooked. The stories of Samuel Colt’s revolver business and that of the Winchester Repeating Arms company’s efforts to generate markets for their firearms form the core of Haag’s analysis. Thus ‘Colt, realised he would need to create his market, give out pistols, demonstrate the gun, despatch salesmen, and advertise … the visible hand of Samuel Colt sat heavily on all the gun markets he endeavoured to cultivate’ (Haag, 2016, p. 27). And likewise: [Oliver] Winchester … didn’t invent the guns that bore his name, or the machines that made the guns, or the parts that made the machines that

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made the guns. But he did invent (or find) their market … it was the gun capitalist’s ordinary repetitive task to roll the boulder of demand up the hill, cultivate a market, and then do it again. (pp. 58, 117) For just as vital as the mechanical invention of a mass-produced repeating firearm was the invention of a world in which it would be desired and then purchased in large numbers (Haag, 2016, p. 64). The firearms industry was an early pioneer of mass market advertising techniques, and Henning and Witkowski (2013) have shown how firearms manufacturers drew upon a wide range of ‘expert testimonials’, tales of heroic exploits or fears of robbery and home invasion, and boasts of quality, military endorsements or honours awarded in shooting competitions. And they have noted how firearms historians have generally regarded such advertising as largely ephemeral and unimportant, overlooking its contribution to the wider gun culture. Developing this argument, Haag proceeds to show how gun culture and frontier masculinity, even the very mythology of the ‘Wild West’ ought more accurately to be seen as outcomes of ‘the eastern corporate industrialism and [its] vanguard technologies’ (2016, p. 170). While it is now a commonplace that the ideology and imagery of the ‘Wild West’ was always a much mediated and fabricated reality produced by the fertile imaginations of the East, designed to serve the voracious appetites of the East (Slotkin, 1992; Wright, 2001), it served to install a populist psychology of a new maverick, sovereign – and typically armed – individualism, the gun man, the ‘true man’, which has been resurrected for contemporary culture. As Somerset has argued: the Darwinian violence of the frontier had made America great. America wanted to believe that Homo americanus was unique, that the violence of the West had bred a nation of strong, righteous men. And Homo americanus would brook no retreat. He would stand his ground. (p. 32) This new identity drew upon and incorporated the attributes and characteristics of the new firearms, transforming, empowering and emboldening the man. Gun industry advertising drove this psychological transformation, perhaps even suggesting weaponisation as an aspect of the civilisation thesis, bringing precision, accuracy, order and resilience, and thereby facilitating ‘a momentous step in a journey toward an emboldened individual shooter … a distinctly modern character’ (Haag, 2016, p. 91). In some senses, the analysis developing here draws upon some of Herbert Marcuse’s insights in One Dimensional Man (1964), where a ‘sweeping industrial rationality’ drives consumption relentlessly onwards, shaping individual needs and aspirations around a flawed, irrational and ultimately unsustainable vision of the advanced industrial society. There is insufficient space to fully develop this

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commentary here, but suffice to say that the conception of freedom, an armed and dangerous sovereign individual freedom, setting the freedoms of each and everyone at odds with those of others, shatters the possibility of a more collective freedom. In Marcuse’s own words, these critical concepts, freedom and right, ‘share the fate of the society of which they had become an integral part. The achievement cancels the premises’ (Marcuse, 1964, p. 19). Thus the very perception that one needs a concealed firearm to walk around freely and safely represents the very antithesis of freedom. Marcuse’s ‘one dimensional society’ premised upon false needs (gun ownership) and contested individualities (the embattled individuality of the ‘Wild West’; Wright, 2001) also recalls Brown’s (2010) analysis of ‘waning sovereignty’, the terminal throes of a failing liberal individualism rather than its apotheosis. The specific allure of the firearm resided in the qualities that gun ownership could confer upon gun users, and this is a narrative still very evident, for instance, in criminal adolescent aspirations regarding guns (Pogrebin et al., 2012; Harcourt, 2006), in the stories of victimised classroom avengers (Klein, 2005), the ‘self-defence’ vignettes of contemporary firearm magazines (Stroud, 2012; Bird, 2014) and, above all, as we shall see later, in much contemporary firearm advertising. As Agger and Luke (2008), have argued, picking up a gun to seek a violent, vengeful redemption is as American as apple pie, and the storyline of almost every Hollywood western. As Haag notes, the core appeal of sovereign self-defence relies upon ‘good guys with guns’ where use of a firearm is invariably righteously motivated in marked contrast with the more typical ‘grubby, routine, domestic, impulsive and stupid’ firearm homicides which punctuate contemporary gun culture (Younge, 2016). In this way, preferred forms of violence obscured the other ‘collateral’ violences (including suicides) endemic to the gun culture. This ideology of firearm use and possession enshrined an entire populist psychology of the gun, replacing the functional – gun as tool – identification with a far more emotional bond where a gun in the hand trumped law (because law was often distant), order (because order was often unequal) and justice (because justice was often capricious and slow). Instead, the gun offered an instant remedy and a solution of last resort to any perceived threats to the integrity of the self. These themes were reflected in the so-called ‘predicament’ advertising of firearms. Advertising images showed characters frozen at the point of maximum risk: hunters trapped on a ledge by a grizzly bear, lone travellers confronted by outlaws or ‘savages’. The scenes depicted a dilemma, inviting the viewer to confirm that the only and obvious response would be to draw one’s gun and shoot the aggressor. Here the gun represented the difference between life and death, or hope in a hopeless situation. The emotional bond between man (or woman) and gun became fundamental. Firearm advertising has continued with these highly charged emotional contexts to the present day, even as early as 1907 also beginning to court the potential female market (Haag, 2016, p. 323). The important point to be derived from this lay in the fact that the tendency to look

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first to one’s firearm in times of trouble was an attitude endorsed and encouraged by gun industry advertising which was forever stoking the fears to which guns were the supposed solution. Concluding her discussion of these themes, Haag noted how 20th-century firearm advertising had come to settle, above all else, upon the ‘emotional resonances’ of firearm ownership and use. Twentieth-century mass consumerism had shifted firearm advertising from ‘narrative’ (what firearms could do) to ‘lyric’ (how they make a gun owner feel) (2016, p. 332). This implied that advertising, appealing to the emotional over the rational (p. 337), had to cultivate these very values, inviting the would-be purchaser to warm to the heft, power and quality of a firearm, feel its rugged and robust construction and imagine what it might do for them. Modern consumer advertising would still endorse the qualities and characteristics of different weapons, especially the ways in which each new generation of firearm was deemed to have surpassed its predecessor, but these meticulously engineered and ergonomic qualities would be addressed to the psychological needs and emotional states cultivated in modern citizens. New firearms would promise much and generate high expectations to push the market incessantly forwards, each innovation and every augmentation in firepower providing a potential edge in a dangerous world and a tight market. Such step changes in firearm marketing are clearly observable in firearm industry media and advertising: a case in point concerns the marketing of semi-automatic pistols (SAPs) in the early 1990s.

Always the next, ‘best gun’ From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, police departments across the USA switched from revolvers to semi-automatic pistols and, just as in previous decades, such as the 13 years of alcohol prohibition which underpinned the gangster era and prompted a police firearms upgrade (Balko, 2014, p. 33), the rationale was always the same: criminal elements were said to be acquiring superior weapons and were capable of ‘outgunning’ the police (Diaz, 1999; McNab, 2009; Mihalek, 2014). The decision to upgrade was controversial in some circles, and even the Commissioner of the New York Police Department (which switched in 1993) cautioned that such guns might be ‘too dangerous in crowded urban settings’ and that the larger magazine capacities might encourage officers to fire more rounds than they might have with revolvers (Wolff, 1993). Nevertheless, he drew attention to the symbolic reassurance provided by a credible gun, noting that ‘there is a psychological element, officers feel more secure [with a semi-automatic] and that cannot be discounted’ (Wolff, 1993). So, even in the functional duty firearm world of policing where the conception of a gun as a tool of the trade (as opposed to style icon, masculine totem, emotional support or fashion statement) might have been expected to have the strongest foundation, it clearly matters how firearms are perceived, how they feel and how their

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owners relate to them. While the functional characteristics of firearms – especially their performance – are undoubtedly important, the implied characteristics of firearms resonate and merge with the identities of those who carry them. This gun ‘appeal’ clearly extended beyond the military and law enforcement to the wider public. In any event, as Diaz (1999) makes clear, government firearm contracts were often sought primarily as loss-leader endorsements for the much more lucrative civilian market, where a ‘military’ or ‘Special Ops’ association added enormously to a firearm’s reputation (Diaz, 2013, p. 143). Accordingly, the civilian market, constantly in search of new-edge firepower to galvanise demand, also shifted significantly towards semi-automatic handguns. Cook and Ludwig (1997) detected evidence of a significant shift to SAPs in civilian handgun purchasing in their survey of 1997 for the National Institute of Justice (NIJ). Blumstein and Cork (1996) detected a link between these newer firearms entering the market and a significant growth in urban youth homicide rates. Likewise, reviewing Bureau of Justice Statistics data of reports of firearms stolen and or used in criminal activity, Zawitz (1995) showed that three-quarters of the crime guns traced by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms in 1994 were handguns, most of which were semiautomatic pistols, and roughly a third of these were less than three years old. Semi-automatics from the cheaper ‘Ring of Fire’ companies (including Lorcin, Bryco, Raven Arms and Davis Industries) were prominent on these lists (Hargarten et al., 1996), but also more expensive models from firms such as Glock and Ruger. What was appealing to the civilian market about the new SAPs also appealed to the criminal elements and gang-involved youth (Wachtel, 1998): ‘Most law-abiding citizens, as well as their criminal counterparts, preferred large-caliber semiautomatic handguns such as the 9mm’ (Ruddell & Mays, 2003, p. 233). Indeed, some the youthful offenders interviewed by Harcourt expressed their preference for bigger, quicker-firing and more powerful 9mm pistols, using words that could have almost come from the firearm advertising copy itself (2006, pp. 9–10). Almost. According to Wintemute (2000, 2002), in 1986 in LA County, semiautomatic pistols had been responsible for just 5% of gang homicides. By 1994, this had risen to 44%. Similarly, in Chicago: almost the entire increase in handgun homicides during the late 1980s and early 1990s was attributable to semiautomatic pistols … and nationwide, it is estimated that more homicides were committed with 9 mm. pistols in 1992 alone than in the entire decade of the 1980s. (Wintemute, 2002, p. 63) Wintemute’s strongest conclusion was that ‘pistol production mirrored handgun homicide rates’ (2000, pp. 54–55). A related issue concerned the supposed ‘lethality’ (or in a related sense the ‘stopping power’) of the newer handguns (Koper, 1997). This was comprised of three elements: the calibre of the

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weapon, the enhanced magazine capacity (more bullets) and the ease of firing, enabling shooters to pull the trigger more rapidly and more frequently. These patterns of criminal misuse should not be surprising, for in the advertising and market testing of the new firearms, lethality and enhanced stopping power were promoted as distinct advantages of the new guns. Unfortunately, many of the consequences of this were felt in hospital emergency rooms, Reedy and Koper (2003) noting that just as SAPs had come to represent 80% of US handgun production by 1993, they had likewise ‘overtaken revolvers as the predominant type of handgun used in crime’ (p. 151). One consequence was that more shots were being fired in assaults with pistols and there was an increase in the number of wounded victims (but not fatalities) in cases in which people were shot, so they concluded that ‘the recent spread of semiautomatic pistols has likely contributed modestly to higher levels of assaultive gun injury’ (p. 155). They acknowledged, however, there were many contextual factors to take into consideration and a need for more developed research. None of these developments ought to surprise us, and a survey of US magazine firearm advertising during the early 1990s (Squires, 2018) found that fully 75% of firearm advertisements carried by a number of popular shooting magazines (Guns & Ammo, Combat Handguns, Guns and Weapons for Law Enforcement) exclusively featured the new SAPs. These were the newest, next, ‘best guns’ to acquire. They were strongly pitched towards the self-defence market, advocating for a state of combat-readiness in a dangerous world. This was the new ‘edge’ that firearm advertising promised, the newest needs for the market to cultivate and exploit. From a customer perspective, buying a newer, more powerful/more accurate (perhaps potentially more lethal) firearm with greater ‘stopping power’ could give them the ‘edge’ over a rival, and the gun advertisements of the mid-1990s meticulously emphasised the various advantages of the advertised firearm versus others currently available. The SAPs being offered to customers in the mid1990s advertisements are light to carry, concealable, easy to use, accurate and fast to target, quick to shoot and powerful – shot after shot, if need be. These – sometimes subtle, sometimes blunt – advertising claims literally produce the discourse through which this new market is constituted, the language and expectations with which it is populated. This market-making, or demand-creation, operates on several levels, and some of these are explicitly asserted, others more implicit and understated. Some of the former types of claims might be characterised as ‘hard’ or factual assertions, others play to valued or symbolic associations, and some stress cherished values and cultural norms. Still others refer to conceptions of need or desire, thereby envisioning a world in which such needs or desires have become normalised and unquestioned, and in this sense they also draw upon the emotions, fears and aspirations of potential customers, anticipating, perhaps, the dangerous contexts in which these weapons might be required. Here, personal safety is conceived in a strictly individualist, contextdependent and volitional ‘consumer sovereignty’ (Carlson, 2015) sense as you

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grip your firearm, deploying it rapidly against potential assailants – what we might term a ‘zero-sum’ or perhaps ‘one-dimensional’ (Marcuse, 1964) conception of liberal safety – or, my personal safety achieved at your expense – rather than a more universal and inclusive sense of collective safety. Here, good firearm design gives one an edge in the personal safety stakes, although somewhat overlooked in this personalist construction of safety is the accumulating evidence of firearms as aggregate risk enhancers (Kellermann & Reay, 1986; Wiebe, 2003; Dahlberg et al., 2004). To reiterate the core argument, the SAP advertising of the mid-1990s both reflected and further underpinned the handgun upgrade occurring at this time, thereby sustaining and legitimizing the emergent self-defence discourse and galvanising a further round of gun advocacy politics. The modern ‘self-defence gun culture’ is therefore a creation of modernity, backfilled into America’s past. Between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s, following changes in police and military weapon procurement, firearms industry publishing and gun advertising helped reconstruct and re-energise the new market by fostering a significant enhancement of the civilian firearms inventory. This put more powerful semi-automatic weapons in the hands of civilians, premised largely upon a discourse of ‘responsible’ self-defence in the face of widespread perceptions of the risk of crime and disorder. This firepower upgrade had major consequences in terms of rates of firearm-involved violence and homicide. In turn, it triggered a largely selffulfilling consequence, in the form of a firearm advocacy politics which has championed various ‘concealed carry’/‘open carry’ firearms movements, firearms deregulation initiatives (Guns on Campus) and the introduction, state by state, jurisdiction by jurisdiction, of ‘Castle Doctrine’ and ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws. The gun industry advertising of the SAP went a long way towards producing and disseminating the concealed carry culture, and with it a new kind of urban gun owner. The main issue to be derived from this discussion concerns the sheer speed with which this transition occurred, and the allied fact that it is clearly not ‘carved into the bedrock of national identity’ or ‘woven into the fabric of American character’, as some of the now-popular clichés would seem to insist. Just as dramatic in some respects has been the concerted effort of reinterpretation to which the meaning of the Second Amendment has been subject (Bogus, 2000; Lepore, 2012). There is not time and space here to review how this strange case of neo-conservative revisionism (broadly reflecting the rightwards shift of NRA politics after 1977) reinterpreted the Second Amendment to favour a modern individual rights perspective. This shift was buttressed by the 1986 Firearm Owners Protection Act, Attorney General John Ashcroft’s 2001 letter to all US federal prosecutors instructing them to interpret the Second Amendment as an individual right and, subsequently, the Supreme Court judgments of 2008 and 2010, striking down the handgun prohibitions of Washington, DC and Chicago (Winkler, 2011, p. 46, 308fn; Squires, 2014, pp. 146–156). Indeed, such legal changes, just like the entirety of present-day gun

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culture, are largely a recent by-product of the very processes which produced and disseminated the self-defence handgun as a late 20th-century commodity. As has been suggested, the recognition that this culture was so rapidly constructed, despite claims of its historical longevity and the glacier-like movement of gun politics more generally, might be an indication that it could, just as quickly, be taken apart. After all, glaciers are melting and changes are afoot. The more recent case of assault rifles may provide a case in point.

Turning the tide? Judging from the most recent firearm magazines, the industry is continuing to fashion a new market for its newest guns, and much of the advertising and many of the magazine covers now feature assault weapons and semi-automatic rifles: these are the new ‘must-have’ firearm. Reportedly, there are now some 15 million AR-15-type rifles in civilian ownership in the USA, although such weapons are restricted in some states (for example, California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey and New York) and were subject to a federal new sales ban between 1994 and 2004. Since the resumption in sales, these weapons have not featured significantly in ‘ordinary’ firearm crime (Koper, 2013), although they do figure prominently in the USA’s most murderous mass shootings (Aurora, Colorado; Sandy Hook School; Santa Monica; San Bernardino; Orlando nightclub; Las Vegas, Route 91; Sutherland Springs, Texas; and Parkland Florida). And since the most recent mass shootings, despite the familiar refrain that ‘now is not the time to talk about gun control’ (for some, it seems, it never is), there are distinct signs that disparate aspects of a gun control ‘movement’ might finally be coalescing. In the immediate wake of the Las Vegas shooting, America’s most murderous firearms atrocity, attention turned to the ‘bump stock’ adaptations which could effectively turn a semi-automatic assault rifle into an automatic-firing weapon – or ‘machine gun’. An initial burst of activism saw Nevada Democrats publish Bills to ban these devices, seemingly with the approval of the NRA. Subsequently, however, the organisation’s enthusiasm cooled and Republican legislators walked away from a fledgling national bipartisan coalition to tackle the issue (Stohlberg, 2017), even as demand for the products surged, though Walmart and Cabela’s removed the items from their websites (Hsu, 2017) and the company which produced bump stock components, Slide Fire Solutions, based in Texas, temporarily shut down production (McGee, 2017). However, in the wake of the Parkland School shooting in Florida (February 2018), President Trump, under pressure from the many young people expressing outrage regarding the failure of politicians to engage with gun policy reform, announced the drafting of executive orders to ban bump stocks. One reaction to this announcement was to see it as a form of tokenism – after all, bump stocks had nothing to do with the Florida shooting – but it was a reaction all the same. The NRA’s ‘best friend’ in the White House had apparently taken an impulsive stance which

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contrasted sharply with the NRA’s usual line. A few days later, he was doing it again in an open meeting, part of which, including a rambling speech by the President, was televised. The complete raft of proposals reportedly ‘under consideration’ by the White House, in addition to the executive orders banning bump stocks, included arming teachers, an old NRA favourite, proposed by Wayne La Pierre in the wake of the Sandy Hook School shooting. Other suggestions included strengthening federal background checks and expanding them to take in sales at gun shows and via the Internet. A related proposal, dubbed the ‘Fix NICS’ (National Instant Check System) Act, had secured a measure of bi-partisan support in the House of Representatives during December 2017,2 although critics, noting that the legislation was not opposed by the NRA, had little confidence in the law having much impact. Worse still, the NICS legislation had been linked with the so-called ‘Concealed Carry Reciprocity’ Act intended to require states to recognise concealed-carry permits issued by other states, a development firmly opposed by many gun control groups. The President also proposed removing firearms from the mentally ill, although overlooking the fact that, barely two months into office, he had signed a Bill tearing another hole in the gun purchase safety net by overturning an Obama regulation under which the Social Security Administration was required to notify NICS of individuals unable to work because of significant mental impairment. Such people would henceforth be unable to purchase firearms. Trump’s comments, and specifically his earlier attempt to cite mental illness as the cause of the Florida school shooting, recalled earlier stigmatising and disparaging remarks he had made about mental illness while still on the campaign trail. He had then referred to ‘sickos’ and noted that ‘gun free zones’, such as around schools, attracted ‘sickos and the mentally ill’ who, irrespective of whatever gun laws existed, would determinedly ‘come through the cracks’ and use them for ‘target practice’ (Koren, 2015). Elsewhere (22 February), the President had tweeted that an armed teacher might ‘immediately fire back if a savage sicko came to a school with bad intentions’. Perhaps the President’s immoderate language, although far from untypical in his public utterances, might explain the peremptory character of the weapon confiscation envisaged: weapons would simply be seized, due process would follow. Representatives of US mental health professions have deplored both the President’s language and the association drawn between mental health and gun violence, and academic research has likewise consistently rejected a simple association between mental well-being and a propensity for armed violence (Swanson et al., 2013). Writing in the American Journal of Public Health, Metzl and MacLeish (2015) likewise concluded: ‘focusing legislative policy and popular discourse so centrally on mental illness is rife with potential problems if, as seems increasingly the case, those policies are not embedded in larger societal strategies and structural-level interventions’ (p. 248).

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Other suggestions voiced by Trump included measures that had once appeared in Obama’s package of ‘common-sense gun proposals’ which were blocked by the Senate in 2013. These included restricting high-capacity ammunition magazines, raising the age limits for purchasing different types of firearms (typically from 18 to 21), banning, once again, the sale of ‘assault’-type rifles and, finally, encouraging those who found themselves disagreeing with the NRA to ‘stand up’ to the organisation. Whether emboldened by the President’s words or not, several major companies have sought to sever their connections with the NRA, including Avis Group and Enterprise vehicle rental, MetLife, and United and Delta airlines. Relatedly, Dick’s Sporting Goods, a major US field sports and shooting chain, announced it would no longer be selling assault rifles, and called upon politicians to embrace ‘common-sense gun reform’. Subsequently, BlackRock Asset Management, a leading equities company, began to offer its clients opportunities to shift their investments out of firearm manufacturing and retailing (Smith, 2018). Other investment companies were said to be engaging with firearms manufacturers to insist upon more responsible corporate governance and to encourage them to ensure ‘safer use’ of their products. This idea concerning ‘common-sense gun reform’ has existed for a while, although it is typically associated with Obama’s gun reform initiative. In fact, the very idea of ‘common-sense’ gun reform goes some way to refuting the idea that in the USA arguments about gun control and gun rights are ‘hopelessly polarised’: Lisa Fisher (2018) argues that the idea regarding social and ideological polarity is itself a social construct, reflecting a debate that is substantially driven by its extremes and engaged in by largely institutionalised interests (activists, advocacy groups and political parties) and media that are always hungry for the most simplified and essentialised of soundbites in lieu of more substantial and complex debate. In fact, the results of recent opinion polling on gun policy reform show a degree of consistency, for it is often the case that (depending upon the precise question posed), in the immediate wake of mass shootings, support for tighter gun controls tends to peak, only to fall away again in the weeks and months which follow. Cook and Goss (2014) have argued that opinion polling frequently suggests contradictory public attitudes and considerable uncertainty about existing US gun laws and the likely results of new ones (p. 177). A sequence of Gallup opinion polls between 1991 and 2017 asking whether people favoured ‘more strict’ or ‘less strict’ firearms controls found 60% supporting stricter laws in 2017, up from only 44% in 2011, the low point (Gallup, 2017). A recent poll commissioned by CNN following the Florida shooting found that support for tighter gun controls, and specifically strengthened gun purchase checks, had jumped to 70%, the highest point since 1993 (Agiesta, 2018). Cook and Goss (2014) report that large majorities of Americans, often approaching 90%, opt in favour of tighter background checks on gun purchases, with even 75–85% of gun owners and card-carrying NRA members agreeing (O’Niell, 2016). Gabor (2016) cites a series of polls undertaken by a variety of polling companies

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between 2001 and 2015 finding between 73% to 93% in favour of tighter firearm purchase controls (p. 232). As Gabor goes on to demonstrate, the precise question posed does make a difference, but nothing in the dozens of polls he reviews undermines the case that, on most issues, substantial majorities support tighter gun regulation (2016, pp. 229–247). The critical issue involves mobilising this underlying, some might say ‘background’, support into more effective political action in the face of the concerted, well-resourced and precisely targeted activities of the gun lobby. Yet there are distinct signs that this time, things might be different. In the first place, we might return to the saturated market that American gun ownership has become, with fewer new buyers but more return customers with everlarger firearm collections. The average number of guns owned by gun owners has increased from five to seven in recent decades, though this is a shrinking market (Azreal et al., 2016; Beckett, 2016). As was argued earlier in this chapter, the gun industry relies upon persuading existing gun owners to upgrade their weaponry, to buy the next ‘best gun’. But fewer people are doing so, while the much-hyped women’s market has not materialised (Koeppel & Nobles, 2017). The great American gun market may yet fall prey to the shifting tides of demography and electoral politics. As Lee has argued, the 2012 re-election of President Obama was the first occasion on which the majority white male electorate was not decisive in electing a president. This might help account for the significant rightwards shift of the Republican neo-conservative establishment, their increasingly strident embrace of neo-liberal values and their attempted re-writing of US history (Lepore, 2010) and the re-interpretation of constitutional amendments. These may be signs of weakness, not strength, of marginality losing touch with core values (Melzer, 2009). New electoral constituencies may yet emerge which, less wedded to the gun culture, come to generate the political will to address the anachronism which is America’s gun problem. These include African American and Latino voters (both of whom are much less likely to own firearms, and considerably more likely to favour gun control: Carter, 1997; Cook & Goss 2014), women voters (Goss, 2006; Thomas et al., 2008) and young people (who have increasingly turned to the Democrats and appear generally more supportive of gun control, especially so in the wake of the Florida school shooting: Frey, 2018). Other broadly demographic factors suggesting patterns of future movement in the gun debate include increasing urban residency (rural exodus and the decline in hunting), rising educational attainment and rising numbers of single (female)headed households. Gun owners are also generally older (the peak age for gun ownership is 50–64) and more likely to have military backgrounds, whereas fewer people are now being inducted into firearms use through military service (Gabor, 2016, p. 28). Likewise, Melzer’s ethnographic analysis of the NRA as a social movement confirmed the picture of an organisation whose core membership is aging whilst remaining overwhelmingly white (Melzer, 2009; Allen, 2006).

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Yet behind these fairly disparate demographically tectonic shifts, the gun control movement has gradually been gathering focus, purpose, momentum and, crucially, resources and members. Most significant here has been the formation of the organisation Everytown for Gun Safety, set up in 2014 as an alliance between the groups Mayors Against Illegal Guns (MAIG), formed in 2006 by Michael Bloomberg (Mayor of New York) and Thomas Menino (of Boston) as an alliance of 15 city mayors committed to tighter gun regulation, and Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America (MDA), formed in 2012 following the Sandy Hook School shooting. MDA reflected the same grassroots momentum which had led to the first ‘Million Mom March’ for gun control held in Washington, DC in May 2000. As Goss (2003) has noted, the leading involvement of women in gun control activities – an issue which resonates globally (Farr et al., 2009) – reflects, to some extent, a reframing of perspective whereby the potentially very specific, even legalistic, conception of ‘gun control’ is reconfigured as an aspect of crime control, and prioritizing motherhood and family, civic responsibility, and community and child safety (Goss, 2003). Later, she concluded: ‘reframing the gun control issue got more people involved, over a longer period of time, in more intense ways than they had before’ (Goss, 2006, p. 105). After the Million Mom organisation joined with the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence (which had campaigned for ten years to pass legislation requiring firearm purchase checks and waiting periods), the Brady organisation itself began to work on a wider agenda of issues embracing family safety, civic responsibility, corporate accountability and cultural change. By the time MDA joined with MAIG, after the Obama gun control proposals had stalled in the Senate, the latter had expanded to some 850 city mayors and including a number of prominent police chiefs. Clearly vital to the Everytown organisation is the fact that Michael Bloomberg funds the organisation’s $40 million annual running costs: this is less than a tenth of the annual revenue available to the NRA, but more than the gun control movement has ever had. Sceptics might argue that such evidence and recent developments are merely ‘straws in the wind’, that bedrock support for the Second Amendment and the US gun culture remains strong. They note that less than two days after his surprising – impulsive and iconoclastic – remarks about common-sense gun control, President Trump appeared already to be backing away from them (Hulse, 2018). It is suggested that if the Sandy Hook moment, and the mass murder of five-year-old children, could not jolt the national debate forward, then nothing would. But the friends and peers of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida have shown something new: courage, resilience and determination laced with passion and outrage about the inept, patronising and irrelevant utterances of professional politicians and the disdainful conceits of the NRA. As Frey (2018) has noted: ‘this time feels different from earlier moments about gun violence’. The ‘political will’ at the grassroots seems more effectively co-ordinated institutionally and nationally (Hulse, 2018), with campaigns such as ‘Throw Them Out’ linked to electoral registration initiatives designed to remove politicians in receipt of NRA campaign donations (Gabbatt,

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2018) and ‘One Less Gun’, in which supporters have filmed themselves destroying firearms, or taking a leaf from the #BlackLivesMatter playbook, making widespread use of new social media to communicate and mobilise, recognizing nevertheless the limitations of such ‘networked’ protest in isolation (Tufekci, 2017).3 Writing in the UK Guardian newspaper, US correspondent Gary Younge cautions against liberals ‘waxing romantic’ at the sight of young people challenging authority. Echoing Tufekci, he notes: ‘there is a limit to what they can achieve alone’, for whilst ‘young people and students can expose a crisis and challenge it, [they can] rarely defeat or solve it unilaterally’ (Younge, 2018). Young people have called ‘time’ on the obscenity of gun violence, and ‘#Enough’ on the political prevarication. They are too young and inexperienced to have become accustomed to the futility of the ‘usual channels’ that consistently fail to deliver and they have largely by-passed the formal political processes and the existing mainstream gun control lobbies. But if they are to be successful in the longer term, they will need each other; the gun control lobbies in particular will need their youthful energy and commitment. To echo an earlier call, the transformational politics of another time and another place, the future politics of US gun control needs to move ‘beyond the fragments’ (Rowbotham et al., 1979)4 and the latest ricochets (mothers of victims, the bereaved of particular mass shootings, #BlackLivesMatter, special-issue campaigns, Walmart boycotts, bump stock bans, class-action lawsuits and disinvestment tactics) in order to embrace the broader intersectional politics of class, race, gender and justice necessary to confront the USA’s appalling legacy of gun violence.

Notes 1 Dunbar-Ortiz’s recent revisionist history of the Second Amendment (2018) challenges the constructionist accounts of both Bellesiles and Haag, but she does so, not simply from the familiar ‘individualist’ perspective that holds sway today, but because the ‘right to bear arms’ served to legitimate the genocide, conquest and slavery upon which the ‘manifest destiny’ of white America rested. Here lies its true significance, and not in obscure historical debates about how many functioning flintlocks did the settlers possess. She argues, ‘Killing, looting, burning, raping and terrorizing Indians were traditions in each of the colonies long before the Constitutional Convention … The Second Amendment’s language specifically gave individuals and families the right to form volunteer militias to attack Indians and take their land’ (2018, p. 18). In turn, this racist foundation forms a part of the very instability of firearm rights – and police powers – today. There is great insight in Waldman’s observation that ‘each generation makes its own Second Amendment’ (2014, p. 68). 2 The legislation was intended to plug a gap in the NICS system exposed by the Sutherland Springs (TX) shooting in which 26 people were killed. Had the US Air Force added information concerning the shooter’s domestic violence conviction to the NICS data-base, he may have been prevented from purchasing the weapons with which he perpetrated the shooting. 3 Support for gun control is sometimes described as ‘a mile wide, but an inch deep’, in other words, superficial attractive to many, but politically insubstantial in practice, especially facing the determined ‘single issue’ activism of the NRA. It is this aspect which prompts the broader and more generic intersectional public safety and social justice ambition, with which this chapter concludes.

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4 Facing the political ascendancy of the ‘new right’ feminist authors Sheila Rowbotham, Lynne Segal and Hilary Wainwright urged the need for a concerted intersectional politics, moving beyond the disparate ambitions of a fragmented political resistance. There may be important lessons here for a new gun politics centred upon social justice and public safety rather than individual freedoms.

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9 ABORTION POLITICS AND THE PERSISTENCE OF PATRIARCHY Meda Chesney-Lind

Introduction Just two decades in, the new century has presented progressive criminologists, particularly in the United States, with a daunting set of challenges. Perhaps as a reaction to the election of the first African American president, Donald Trump’s candidacy and narrow victory to succeed President Obama topped a series of disturbing political developments in the US and elsewhere. Many nations in the Global North, in particular, have seen the rise of an unapologetic rightwing (often nativist) populism, which seems to have emerged in response to a set of transnational political factors, including immigration and globalization. Another key, but sometimes overlooked, aspect of these emerging rightwing movements has been a direct appeal to white male dominance and an implicit endorsement of misogynistic attitudes, particularly regarding women’s rights and the policing of women’s sexuality (Jacobs, 2018). For feminist criminologists, the current global political climate is particularly challenging, given the centrality of violence against women to the field’s intellectual agenda. Donald Trump is an unapologetic misogynist, and one who bragged about grabbing women in their genitals; he has also been accused of sexual misconduct by over a dozen women (Talking Points News, 2018, p. 16). During the campaign for president, he also raised eyebrows by suggesting that women who seek abortions should be “punished,” something that even the anti-abortion movement has avoided suggesting (White, 2016). His campaign pandered shamelessly to nativism, racism (including constructing immigrants as criminals), and anti-abortion sentiments, while also articulating a more centrist narrative about the return of manufacturing jobs that appealed to working-class whites in rust belt states.

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Upon taking office, though, his presidency has been characterized by additional troubling patterns. Importantly, because of the issues surrounding his dubious election victory, Trump’s allies have been targeting the very legitimacy of the US criminal justice system itself (in an effort to undercut what might likely be an effort to prosecute him for obstruction of justice). On a political and policy level, however, Trump appears to have established an effective coalition with conservative establishment Republicans in Congress. In exchange for their silence surrounding his most egregious political and personal blunders and missteps, his administration has facilitated the advance of a social and economic agenda that many note often betrays his populist election rhetoric, delivering instead a narrow but troubling set of victories for traditional conservative core constituencies (including the wealthy Republican donor base and evangelical Christians) (Wagner & Eilperin, 2017). Trump’s efforts, including the continued efforts to undermine and ultimately repeal the Affordable Care Act, and the recent tax cuts (that largely benefited the rich and corporations), are clear examples of his hewing to traditional conservative issues. Perhaps the least discussed, but arguably the most “effective” of these efforts, though, are dramatically stepped up efforts to curtail and even criminalize girls’ and women’s access to the full range of reproductive rights, including various forms of abortion. It is to this latter point that we now turn, given that it is the most prominent anti-woman initiative launched by the Trump administration (Rovner, 2018).

Women’s reproductive rights and patriarchy The social control over women’s sexuality, sexual expression, and reproduction is arguably as old as human civilization, and it is a central feature of the patriarchal sex/gender system (Renzetti, Curran, & Maier, 2012). Lerner (1986) argues, in her landmark work The Creation of Patriarchy, that the commodification of women’s sexual and reproductive capacity was an essential feature of women’s subordination: “Women themselves became a resource, acquired by men much as the land was acquired by men” (Lerner, 1986, p. 212). Lerner contends that women were subsumed within this system as the sexual property of men, expected to provide sexual and reproductive services to them to gain a “respectable” status within the family and the larger social structure. Here is Lerner (1986) on this point: For women, class is mediated through their sexual ties to a man. It is through the man that women have access to or are denied access to the means of production and to resources. It is through their sexual behavior that they gain access to class. “Respectable women” gain access to class through father and husbands, but breaking the sexual rules can at once declass them. The gender definition of sexual “deviance” marks women as “not respectable,” which in fact consigns her to the lowest class status possible. (p. 215)

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For millennia, women’s deportment has been largely seen through the lens of women’s adherence to restrictive norms governing their sexuality (and reproduction). Sometimes called the whore/Madonna dichotomy, this sexual double standard is in many ways the cornerstone of classic norms governing female (but not male) behavior in virtually all spheres. Societal discussions, then, of issues such as contraception, abortion, and sex education need to be understood as occurring within this patriarchal context. Legal and cultural norms that often label women’s actions as “bad,” “deviant,” “not respectable,” even “criminal” when they are seeking medical services that allow them to control their sexuality and reproduction in part fall back on this patriarchal view of women as male sexual property (Schur, 1984). Flash forward to the present. The understanding of patriarchy as a system of gender stratification has recently received an important theoretical update. In response to Trump’s election, among other things, Cynthia Enloe (2018), argues in her new book, The Big Push: Exposing and Challenging the Persistence of Patriarchy, that it is past time to start thinking about patriarchy. She confesses, though, that she did not always feel this way: “I almost broke into a run to get away from the first person I heard utter the word ‘patriarchy’” (p. ix), thinking it “so heavy, so blunt, so ideological” (p. ix). In subsequent decades, though, the feminist political theorist has gradually seen a particular utility in the concept. She proposes we use patriarchy as a “searchlight” whereby we see what we would otherwise miss: “the connective tissues between large and small, subtle and blatant forms of racialized sexism, gendered misogyny and masculine privilege” (pp. ix–x). Enloe (2018) suggests that we need to do research that showcases the questions that feminists must ask, and she cautions against timidity: The antidote to a patriarchally complicit lack of curiosity is asking new feminist-informed questions. Lots of questions. Conducting deep and ongoing feminist investigations of the institutions apparently at the forefront of modern life is a crucial form of resistance. (p. 166) Aiming to document how this works, Enloe (2018) argues that we need to explore both the “persistence” of patriarchy and the importance of feminist resistance (p. x). Significantly, Trump does not loom large in her thinking about patriarchy. Enloe argues that we should not be diverted by the “patriarchal machinations of any outsized figure,” and instead focus on “more insidious dynamics that are perpetuating patriarchal ideas and relationships” (p. x). It is hard to imagine a system more in need of this sort of critical feminist exploration than the series of state and federal legal initiatives trying to dramatically reduce women’s access to reproductive rights, both in the US and around the world. Efforts to criminalize (or re-criminalize) family planning and abortion place the criminal justice system firmly in the center of patriarchal controls on

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girls and women’s behavior, particularly since women’s sexual and reproductive health is a matter of grave concern worldwide. Recent data indicated that roughly 39% of the world’s population still live in countries with highly restrictive laws governing abortion. These countries either prohibit abortion altogether, or allow the procedure only to save a woman’s life, or to preserve her health (Center for Reproductive Rights, 2014b). As a result, nearly half of all abortions worldwide are unsafe (Guttmacher Institute, 2015). The proportion of abortions that are performed under unsafe conditions is not currently known. However, complications from unsafe abortions are more common in developing regions, or where the procedure is often highly restricted (Guttmacher Institute, 2015). Estimates for 2012 indicate that 6.9 million women in these regions were treated for complications from unsafe abortions, corresponding to a rate of 6.9 women treated per 1,000 women aged 15–44. Furthermore, most recent estimates suggest that some 40% of women who experience complications from unsafe abortions never receive treatment (Guttmacher Institute, 2015). More will be said about the global issues surrounding access to abortion, and the key role played by US domestic policy in dramatically reducing reproductive rights, later in the chapter. Suffice to say here that girls and women’s “reproductive rights,” and particularly their access to abortion, are some of the most vigorously contested issues in contemporary American political life, arguably key to deciding presidential elections. Because discussion of these issues tends to be quite heated and ideological (often relying on deeply held cultural beliefs like religion), the larger political and social meaning of female access to abortion services can get lost in the religious rhetoric. For this reason, it is very important to put the discussion of girls’ and women’s access to contraception and abortion into a socio-political and criminological context, rather than simply reducing the discussion to one about the legal, moral, biological, and medical aspects of a set of “procedures.” It is important to recall that access to contraception was initially framed as a political and human right rather than a medical or “privacy” right, as is the case even for some of the progressive supporters of women’s rights.

Reproductive rights in the United States: a brief history The movement to establish a woman’s right to control her own sexuality and reproduction started at the beginning of the twentieth century in the United States (Sinding, 2007). Activists like Emma Goldman, who worked as a nurse among immigrant women, saw that the absence of contraception risked women’s lives because of botched efforts to induce abortion. She and, later, Margaret Sanger were struggling to establish a women’s right to avoid unwanted pregnancies, focusing on the individual woman and her well-being. During that time, the term “birth control” did not even exist and discussion of the “prevention of conception” was seen as “obscene” and a crime (Mlitt, 1980). Goldman was arrested, put on trial, and eventually jailed in 1916 for attempting to give

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women information about contraception, and she took a broader view of the issue than did Sanger, who eventually focused narrowly on a more medical approach to the discussion of contraception (Berkeley Library, 2018). Here is Emma Goldman commenting on her jailing for attempting to distribute birth control information in 1916: while I am not particularly anxious to go to jail, I should yet be glad to do so, if thereby I can add my might to the importance of birth control and the wiping off our antiquated law upon the statute. (Berkeley Library, 2018) Goldman ended up spending two weeks in a prison workhouse. The Carnegie Hall meeting that marked her release that May drew more than 3,000 people who wanted to celebrate her return—and to obtain information about birth control (Berkeley Library, 2018). During the second wave of feminist activism, the family planning movement gained further ground as efforts to decriminalize abortion in the 1960s and 1970s ultimately prevailed with the issuing of the landmark Supreme Court Decision Roe v. Wade in 1973 (Doan, 2007; Lind & Hadi, 2014; Planned Parenthood Federation of America, 2014). Women’s rights activists’ use of the phrase “Reproductive Politics” emerged in the mid-twentieth-century, and signaled that the movement no longer dealt with just women’s right to avoid unwanted pregnancies. Instead, it expanded the struggle over contraception to include abortion, race, and sterilization, class and adoption, women and sexuality, and other related subjects (Solinger, 2005). That said, in the decades that followed, some contend that a “narrow” focus on the legal right to abortion meant that the more inclusive platform originally envisioned by the early reproductive rights advocates failed to develop. Knudsen (2006) makes this argument forcefully: [T]he best-known reproductive rights organizations historically focused almost exclusively on issues that were most important to white, upperand middle-class American women rather than addressing matters that more directly affected the less privileged. Narrowly concentrating on a woman’s legal right to abortion, for example, American feminists until recently have largely neglected other reproductive rights issues that greatly affect women of color and poor women, such as sterilization abuses and inadequate access to health services, not to mention access to information and contraception. While the issue of abortion clearly has a tremendous impact on all women, the greatest obstacle to procuring a safe abortion for poor women and women of color in the United States is usually a matter of access and not one of legality. The legalization of abortion may ensure that a wealthy white woman can obtain an abortion from her private physician, but legalization by itself does not ensure that a poor, black

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woman in a rural area will have the financial resources or physical access to get an abortion. (p. 10) These shortcomings became abundantly clear in the context of recent efforts to effectively re-criminalize abortion in the United States. These legal and political moves, in turn, provide a case study of the larger issue of the specific role of the government in the enforcement of patriarchal control over women’s sexuality (and ultimately their lives). After the 2010 midterm election, when Republicans scored major victories in many state races (taking over both governorships and legislatures) (Balz, 2010), US anti-abortion activists shifted their focus to the states, and in particular began to work on restricting access to abortion (rather than federal court battles about the legality of the procedure). As a result, restrictions on abortion proliferated— some so severe that they essentially render abortion unavailable for broad swaths of the country. As a result of these sorts of changes, the Guttmacher Institute concluded, the proportion of women living in restrictive states went from 31% to 56% between 2000 and 2013, while the proportion living in supportive states fell from 40% to 31% over the same period (Nash et al., 2014). As of January 1, 2014, at least half of the states have imposed excessive and unnecessary regulations on abortion clinics, mandated counseling designed to dissuade a woman from obtaining an abortion, required a waiting period before an abortion, required parental involvement before a minor obtains an abortion, or prohibited the use of state Medicaid funds to pay for medically necessary abortions (Guttmacher Institute, 2016). These restrictions had a discernible impact, as the number of US abortion providers declined 4% between 2008 and 2011 (Guttmacher Institute, 2015). This state-by-state strategy of rendering abortion unavailable was decisively blocked by a surprising strong decision in Whole Woman’s Health et al. v. Hellerstedt (579 US (2016)). On June 27, 2016, by a vote of five to three, the Supreme Court reaffirmed and strengthened constitutional protections for abortion rights by striking down parts of a restrictive Texas law that reduced the number of abortion clinics in the state by half, leaving them only in the largest metropolitan areas. Specifically, the court found that the Texas requirements that abortion clinics had to meet the relatively high standards of “ambulatory surgical centers” and that doctors performing abortions had to have admitting privileges at local hospitals violated earlier Supreme Court requirements that the states not place an “undue burden” on girls and women seeking abortions (Liptak, 2016). Abortion opponents had hoped this case would provide the deeply divided Supreme Court with an opportunity both to gut both Roe v. Wade, but also reverse the 1992 case (Planned Parenthood v. Casey) which held that abortion laws that created an “undue burden” on women were unconstitutional. Instead, the court both clarified and strengthened Casey while striking down the Texas

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requirements. One analysis of this concluded that the case “could invalidate anti-abortion laws in another 25 states” (Martin, 2016). This relatively unexpected decision, hailed by one abortion rights advocate, as a “game changer,” essentially “leaves the right to an abortion on much stronger footing” (Martin, 2016). It also means that the state-by-state approach to dramatically restricting access to abortion services, described as “guerrilla warfare against abortion itself,” has been essentially rejected at the federal level. This decision, though, both energized abortion opponents in the United States and has not prevented a number of states continuing to try to impose draconian restrictions. In fact, efforts to essentially re-criminalize abortion by prohibiting it at earlier and earlier stages in pregnancy continue: as an example, Kentucky recently passed a law prohibiting abortion after 11 weeks of pregnancy and Mississippi at 15 weeks, though both were challenged in court, with Mississippi’s effort now blocked (Sperling, 2018). More globally, these burdensome regulations are not an anomaly—they are the rule when it comes to abortion access in America, particularly since Trump’s election (Balmert, 2017). Even before the most recent Supreme Court decision, abortion was clearly a key issue in the 2016 race for the presidency in the United States, and ultimately may have been a factor in Trump’s surprising victory. As noted earlier, on the campaign trail, Trump recently said not only do you have to “ban” abortion, but also that there “has to be some sort of punishment” for women who seek abortions. Those comments were so controversial, even among abortion opponents, that he quickly backed away from them (White, 2016), but they were also a warning of how seriously Trump’s election would impact availability of the procedure. Trump also bragged on the campaign trail that he would put an abortion foe on the Supreme Court. Hillary Clinton, the losing candidate, was a strong champion of abortion rights, but her pick of Tim Kaine as a vice presidential running mate shows a troubling calculation on this issue. Notably, while Kaine did not back overturning Roe v. Wade, he was personally opposed to the practice and has backed controversial restrictions, such as parental notification laws and a ban on late-term abortions (Sullivan, 2016). Since his election, Trump and his Vice President Michael Pence have been extremely visible and impassioned about their opposition to abortion. Trump became the first sitting president to address the “March for Life” (Woellert, 2018). He has also named an anti-abortion judge to the US Supreme court, Neil Gorsuch, one of his very few congressional achievements. Gorsuch’s appointment is related to another worrying trend as more “religious” groups are seeking to avoid having to provide their employees with access to legal contraceptives after the US Supreme Court earlier voted narrowly to grant a private, for-profit corporation the right to deny its employees access to insurance to cover the cost of contraception on the basis of the religious beliefs of the owners of the company (Liptak, 2014). Gorsuch issued a key ruling earlier on this same case, arguing to dramatically expand the “religious protections” afforded owners of corporations (Totenberg, 2017). Since the

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upfront cost for an intra-uterine device (IUD) can be nearly $1,000, which translates, as Justice Ruth Ginsburg noted in her strongly worded dissent, to nearly a month’s wages for a low-income worker, this exemption hits young and low-income women especially hard (Joffe, 2017, p. 148). When anti-abortion protesters gathered in Washington, DC for the 45th annual “March for Life” rally, as an example, the Trump administration announced two new policies. One is a letter to states aimed at making it easier for them to exclude Planned Parenthood facilities from their Medicaid programs, the other is a proposal to allow health care providers to refuse to perform services that conflict with their “religious or moral beliefs.” Trump declared in a video address from the Rose Garden to the group: “In my administration, we will always defend the very first right in the Declaration of Independence, and that is the right to life” (Rovner, 2018). More recently, Vice President Mike Pence has argued that abortion “will end in our time” (Levy, 2018). That said, despite many attempts, Congress has so far failed to pass a federal ban on abortions occurring after 20 weeks, and it did not cut off Planned Parenthood’s federal funding, and also did not write into permanent law the Hyde Amendment, which bans most federal abortion funding, but needs annual renewal (Rovner, 2018). The abortion issue continues to color the Trump presidency. One of the most egregious examples of this is provided by Scott Lloyd, an anticontraceptive and abortion activist, who was appointed by the president to serve as head of refugee resettlement. In that capacity, he has tried to block abortions for young, undocumented immigrants being held in custody in a detention center in Texas. In fact, Lloyd visited the teen while she was in custody, asking her if she was comfortable and if she had the food she liked, but most importantly, he wanted to “counsel her against having an abortion” (Peters, 2018). Lloyd’s actions “drew an admonishment from a federal judge who said she was ‘astounded’ the government had been so insistent on keeping someone from obtaining a constitutionally protected procedure” (Peters, 2018). How Lloyd, an appointee of President Trump, turned a small office in the Department of Health and Human Services that provides social services to refugees into a battleground over abortion rights is part of the larger story of the Trump administration’s push to enact rules that favor socially conservative positions on issues like abortion, contraception and gay, lesbian, and transgender rights across the board (Peters, 2018). Ultimately, the courts blocked Lloyd’s efforts due to a suit filed by the American Civil Liberties union in 2018 (Stevens, 2018), but the case speaks volumes about the Trump administration’s commitment to anti-abortion politics and practices.

Abortion trends in the US: facts versus rhetoric An important aspect of the politics of abortion is to review the facts about abortion, both in terms of numbers of procedures and in terms of what sort of women seek

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these services. First, and significantly, the numbers of abortions are going down. According to the Guttmacher Institute (2016), in the US in 2011, 1.06 million abortions were performed, down 13% from 1.21 million in 2008. Reasons for this decline are “not fully understood,” according to a recent national study conducted by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. It may well be due to increasing use of more effective forms of contraception (especially longer-acting forms such as IUDs and implants), as well as declines in the rates of unintended pregnancies, and possibly the increasing number of state regulations that “limit the availability of otherwise legal abortion services” (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018, p. 5). Since abortion became legal, most abortions (91.6%) have been performed in early pregnancy (e.g. less than 13 weeks). Because of recent technological advances such as “highly sensitive pregnancy tests and the availability of medical abortion,” abortions are actually being performed at increasingly earlier gestation. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the percentage of early abortions performed at six weeks’ gestation increased by 16% from 2004 to 2013. In 2013, 38% of early abortions occurred at six weeks or less, and this figure is expected to rise as use of medication abortions becomes more common (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018, p. 5). In 2014, the vast majority of abortions were performed in nonhospital settings, either in an abortion clinic (56%) or clinics offering a variety of medical services (36%). Fewer than 5% of abortions were provided in hospitals. That said, the number of abortion providers is declining. The greatest proportional decline has occurred in states that have enacted abortion-specific regulations. In 2014, there were 272 abortion clinics in the United States—17% fewer than in 2011—and 39% of women of reproductive age resided in a county without an abortion provider. Twenty-five states have five or fewer abortion clinics; five states have only one abortion clinic. As a result, roughly 17% of women travel more than 50 miles to obtain an abortion (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018, p. 5). Access to safe and legal abortion is vital to women’s reproductive health since half of pregnancies among American women are unintended, and four in ten of these are terminated by abortion. The vast majority of women who receive abortions are either poor or low-income, and they are quite young. In 2012, the majority of those seeking abortions were in their twenties (60%), with women in their thirties accounting for an additional 25%. The number of teens seeking abortions actually declined by 32% between 2008 and 2014, accounting for 12%. The group is ethnically diverse, with white women accounting for 39% of abortion seekers, black women, 28% and Hispanic women 25%. Looking at these data slightly differently, though, over half of the girls and women who seek abortions (61%) are women of color; over half are either African American or Hispanic (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018, p. 13). Religiously, 39% identify as Protestant and 28% identify as Catholic. Notably, the group is overwhelmingly low-income, with nearly half living at

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less than the federal poverty level (Jerman, Jones, & Onda, 2016). In total, the Guttmacher Institute (2016) estimates that 30% of American women get an abortion by the time they turn 45.

Abortion access worldwide and US policies: the Global Gag Rule As noted earlier, women’s sexual and reproductive health is a matter of grave concern worldwide. The World Health Organization estimates that 19 million unsafe abortions take place every year (Ahman & Shah, 2002). Despite the adverse impact on women’s health, roughly one-third of the world’s women live in countries with strict legislation that does not allow women to opt for abortion under any circumstances, or only in extreme cases of rape, incest, or where the woman’s health is in serious danger (Mishra, 2001). Moreover, whether legal or illegal, induced abortion is usually stigmatized and frequently opposed by political and/or religious groups (Grimes et al., 2006). Today, despite all sorts of medical advances, women worldwide still do not have the power to make their own sexual and reproductive choices without government interference. Women’s right to control their sexuality and reproduction has become an international struggle, with strong opposition emerging from organized religious groups like the Catholic Church and other sexually conservative religions. Maguire (2003), analyzing the case of contraception and abortion in the international arena, stated: What is not notoriously difficult to say is that religions seriously affect national and international policy on contraception and abortion. The Vatican from its unduly privileged perch in the United Nations along with the “Catholic” nations, newly allied with conservative Muslim nations, blocked reference to contraception and family planning at the United Nations conference in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. This alliance also disrupted proceedings at the 1994 United Nations (UN) conference in Cairo and impeded any reasonable discussion of abortion. As the then Prime Minister Brundtland of Norway said of the Rio conference: “States that do not have any population problem—in one particular case, even no births at all [the Vatican]—are doing their best, their utmost, to prevent the world from making sensible decisions regarding family planning.” (p. 13) Maguire (2003) notes that most of the world’s religions originated at a time when the global population was 50 million–450 million people, in comparison to 6 billion at the beginning of the second millennium, and thus the laws and edicts articulated at that time to guide (control) human behavior are not applicable or appropriate now, in fact they are counter-productive. The extensiveness of governmental, and criminal justice, control over women’s choices on reproductive health is evident across the globe. In Nepal,

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women are criminalized for attempting abortion, even when their pregnancies are the result of rape or incest. In 1997, a nationwide prison study conducted by CREHPA, a non-governmental organization (NGO)in Nepal, revealed that approximately 20% of women prisoners were in custody on charges of abortion (Mishra, 2001). Moreover, the existing law in Nepal does not draw a clear distinction between abortion and infanticide. Thus, while abortion has a maximum punishment of one and a half years, infanticide can expose a woman to punishment for murder, which includes life imprisonment and confiscation of all her property (Mishra, 2001). Often, this gap in the law is misused by neighbors and/or family members with designs on the women’s property, or those seeking revenge. In Indonesia, Amnesty International’s research has highlighted a number of legal provisions, including in the Criminal Code, which restrict access to sexual and reproductive rights or have a chilling effect on the provision of sexual and reproductive health information and services (Schlitt, 2011). Specifically, there are concerns that the Pornography Law (No. 44/2008) could be interpreted in a way that would criminalize sex education. One activist told Amnesty International: “If people feel uncomfortable and think I am promoting sex, this can be a problem … it always depends on community leaders … if they are very fundamentalist then there is a high chance [we will be arrested]” (Schlitt, 2011). In 2008, draconian legal provisions came into force in Nicaragua, which now criminalizes abortion in all circumstances. The situation is so desperate that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights had to demand that the Nicaraguan Government provide medical treatment for a young woman suffering from cancer. She was denied the treatment she needed because the 2008 law criminalizes even unintentional harm to the fetus—a risk that her treatment for cancer entailed (Schlitt, 2011). In India, the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act (MTP Act) of 1972 allows women access to abortion in a few limited circumstances, but does not see abortion as a right (Mishra, 2001). The MTP Act permits termination of pregnancy on the grounds that the continuance of pregnancy involves risk to the life of the woman or of grave injury to her physical and mental health and where substantial risk exists of the child being born with serious physical or mental abnormality. The Act restricts abortions to be only performed at government hospitals and only by their registered medical practitioner. While providing women with the legal option for abortion, the MTP Act grants the decisionmaking power to the government medical personnel, not the women. In Bangladesh, although population control is a major national objective, abortion is still illegal except when the pregnancy results from rape or threatens the life of the mother (Islam, 2013). In such cases, the decision to terminate the pregnancy must be made by three licensed medical practitioners, yet again taking away all decisionmaking power from the women. While these conservative religious forces have affected the availability of abortion globally, contrary pressures were also present, at least in the later part of the

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twentieth century. In fact, for decades, the developing world’s reproductive health programs and policies were primarily driven by quite a different set of forces. Driven by fears of “overpopulation,” family planning programs shaped and funded by countries in the Global North pursued an aggressive agenda to control women’s fertility in these economically marginalized societies (United Nations, 2014). Throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, developed countries poured substantial resources into controlling “Third World” population growth, “garnering support for their campaigns through racist imagery that depicted the Western world being overrun by people from poor countries” (Knudsen, 2006, p. 4). These programs frequently used coercion rather than a human rights-based approach in an attempt to reduce total fertility levels. However, opposition by women’s health activists coupled with international organizations’ push to establish reproductive rights among basic human rights helped re-direct global policies to some extent. Some milestone achievements within these international human rights campaigns include the following (United Nations, 2014): •

•

•

•

The 1968 Final Act of the Tehran Conference on Human Rights, the first document to formally embed reproductive rights within human rights, states in section 16: “Parents have a basic human right to decide freely and responsibly on the number and spacing of children and a right to adequate education and information in this respect.” The 1975 Declaration of Mexico on the Equality of Women and their Contribution to Development and Peace confirms the principle of equal rights within the family. According to Principle 12 of the declaration: “Every couple and every individual has the right to decide freely and responsibly whether or not to have children as well as to determine their number and spacing, and to have the information, education and means to do so.” The 1993 Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, adopted at the World Conference on Human Rights, documents worldwide consensus on the right to sexual and reproductive health. Section 3 of Programme of Action 12 in the declaration deals with women’s rights and their right to accessible and adequate health care and the widest range of family planning services, as well as equal access to education at all levels, including sexuality education. Finally, the Cairo Consensus emerged from the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), where reproductive rights were clarified and endorsed internationally (United Nations Population Fund, 2007). Notably, 179 nations met in Cairo and adopted a 20-year Program of Action that is credited with reframing the population discourse (Knudsen, 2006). Participants at the ICPD asserted that governments have a responsibility to meet individuals’ reproductive needs, rather than demographic targets (Knudsen, 2006). The Program of Action affirmed: “Reproductive health implies that people are able to have a satisfying and safe sex life and that they have the capability to reproduce and the freedom to decide if, when and how often to do so” (Knudsen, 2006).

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Tracking the liberalizing of abortion laws, a 2014 report by the Center for Reproductive Rights noted that 30 countries1 have liberalized or amended their laws to expand access to safe and legal abortion services in the 20 years following the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development, a trend that is likely to significantly reduce rates of maternal mortality due to unsafe abortions (Center for Reproductive Rights, 2014a). The 1980s, though, marked a change in the US overseas programs for family planning and reproductive health, as policymakers who were anti-abortion and increasingly anti-family planning gained political control (Barot & Cohen, 2015). Restrictive policies, most notably the Mexico City policy, also known as the Global Gag Rule (GGR), first instituted in 1984 by President Ronald Reagan and reintroduced by President George W. Bush in 2001, prohibited foreign NGOs that receive US family planning assistance from using non-US funding to provide abortion services, information, counseling, or referrals and from engaging in advocacy to promote abortion (Barot, 2013). While the GGR was in effect between 2001 and 2009 (the Bush era), it forced many clinics to cut back on a range of critical health services that have nothing to do with abortion, such as family planning, obstetric care, and even HIV testing (EngenderHealth, 2011). Although an intent of the GGR was to reduce the global incidence of abortion, by dramatically impairing the delivery of sexual and reproductive health services, its actual impact has been to increase the number of unintended pregnancies and the abortions that inevitably follow (EngenderHealth, 2011). According to the Center for Reproductive Rights (2003), the GGR penalized NGOs in 56 countries that received family planning assistance funds from the US. Among these were many South Asian countries. In Bangladesh, where abortion is generally prohibited, US-funded NGOs that spoke publicly about abortion issues were severely affected. The GGR stifled their free speech rights, lobbying efforts to liberalize abortion laws, and censored open and honest political participation and debate. The GGR policy disqualified many foreign Bangladeshi NGOs from receiving USAID funding if they engaged in abortion-related activities. The International Planned Parenthood Federation, which refused to sign the GGR, immediately lost $12 million in USAID funding (Hetterly, 2013). Additionally, $34 million in funding that had previously been approved by the US Congress for the United Nations Population Fund was withheld in 2002 (Hetterly, 2013). While President Obama repealed the rule during his first week in office, for developing nations, such funding cuts over the past decades have had a lasting impact on the existing and prospective reproductive services for women who desperately need them (Nasaw, 2009). While the Global Gag Rule was brought in and out of existence as the presidency changed hands, the Trump presidency has massively expanded its impact. Now, the rule’s powers no longer apply solely to family planning assistance given by the US government, but also to funding given to NGOs focusing on disease control. Efforts to address Ebola, Zika, and other threats to world health might be compromised. Essentially, Trump’s version of the GGR will apply to

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roughly $9.5 billion in global health funding, as opposed to roughly $575 million in family planning and reproductive health funding, according to Population Action International (PAI), a global family planning advocacy organization. Ironically, research has shown that because of the GGR, abortions in many poor countries actually increased because the health clinics that had been providing contraception were closed due to it (Population Action International, 2018). In essence, US political efforts to restrict family planning and abortion services have not only created a major threat to global women’s reproductive health and rights, they also pose a terrible threat to human health globally.

Feminist resistance and abortion as a human right Intense reaction to Trump’s election spawned the “Women’s March” on January 21, 2017. This evolved into a worldwide protest shortly after his inauguration. March organizers expressed concern over a wide range of social policies, including women’s rights, immigration reform, health care reform, reproductive rights, the natural environment, LGBTQ rights, racial equality, freedom of religion, and workers’ rights. Most of the rallies focused on Trump, largely due to statements that he had made and positions that he has taken which were regarded by many as anti-woman and misogynistic. There was also a clear emphasis on reproductive rights. The marches constituted the largest single-day protest in the history of the United States (Cauterucci, 2017), but what impressed political observers like Enloe was the global scope of the protest, with the amazing number of “sister marches” (673) with an estimated attendance of 4.9 million (Enloe, 2018, p. 5). March participants were right to be concerned. Both nationally and globally, we have seen the emergence of policies and practices that seek the control of female sexuality and, ultimately, girls’ and women’s bodies. Girls and women in both the United States and the developing world have seen their access to contraceptive and abortion services greatly restricted due to the conservative and patriarchal political attitudes of those in power in the United States. These androcentric views have put at risk the lives of thousands of women, not only in the US, but also in the developing countries. The US imposition of the Global Gag Rule, which has recently been greatly expanded, has for decades denied girls and women access to not only abortion services, but a vast array critical health services that have nothing to do with abortion, such as family planning, obstetric care, and even HIV testing. Now, it may even put global health at risk, given its recent expansion under the Trump presidency. One key recent development on the side of reproductive rights was an important report released in February 2013, when Juan Mendez, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, “focused on the lack of access to abortion” as a form of abuse in health care settings (much like forcing drug addicts to detox without medical support). The report noted that the denial of reproductive

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justice is discrimination on the basis of gender, and denial of that right can cause “tremendous and lasting physical and emotional suffering” to women (Bolourian, 2013). Mendez noted that such violations include (Bolourian, 2013): • • • •

denial of legally available health services such as abortion and post-abortion care; violations of medical secrecy and confidentiality in health care settings; denunciation of women by medical personnel when evidence of illegal abortion is found; forcing confessions to criminalize those who have undergone abortion.

The UN’s ongoing role in advocating legal reforms in nations with restrictive abortion laws is impressive. Recently, for example, the UN’s Human Rights Committee has called on the Irish Government to reform its restrictive abortion legislation after ruling that it subjected a woman, Ms. Amanda Mellet, to cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment and violated her human rights (Gentleman, 2016). A panel of UN Human Rights Committee experts found that Ireland’s prohibition and criminalization of abortion services subjected Ms. Mellet to severe physical and mental suffering after she was denied an abortion in 2011 by doctors in Ireland even though the fetus had serious congenital defects. The ruling concluded that because of Ireland’s restrictive abortion laws, Ms. Mellet had to choose “between continuing her non-viable pregnancy or travelling to another country while carrying a dying foetus, at personal expense, and separated from the support of her family, and to return while not fully recovered” (Gentleman, 2016). Ireland, a signatory of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which is part of the International Bill of Human Rights, was required to compensate Ms. Mellet and to prevent similar violations from occurring in the future (Gentleman, 2016). In a world that is increasingly examining ways to reduce mortality and morbidity, it is appalling that tens of thousands of girls and women are dying or being disabled from botched or self-induced abortions. Every one of these could be prevented through sexuality education, use of effective contraception, the provision of safe, legal induced abortion, and timely care for complications. For this reason, abortion rates and maternal mortality due to unsafe abortion are the lowest in the world in Western Europe, home to the most permissive abortion laws (Center for Reproductive Rights, 2014b). Ironically, even in the US, where restrictions on access to abortion have been proliferating, nearly a third of all women seek the procedure at some point in their lives. The liberalization of abortion laws, accompanied by expanded access to contraceptive services and sexuality education, allows governments to prevent unwanted pregnancy while ensuring that safe and legal abortion is available to any woman who chooses to terminate a pregnancy. While in the US and elsewhere a political backlash has developed around girls’ and women’s access to abortion, there are actually global counter-trends,

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such as the recent efforts by the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Torture calling denial of abortion services, when such services are available, equivalent to “torture” and a form of gender discrimination. Given the toxic role that US politics has played globally in denying women safe and legal access to the full range of reproductive rights, including abortion, it is clearly time for women’s rights activists in the United States, in particular, to make access to safe and legal abortion a centerpiece of their political agenda, both in their own country and globally. More generally, though, safe, legal, affordable access to this vital reproductive right needs to be prioritized, and spoken about in bold, clear, and unapologetic terms in every forum that considers the human rights of the world’s women and girls.

Note 1 According to the 2014 report of Center for Reproductive Rights, in Africa, the following countries have eased legal restrictions on abortion since 1994: Burkina Faso, South Africa, Guinea, Chad, Mali, Ethiopia, Swaziland, Niger, Togo, Kenya, Lesotho, Mauritius, Rwanda, and Somalia. In Asia, Cambodia, Nepal, Bhutan, Iran, Fiji, Indonesia, and Timor-Leste have done so. In Europe, when the 1994 ICPD PoA was adopted, the majority of countries across Europe already permitted abortion without restriction as to reason or on socioeconomic grounds. Since 1994, a number of countries throughout Europe have further liberalized their abortion laws or enacted measures to ensure greater access to abortion services. These include Albania, Switzerland, Portugal, Monaco, Spain, and Luxembourg. In Latin America and the Caribbean, Guyana, Saint Lucia, Colombia, Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay have eased legal restrictions on abortion since 1994. While the vast majority of abortion laws are determined at the national level, a few countries with federal systems regulate abortion at the state level—namely, Australia, Mexico, and the United States. These countries have seen a significant number of legislative changes to their state-level abortion laws during the past two decades.

References Ahman, E., & Shah, I. (2002). Unsafe abortion: Worldwide estimates for 2000. Reproductive Health Matters, 10, 13–17. Balmert, J. (2017). What a Trump presidency will mean for abortion access. Cincinnati Inquirer, January 17. Retrieved from www.cincinnati.com/story/news/politics/elec tions/2017/01/17/what-trump-presidency-will-mean-for-abortion-access/96403486/ Balz, D. (2010). The GOP takeover in the states. Washington Post, November 13. Barot, S. (2013). Abortion restrictions in U.S. foreign aid: The history and harms of the Helms Amendment. Guttmacher Policy Review, 16(3). Retrieved from www. guttmacher.org/about/gpr/2013/09/abortion-restrictions-us-foreign-aid-history-andharms-helms-amendment Barot, S., & Cohen, S. A. (2015). The Global Gag Rule and fights over funding UNFPA: The issues that won’t go away. Retrieved from www.guttmacher.org/about/gpr/2015/06/ global-gag-rule-and-fights-over-funding-unfpa-issues-wont-go-away Berkeley Library. (2018). Birth control pioneer. The Emma Goldman Papers. Retrieved from www.lib.berkeley.edu/goldman/MeetEmmaGoldman/birthcontrolpioneer.html

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Bolourian, L. (2013). UN report classifies lack of access to abortion as “torture”. MIC. Retrieved from http://mic.com/articles/30925/un-report-classifies-lack-of-access-toabortion-as-torture#.OGtTOvTCV Cauterucci, C. (2017). The Women’s March on Washington has released an unapologetically progressive platform. Slate, January 12. Center for Reproductive Rights. (2003). The Global Gag Rule’s effects on NGOs in 56 countries. Retrieved from www.reproductiverights.org/document/the-global-gag-ruleseffects-on-ngos-in-56-countries Center for Reproductive Rights. (2014a). A global view of abortion rights. Retrieved from www.reproductiverights.org/sites/crr.civicactions.net/files/documents/WAM_Global View_2014%20EN_0.pdf Center for Reproductive Rights. (2014b). Abortion worldwide: 20 years of reform. Retrieved from http://reproductiverights.org/sites/crr.civicactions.net/files/documents/20Years_ Reform_Report.pdf Doan, A. E. (2007). Opposition and intimidation: The abortion wars and strategies of political harassment. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. EngenderHealth. (2011). Raise your voice: End the Global Gag Rule! Retrieved from www. engenderhealth.org/media/info/globalgagrule-video.php Enloe, C. (2018). The big push: Exposing and challenging the persistence of patriarchy. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Gentleman, A. (2016). UN calls on Ireland to reform abortion laws after landmark ruling. The Guardian, June 9. Retrieved from www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/09/ire land-abortion-laws-violated-human-rights-says-un Grimes, D. A., Benson, J., Singh, S., Romero, M., Ganatra, B., Okonofua, F. E., & Shah, I. (2006). Unsafe abortion: The preventable pandemic. The Lancet Sexual and Reproductive Health Series, 368, 1,908–1,917. Guttmacher Institute. (2015). Fact sheet: Induced abortion worldwide. Retrieved from www.guttmacher.org/pubs/fb_IAW.html#6 Guttmacher Institute. (2016). Fact sheet: Induced abortion in the United States. Retrieved from www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/induced-abortion-united-states Hetterly, E. G. (2013). Reproductive rights of young married women in urban slums of Bangladesh. Retrieved from http://dspace.udel.edu/bitstream/handle/19716/12675/Hetterly,% 20Elizabeth.pdf Islam, U. (2013). Unsafe abortion putting women’s health at stake. Dhaka Tribune, September 9. Retrieved from www.dhakatribune.com/uncategorized/2013/09/09/unsafeabortion-putting-womens-health-at-stake Jacobs, T. (2018). More evidence that racism and sexism were key to Trump’s victory. Pacific Standard, April 4. Retrieved from https://psmag.com/social-justice/moreevidence-that-racism-and-sexism-were-key-to-trump-victory Jerman, J., Jones, R. K., & Onda, T. (2016). Characteristics of U.S. abortion patients in 2014 and changes since 2008. Retrieved from www.guttmacher.org/report/characteris tics-us-abortion-patients-2014#full-article Joffe, C. (2017). Putting Hobby Lobby in context: The erratic career of birth control in the United States. In L. Wade (Ed.), Assigned: Life with gender (pp. 145–149). New York: W. W. Norton. Knudsen, L. M. (2006). Reproductive rights in a global context: South Africa, Uganda, Peru, Denmark, United States, Vietnam, Jordan. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Lerner, G. (1986). The creation of patriarchy. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

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Levy, G. (2018). Pence sees end to abortion “in our time.” US News and World Report, February 27. Retrieved from www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2018-02-27/ pence-sees-end-to-abortion-in-our-time Lind, M., & Hadi, S. T. (2014). Silence and the criminalization of victimization: On the need for an international feminist criminology. In B. Arrigo & H. Bersot (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of international crime and justice studies (pp. 33–52). New York: Routledge. Liptak, A. (2014). Justices rule in favor of Hobby Lobby. New York Times, June 30. Retrieved from www.nytimes.com/2014/07/01/us/hobby-lobby-case-supreme-courtcontraception.html Liptak, A. (2016). Supreme Court strikes down Texas abortion restriction. New York Times, June 27. Retrieved from www.nytimes.com/2016/06/28/us/supreme-court-texasabortion.html Maguire, D. C. (Ed.). (2003). Sacred rights: The case for contraception and abortion in the world religions. Cary, NC: Oxford University Press. Martin, N. (2016). Game changer: The best analysis of the Supreme Court’s abortion decision. ProPublica, June 30. Retrieved from http://nmpoliticalreport.com/55203/gamechanger-the-best-analysis-of-the-supreme-courts-abortion-decision/ Mishra, Y. (2001). Unsafe abortions and women’s health, Economic and Political Weekly, 36 (40), 3,814–3,817. Mlitt, D. W. (1980). Margaret Sanger: Birth control’s successful revolutionary, American Journal of Public Health, 70, 736–742. Nasaw, D. (2009). Obama reverses “global gag rule” on family planning organizations. The Guardian, January 23. Retrieved from www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jan/23/ barack-obama-foreign-abortion-aid Nash, E., Gold, R. B., Rowan, R., Rathbun, G., & Vierboom, Y. (2014). Laws affecting reproductive health and rights: 2013 state policy review. Retrieved from www. guttmacher.org/statecenter/updates/2013/statetrends42013.html National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (2018). The safety and quality of abortion care in the United States. Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences. Retrieved from www.nationalacademies.org/hmd/Reports/2018/the-safety-andquality-of-abortion-care-in-the-united-states.aspx Peters, J. (2018). Under Trump, an office meant to help refugees enters the abortion wars. New York Times, April 5. Retrieved from www.nytimes.com/2018/04/05/us/politics/ refugee-office-abortion-trump.html Planned Parenthood Federation of America. (2014). Roe v. Wade: Its history and impact. Retrieved from www.plannedparenthood.org/files/3013/9611/5870/Abortion_Roe_ History.pdf Population Action International. (2018). Understanding Trump’s Global Gag Rule. Retrieved from http://trumpglobalgagrule.pai.org/understanding-the-policy/ Renzetti, C. M., Curran, D. J., & Maier, S. L. (2012). Women, men, and society. Boston, MA: Pearson. Rovner, J. (2018). In Trump’s first year anti-abortion forces make strides. Health News: National Public Radio, January 22. Retrieved from www.npr.org/sections/health-shots /2018/01/22/579661047/in-trumps-first-year-anti-abortion-forces-make-stridesNews Schlitt, S. (2011). Rights—not criminalization—for girls and women, says UN health expert. Amnesty International. Retrieved from www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/ 2011/10/rights-not-criminalization-for-girls-and-women-says-un-health-expert/

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Schur, E. M. (1984). Labeling women deviant: Gender, stigma, and social control. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Sinding, S. S. (2007). Overview and perspective. In W. C. Robinson & J. Shivakumar (Eds.), Global family planning revolution: Three decades of population policies and programs (pp. 1–12). Herndon, VA: World Bank Publications. Solinger, R. (2005). Pregnancy and power: A short history of reproductive politics in America. New York: New York University Press. Sperling, J. (2018). Idaho, Kentucky anti-abortion measures gain ground, while Mississippi bill put on pause. NBC News, March 23. Retrieved from www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news /idaho-kentucky-anti-abortion-measures-gain-ground-while-mississippi-bill-n859516 Stevens, M. (2018). Judge temporarily stops U.S. from blocking undocumented teenagers’ abortions. New York Times, March 31. Retrieved from www.nytimes.com/2018/03/ 31/us/abortion-immigrant-teens.html Sullivan, P. (2016). Abortion is weakness for Clinton VP favorite. The Hill, June 22. Retrieved from http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/284379-abortion-is-weaknessfor-clinton-vp-favorite Talking Points News. (2018). Porter: The Trump White House’s women problem. The Week, February 23. Totenberg, N. (2017). Judge Gorsuch’s writings signal he will be a conservative on social issues. National Public Radio, March 16. Retrieved from www.npr.org/2017/03/16/ 519501771/judge-gorsuchs-writings-signal-he-would-be-a-conservative-on-socialissues United Nations. (2014). Reproductive rights are human rights. Retrieved from www.ohchr.org /Documents/Publications/NHRIHandbook.pdf United Nations Population Fund. (2007). Supporting the constellation of reproductive rights. Retrieved from www.unfpa.org/resources/supporting-constellation-reproductive-rights #sthash.965vSw4s.dpuf Wagner, J., & Eilperin, J. (2017). Once a populist, Trump governs like a conservative republican. Washington Post, December 6. Retrieved from www.washingtonpost.com /politics/once-a-populist-trump-governs-like-a-conservative-republican/2017/12/05/ e73c6106-d902-11e7-b1a8-62589434a581_story.html?utm_term=.db7d35fcae53 White, D. (2016). Donald Trump on abortion: “I’m saying women punish themselves.” Time. Retrieved from http://time.com/4340358/donald-trump-women-abortionspunish-well-being Woellert, L. (2018). Trump’s speech to March for Life marks a U-turn on abortion. Politico, January 17. Retrieved from www.politico.com/story/2018/01/17/trump-march-forlife-2018-34384

10 RESISTING ECOCIDE Engaging in the politics of the future Rob White

Introduction The concept of ecocide refers to extensive damage, destruction to or loss of ecosystems of a given territory, and includes both natural (for example, pest infestation of an eco-system) and anthropogenic (that is, as a result of human activity) causes for the harm (Higgins, 2010, 2012). Recently the concept has also been applied to the global scale insofar as the consequences of climate change are planet-wide, transformative and catastrophic (White, 2018a). From a legal and criminological perspective, if such harms occur as a result of human agency, then it is argued by some that these acts or omissions should be defined, at the very least, as a crime against peace (Higgins, Short & South, 2013). Resisting crimes of ecocide is motivated by the need to respond to a singularly important trend: the existing planetary environment is rapidly being destroyed. This is because the four elements that sustain life – earth, air, water and sun (energy) – are under severe adverse pressures. Fundamental environmental problems stem from the systemic extraction and contamination of natural resources, and one consequence is the diminishment of ecosystem services generally. Meanwhile, our world is heating up, and along with the rampant plunder of resources and widespread pollution, the result is that the whole planet is inexorably moving toward a radically altered ecological state. The victims are biotic (living creatures and plants) and abiotic (landscapes), and include humans (us) and non-human environmental entities (animals, rivers). No one and nothing can escape the impact of the transgressions presently impinging upon the biosphere. The pervasive destruction of natural amenities (forests, lakes, rivers, oceans, mountain tops and marshlands), systematic pollution of the environment (air, land and water) and rampant exploitation of plant and animal species (via

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destruction of habitat, illegal and legal trade, and introduction of genetically modified organisms) is not only bad in its own right – destroying eco-systems and leading to species extinction – but simultaneously contributes to the present and looming climate chaos. Deforestation provides a case in point, as it is a major contributor to carbon emissions and the reduction in ecosystem resilience (McGarrell & Gibbs, 2014). This is ecocide on a planetary scale. The perpetration of these environmental harms is systemic (global capitalism) and agentic (transnational corporations, nation-states). Real institutions and real people are doing real damage, under the cover of ‘business as usual’, that is leading to our collective demise (Tombs & Whyte, 2015). This is the reality. They are, therefore, our most destructive, and powerful, enemies. As Bill McKibben (quoted in Mitchell, 2016) has said in relation to climate change: ‘We’d won the argument in 1990. The science was crystal clear on what was going on. We were not in an argument, we were in a fight, and the fight – as fights always are – was about money and power.’ In this fight, there is little room for ‘neutrality’. The stakes are high and the consequences dire; indeed, they are so regardless of final outcome. Yet basic survival is the ultimate prize, and all are implicated in how and whether this is achieved or not. This chapter considers activism in the context of ongoing struggles for social and ecological justice. It assumes that the reader agrees that: (1) the environment is worth saving, (2) its demise is fundamentally due to the imperatives of capitalist growth and corporate bottom lines, (3) the nation-state is both partner in this destruction, but also potential counter-weight to the power of sectional business interests, and (4) the most important pillar of counter-hegemonic action is activism. Before considering the contours of the latter, the chapter first outlines a radical perspective on eco-justice – namely, a critical green criminology. Resisting ecocide involves both considerations about how we understand the world as well as how we think it can be changed.

A critical green criminology perspective A distinctive critical green criminology perspective consists of three broad approaches, focussing respectively on political economy, ecology and species justice (White, 2018b). These are summarised in Table 10.1. As indicated, within each of these conceptual domains there are particular emphases that provide theoretical understanding and interpretation of environmental crime and harm. These conceptual building blocks provide the foundations for particular types of substantive analysis and identification of the key targets for social action. These approaches are critical in the sense that they tend to challenge existing power relationships (between citizens and corporations; between humans and non-human animals), they are propelled by an urge to radically alter existing ways of thinking about the natural world and the place of humans within this, and they are oriented toward major social and economic transformations. At the

TABLE 10.1 Critical green criminology approaches

Approach orientation

Description

Conceptual focus

Examples

Political economy – study of harm perpetrated by nation-states and transnational corporations

Investigation of the interplay of politics and economics in explaining social behaviour and environmental issues

Treadmill of production Commodification of nature Corporate colonisation of nature State-corporate crime

Economy versus ecology as regards resource extraction and contamination of the environment Nature has no intrinsic value, but is treated as only having worth insofar as it can be exchanged for money in the market Land grabs and the transformation of nature through application of technologies such as genetically modified crops Close collusion between private companies (such as oil, gas and energy companies) and particular nation-states (through subsidies, failure to regulate)

Ecology – study of harm to abiotic components (air, water, soils, atoms and molecules) and biotic components (plants, animals, bacteria and fungi) of ecosystems

Investigation of the effects of human intervention on eco-systems, ecological sustainability and the division of social practices into environmentally benign and destructive

Eco-global criminology Eco-justice Ecocide Climate change

Transgressions against humans, specific eco-systems, and animals and plants are such that all are connected in some way, and environmental harm in one place will have repercussions for those living in other places Includes consideration of environment rights and environmental justice (humans), ecological citizenship and ecological justice (ecosystems), and animal rights and species justice (non-human animals and plants) Attempts to criminalise human activities that destroy and diminish the (Continued )

TABLE 10.1 (Cont.)

Approach orientation

Description

Conceptual focus

Examples wellbeing and health of ecosystems and species within these, including humans The key perpetrators and responders to global warming tend to be one and the same: namely, nation-states and transnational corporations, both of which are primarily concerned with maintaining ‘business as usual’

Species – study of both the individual and aggregate rights and status of plant and animal species

Investigation of preservation and conservation, and rights and stewardship in relation to species

Biodiversity Speciesism Theriocide Habitat

The loss of biodiversity in all three of its main components – genes, species and ecosystems – continues at a rapid pace today, and the principal pressures directly driving biodiversity loss are either constant or increasing in intensity Need to expose the ill treatment and abuse of animals, and to forge new understandings of the human–nonhuman animal relationship through consideration of animal rights and the status of animals generally Multiple ways and justifications for the human killing of different non-human animals Destroying species home lands is a profoundly harmful activity that intrinsically constitutes a form of abuse and harm.

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heart of critical green criminology is acknowledgement of the importance of social action, political contestation and ‘speaking truth to power’. The point is to not only understand the world, but to change it. Theoretically informed practice and intervention is vital to this.

Transformative politics A distinguishing characteristic of critical green criminology is that it generally takes an oppositional stance in relation to much of the work of conventional criminology, and also many contemporary policy developments in the field of criminal justice. As well, it exhibits a strong orientation toward transformational politics, which involves movements that attempt to change the status quo, and as part of this to create new social relations and new institutional arrangements (White, 2018b). It thus challenges mainstream ideas, and existing policies and practices. It is action-oriented.

An action agenda Translated into an action agenda, the mission of critical green criminology is to engage with and map out a strategic plan that will have immediate and longerlasting effect, that builds capacity, and that incorporates staged transitions toward achieving the end-goal of social and ecological justice. Tactically, this means engagement in a series of reforms across the criminal justice domain. Potential actions supportive of eco-justice goals in relation to law reform, policing, courts and social activism provide a snapshot of initiatives and interventions oriented toward responding to climate change (White & Kramer, 2015). For example, in the area of law reform, measures such as public interest litigation and calls for criminalisation of environmental harm via concepts such as ecocide provide interventions in the short to long term. Similarly, in regard to law enforcement, one can envisage the establishment of environmental crime task forces to tackle specific types of environmental crime. Expansion of specialist environment courts and tribunals as well as development of a wide range of sanctions and remedies are also important areas for further agitation in pursuit of robust responses to environmental crimes. All of these measures, in turn, need to be underpinned by public pressure and collective social action, and with interventions that span protest actions through to collaborations between state agencies and international non-government organisations. This kind of mapping exercise is essential as regards identifying potential courses of action. However, the politics of intervention as a topic in its own right demands further explanation and exploration. For example, there are frequently differences in opinion over the nature of global political economy, and over the tactics and strategies most likely to bring about desired social and ecological transformations (reflecting longstanding differences within the social democratic movements and among environmental activists, and sometimes

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expressed as the tension between ‘revolution’ and ‘reform’). These manifest in different approaches and responses to environmental harm. Indeed, there are several ways in which the issues pertaining to ecocide and the prevention of environmental harm have been framed (White, 2008). Implicit within these approaches are assumptions about the capacity for reform within existing systems, the types of transitional measures that can be drawn upon in building new societal arrangements, and who the key actors and institutions are as regards significant social change. For instance, one approach is to chart out existing environmental legislation and provide a sustained socio-legal analysis of specific breaches of law, the role of environmental law enforcement agencies, and the difficulties of and opportunities for using criminal law against environmental offenders. This means essentially working within existing systems of social control in order to highlight their shortcomings and to suggest appropriate legislative and administrative responses. Using the ‘big stick’, and using it appropriately, is a key emphasis in this approach. By contrast, another approach places greater emphasis on social regulation as the crucial mechanism to prevent and curtail environmental harm, and this involves attempts to reform existing systems of production and consumption through a constellation of measures, including bringing non-government and community groups directly into the regulatory process. This approach is less focused on use of coercive force than civic engagement and multiple public and private pressures to engender better compliance with existing laws and regulations. An important part of this is to encourage corporate-level operations that are based upon ethical practice and ecological sensitivities. A third approach presses the need for transnational activism, with an emphasis on fundamental social change. What counts here is engagement in strategies that will challenge dominant authority structures and those modes of production that are linked to environmental degradation and destruction, negative transformations of nature, species decline and threats to biodiversity. Social movements are seen as vital in dealing with instances of gross environmental harm, and the point of intervention is to undermine and/or overthrow existing practices and ways of being and relating. These varied emphases on social control, social regulation and social transformation are not, however, necessarily mutually exclusive. They can feed into each other and occur simultaneously. Nonetheless, there exist major political divisions within the broad spectrum of green criminological work (and indeed, within environmental activist and green political movements), and these have major implications as to whether action will be taken in collaboration with capitalist institutions and state authorities, or whether it will be directed against these institutions and authorities. In practice, many green criminologists and non-governmental organisations in fact do both. How they do so is contingent upon immediate local context and wider international developments.

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At the end of the day, however, visions of the future need to be construed in such a way that environmental activism is not only reactive to environmental destruction and the exploitation of humans and animals, but offers direction for ‘where to from here’. This needs to involve several interrelated projects. One is to identify the multiple sites for social action and intervention on relevant environmental issues (as indicated below). The other is to map out the values and kinds of institutions that can be foreshadowed in and by our actions to change the world. This is both utopian in orientation (in the sense of prefiguring an ideal future) and driven by identifiable and achievable goals and demands (that is, it must have concrete and measurable outcomes).

Activism and political struggle Negotiating the tactical and strategic minefields of activist politics requires appreciation of a constantly shifting political ground. This demands a modicum of tactical and strategic nous, and an ability to fight and to compromise and to choose the right thing to do at the right moment. Importantly, there are certain ongoing dynamics in regard to social change, and, conversely, on the part of the powerful, maintenance of the status quo. This toing-and-froing is marked by constant change in tactics and strategies by key protagonists, the use of a wide range of measures across the relevant domains, and persistent ideological struggles over core values and diverse interests. The dialectics of social change with respect to activism and resistance are illustrated in Table 10.2 through consideration of use and control of public spaces, the range of measures mobilised by different parties, and the nature of ideological struggles.

TABLE 10.2 Tactics and strategies of key environmental protagonists

Activist

State

Corporate

Policing practices that narrow spaces

Private ownership of spaces

Pamphlets

Arrest

Greenwashing

Direct action

Counter-terrorism

Litigation

Ecotage

Torture

Violation of human rights

Ecological citizenship

National interest

Economic interest

Public interest

Public order

Private property

Green scare

Eco-terrorism

Threat to jobs

Uses of public spaces Mass demonstrations in public spaces Range of measures

Ideological struggles

Source: White (2013).

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In conceptually unpacking the struggles associated with social resistance, it is useful to consider specific examples, such as the struggles within and over particular places. Public spaces are battle grounds for public opinion, and the tactical use of ‘space’ is reflected in attempts to open it up for democratic purposes (for example, social networking, mass demonstrations), to restrict it according to the security dictates of public order policing (for example, penning techniques, banning of social media), and to close it off completely under the rubric of private property (for example, corporate buildings and grounds, private security) (Baker, 2011). In the struggles over political spaces and actual physical places, measures of activism and counter-activism range from the mild to the extreme: delivery of pamphlets through to ecotage on the part of activists; arrest, use of counterterrorism powers and torture on the part of states; and greenwashing through to violation of human rights (including extra-judicial killings and rape of local villagers) on the part of corporations (Boekhout van Solinge, 2010; Clark, 2009; Robin, 2010). The ideological struggle has many different components. It can include differing emphasis on ecological citizenship (for example, popular concerns about planetary wellbeing), the national interest (for example, narrow chauvinist concerns of the state elite), and economic interest (for example, usually defined to the benefit of profit-oriented enterprises). The public interest may be set against public order concerns, which in turn may be linked to neo-liberal exaltations in support of specifically bourgeois notions of private property (that simultaneously deny general interests based upon the public good). The contest over and against hegemonic ideas is essential and ongoing. Hegemony refers to processes of contestation in which social life is practically organised in accordance with specific dominant meanings and values (Gramsci, 1971; Williams, 1977). It is a continuous process of socialisation in which the influence of ruling class thought is pervasive (via cultural institutions), although this is neither monolithic nor absolute. For example, the ‘big lie’ technique works – repeat something enough times and people will start to believe it. Call disagreement ‘fake news’ and, over time, the legitimacy of ‘facts’ may be eroded. There are various facets to how commonsense knowledge is socially constructed and manipulated. Counter-hegemonic action provides a foil to these. But the challenges are great. One of the signature attributes of the hegemonic process, for instance, is that is allows for contradictory and fragmented notions to be combined at the level of lived experience. For example, people may simultaneously reject the message of climate science (in part due to the push-back by industry and other powerful interest groups) and yet recognise that things are nonetheless changing. Commonsense experience is likewise also constituted through emotions, and ‘the affective’ is powerful in terms of both driving climate change denial (people are frightened by the thought of confronting the consequences of global warming) and specific responses to the threats posed by climate change (the emphasis on defending one’s own turf and interests at the expense of others). Thus, the rational and the irrational are intertwined at the level of lived experience in

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ways that are paradoxical and nonsensical, but which nonetheless are integral to constructions of neo-liberal subjectivity. The conjunction of economic polarisation and ecological calamity, fostered and propelled by global capitalism, is heightening social inequalities and geographical disparities. It is an age of great uncertainties and insecurities. A major political problem for environmental activists is that ‘security’ is being materially constructed and popularly sold on the basis of ‘dog eat dog’ and ‘protect what you have’. Donald Trump’s election slogan ‘Make America Great Again’ taps into this sentiment. These attitudes are also being reproduced in the commonsense response to environmental destruction and climate change. It is a recipe for the construction of a ‘fortress Earth’ mentality in which self-interest is narrowly construed as preserving perceived local and national privilege (White, 2014). The key message is to look after ourselves first and protect our particular fortress (whatever form it takes), because no one else will. It is a powerful message that resonates particularly well with vulnerable sections of the white working class. Any counter-hegemonic strategy must acknowledge and respond to the attractions and appeal of the far right insofar as these are grounded in real insecurities. For environmental activists, it is easy to criticise already existing environmental harms generated by global capitalism. At some stage, however, there is a need to articulate not only what we are ‘against’, but also what we are ‘for’ (Albert, 2014). As shown below, this can take the form of specific demands, such as those proposed by the Climate Justice Network. In part, these too promise a better life, one that is more secure, pleasant, healthy and good. ‘Make the Planet Healthy Again’ does have practical effect and transparent benefits. Overarching these demands, the fight for climate justice must fundamentally involve assertion of democratic control over land, air, water and energy. This means divesting present corporate owners of their private property and reasserting the public interest. Just a handful of transnational corporations contribute a significant proportion of the world’s carbon emissions. These companies are responsible for more greenhouse gases than most countries. Collectively, they are also destroying forests, polluting air, land and water, ripping up the Earth, and displacing whole communities. This is occurring everywhere around the world, from the Arctic to the Amazon. They must be stopped. As part of this, divestment must include imposition of community control over the means of life, as well as curtailing investment in dirty industries. Our lives and futures depend on this, and it is community action that matters most in the fight to take back what is rightfully ours. Internationally, most political attention is on nation-states and, as articulated in the Paris Agreement, interpreting and putting into practice the notion of ‘common but differentiated responsibility’. Environmental activists are pressuring nation-states to accept their fair share of the financial burden in countering global warming, for needed expenditures on both mitigation and adaptation strategies. However, there is a central dilemma here that also needs to be

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addressed. Namely, many of the wealthy nation-states are running huge budget deficits, and accordingly are disinclined to spend money outside their own domestic sphere. Simultaneously, major tax cuts, such as recently seen in the United States, privilege the corporate sector and the wealthy, thus contributing to overall budget shortfalls. It is already the case that transnational corporations pay little or no tax, and many shift money around globally to avoid tax – as demonstrated in the Panama and the Paradise Papers that deal with the clandestine financial wheeling and dealing of the world’s elite. Corporations must also be held to account, not only nation-states. This, too, must be integral to activist politics.

Spectrum politics In listening to and talking with experienced and longstanding climate change activists, it is clear that engagement in transformation will require collaborations across the political spectrum (Stilwell, 2018). Such ‘spectrum politics’, however, has to be constructed on a clear conceptual and organisational basis. Working in conjunction with others does not mean identifying with their sectional interests; rather, it is about joining forces strategically in order to progress specific demands and specific courses of action. In regard to climate change agitation, for example, Climate Change Criminology involves and supports public engagement and social interventions that challenge the status quo by focusing on climate justice for humans and non-human environmental entities (White, 2018a). Two key concepts are central to these efforts: the democratisation of mitigation and adaptation strategies in support of those that are premised upon universal human and ecological interests, and the idea that there are multiple sites of intervention, including working in and against the state. Joining up diverse social forces (for example, farmers, Indigenous people, students, environmentalists) in support of climate justice goals and objectives is not only acceptable, but essential, as are rallies, protests and active social media use that provide opposition to hegemonic policies and institutions. Cross-class alliances and collaborations also make entirely good sense in the context of the fight for universal human interests. Certain events or potentialities generate dangers, risks and threats that reach beyond any single class or group. Nuclear war is one. Another is climate change. While the continued deterioration of the planetary environment is best explained through class analysis of capitalist power and interests, specific fractions of capital and particular wealthy individuals and business people can and do see the perils of continuing along the present economic trajectory. It is in their interests as humans and as members of the wider Earth community to join in the fight against the forces propelling us further and further into global warming. This makes them potential allies in our struggles. Spectrum politics thus needs to be multi-pronged. This simultaneously means keeping the focus on the main game – eco-justice ideals – rather than competing with and/or attacking fellow travellers whose activism we may not entirely

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agree with. To put it differently, there may be different theories of social change that range from bold declarations about the need to overthrow capitalism and revolutionary action outside the mainstream corridors of power to an emphasis on more gradual and conciliatory gestures such as changing consumption habits and working within existing forums such as the United Nations. Yet these varied tactics and strategic orientations all have their place in the wider struggle. It is the totality of activism that matters. There may be tiered boundaries and flanks – some on the outside of the conventional, some on the inside, and some who traverse the outside–inside divide – but it is the overall weight of engagement and resistance and challenge that ultimately counts. While tactics might differ, the important thing is to agree on common objectives, regardless of disagreements as to how to attain these. The more specific the objectives, the more scope there is to build communities of practice around particular initiatives. Consider, for instance, the key demands (abridged below) of the Climate Justice Network (Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice, 2018):1 1. Fight for the transformation of energy systems. 2. Fight for food sovereignty, for people’s rights to sufficient, healthy and appropriate food and sustainable food systems. 3. Fight for people’s rights to sufficient, affordable, clean, quality water 4. Fight for just transitions for all workers, beginning with those in the dirty and harmful energy industries. 5. Fight for people’s safety and security of homes and livelihoods from climate disasters. 6. Fight for the social, political, economic, cultural and reproductive rights and empowerment of all our people and communities. 7. Fight for mobilisation and delivery of climate finance by all states. 8. Fight for reparations for climate debt owed by those most responsible for climate change. 9. Fight for an end to deception and false solutions in mitigation and adaptation. 10. Fight for an end to policies, decisions and measures by governments, elites, institutions and corporations (domestic, regional and global) that increase the vulnerabilities of people and planet to impacts of climate change. 11. Fight to stop the commodification and financialisation of nature and nature’s functions. 12. Fight for an international climate agreement that is rooted in science, equity and justice. The first demand actually translates nicely into movements away from centralised energy systems to de-centralised systems that are also community-run for community benefit. Solar power at the local level is one example of such initiatives. More generally, each demand also carries with it the potential to make

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things better. In this regard, activism can be informed by an emphasis on the positive aspects of change – clean air makes us feel good! From Beijing to Hamburg, Bangkok to Sydney, many will appreciate the benefits that flow from this. In a similar vein, the ‘350.org’ campaign (350.org, 2018) has three clear demands: keep carbon in the ground; help build a new, more equitable zerocarbon economy; and pressure governments into limiting emissions. Three basic principles inform the work of this campaign: Principle #1 We believe in climate justice Principle #2 We’re stronger when we collaborate Principle #3 Mass mobilizations make change Taking a stand involves deciding whose side you are on, who you can work with, and what the specific objectives of the campaign are. Again, specificity and clarity in political purpose and campaign demand are essential to building mass opposition to global warming.

Speaking truth to power Standing up for what you believe, especially when the protagonists are rich, powerful and dogmatic, is always going to be hard, and this includes for those involved in resisting ecocide. All these struggles require considerable courage and strong commitment. Politics is about necessity and choice, winning and losing, timing and opportunity. For activism today, it is notable, and hope-inspiring, that the political landscape is seemingly capable of rapid shifts in political sentiment. Thankfully, this applies to movements to the left as well as the right. The origins of the phrase ‘speak truth to power’ stem from an old Quaker saying from the 18th century that was reproduced in the book Speak Truth to Power: A Quaker Search for an Alternative to Violence, published in 1955. Quakers, who practice pacifism, have long played a key role in both the abolition of slavery and women’s rights movements. It is fitting, then, that the latest incarnation of speaking truth to power is likewise oriented toward alternatives to violence and the putting down of arms. The ‘power’ in this instance is the National Rifle Association (NRA), the major gun lobby in the United States. Those who are speaking up against guns, especially military-style guns, now count among their number survivors of the February 14, 2018 school massacre in which 17 of their classmates were killed. Fearless in their demeanour and withering in their criticism, these students are leading a new wave of resistance to a mightily entrenched gun culture in the US.

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The critique has been twofold, but simple: • •

Stop the guns. Guns are the problem, not mental illness, victim precipitation, lack of security or unarmed teachers. Stop the guns, stop the killing. Shame on the NRA. It is time for change, and the NRA and politicians taking money from the NRA need to be held to account. Their efforts are directed at stopping needed reform. To stop the killing means that major changes in gun laws are needed. Change the laws.

Passionate, uncompromising speeches, extensive television coverage, collective resistance to government efforts to keep them in the classroom, expert use of social media, and the translation of their anger and grief into political action have garnered for the students a voice on gun control that is unprecedented in recent memory – so much so that major companies are now joining the boycott of the NRA. This campaign is hitting the powerful where it hurts – so much so that the victims of the tragedy have been transformed into villains in the eyes of some: students and their families are receiving daily death threats from gun supporters. Meanwhile, the NRA is in attack mode with regard to those speaking out against their interests. Yet it is on the back foot, since the harder it pushes, the more traction that is gained by the anti-gun movement. The actions of these students illustrate the ways in which mass mobilisation can circumvent and short-circuit even the most powerful of interest groups. There are general lessons to be learned here for environmental activists, as well as what can be gleaned from other campaigns such as the #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo movements. Some of these include: • • • • • • • •

Study social movements and revolutionary upsurges – learn ‘what works’, ‘what does not work’ and ‘what sometimes works’. Study corporate and state responses to activism – learn what most disturbs, annoys and unsettles the powers that be (their pain is our blueprint). Large numbers of people will connect around strategic goals that have practical effect – demands need to be concrete and specific. Target the public, not politicians – the former will lead, the latter will, eventually, follow. Articulate key principles that prioritise certain values over others – lives matter, not guns. Channel anger and grief into meaningful outlets that hold out the promise of change – victims voices are powerful and integral to social change movements. Use the mediascape cleverly – images and messages ought to be striking and simple. Base action on the involvement of those living and working at the grassroots – bottom-up is the best way to tackle the top-down.

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Environmental activism is complex and multifaceted, with many different players at the local, regional and international levels. Resisting ecocide requires the marshalling of as many countervailing forces as possible so that speaking truth to power translates into concrete institutional change.

Conclusion For many worldwide, life is already short, nasty and brutish as war, famine, enforced migration and ecological disaster collapse the certainties of work, education, family and place. From a global perspective, living conditions for the majority are worsening by the day. From Asia to Africa, South America to Southern Europe, structural inequality and political indifference are generating new searches for meaningfulness and salvation. Even the heartlands of privilege in North America and Northern Europe are experiencing mass disillusionment with mainstream political and economic regimes. Things will only get worse as global warming increases and environmental conditions deteriorate. The world is at a crossroads. The politics of fear and repression constitute a major stumbling block to what must be done to right the contemporary wrongs. Yet the failure of such politics to deliver the goods, the chronic threats to water supply, food and air quality, the ever-present disasters of flood and heat all portend that something must give. Under such circumstances, increasing worldwide recognition that ecological and social justice necessarily go hand-inhand means that the climate wars are yet to be won or lost. Therein lies our hope; therein lies our future.

Note 1 Since the URL cited in the References entry for Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice (2018) was accessed in March 2018, it appears that this site has been shut down, although the reasons for this are unclear.

References 350.org. (2018). ‘Overview’ and ‘Principles’. Retrieved from www.350.org/about/ Albert, M. (2014). Realizing hope: Life beyond capitalism. London: Zed Books. Baker, D. (2011). A case study of policing responses to camps for climate action: Variations, perplexities, and challenges for policing. International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice, 35(2), 141–165. Boekhout van Solinge, T. (2010). Equatorial deforestation as a harmful practice and a criminological issue. In R. White (Ed.), Global environmental harm: Criminological perspectives (pp. 20–36). Cullompton, UK: Willan Publishing. Clark, R. (2009). Environmental disputes and human rights violations: A role for criminologists. Contemporary Justice Review, 12(2), 129–146. Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice. (2018). Fight for climate justice! Retrieved from www.demandclimatejustice.org Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks. New York: International Publishers.

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Higgins, P. (2010). Eradicating ecocide: Laws and governance to prevent the destruction of our planet. London: Shepheard-Walwyn Publishers. Higgins, P. (2012). Earth is our business: Changing the rules of the game. London: ShepheardWalwyn Publishers. Higgins, P., Short, D., & South, N. (2013). Protecting the planet: A proposal for a law of ecocide. Crime, Law, and Social Change, 59(3), 251–266. McGarrell, E., & Gibbs, C. (2014). Conservation criminology, environmental crime, and risk: An application to climate change. In Oxford Handbooks Online (Subject: Criminology and Criminal Justice, Criminological Theories). DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/ 9780199935383.54 Mitchell, T. (2016). Sketching the fight: Bill McKibben on how to save the planet. New Matilda, April 24. Robin, M.-M. (2010). The world according to Monsanto: Pollution, corruption and the control of our food supply. New York: The New Press. Stilwell, M. (2018). Climate justice: International civil society perspectives, Presentation at Imagining a Different Future, Climate Justice Conference. Hobart, Tasmania, February 9. Tombs, S., & Whyte, D. (2015). The corporate criminal: Why corporations must be abolished. London: Routledge. White, R. (2008). Crimes against nature: Environmental criminology and ecological justice. Cullompton, UK: Willan Publishing. White, R. (2013). Environmental activism and resistance to state-corporate crime. In E. Stanley & J. McCulloch (Eds.), State crime and resistance (pp. 128–140). London: Routledge. White, R. (2014). Environmental insecurity and fortress mentality. International Affairs, 90 (4), 835–851. White, R. (2018a). Climate change criminology. Bristol, UK: Policy Press. White, R. (2018b). Critical green criminology. In W. DeKeseredy & M. Dragiewicz (Eds.), Routledge handbook of critical criminology (pp. 120–131). New York: Routledge. White, R., & Kramer, R. (2015). Critical criminology and the struggle against climate change ecocide. Critical Criminology, 23, 383–399. Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and literature. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

11 YOUTH FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE IN AN AGE OF YOUTH EXPENDABILITY Randy Myers and Tim Goddard

Introduction The structural and political shifts that have occurred under neoliberalism penalize poor people for being poor, motor educational and economic inequality, and justify increased carceral and quasi-carceral control for individuals who cannot contribute to the market. Globally, this movement towards a harsher, more unequal and less secure world damages young people in numerous ways, as overt exclusion, regressive youth justice trends, and the creep of market logic into schools, social supports and health care provisions have increased the social and economic precariousness of youth and their families. It appears to many observers that increasing numbers of youth everywhere are regarded as not worth maintaining—they are expendable, even disposable. While addressing the overtly punitive and damaging justice system practices aimed at disposable youth is important, it is not enough. Making appreciably better the lives of young people who routinely find themselves relegated to correctional monitoring, detention, and incarceration—as well as the sort of educational spaces dominated by carceral logics (Selman, 2017)—requires us to think far beyond the justice system. That is why we believe that criminologists on the left must think about justice for youth rather than youth justice or juvenile justice reform. Building on recent lessons we learned from fieldwork with social justiceoriented youth-serving organizations in the US (Goddard & Myers, 2018) and recent trends in youth activism from around the world (Pickard & Bessant, 2018), we offer ideas about what this should look like. We propose that a movement that is serious about justice for youth while challenging all forms of exclusion that accompany neoliberal carceralism ought to include three core features: consciousness-raising that takes seriously the values and worldviews of fully neoliberalized youth, projects and interventions that tie personal change to

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social change, and inventive engagement with neoliberalism by collectives of young people working to dream up and make possible a fairer and more just social order.

Crime, inequality and young people: current trends The neoliberal state protects the needs and interests of the market rather than those of individuals, families, and communities—abandoning and demonizing those who cannot or do not contribute to the market (Giroux, 2010). One consequence of a state that protects markets rather than people is a high rate of child poverty. In the US, one in three black children under the age of 18 lives in poverty, as do one in four Hispanic/Latino children (Children’s Defense Fund, 2017). The percentage of children of color under the age of five living in poverty is even more staggering: while 11% of white children under the age of five live in poverty, 36.3% of young black children, 26.8% of young Hispanic children, and 32.7% of young Native American children do. Worse still, one in five (or 21.9%) young black children live in extreme poverty, as do 21.6% of young Native American children (Children’s Defense Fund, 2017). Although most children living in poverty have parents who work (69.5% in 2016), low wages and unstable employment mean that many working families cannot meet the most basic of needs of children. Market logic penalizes the most vulnerable families: poor families do not deserve resources from the state because they have no resources. The stress and strain of poverty helps us understand the high rates of child abuse and neglect that we see in poor families, particularly very poor families in the US. In addition to putting them at higher risk of child abuse and neglect, growing up in poverty can impede a child’s ability to learn, contribute to emotional and behavioral problems, and can lead to poor physical and mental health (Brooks-Gunn & Duncan, 1997). The same logic that penalizes poor families for being poor also motors and “justifies” educational inequality in the United States. In the US, under-funded schools staffed with under-paid teachers working in overcrowded classrooms with out-of-date equipment routinely have their funding cut for having low test scores (Kozol, 2005). At the same time, schools with better test scores, which tend to be better funded to begin with, are rewarded with additional funds for their higher test scores. This is akin to giving the healthiest people a stipend to purchase gym memberships, organic foods, preventative check-ups, and counseling services (because they are succeeding at being healthy), while denying this stipend to unhealthy people. Withholding measures that could improve health compounds the factors that lead to their initial poor health. Of course, the “healthier” schools will perform better, just as already healthy people will not get sick as often, yet somehow market logic justifies increasing the funding of better-performing schools while defunding those that fail to perform. The same Darwinian logic that structures and justifies inequality in school spending also guides how schools react to students. In some communities,

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40–50% of young men of color do not graduate (America’s Promise Alliance, 2014). While many students drop out, many others are pushed out. US schools suspend, expel and refer black students to law enforcement more often than white students (US Department of Education Office for Civil Rights, 2014). And this is true for both boys and girls, as a recent study by the US Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights revealed that New York City schools expelled African-American girls at a rate that was six times higher than for white girls (Goff, 2016). We know unequivocally that without a high school education, the chances of employment decrease and the chances of incarceration increase (Western & Pettit, 2002, 2005). The extreme levels of economic inequality and absolute poverty seen in the US—as well as the precariousness felt by the better-off middle classes—are the result of political choices that have redistributed wealth and resources upward and made already vulnerable and precarious people more so. And it is in countries where the state protects and furthers the interests of markets and business rather than people where the highest rates of serious violence exist. Highly unequal South American nations lead the world in deadly violence: in 2012, Honduras led with a homicide rate of 91 per 100,000, followed by Venezuela with a rate of over 50 per 100,000. While the US rate falls short of those countries, its rate of homicide is much greater than its peers: it is seven times that of Germany and over 16 times that of Japan. And for some groups in certain US cities, the risk of dying by homicide rivals the most dangerous countries in the world: for example, “in 2012 there were more deaths from homicide in the city of Baltimore, Maryland, than in the countries of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden combined” (Currie, 2016, p. 22). And many of the lives being lost in the US, and in unequal societies around the world, are those of young people and children (Currie, 2016). Highly unequal societies possess the largest and most invasive criminal justice systems. In such countries, when there is no market to tap into or profit to be made, people become effectively disposable. However, this does not mean they are left alone by the state: they may attract state attention if their presence threatens housing and retail markets where a profit could be made. While the people are disposable, the property that they inhabit may not be. In these instances, the heavy hand of the carceral state comes down on these people. In cities throughout the US, poor people are routinely displaced to make way for “progress” of the new economy. From East Los Angeles to Oakland California, from the Bronx New York to South East London, communities once inhabited by industrial workers during the boom years of the 1940s and 1950s, and then the working poor and unemployed of the de-industrialized years in the 1970s and 1980s, are pushed out as upstart companies set their sights on cheaper property and former commercial and industrial infrastructure. For those who are stuck in these places (Sharkey, 2013), particularly the young, the state reacts with a toolkit composed of carceral and quasi-carceral strategies. In addition to aggressive policing tactics, the toolkit often includes

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seemingly neutral or benevolent measures, such as justice reinvestment projects that in fact expand the carceral net (Story, 2016) and crime mapping techniques which legitimize carceral interventions “that narrowly target only the perceived pathologies of communities”—a strategy which effectively “renders neighborhood spaces containers of social problems rather than products of more complex social dynamics” (Brown, 2017, p. 1,265; Valverde, 2009). Youth in these communities do not need to be diverted out of the system and towards the workforce. And they are not. Poor black youth are arrested most often, receive diversion from formal punishment least often, and receive longer sentences than white youth (Schlesinger, 2013). For youth living in poor communities of color in the US, contact with the criminal justice system has become a damaging rite of passage as they enter adulthood. As one participant in Megan Comfort’s study reflected: for the young people in his community, the prison was “basically college for us” (Comfort, 2012, p. 315). Moreover, the prison system is only one relatively small slice of a vast carceral network that facilitates and maintains social and economic inequality (Miller & Stuart, 2017). There has been an uptick in not only school suspensions and expulsions, but also fare evasion, curfew breaking, and loitering ordinances. The proliferation of statutes criminalizing formerly noncriminal behavior gives police the power to arrest people for minor infractions, such as breaking park rules or making excessive noise. From the school to the park, on the sidewalk and in malls, young people face dozens of “traps” that latch onto them figuratively and literally. These more shadow carceral measures saddle youth with records of risk, debt, and failure that later serve as “evidence” of their supposed criminality when intake attendants, judges, or probation officers apply risk instruments to them. Through overt and shadow measures, the US carceral state marks youth in poor communities of color with the sort of records that make incarceration (and poverty and precariousness) more likely. While the carceral system ensnares youth at the bottom of the social order, for those who manage to find work, this usually amounts to low-level service sector employment. Some of these positions might have the trappings of glamour or style, but they are often in the service sector or gig economy, where benefits are scarce, hours are erratic, and pay is low (Ayuero, 2016). Young people in the lower ranks of the legitimate labor market are often one paycheck away from destitution, or at least a loss of independence (Standing, 2011). And even for more privileged young people, skyrocketing student debt, the disappearance of pensions, and the casualization of work mean that they too—even if they have attained some of the prizes of consumer capitalism—are often only a pink slip away from financial ruin and the demoralization that comes with a loss of independence and a return to the house of a parent. While the prizes at the top have gotten bigger and flashier, the threat of falling from a position of relative privilege (or absolute privilege) has increased under neoliberalism (Standing, 2014).

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The “overt” exclusion of poor youth—and the increased precariousness of better-off young people—result from the structural and political shifts that have occurred under neoliberalism. Jock Young’s (1999) racetrack metaphor captures how the shift to a post-industrial labor market, the evisceration of social safety nets, and the rise of consumer capitalism reverberate across the class structure, leading to feelings of relative deprivation for those sidelined from the race and a fear of falling for those who manage to enter it: The market economy emerging in post-Fordism involved a qualitative leap in the levels of exclusion. The downsizing of the economy has involved the reduction of the primary labor market, the expansion of the secondary market and the creation of an underclass of structurally unemployed …. If we picture contemporary meritocracy as a racetrack where merit is rewarded according to talent and effort, we find a situation of two tracks and a motley of spectators: a primary labour market where rewards are apportioned according to talent and effort but where there is always the chance of demotion to the second track where rewards are substantially inferior …. As for the spectators, their exclusion is made evident by barriers and heavy policing: they are denied real access to the race but are the perpetual viewers of the glittering prizes on offer. (p. 8) In the 2016 US presidential election, the unfairness, anger and unease created by the racetrack system opened up the opportunity for candidates who spoke—with radically different emphases—to the unfairness of that system. The candidate who ultimately prevailed channeled the discontent of disaffected (mostly older) white working-class voters, in part, by coupling long-simmering xenophobic sentiments with the sort of material concerns that neoliberal politicians of both parties had refused to take seriously for three decades. While every indication suggests that the new administration will further narrow the track and divest from safety equipment, they have promised, and are likely to deliver on, a range of regressive policies: locking the gates to the raceway, further disciplining those already relegated to the stands, and increasing the share of ticket sales received by the folks in the luxury suites. While the term “silver lining” is perhaps too strong, 2016 also saw a selfproclaimed Democratic Socialist, Bernie Sanders, pose a serious challenge to the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination; and he was the only candidate, of either major party that a majority of young adults (aged 18–29) held a positive view of during the election (Harvard IOP Survey, 2016). While the Sanders campaign saw large pockets of support on college campuses, youth in poor communities of color have continued to advocate for an end to police violence and mass incarceration, with no small amount of success. So, at the same time that the political right has been revived, there has also been a resurgence in

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progressive and further-left causes, many of which are being led by youth and young adults. To build a more equitable and just society, precarious and excluded youth need to organize together. In order to do so, youth need to be able to see their struggles as intertwined—whether it is a young woman with dreams of a wellpaying yet precarious position in the tech boomtowns of Austin, Texas, or Portland, Oregon, a nearly redundant young coal miner working short-term contracts in Appalachia, or a young man navigating parole requirements in Chicago, Illinois. If we hope to combat the regressive and authoritarian tendencies that are afoot, youth on both tracks need to recognize their shared struggle as well as what they have in common with young people relegated to just watching the race. Young people need to become conscious of how the structure of the racetrack leads to the sort of unease and hopelessness that finds short-term relief in episodes of crime, consumption, or expressions of social, cultural, and carceral punitiveness. This consciousness-raising should be at the center of a reinvigorated criminology on the left and guide our change efforts with young people, including those in trouble with the law.

The way forward: from youth justice reform to justice for youth Many struggles for social justice in the US fight for cultural and economic inclusion for segments of the population currently excluded from participation in the racetrack of neoliberal consumer capitalism. Young people are at the heart of these and other important movements (Kwon, 2013; Pickard & Bessant, 2018). While inclusion in the race may be preferable (and more just) than exclusion, single-issue movements can obscure just how unfair that “racetrack” in fact is. Due to austerity measures in the US and elsewhere, the racers are hurdling around a track that is in disrepair, with few tow-trucks and safety fences to limit the damage inherent to intense competition, human fallibility, and human frailty. Moreover, the race itself depends on the exploitation of other (invisible) workers who build the cars under even more oppressive conditions; and it depends on, and may bring about, the destruction of the world beyond the track by poisoning the air breathed by drivers and watchers alike, while setting off environmental disasters that threaten human existence. While we can’t lose sight of the fact that, of course, all should able to participate in this race and paint their car whatever color they choose, the politics of the left—and progressive criminology of all sects—must develop a way to articulate how unfair and damaging this racetrack is to drivers and onlookers. And this goal should guide how we engage and work with youth, including those involved in the justice system. Our interventions with young people ought to speak to how the racetrack arrangement ultimately benefits only a few of the people in the luxury boxes; it must bring consciousness to the forces that cloud their vision of the track, and it must allow them the psychic space to imagine a less damaging social order. That is, we need to be able to talk, to youth

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especially, about how destructive the race in fact is—and to imagine, at a minimum, how we might widen the track, improve driver safety, curb emissions, and care for injured drivers while we work towards building a new social order not based on competition that is harmful to all who participate in and watch it. Making appreciably better the lives of young people who routinely find themselves relegated to correctional monitoring, detention, and incarceration— or the sort of work and educational spaces dominated by carceral logics (Selman, 2017)—requires us to think beyond reforming the justice system. Criminology on the left has a role to play in sketching and disseminating what that world ought to look like. A new movement in search of justice for youth needs to go beyond removing the most troubling, exclusionary practices—and think hard about how youth, at-risk, criminalized, and otherwise, might become conscious of the racetrack’s unfairness and work towards building something more lifeaffirming. Therefore, criminologists on the left ought to think about justice for youth rather than juvenile justice or youth justice reform. Drawing on recent lessons we learned from fieldwork with social justiceoriented youth-serving organizations in the US (Goddard & Myers, 2018) and trends in youth activism from around the world (Pickard & Bessant, 2018), we articulate ideas about what this should look like. A movement that is serious about justice for youth and challenging all forms on imprisonment that come with neoliberal carceralism ought to include three core features: (1) consciousnessraising that takes seriously the values and worldviews of fully neoliberalized youth, (2) projects and interventions for youth that tie personal change to social change, and (3) creative engagement with the neoliberal system to further the work of collectives of young people working to dream up and make possible a fairer and more just social order.

Youth movements for a better and more just society: consciousness-raising that takes youth culture under neoliberalism seriously As urged by the editors of this book, beyond the progressive strategies of the past, we must craft new approaches and concrete strategies to address problems of crime and justice to respond to the political and economic realities of an increasingly volatile world. Indeed, this is sound advice; but for young people (particularly those caught up in the carceral net), too many existing strategies are out of line with this broader vision of justice for youth. This is certainly true of the more blatant punitive approaches for dealing troubled youth in schools (Simmons, 2016), families (Wakefield, Lee, & Wildeman, 2016), and communities (Clear, 2009), but it is also true of many of our rehabilitative practices (Cox, 2015). Too many approaches ask young people to turn inward to better cope with the problems in their lives, families, and communities—to change their thoughts and behaviors even as neoliberal carceralism surges, economic

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opportunities evaporate, and social safety nets disintegrate (Currie, 2013). While individualized approaches might have their place, for them to be fair and most effective, they ought to be nested within broader community- and structurallevel policy changes that address the larger forces that push young people to the margins, and often into carceral institutions (Goddard & Myers, 2017). We believe that young people should detail and demand what is best for their lives and their communities. As such, young people must first understand the links between material conditions and the current and historical use of carceral institutions to control the disposable populations, and recognize how this framework directly structures their lives—and the lives of other youth, including those who they may perceive as different from themselves. For a genuinely effective movement to take place today, young people must see that the categories that separate them from one another need to be abolished. And we do not only mean the more recognizable categories that divide young people down lines of race and class, but also the more subtle and personal categories such as neighborhood, fashion style, and even preference for certain music or sports teams which inhibit young people from seeing their struggles in the struggles of other young people. For young people, maintaining the idea of the intersectionality of expendability may allow for the production of more creative and inclusive approaches (Burrowes et al., 2017). To detail what we think social consciousness-raising should look like, we build on the ideas of real-world experts. In our research, which took place in several major US cities, advocates at social justice organizations explained how their philosophies and practices often centered on consciousness-raising efforts and involving youth in social change campaigns as a way to bring about personal change (Goddard & Myers, 2018). The advocates interviewed saw the need for consciousness-raising efforts that avoid alienating or embarrassing young people who might be invested in consumer culture. Instead, they encouraged youth to produce their own analysis of how neoliberal capitalism and consumer culture had conditioned their views, values, and biographies, warped the institutions that they engaged with, and isolated them from the social and themselves. Illustrating this in practice, advocates for youth described how they spoke to young people about how consumer capitalism related to their oppression—without shaming them for “reproducing” the current system and culture that they must navigate daily: [We talk to young people about] who is seen as the groups that should be oppressed, [which] is very rooted in capitalism …. I would argue that what young people are facing is that they’re not seen as valuable producers in a capitalist society. [However] they’re also young folks tryin’ to like survive, and to have like a certain pair of Jordan’s (expensive shoes) will give them status in their school, and allows them to navigate in their reality in a way that, you know, that’s their choice, right? And, that’s their experience. So they, ultimately, they know how to survive, and they will

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survive with us or without us, right? So, we’re just there to be able to give tools and allow them to question themselves, question other people, and question us, right? We don’t work to create shame, but we do work to develop an analysis.1 The need for consciousness-raising efforts goes well beyond youth in trouble with the law. While many young Americans embrace progressive causes, and a growing number are skeptical of the free market, many are fully neoliberal, and are skeptical of state intervention to address the social and economic inequalities that they care about. A recent survey of Americans aged 18–29 revealed that less than half of the respondents supported capitalism (42%), exactly a third supported socialism, 44% supported progressivism, and nearly half supported feminism and social justice activism (48 and 49% respectively). But while many young Americans seemed to care about inequality and injustice, and many identified with left-leaning causes, only 30% believed that the federal government ought to play a “large role” in reducing income inequality (Harvard IOP Survey, 2016)—which is perhaps the defining feature of safer, less punitive, more equal societies (Currie, 2016). Although young people are discontent with the racetrack structure, they are unsure of the role that the state should play in reforming it. Beyond opinion polling, many young people’s movements are centered around the free expression of identities and individual rights. Young adults are also the most ardent supporters of social democrat-style politicians such as Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn, even as they often see governments as the source of the problem and seem to favor “taking action into their own hands and engaging in politics themselves” (Pickard & Bessant, 2018, p. 4). To engage this group, we must take seriously their desire for individual expression and engagement with consumer culture, and not assume they are apolitical.

Interventions that tie personal change to social change Similar to some of the progressive strategies from the 1960s, we believe that the discourse of “intervention” should focus on social change instead of “treatment” (Clark, 1965). One way to do that is to suture personal change efforts to community improvement or organizing efforts. Such an approach runs counter to the sort of individualized empowerment efforts that encourage youth to only look inward and behave or think differently, and instead attempts to use the discontent and untapped energies of young people towards community betterment and social change. This idea is not new, but appears to have been forgotten. As Kenneth Clark (1965) wrote many years ago: “There is harnessable power to effect profound social change in the generally repressed rage of the alienated. There is much energy and imagination in the deviant subcultural forms in which this rage presently finds expression” (p. 54). Again, drawing on the words of a director at one contemporary social justice organization in the US:

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A whole prison industrial complex has been geared to telling these people, “Stop doin’ this”, and they have failed miserably, you know what I’m sayin’? And I can tell you, in my community, from my experience, that when we say it, and we say it with love, with concern, with compassion, it has an impact, and people listen, you know? And then you start little by little turnin’ around a subculture. But we don’t want to get rid of the anger because if you’re poor, if you’re livin’ at the bottom of the barrel, if you’re frustrated, like that’s okay ’cause that’s a natural feeling. But don’t take it out on the other kid across the street that’s goin’ through the same social conditions. (Currie, Goddard, & Myers, 2015, p. 19) The ability of young people to connect their personal problems to social issues is a crucial part of inspiring personal transformation for many of these organizations. Or as activists at one grassroots organization wrote, “the personal is political” (Burrowes et al., 2017, p. 228). For more privileged youth as well, who have likely been spared the highly classed and racialized US justice system, involvement in the same sort of activities may serve similar ends. As a recent illustration of this, after the massacre of 17 high school students in Parkland, Florida, the students who survived the shooting mobilized against lenient gun policies as a sort of treatment or catharsis for their grief and anger. Partnerships between more privileged and less privileged groups of young people are necessary to bring about social change. One example of this is recent partnership between the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and a grassroots social justice organization in Los Angeles to help fix the tail lights of cars driven mainly by poor young people of color who are at highest risk of being pulled over by the police. Going forward, if more affluent young people, like the students in Parkland or activists from organizations like the DSA, join projects for social action with youth from marginalized sectors, this may help to bring about the sort of broad social movement needed to transform social control in the US (Alexander, 2010).

Strategic use of neoliberal vehicles while revitalizing older collective strategies The barriers to building this sort of broad-based movement are numerous and formidable. For instance, there exist few outposts where (young) people can come together to help them understand that their personal troubles are public issues. While union halls and town squares are fast disappearing, online forums and social media platforms do exist, and they have the potential to be global in scope. The most voracious consumers of these technologies are young people, and they open up spaces where young people mobilize for social change. Social media outlets like Facebook have been integral in the Black Lives Matter movement against police violence as well as the recent West Virginia Teacher’s Strike

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of 2018, which was one of the most successful labor efforts of the last two decades, and was started and organized through bottom-up, largely online actions of individual members rather than by union officials. Relatedly, the mode of social change is evolving within neoliberalism. Returning to what was recent at the time of writing, within days of the school massacre in Parkland, Florida, the young people who survived the shooting mobilized against making the weapons of war available to consumers. These young people met with political leaders, calling for gun legislation at the state capital. When the lawmakers were debating reforms, students threatened to boycott companies that sold weapons of war to consumers. Many of these companies (including Walmart and Dick’s Sporting Goods, both colossal companies) stopped selling assault weapons within just a week of the students’ mobilization. For sure, boycotts are not new; however, the central neoliberal drive for profit by companies becomes a target for young people, who may recognize the centrality of profits and may work within the framework to build something better. We may in fact need to utilize the neoliberal vehicle to challenge neoliberalism, as young people are establishing virtual sites for organizing and advocates for social justice are using neoliberal vehicles to challenge the most troubling aspects of the carceral state (Goddard & Myers, 2018). There is a need to be strategic about how to engage young people who have only ever known neoliberalism. In the end, adult advocates should advise young people, but not manage them, and trust them out of a recognition that youth will survive “with us or without us.” In the immediate future, that may well mean adhering to the norms of consumerism and some aspects of predatory capitalism— out of a need to avoid their own social, cultural, and economic disappearance. The broader mission may need to be advanced, at times, through partial and flawed vehicles which, nevertheless, enhance the possibility for the sort of global collaboration needed to abolish the root cause of the crises at hand: a predatory capitalism that renders young people across the globe disposable and threatens the future of the planet. The prospects for bringing about a social and economic order that affirms all life, symbolically and materially, can be made more possible by an engaged criminology dedicated to social and economic justice for youth.

Note 1 This quote comes from an interview conducted by the authors with a staff member at a youth-serving social justice organization in the USA in November 2012. For more information about the study, please see Goddard and Myers (2018).

References Alexander, M. (2010). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. New York: The New Press. America’s Promise Alliance. (2014). Building a GradNation: Progress and challenge in ending the high school dropout epidemic. Retrieved from www.americaspromise.org

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/resource/building-gradnation-progress-and-challenge-ending-high-school-dropoutepidemic-2014 Ayuero, J. (2016). Invisible in Austin: Life and labor in an American city. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Brooks-Gunn, J., & Duncan, G. J. (1997). The effects of poverty on children. Children and Poverty, 7(2), 55–71. Brown, E. (2017). A community gets the delinquents it deserves: Crime mapping, race and the juvenile court. British Journal of Criminology, 57(5), 1,249–1,269. Burrowes, N., Cousins, M., Rojas, P. X., & Ude, I. (2017). On our own terms: Ten years of radical community building with Sistas II Sistas. In INCITE! (Eds.), The revolution will not be funded: Beyond the non-profit industrial complex (pp. 227–234). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Children’s Defense Fund. (2017). Child poverty in America 2016: State analysis. Retrieved from www.childrensdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/child-poverty-inamerica-2016-1.pdf Clark, K. B. (1965). Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of social power. New York: Harper & Row. Clear, T. (2009). Imprisoning communities. How mass incarceration makes disadvantaged neighborhoods worse. Studies in crime and public policy. New York: Oxford University Press. Comfort, M. (2012). “It was basically college to us”: Poverty, prison, and emerging adulthood. Journal of Poverty, 16(3), 308–322. Cox, A. (2015). Fresh air funds and functional families: The enduring politics of race, family and place in juvenile justice reform. Theoretical Criminology, 19(4), 554–570. Currie, E. (2013). Consciousness, solidarity and hope as prevention and rehabilitation. International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, 2(2), 3–11. Currie, E. (2016). The roots of violence: Violent crime in a global perspective. New York: Oxford University Press. Currie, E., Goddard, T., & Myers, R. R. (2015). The Dark Ghetto revisited: Kenneth B Clark’s classic analysis as cutting edge criminology. Theoretical Criminology, 19(1), 5–22. Giroux, H. A. (2010). Youth in a suspect society: Democracy or disposability? New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Goddard, T., & Myers, R. R. (2017). Against evidence-based oppression: Marginalized youth and the politics of risk-based assessment and intervention. Theoretical Criminology, 21(2), 151–167. Goddard, T., & Myers, R. R. (2018). Youth, community and the struggle for social justice. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Goff, M. (2016). African American girls and the school-to-prison pipeline: Who are our sisters’ keepers? Urban Institute. Retrieved from www.urban.org/urban-wire/africanamerican-girls-and-school-prison-pipeline-who-are-our-sisters-keepers Harvard IOP Survey. (2016). Survey of young Americans’ attitudes toward politics and public service, 29th edition: March 18–April 3, 2016. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Institute of Politics. Retrieved from http://iop.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/content/ 160423_Harvard%20IOP_Spring%202016_TOPLINE_u.pdf Kozol, J. (2005). The shame of the nation: The restoration of apartheid schooling in America. New York: Broadway Books. Kwon, S. A. (2013). Uncivil youth: Race, activism, and affirmative governmentality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Miller, R. J., & Stuart, F. (2017). Carceral citizenship: Race, rights and responsibility in the age of mass supervision. Theoretical Criminology, 21(4), 532–548.

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Pickard, S., & Bessant, J. (Eds.). (2018). Young people re-generating politics in times of crises. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Schlesinger, T. (2013). Racial disparities in pretrial diversion: An analysis of outcomes among men charged with felonies and processed in state courts. Race and Justice, 3(3), 210–238. Selman, K. J. (2017). Imprisoning “those” kids: Neoliberal logics and the disciplinary alternative school. Youth Justice, 17(3), 213–231. Sharkey, P. (2013). Stuck in place. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Simmons, L. (2016). The prison school: Educational inequality and school discipline in the age of mass incarceration. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Standing, G. (2011). The Precariat: The new dangerous class. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Standing, G. (2014). A Precariat charter: From denizens to citizens. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Story, B. (2016). The prison in the city: Tracking the neoliberal life of the “million dollar block”. Theoretical Criminology, 20(3), 257–276. US Department of Education Office for Civil Rights. (2014). Civil rights data collection. Data snapshot: School discipline. Retrieved from https://ocrdata.ed.gov/downloads/crdcschool-discipline-snapshot.pdf Valverde, M. (2009). Jurisdiction and scale: Legal “technicalities” as resources for theory. Social & Legal Studies, 18(2), 139–157. Wakefield, S., Lee, H., & Wildeman, C. (2016). Tough on crime, tough on families? Criminal justice and family life in America. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 665(1), 8–21. Western, B., & Pettit, B. (2002). Beyond crime and punishment: Prisons and inequality. Contexts, 1, 37–43. Western, B., & Pettit, B. (2005). Black-white wage inequality, employment rates, and incarceration. American Journal of Sociology, 111(2), 553–578. Young, J. (1999). The exclusive society: Social exclusion, crime and difference in late modernity. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

12 WHAT’S WRONG WITH AMERICAN CRIMINAL JUSTICE REFORM? Sonya Goshe

Introduction The energy around criminal justice reform is palpable and exciting. The recognition that prisons cost an exorbitant amount and do not work particularly well, long the stance of progressive criminologists, appears to have penetrated not just mainstream criminology, but the political establishment as well. The “tough on crime” rhetoric has begun to fade in favor of “right on crime” or “smart on crime” proposals that “reinvest” in evidence-based practices and community corrections. For a country that has incarcerated more than 2 million of its citizens, the political recognition of the problem and the consideration of alternatives constitute definitive progress. Yet here I am, arguing that criminal justice reform is in crisis. Despite encouraging trends, the celebratory spirit of reform has overshadowed the grim realities of continued frequent and harsh punishment, ongoing racial disparities, anemic and inaccessible rehabilitation, dismal recidivism, and marginal sentencing reforms. While prison closures and rerouting low-risk people into local jails or community-based corrections are important reform projects, they do little to improve the desperate social conditions that fuel serious crime and violence. We may be increasingly able to calculate and track “risk,” but if we do not improve the lived experience of it, we will continue to power the revolving door of the criminal justice system. Merely tweaking the sentencing policies that fueled the mass incarceration movement will not undo the vast punitive net that continues to ensnare millions of Americans, and entire communities. Ideologies of cost and risk that have been central to the reform agenda are important, but in isolation they do not help states do less punishment overall. Instead, they simply encourage states to distribute the costs or find cheaper ways to do it. Nor do cost and risk rationales alone offer compelling ideological alternatives to punitive

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norms, which enjoy inflated weight in a society that does little else to ensure justice and welfare. The disparity between the promising rhetoric of reform and the more unsettling reality highlights the crisis and foreshadows how staying the present course inadvertently encourages reforms poised to redesign, rather than extinguish, mass incarceration in America. Fortunately, the crisis can be resolved, and attention to root causes can organize and revitalize a sustainable program of progressive reform.

The problem of rhetoric versus reality In America, the rhetoric heralding criminal justice reform has been steadily gaining momentum. It is no longer as politically risky to acknowledge that prison is expensive and that recidivism rates are high. State lawmakers now want to hear about “evidence-based practices” and are especially amenable to rehabilitation programs shown to have cost savings relative to prison and that “work” as well or better in promoting public safety. It is no longer just progressives noting the injustices and ineffectiveness of a four-decade “war on drugs”—efforts to reduce sanctions, such as mandatory minimums for low-level marijuana offenses, have been successful in some states, and legalization or decriminalization efforts are also gaining political traction at the state level. Lawsuits documenting the overcrowding and abusive conditions of both adult and juvenile prisons have succeeded, leaving the continuation of reckless incarceration as a viable political strategy in constitutional doubt (Simon, 2012). Notably, states that used to lead the nation in mass incarceration, like California and New York, are now the forerunners in the decarceration movement (Martin, 2016). Former President Obama was the first sitting president to visit a prison facility, and Attorney Generals Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch signaled favorable changes in federal prison policy. It has been argued, with a sigh of cautious relief, that the “experiment” in mass incarceration is over (Clear & Frost, 2014), and that drivers of progressive change are accumulating (Green, 2015). Yet, even amidst the welcome optimism and hopeful signs, echoes of unease have persisted. It may be admittedly expensive and ineffective, but America continues to incarcerate 2.2 million people, a number that has only marginally improved from its peak of 2.3 million 11 years ago. Moreover, the pattern of decline has been slow and uneven, with some jurisdictions leveling off and even increasing their prison populations (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2018), and the number of Americans under some form correctional control has ballooned to nearly 7 million people. It is fair to characterize existing reforms as a relatively minor shift in carceral dynamics rather than a true normative rejection of punitive excess. Similarly, the reality of rehabilitation has fallen short of the rhetorical “revitalization” it has experienced (Cullen & Gendreau, 2001). Despite the clear recognition that people in prison have significant treatment needs, especially for substance abuse, only about 13 percent of inmates receive it during their

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incarceration, and fewer than 5 percent with a documented, specific need gain access (Taxman et al., 2014). The lackluster reality extends to employment and education services, where only about 7–8 percent of the inmate population participate on any given day. The quality of services has also proven inadequate to meet the intensive and complex needs of the prison and re-entry population (Taxman et al., 2014; Wolf & Shi, 2012). Further, knowledge about “what works” has outpaced knowledge about what works reliably and sustainably over time (Taxman, 2018). Moreover, we are not doing much better when people leave prison to keep them from going back. While the truism that they all come home may now be near universally accepted (Petersilia, 2003), the reality of an obstacle-ridden reentry process has gotten lost underneath the rhetorical fanfare of prison closures and “second chances.” Undercutting the optimism is the ongoing reality that most leave prison with little more than minimal gate money, a change of clothes, and a bus ticket. The barriers to success are known, but it is a rare few who leave prison with a stable place to live, a meaningful job, supportive relationships, access to appropriate treatment services, or knowledge of their next steps beyond heading back to the place full of “criminogenic risk” and “triggers” of antisocial behavior (Petersilia, 2003; Western et al., 2015) The set-up for failure manifests as a disturbing and persistent recidivism statistic where two in three inmates are arrested for a new crime within three years, and three in four within five years (Durose et al., 2014) The echoes of unease have grown louder with the recent presidential election. President Trump was elected, in part, on “law and order” and “get tough” rhetoric that the reform movement and many on the left had treated as politically dead. Trump was willing to publicly acknowledge, even if inelegantly, the ongoing reality of violence for disadvantaged urban areas that has been minimized or ignored amidst the energy of reform. While violent crime is down overall from its peak in the mid-1990s, America remains far from “safe,” especially in certain places whose homicide rates rival countries embroiled in civil war (Currie, 2015). Meanwhile, the root causes of violence, especially inequality, concentrated disadvantage, abuse, and trauma remain largely neglected as part of criminal justice reform and have been mostly ignored by administrations on both sides of the political aisle. Sentencing reform has been one of the central elements of the reform project, and has received ostensible bipartisan support, a possibility that seemed unthinkable at the height of the mass incarceration movement. Yet people serving time for mandatory minimums still make up over 55 percent of the federal prison population, a marginal decrease from 58 percent in 2010 (US Sentencing Commission, 2017). Jeff Sessions, the current Attorney General, has called for a ramping up, instead of a scaling down, of the War on Drugs (Gunter, 2017). Even at the state level, where the tweaking of mandatory minimums has been most pervasive, the results have targeted mostly low-level marijuana or minor possession offenses, and there are still ten times as many people in state prison

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for drug offenses than there were in 1980 (The Sentencing Project, 2017). Meanwhile, America still has a high demand for recreational drugs and the highest rates of drug-related deaths (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2017), two long-standing empirical realities that get lost in the focus on sentencing reform and the expensive war on drugs. The call for prison reform has also largely skirted the fact that over half of those in state prisons are serving time for a violent offense (The Sentencing Project, 2017) and that to meaningfully lower prison populations, reforms will have to do more than divert the “low-risk” to community control or local jails. Finally, prisons remain harsh and abusive places despite the success of lawsuits in forcing states to confront abusive conditions, and the widespread acknowledgment of solitary confinement as an especially damaging practice (Kupers, 2017; Reiter & Koenig, 2015). In adult facilities, extended use of solitary confinement is the norm, and most prisons use solitary confinement for both administrative and punitive purposes, with stays averaging from months to years. Even in juvenile facilities, where prison abuse is often seen as most intolerable, conclusive evidence of systemic abuse has been documented in almost every state in the union, and a recent report indicated that the news was getting worse, not better (Mendel, 2015).

The crisis of disconnection and its consequences The mismatch between the celebratory rhetoric and the continued disturbing realities reflects a crisis in criminal justice reform. American criminal justice reform is disconnected from its knowledge of root causes of social harm and the depth of punitive norms in a society that does little more than punish to keep people safe. The crisis of disconnection has influenced an overly narrow, circumscribed reform agenda poised to perpetuate and restructure, rather than undo, the problem of mass incarceration. We have lost sight of social justice and our knowledge about the root conditions of crime, drug abuse and violence, and continue to fuel the pipelines of despair that funnel into the revolving door of the criminal justice system. Concentrated disadvantage, inequality, abuse and neglect, and lack of meaningful and stable employment are stable predictors of drug abuse, crime, and violence, but have been “lessons ignored” (Currie, 1993) in criminal justice reform historically, and they have been largely overlooked in the current reform agenda. Yet this raises the question: why has a movement committed to ending mass incarceration has largely neglected the problems that lead to crime in the first place? Criminology, after all, has an impressive, long-standing theoretical and empirical body of work that addresses the social roots of serious crime, drug addiction, and violence. Root causes have been fundamentally severed from the criminal justice reform project, not because we do not know what the root causes are, but because ideologically, they are treated as impervious to reform, beyond the scope of the criminal justice system to fix, or largely inevitable outcomes

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changeable only by personal or local will. I refer to this ideology as structural nihilism. Under the nihilistic philosophy, serious social disadvantage must be managed more than eliminated, or more optimistically, transcended through personal determination or moral transformation. Nihilism ideology recommends handling the structural roots of social problems at the personal and community level, through spiritual guidance, mentoring, or cognitive behavioral therapy handled primarily through local agencies, especially charities, nonprofits, and faith-based organizations. While the benefits of local problemsolving should not be shortchanged, failing to also deal with the broader unfair social arrangements places the burdens on the most disadvantaged communities, where the disinvestment that creates risk in the first place works against efforts to combat it. Unfortunately, embracing nihilism and abandoning root causes in criminal justice reform have serious consequences. First, the abandonment of root causes has left youth in conditions of despair that contribute to a wide range of social problems that funnel into the criminal justice system. One in five children is poor (UNICEF, 2014). The legacy of racial oppression becomes visible in child poverty, where fully one-third do not have their basic needs met and nearly half of the already poor face conditions of extreme deprivation. Child poverty delays cognitive development, stifles social opportunity, and increases the likelihood of a veritable buffet of bad outcomes, including dropping out of high school, developing physical and mental health problems, and entering the criminal justice system (Farrington & Welsh, 2007). Poverty in the context of inequality is especially destructive, and ripens conditions for violence and serious delinquency. In the US, the story of the rich getting richer while the poor get poorer has continued, and in 2012, 90 percent of the population earned less than half the income while the top 1 percent earned almost 25 percent (Saez, 2016). In a society where material gain is prized and the gateways to prosperity open only to a few, scholars have long recognized the links to social problems, particularly crime and violence (Currie, 1997; Merton, 1938; Messner & Rosenfeld, 1994). A recent, comprehensive study of children’s exposure to violence found that, far from being rare, youth are victimized and witness victimization all too frequently (Finkelhor et al., 2009). Sixty percent had experienced violence—either personally or vicariously—within the last year. Over half had been assaulted; one in 10 had been injured in the assault. Ten percent of youth reported abuse and neglect, and one in 16 acknowledged they were sexually abused. Almost 25 percent had witnessed a violent act, and almost 10 percent witnessed family members harm each other. Repeated violence was common, and nearly 40 percent of youth reported two or more victimizations; more than 10 percent reported more than five. Ongoing exposure to violence is linked to developmental problems, educational delays, and criminal justice system involvement (Farrington & Welsh, 2007).

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Children are also failing to thrive in the nation’s schools. Half a million youth drop out of high school and two-thirds of eighth-graders in public school fall below grade level in reading and math (Children’s Defense Fund, 2014). For youth already caught up in the juvenile justice system, their educational performance lags even further behind (Kim et al., 2010). School failure places kids on the path to delinquency and later social problems such as unemployment, substance abuse, and graduation to the adult criminal justice system, In addition to the continued fueling of the pipelines of despair that overwhelm the criminal justice system, structural nihilism and the neglect of root causes sabotage rehabilitation and re-entry efforts. Instead of rehabilitation that leads people toward “good lives” (Ward & Maruna, 2007) or provides a compelling alternative to life on the street, much of the rehabilitation popular in criminal justice reform is “conformist” (Currie, 2012), consisting of anemic pills and programs. Medication, anger management, and short-term cognitive behavioral programs help people overcome internal psychological or medical problems that might well stem from problematic social circumstances, but they are not designed to change them. And I want to be clear that there is plenty of merit in certain pills and programs—for people who truly need them and when they are administered with restraint in the context of other supports. But pills and programs that aim to change how someone thinks about their disadvantage, their anger triggers, and their antisocial attitudes without addressing the social roots of those problems or altering their experience of them are being set up for failure. To the extent such efforts do work, and some of them do in the short term, especially when compared to doing nothing (Lipsey & Cullen, 2007), it is not a recipe for meaningful or sustainable change. Even if the pills and programs work as they are supposed to, changed people are sent back to unchanged surroundings where they are expected to manage their mental illness, stay off the drugs, and reframe their frustration and hopelessness at not making enough to have a good life for themselves or their families even when it is overwhelmingly difficult and potentially dangerous to do so. They are expected to transcend the insurmountable, and when they manage that, to keep it up even if opportunities to benefit from being a “changed person” are few and far between, and opportunities to revert to their old selves are everywhere and the benefits, if not simple, are perhaps more obvious. The social disadvantages and suffering embedded in “risk” scores simply must be addressed if we are to do anything more than document and track risk and the recidivism rates that follow it. Of course, the resilience of the human spirit means that some people do indeed surmount the insurmountable, but criminal justice reforms that rely on the exceptionalism of a few while sabotaging the efforts of the many will not only fail to stem the tide of people flooding into the carceral state, it will sabotage its own efforts at sustainable change. The idea that we can dismantle the punitive state without an attack on root causes (Gottschalk, 2015) as part of the reform project is disconnected and out

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of touch with the reality that serious crime, the kind that engenders fear and anger and inflames punitive sentiments, remains a significant problem in the United States (Miller, 2015). Violence is a leading cause of death, especially for people of color and the young (CDC, 2015), and 50 percent of the people in the nation’s state prisons are serving time for a violent offense (The Sentencing Project, 2017). The idea that punishment is necessary for retribution, incapacitation, and deterrence in response to serious crime becomes inflated in a society that does little else to address the injustice, pain, and suffering that violence provokes. It becomes increasingly difficult to make a progressive argument against punishment, no matter how grounded in logics of cost and risk, when the reality of violence shatters individuals, their families, and whole communities. Incapacitation and the infliction of pain and suffering on those who offend provide a kind of psychic reassurance that life matters, even if little else is done to ensure its protection and celebrate its potential. Realistically, if little else is done to hold the social fabric together and ensure basic safety and security, then it is not irrational for the public to become wedded to punishment and to the idea that it is necessary to ensure justice, to coerce change, and to deter others. In the absence of a viable social policy (Currie, 2013), a vast punitive net appears both natural and essential to the basic functioning of society. The idea that we need punishment (Goshe, 2017) makes sense given the conditions of despair that fuel serious crime and the revolving door of the criminal justice system. It is particularly powerful in a society that has historically used punishment or the threat of punishment, sanctioned explicitly or implicitly by the state, as a means of racialized social control (Alexander, 2010). The reality that the prison industrial complex is sustained on the backs of the marginalized and is now tied to the economic gains of others makes it especially imperative that we not only attack harsh sentences, but we attack the root causes of crime that sustain both the social inequalities and the punitive norms that form the backbone of the system. The ideology of necessity also illuminates why we struggle to do more than tinker with carceral dynamics (Doob & Webster, 2014) that redesign mass incarceration rather than eliminate it and why the rationales of cost and risk, by themselves, are counter-productive. Rather than concentrating on reducing exposure to risk, necessity ideology equates risk with the level of punishment required. Punishment is necessary; how much punishment is prescribed should correspond to the risk the person poses. High-risk people, especially those with histories of violence, will find it very difficult to find their way out of prison unless necessity norms are attacked. High risk is also a euphemism for social suffering and conditions of disadvantage. Risk will not ultimately come down until those conditions improve. Pointing out the high price tag, on its own, will not do the job either. When the costs of punishment become too high for the state to bear, the solution, under a framework that privileges punishment as necessary, that has become materially invested in having a lot of punishment, and that ties punishment to systems of racial and class-based social control, will simply

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implement “reforms” that distribute the costs, make existing punishment cheaper, or create ways to profit from new mechanisms of punishment. Punishment that substitutes for real social security (Goshe, 2017) is more insulated from critiques that it is too harsh and racially unjust. Exceptionally punitive practices serve only to stretch our sense of what is tolerable (Travis, 2014). Harsh punishment and police and prison abuses can be viewed as just, deserved, and necessary for people who have inflicted pain on others, and can act as a social analgesic for the grief, anger, and fear that crime engenders. Similarly, if little is offered within prison to make it a safe and secure place, harsh practices, such as use of force and solitary confinement, become perceived as necessary to managing the institution and keeping others safe. When punishment is perceived as necessary, it becomes difficult to conceive and implement alternatives apart from and beyond punishment. Well-intended progressive reforms that attempt to do something besides punishment end up incorporating it to satisfy normative demands of necessity, ensure compliance, or gain institutional legitimacy. Restorative justice, for example, has been critiqued for incorporating too much “shame and blame” and for relying on traditional punitive sanctions instead of the broader idea of reparation to victims (Haines & O’Mahony, 2006; Levrant et al., 1999). Similarly, non-intervention began from the premise that most intervention was unnecessary and too punitive, a premise that currently animates the rationale to let the low-risk out of prison. But doing “nothing, at least in juvenile justice, where it has been most received, has morphed into a lesser series of “informal” penalties that “widened the net” of social control (Austin & Krisberg, 1981) and sets the stage for the troubling technical violations that fuel the revolving doors of jails and prisons. Other contemporary “alternatives” to harsh sentences employ short jail stays that are swiftly and certainly delivered in violation of drug treatment programs or community-based probation and parole (Kleiman, 2010). Punishment light reforms may appear to be better than the brute “get tough” policies of the past, but they threaten to widen the net, provide help that does more harm than good, and reinforce rather than replace punitive norms.

Conclusion and new directions for progressive reform The crisis of disconnection that has displaced root causes and inadvertently reinforced punitive norms is not inevitable. Progressives have the opportunity in the current political moment to develop an agenda designed to promote sustainable change by learning lessons from what has compromised reform the past. Despite the political volatility that has followed the 2016 presidential election, there remains substantial positive energy around resistance and reform. We know more than ever about the dangers of too much punishment and the failure to make our society a safer and more inclusive place. We must directly challenge the nihilism that has encouraged the severance of root causes from the reform project and come to terms with the depth of punitive norms in a society that

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does little to promote social security and welfare. We must recognize the inadequacy of cost- and risk-based rationales, and their capacity to be distorted in punitive ways, if we continue to populate the pipeline of despair and breed conditions that fuel harm and violence. We must recognize the insufficiency of pills and programs to rehabilitate when we do little else to reduce exposure to risk or encourage a hopeful stake in society. We must recognize that tinkering at the margins of sentencing and shifting carceral dynamics does not disturb the punitive norms of necessity, with its history of racial- and class-based social control and the material interests embedded in the prison industrial complex. A progressive reform agenda places root causes at the center of its agenda, as an organizing normative principle justifying multi-level prevention, sentencing reform, rehabilitation, and re-entry that provides a compelling substitute for inflated norms of punitive necessity. Necessity ideology is powerful, but it is especially so in the absence of convincing alternatives. Cost and risk justifications are utilitarian and useful, but they do not address the deep human desire for safety and wellbeing. Norms about root causes offer a different and persuasive vision of justice: one where people are safe in the first place, and where we can confidently help people reintegrate and contribute to society. A multi-level reform project centered on root causes incorporates universal prevention measures such as poverty elimination, full, secure employment at livable wages, security measures that protect jobs in the event of economic distress, generous paid parental leaves, high-quality day care and early education, high-quality health care and parent support, and wide access to meaningful opportunities to learn and develop potential (Currie, 2013; Muncie & Goldson, 2006). It focuses on inclusive, multi-systemic models of transformative rehabilitation (Currie, 2012) that help people heal from trauma, find their strengths, provide social solidarity, and help them find pathways to a “good life” (Ward & Maruna, 2007). It promotes comprehensive re-entry that includes stable housing, treatment, stable work, and a commitment to sticking with people as they transition to desistance and reintegration. It is also makes sense to continue undoing the kinds of sentencing polices that fueled mass incarceration (Gottschalk, 2015), but ignoring root causes in this effort will not undo mass incarceration as much as give states the tools to reengineer it. It is true that America’s social welfare has long been neglected, and we have not always had mass imprisonment. But this argument to sever root causes from criminal justice reform loses touch with how realities of violence provoke punitive sentiments more broadly, and it also neglects the deep roots of punishment-based social control, perhaps not via mass incarceration, but through segregation and violence against racial groups, the poor, and women that traditionally enforced a more rigid structure of social and economic privilege. A reform project committed philosophically and practically to root causes is neither naive, outside the scope of criminal justice, nor a waste of energy, as nihilistic ideology suggests. Attention to root causes is essential to reduce demand on the criminal justice system in the first place, effectively rehabilitate

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those who enter it, and keep the people leaving it from going back. While it is naive to assume that simply getting it on the reform agenda for criminal justice will produce immediate results in this area, it is dangerous to suggest we can continue to ignore it. I am also not suggesting this will happen instantaneously or easily. The nihilistic and material forces that work against upgrading our social policy are serious and substantial, and extend beyond the criminal justice system. That fact is precisely why leaving them off has been so damaging: we have simply empowered other less progressive voices that speak convincingly and powerfully to fill the void. Absent sustained and compelling advocacy demanding otherwise, the safety net will not strengthen itself, and indeed remains ever-vulnerable. Root causes need to be a central focus of reform, and progressive advocates should be clamoring for a seat at the policy tables, aggressively advocating for policy changes that target root causes as much as we have targeted mandatory minimums and the cost-ineffective practices associated with burgeoning prison populations. If the criminal justice system that is most in touch with the reality of a failed social welfare policy is not among the loudest voices shouting for change, then why should we expect anyone else to do it? In advocating a reform project centered on root causes, I am also not disparaging the importance of what has been accomplished and the hard efforts that have been required to achieve it. Resistance to mass incarceration and the policies that fuel it has been around since it started, and has laid a foundation for progressive reform. I am also not discounting the importance of incremental change in disabling the normative commitment to punishment. However, a reform agenda that ignores the role of root causes and underestimates the grip of punitive norms, especially in the face of social distress, is disconnected, sabotages the potential of those incremental changes, and squanders the current political energy around reform and resistance. Resistance and advocacy connected to, and organized around, what we know about the root causes of social harm offer compelling alternatives to punitive norms and harness the current energy on reform in ways that are transformative and sustainable.

References Alexander, M. (2010). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. New York: The New Press. Austin J., & Krisberg, B. (1981). Wider, stronger, and different nets: The dialectics of criminal justice reform. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 18(1), 165–196. Bureau of Justice Statistics. (2018). Prisoners in 2016. Washington, DC: US Department of Justice. Center for Disease Control. (2015). Deaths: Leading causes for 2015. National Vital Statistics Reports, 66(5). Retrieved from www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr66/ nvsr66_05.pdf Children’s Defense Fund. (2014). The state of America’s children yearbook. Washington, DC: Children’s Defense Fund.

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Clear, T., & Frost, N. (2014). The punishment imperative: The rise and fall of mass incarceration in America. New York: New York University Press. Cullen, F., & Gendreau, P. (2001). From nothing works to what works: Changing professional ideology in the 21st century. The Prison Journal, 81(3), 313–338. Currie, E. (1993). Reckoning: Drugs, the cities, and the American future. New York: Hill and Wang. Currie, E. (1997). Market, crime and community: Toward a mid-range theory of post-industrial violence. Theoretical Criminology, 1, 147–172. Currie, E. (2012). Rethinking intervention: Consciousness, solidarity and hope as criminological principles. Western Criminology Review, 13(3), 15–20. Currie, E. (2013). Crime and punishment in America, revised edition. New York: Metropolitan Books. Currie, E. (2015). The roots of danger: Violent crime in global perspective. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Doob, A., & Webster, C. M. (2014). Creating the will to change: The challenges of decarceration in the United States. Criminology and Public Policy, 13(4), 547–559. Durose, M., Cooper, A., & Snyder, H. (2014). Recidivism of prisoners released in 30 states in 2005: Patterns from 2005 to 2010. Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics, US Department of Justice. Farrington, D., & Welsh, B. (2007). Saving children from a life of crime: Early risk factors and effective interventions. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Finkelhor, D., Turner, H., Ormrod, R., Hamby, S., & Kracke, K. (2009). Children’s exposure to violence: A comprehensive national survey. Washington, DC: Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. Goshe, S. (2017). The lurking punitive threat: The philosophy of necessity and challenges for reform. Theoretical Criminology, 1–18. DOI: 10.1177/1362480617719450 Gottschalk, M. (2015). Razing the carceral state. Social Justice, 42(2), 31–51. Green, D. (2015). US penal-reform catalysts, drivers, and prospects. Punishment & Society, 17(3), 271–298. Gunter, J. (2017). Officers rue the return of U.S. “war on drugs.” BBC News, April 18. Retrieved from www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-39623671 Haines, K., & O’Mahony, D. (2006). Restorative approaches, young people and youth justice. In B. Goldson & J. Muncie (Eds.), Youth crime and justice (pp. 110–124). London: SAGE. Kim, C., Losen, D., & Hewitt D. (2010). The school to prison pipeline. New York: New York University Press. Kleiman, M. (2010). When brute force fails: How to have less crime and less punishment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kupers, T. A. (2017). Solitary: The inside story of supermax isolation and how we can abolish it. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Levrant, S., Cullen, F., Fulton, B., & Wozniak, J. (1999). Reconsidering restorative justice: The corruption of benevolence revisited? Crime and Delinquency, 45(1), 3–27. Lipsey, M., & Cullen, F. (2007). The effectiveness of correctional rehabilitation: A review of systematic reviews. Annual Review of Law & Social Science, 3, 297–320. Martin, W. (2016). Decarceration and justice disinvestment: Evidence from New York State. Punishment & Society, 18(4), 1–26. DOI: 10.1177/1462474516642857 Mendel, R. (2015). Maltreatment of youth in U.S. juvenile corrections facilities. Baltimore, MD: Annie E. Casey Foundation. Merton, R. (1938). Social structure and anomie. American Sociological Review, 3, 672–682.

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Messner, S., & Rosenfeld, R. (1994). Crime and the American dream. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Miller, L. (2015). What’s violence got to do with it? Inequality, punishment and state failure in US politics. Punishment & Society, 17(2), 184–210. Muncie, J., & Goldson, B. (2006). States of transition: Convergence and diversity in international youth justice. In J. Muncie & B. Goldson (Eds.), Comparative youth justice: Critical issues (pp. 196–218). London: SAGE. Petersilia, J. (2003). When prisoners come home: Parole and prisoner reentry. New York: Oxford University Press. Reiter, K., & Koenig, A. (Eds.) (2015). Extreme punishment: Comparative studies in detention, incarceration and solitary confinement. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Saez, E. (2016). Striking it richer: The evolution of top incomes in the United States. Retrieved from https://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/saez-UStopincomes-2015.pdf Simon, J. (2012). Mass incarceration: From social policy to social problem. In J. Petersilia & K. Reitz (Eds.), Oxford handbook of sentencing and corrections (pp. 23–47). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Taxman, F. (2018). The partially clothed emperor: Evidence-based practices. Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, 34(1), 97–114. Taxman, F., Pattaina, A., & Caudy, M. (2014). Justice reinvestment in the United States: An empirical assessment of the potential impact of increased correctional programming on recidivism. Victims and Offenders, 9, 50–75. The Sentencing Project. (2017). Trends in U.S. corrections. Retrieved from www. sentencingproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Trends-in-US-Corrections.pdf Travis, J. (2014). Assessing the state of mass incarceration: Tipping point or the new normal? Criminology and Public Policy, 13(4), 567–577. UNICEF. (2014). Innocenti report card 12. Children of the recession: The impact of the economic crisis on child well-being in rich countries. Retrieved from www.unicefirc.org/publications/series/16 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. (2017). World drug report 2017. Retrieved from www.unodc.org/wdr2017/index.html US Sentencing Commission. (2017). 2017 overview of mandatory minimum penalties in the federal criminal justice system. Retrieved from www.ussc.gov/research/researchreports/2017-overview-mandatory-minimum-penalties-federal-criminal-justice-system Ward, T., & Maruna, S. (2007). Rehabilitation. New York: Routledge. Western, B., Braga, A., Davis, J., & Sirois, C. (2015). Stress and hardship after prison. American Journal of Sociology, 120(5), 1512–1547. Wolf, N., & Shi, J. (2012). Childhood and adult trauma experiences of incarcerated persons and their relationship to adult behavioral health problems and treatment. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 9, 1908–1926.

13 CONTINUITY OF AMERICAN XENOPHOBIA UNDER TRUMP AND PLAUSIBLE ALTERNATIVES James Diego Vigil and Nativo Lopez Vigil

Introduction Mexico and United States border relations have been a problem ever since the War of 1846–1848 ended with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Minor skirmishes over border boundaries, cattle ownership, and the like, were dwarfed by major battles pitting US forces against Mexican social bandits or wars over land ownership. At the turn of the 20th century, and especially after the end of the 1910 Mexican Revolution, immigration became the issue that has driven US– Mexico relations to this day. With the ebb and flow of Mexican immigrants tied to a burgeoning or slowing US economy, and the seesawing nature of laws to stop or enhance immigration, Mexicans valiantly and appreciatively joined the US in all the wars of the 20th and 21st centuries to show their loyalty and patriotism to their new home. Even though they were from Los Angeles, San Antonio, Tucson, and town names from the Mexican past, they were truly treated as strangers in their own land. Today, Mexicans are pariahs. “Mommy, daddy …,” cried the children. “An orchestra,” ridiculed a Customs Border Protection officer at a detention center in south Texas where children had been separated from their parents as they presented themselves at the US–Mexico border seeking political asylum. All was captured by ProPublica, a New York-based nonprofit organization dedicated to investigative journalism. President Donald Trump had encountered a legal way to separate children from their parents as an artifice to discourage undocumented migrants from amassing at the US’s southern border in search of refuge. The majority of the migrants hail from Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. In Central America, the region is called the “Northern Triangle.” He needed to criminalize the migrants by prosecuting them for “illegal entry” to the United States. This is the premise of his “zero tolerance” policy whereby

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more than 2,300 children have been snatched from their parents who have been accused of a criminal offense. The Undesirable Alien Act, passed in 1929, is the law that US Attorney General Jeff Sessions used to direct Customs Border Protection (CBP) to proceed criminally, and no longer under civil proceedings. Under a criminal prosecution, the government is required to take the children into custody as “wards of the state.” This actually occurs daily in counties throughout the US when individuals with children are arrested for an alleged criminal offense and their children are taken into custody by Offices of Children Welfare Services. And these are not even immigration-related cases. As such relates to immigration, while technically legal, it was morally reprehensible, and politically untenable. The bellowing bully Trump was forced to backpedal and issue an executive order ending the policy of separation of children. The public confusion here is that there are two groups of minors. In many ways, this is a repeat of the 2014 experience occasioned on President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton when thousands of unaccompanied minors navigated their way to the border and turned themselves over to the border patrol. The peak of that crisis was in 2015. Clinton’s response was that the children could not be accommodated in the US, and thus, she blatantly declared in one interview, “Send them home.” The Obama administration busied itself in creating a national infrastructure of federally supported private detention centers to house the unaccompanied minors. This was managed by the Department of Health and Human Services, and eventually by the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). The administration was constrained by a previous litigation agreement which limited such detention to no more than 20 days. The Flores Settlement Agreement stemmed from a class action lawsuit filed in 1985 by the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law and the National Youth Law Center. The case, titled Jenny Lizette Flores vs. Janet Reno, Attorney General for the United States, was settled in a stipulated agreement between the parties in 1997, but not before touching the United States Supreme Court on appeal. The Agreement imposed several obligations on the immigration authorities: [one,] the government is required to release children from immigration detention without unnecessary delay to, in order of preference, parents, other adult relatives, or licensed programs willing to accept custody; two, if a suitable placement is not immediately available, the government is obligated to place children in the “least restrictive” setting appropriate to their age and any special needs; and three, the government must implement standards relating to the care and treatment of children in immigration detention. (Human Rights First, 2016) However, this is exclusively germane to unaccompanied minors.

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In reality, there are two groups of juvenile migrants, one unaccompanied and the other accompanied – by parent(s) or a legal guardian. There are federal statutes and legal agreements that determine how each group should be treated by the government. The CBP considers the accompanied minors as part of a family unit, and it collects data to that effect. The “unaccompanied alien child” (UAC) is a technical term defined by law as a child who has no lawful immigration status in the US, has not attained the age of 18 years of age, and who has no parent or legal guardian in the US or no parent or legal guardian in the US is available to provide care and physical custody. On the other hand, children arriving in the US with a parent or guardian are considered “accompanied.” This is a significant difference which determines how they are to be treated by the CBP. According to Customs Border Protection, between October 1, 2013 and September 30, 2014, border agents detained 67,339 unaccompanied minors. Their origin by country was 27 percent from Honduras, 25 percent from Guatemala, 24 percent from El Salvador, and 23 percent from Mexico – pretty evenly distributed. The peak period was the summer and fall of 2014, followed by a 45 percent reduction the following year. Setting aside Trump’s vicious campaign rhetoric about the threat at the southern border, the general apprehension numbers, as recorded by the CBP, tell the real story. The total apprehensions of undocumented migrants in fiscal year (FY) 2000 were 1,676,438, whereas the total for FY 2017 (ending September 30, 2017) were 310,531, and 180,077 of these were identified as “other than Mexican apprehensions.” Notwithstanding his anti-Mexican vitriol, in 2017 there were only 130,454 apprehensions of Mexicans by 19,437 border patrol officers nationwide and 16,605 of those assigned to safeguard the southwest border sectors. Not to be blinded by the statistics, the important thing observed is the historically low apprehensions and the steady decline since FY 2000. For example, in FY 2013 there was a spike up to 426,789 from the FY 2012 total of 364,768, an increase in FY 2014 to 486,651, a drop again to 337,117 in FY 2015, an increase again to 415,816 in FY 2016, and a precipitous drop to 310,531 in FY 2017. The apprehensions in FY 2017 of accompanied and unaccompanied minors were almost evenly split – 41,131 of the former and 41,435 of the latter. The total number of adults apprehended along the southern border sector totaled 221,350. Never before have apprehensions been lower in recent history, especially among Mexican migrants. In terms of CBP staffing nationwide, for FY 1992 (the most recent information available) the number of agents deployed in the Coastal Border Sector was 187, the Northern Border Sector was 299, and the Southwest Border Sector was 3,555, for a total of 4,041. This was six years after the enactment into law of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), popularly known as “amnesty,” which legalized 3.2 million undocumented migrants. It was estimated that there were 6 million unauthorized migrants in the US at the time the legislation was signed into law by Republican President Ronald Reagan.

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The staffing pattern of border patrol agents in FY 2017 was 19,437, down from a high of 21,444 in FY 2011. During President Barack Obama’s two terms, the staffing never declined lower than 20,000 agents, with the exception of FY 2016, when it dipped to 19,828. We can observe that when Donald Trump took office, preceded by one year on the campaign trail, there was the highest number of border patrol agents ever since the founding of the service in 1924, and on the other hand, the lowest number of apprehensions for the previous 30 years. Ironically, 2016 and 2017 also witnessed the lowest apprehensions of Mexican migrants over the same period. What, then, was driving Trump’s anti-Mexican and anti-immigrant vitriol? His pronounced immigration policies, both domestically and internationally, fly in the face of the historic lows of migrant entries and the highest border staffing patterns, and the highest deportation numbers over the previous eight years under Obama than any other period in American history. It appears that Trump is desperately searching for an immigration problem that doesn’t exist, or one that doesn’t require fixing. Let us examine his executive orders related to immigration and nonimmigrant travel from abroad to the US issued practically upon taking office. Titled “Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements,” “Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States,” and “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States,” all elements of the executive orders were premised on previously passed and authorized federal immigration statutes. We will examine these statutes subsequently. The point, however, is that President Trump used existing law to make his case via executive orders instead of taking the legislative route to amend existing law.

President Trump’s executive orders designed to expedite action The first executive order, titled “Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements,” outlines various areas geared to ramp up enforcement specifically along the 2,000-mile southern border. Trump used tough language to introduce his measures: “Although federal immigration law provides a robust framework for federal-state partnership in enforcing our immigration laws and the Congress has authorized and provided appropriations to secure our borders the federal government has failed to discharge the basic sovereign responsibility.” This was seriously directed at the Obama administration, whereas, as mentioned previously, the measures taken under Obama were the most vigorous and onerous since the 1970s. No other president had deported the number scored by Obama during his two terms. For example, between 2009 and 2015 his administration had removed 2.5 million people, with an additional 340,000 by the end of 2016. He neared the 3 million mark, and these numbers don’t reflect those people who self-deported or who were turned away and/or returned to their country of origin by CBP. Nor does this address the estimated 800,000 US

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citizen minors of Mexican deported parents who returned to Mexico. This was the reason he was dubbed the “Deporter-in-Chief” by immigrant advocacy organizations. However, Trump’s policies have been Obama policies on steroids. In fact, after examining Trump’s first year-and-a-half in office, one can easily conclude that he is using all the Obama measures as foundational to move his own immigration agenda. Trump’s directives have been sweeping, and the first included securing the southern border with a wall and increased personnel. This directive contemplates securing from Congress a budget allocation of $25–40 billion to complete a barrier of 1,200 miles, and adding 5,000 more border agents to the approximately 19,000 to 20,000 already patrolling the border. An estimated 600 miles of border barrier already exist, mainly along California, Arizona, and parts of Texas. Trump has yet to find a willing funding source for his wall, whether that be Congress or Mexico, which he repeatedly claimed during the campaign would pay for it. The second was to detain individuals arrested while entering unlawfully. That is a given, but the data provided previously well demonstrate that the apprehension numbers continue to decline. The third was to expedite decisions about those arrested. This particular directive is dependent on the assignment of additional judges – many more of them. This too was problematic for President Obama. Ultimately, once again, this requires a significant budget allocation from Congress. It’s not just a question of judges, but prosecutors, clerks, courtroom space, and temporary detention space. The fourth was to quickly deport those ordered to be removed. In this respect, Trump has sought to end the “catch and release” approach which allows a defendant to be released on bond after the initial arrest for unlawful entry. This practice dates back decades, in recognition of the due process rights of detainees to dispute their removal by availing themselves of existing immigration benefits and remedies. The lack of detention space available to house detainees for the misdemeanor offense of entering the US unlawfully was the vulnerability that obligated the release approach. The Trump administration claims that individuals do not show up on their assigned court dates, notwithstanding evidence to the contrary. It should be noted that the annual federal budget includes an obligatory funding provision to provide 35,000 beds in privately contracted detention centers (jails) on a permanent basis, specifically to house undocumented arrestees awaiting court hearings to adjudicate their legal status and deportability. The fifth was to cooperate with state and local governments to support federal efforts. This is probably the most controversial of the controversies. There was immediate push-back by local municipal and state authorities, both large and small. This was an opportunity for states to accentuate their sovereignty, and they have. California Governor Jerry Brown signed into law Senate Bill 54 (SB54), titled the California Values Act, but popularly known as the

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“sanctuary” law. SB54 essentially limits cooperation between Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) (an agency of the Department of Homeland Security responsible for interior enforcement of immigration laws) and local and state police agencies. Without the implicit cooperation of police agencies with ICE, the number of interior arrests of suspected or real undocumented individuals would be much lower than is the case. Such cooperation occurs when migrants are arrested for a criminal offense, serious or not, and ICE is permitted access to the arrestees’ information, particularly their immigration status and previous criminal record. If ICE discovers that an arrestee does not have lawful status, as a routine procedure it will submit a detainer request to the police agency. According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU): an ICE detainer – or “immigration hold” – is one of the key tools U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) uses to apprehend individuals who come in contact with local and state law enforcement agencies and put them into the federal deportation system. An ICE detainer is a written request that a local jail or other law enforcement agency detain an individual for an additional 48 hours (excluding weekends and holidays) after his or her release date in order to provide ICE agents extra time to decide whether to take the individual into federal custody for removal purposes. (American Civil Liberties Union, 2017) ICE’s use of detainers to imprison people without due process and, in many cases, without any charges pending has been rampant for decades. There have been numerous legal challenges to “detainer requests,” and courts in multiple jurisdictions have found them not to be valid from the perspective of requiring local law enforcement to comply. In effect, ICE has circumvented due process rights of the detainees to secure an immigration hold, at least for 48 hours beyond the release date and time, for the purpose of executing a new arrest in order to pursue deportation. In other words, such detainer requests have resulted in illegal detention of detainees, minimally for 48 hours. A federal warrant, on the other hand, is a different matter. Respect for a detainee’s due process rights means that ICE is required to obtain a federal warrant by providing evidence to a federal court that a detainee is not lawfully in the US, and is therefore subject to an immigration hold for the purpose of pursuing the detainee’s deportation. This is what the law requires. The Trump administration, as occurred under President Obama and previous administrations, has sought to obligate local law enforcement to, in effect, act and operate as an arm of ICE in pursuit of undocumented persons and have them removed from the US. The majority of immigration arrests in the interior of the country actually occur by this means. It is not lost on local and state political authorities that without the implicit and complicit cooperation of local law enforcement, immigration arrests would not be so high.

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The second executive order, titled “Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States,” deals with enforcement of immigration laws in the interior of the country with the same appeals to and rationales of national security and public safety. Throughout the order, the focus is on the haunting prospect of “criminal aliens” entering the US. Another central concern expressed is related to the question of sanctuary jurisdictions. Trump seems seriously troubled by jurisdictions that are perceived to be undermining federal sovereignty, so he declared: Sanctuary jurisdictions across the United States willfully violate Federal law in an attempt to shield aliens from removal from the United States. These jurisdictions have caused immeasurable harm to the American people and to the very fabric of our Republic. (Trump, 2017b) This is important to him, for he understands clearly that without the cooperation of local police agencies, his enforcement policies will be for naught. The order included measures to give no quarter to undocumented individuals who have committed any criminal offense, especially those who have been released back into the community. He directed the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Attorney General to “employ all lawful means to enforce the immigration laws of the United States” and not exempt “classes and categories of removable aliens from potential enforcement.” This was a criticism of Obama, who supposedly exempted non-criminal aliens during the final years of his presidency. Trump affirmed his authority under the Constitution, Article II, Section 3, which defines the responsibilities and prerogatives of the executive, and under the statutory oath of office, to enact the executive order. He applied this to himself as an assertion of his authority, and to the jurisdictions that he planned to challenge. His directives would deny “Federal funds to those jurisdictions that fail to comply with applicable Federal laws.” He threw down the gauntlet to these jurisdictions “that have made even vague declarations of ‘sanctuary’ status,” particularly as this pertained to respecting detainer requests by ICE to local law enforcement. The executive order emphasized that “aliens ordered removed from the U.S. are promptly removed” and that provision be made for the “support to victims, and families of victims, of crimes committed by removable aliens.” The executive order on the whole emphasized the element of criminality – those who had “been convicted of,” “charged with,” “committed acts,” “engaged in fraud or willful misrepresentation,” “abused any program related to receiving a public benefit,” or “subject to a final order of removal,” and that the Secretary of the DHS and the Attorney General should pursue “assessment of fines and penalties,” and “collect from aliens unlawfully present in the U.S. and from those who facilitate their presence in the U.S.”

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He directed the “recruitment of 10,000 additional enforcement and removal officers” – “to the extent permitted by law and subject to the availability of appropriations.” Once again, his directives are premised on an appropriation by Congress. In relation to law enforcement cooperation, Trump’s order directed the following: “It’s the policy of the executive branch to empower State and local law enforcement agencies across the country to perform the functions of an immigration officer in the interior of the United States to the maximum extent permitted by law.” In order to undergird in federal law this approach with local jurisdictions, he directed the Secretary and Attorney General to enter into agreements with state and local officials under Section 287(g) of the federal immigration statute. According to the American Immigration Council, Section 287(g) of the “U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Act authorizes the Department of Homeland Security to deputize selected state and local law enforcement officers to enforce federal immigration law.” Here again, Trump reached back into existing federal statutes to lawfully pursue his policies. Section 287(g) was codified into law when added to the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996. This was signed into law by Democratic President Bill Clinton on September 30, 1996, having been passed by a Republican Congress under the House leadership of Newt Gingrich. Clinton sounded very little different from Trump on immigration enforcement. Trump clearly understood the role of local police agencies when directed “to authorize State and local law enforcement officials … to perform the functions of immigration officers in relation to the investigation, apprehension, or detention of aliens in the United States.” Furthermore, he directed an assault against “sanctuary” jurisdictions: “It is the policy of the executive branch to ensure to the fullest extent of the law, that a State, or a political subdivision of a State, shall comply with 8 U.S.C. 1373.” This section of the federal statute disallows any governmental entity or official from prohibiting or restricting any government entity or official from communicating with the “Immigration and Naturalization Service information regarding the citizenship or immigration status, lawful or unlawful, of any individual.” He further directed the DHS Secretary and Attorney General “to make ineligible of Federal grants those jurisdictions that willfully refuse to comply with federal immigration laws,” and authorized the Attorney General ample discretion to prosecute jurisdictions not in compliance. And Attorney General Jeff Sessions has done exactly that with regard to federal funds and state statutes unsuccessfully asserting state sovereignty over the matter.

Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, known as the McCarran-Walter Act after the authors, Senator Pat McCarran (Democrat – Nevada) and

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Congressman Francis Walter (Democrat – Pennsylvania), perpetuated the quota system and restricted immigration to the United States. It was enacted on June 27, 1952 and codified under Title 8 of the United States Code. While it abolished racial restrictions existing at the time in US immigration and naturalization statutes, it retained the quota system for nationalities and regions. It established a preference system defining certain ethnic groups as desirable, and emphasized labor qualifications. And while the Act abolished the “alien ineligible to citizenship category from U.S. immigration law,” which included the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1880 and the Asian Exclusion Act of 1924, the Act continued to severely restrict lawful immigration of Asians to ridiculously minuscule numbers. The Act further allowed the deportation of both immigrants and naturalized citizens engaged in what were considered “subversive” activities. The so-called “subversives” of the day were suspected members of the Communist Party, their friends, and “fellow-travelers.” The Act also disallowed entry or re-entry into the US for suspected Communist Party affiliation, current or former. Both sponsors of the Act were considered vehemently anti-communist. President Harry Truman vetoed the legislation as “un-American,” and viewed it as discriminatory. His veto message was a stinging rebuke: Today, we are “protecting” ourselves as we were in 1924, against being flooded by immigrants from Eastern Europe …. These are only a few examples of the absurdity, the cruelty of carrying over into this year of 1952 the isolationist limitations of our 1924 law. In no other realm of our national life are we so hampered and stultified by the dead hand of the past as we are in this field of immigration. (Truman, 1952) On the other hand, Trump could have written the speech pronounced on the Senate floor on March 2, 1953 by Senator McCarran in marshaling the twothirds of votes (57 to 26) to override Truman’s veto. And so he said, according to the Congressional Record: I believe that this nation is the last hope of Western civilization and if this oasis of the world shall be overrun, perverted, contaminated or destroyed, then the last flickering light of humanity will be extinguished. I take no issue with those who would praise the contributions which have been made to our society by people of many races, of varied creeds and colors. … However, we have in the United States today hard-core, indigestible blocs which have not become integrated into the American way of life, but which, on the contrary are its deadly enemies. Today, as never before, untold millions are storming our gates for admission and those gates are cracking under the strain. The solution of the problems of Europe and Asia will not come through a transplanting of those problems

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en masse to the United States. … I do not intend to become prophetic, but if the enemies of this legislation succeed in riddling it to pieces, or in amending it beyond recognition, they will have contributed more to promote this nation’s downfall than any other group since we achieved our independence as a nation. (McCarran, 1953) The Trump administration focused on the enforcement provisions of the Act to substantiate its authority to restrict travel to the US based on his interpretation that individuals from certain countries represented a threat to national security. The difference here, however, was that the Act gave authority to the federal government to deny entry into the US on an individual basis for perceived security threats or for affiliation with communist parties or professing such ideology. Trump took it a step further and denied entry to whole countries (seven, then adjusted to six by eventually excluding Syria) professing a particular religion, the Islamic faith. This is the fundamental basis of the “Executive Order Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States,” issued March 6, 2017. It is important to note that the 82nd Congress was controlled by the Democratic Party, with Democrat President Truman at the helm for two terms. The McCarran-Walter Act garnered a 65 percent vote in favor, 107 Democrats and 170 Republicans supporting it for a total of 278 to 113. Democrats did the heavy lifting in overriding the veto of the president from their own party on legislation still considered overtly racist due to the perpetuation of the quota system enacted in 1924 for the sole purpose of restricting immigration from southern European countries and Japan, and a continuation of Chinese exclusion. Notwithstanding Truman’s flourishing language apparently favorable to immigration, it was during these years that the federal crackdown occurred against Mexican migrants, lawful permanent residents, and even US citizens in what came to be known as Operation Wetback. Launched in 1954 under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, under President Truman 726,923 Mexican nationals were deported from the US in 1952 alone. More than 1 million Mexicans were rounded up and deported back to Mexico during the economic crisis that hit the US after World War II. These were the same migrants who had been recruited as braceros (temporary contracted laborers) in 1942 to be employed principally in the agriculture, manufacture, and railroad industries due to a shortage of American workers. It is estimated that they were employed in over 24 states nationally. This program concluded in 1964. That was a significant expulsion of Mexicans considering that the total Mexican/Latino population at the time (excluding Puerto Ricans and Cubans, who were not subject to immigration removal) was probably less than 5 million of the total US population of 162,280,405 in 1950. The Mexican/Latino population was concentrated in the states of Arizona, California, Colorado, New

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Mexico, and Texas, and probably did not constitute more than 3 percent of the total US population. The next major reform of the Immigration and Naturalization Act occurred in 1968 with the passage of the Hart-Celler Act, which finally eliminated the national origins quota system and established a system based on family preferences, but no limits to immediate family relatives of US citizens. The discrimination against southern Europeans ended with this reform.

Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000 The Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000 was signed into law in 2000 by President Bill Clinton for the purpose of authorizing protection of undocumented migrants who have been the victims of serious violence and human trafficking. This statute has been reauthorized during the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, with additional provisions and changes in the name. Originally designed to address the problem of human trafficking, it was not until the later years of the Obama administration that the US witnessed the mass influx of unaccompanied minors, principally from Central America. In 2008, it was reauthorized and renamed the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, after William Wilberforce, who advocated for the abolition of the slave trade and slavery, and led a 20-year campaign as a member of the British Parliament in the early 19th century to approve the Slave Trade Act of 1807. He was also responsible for the eventual passage in 1833 of the Slavery Abolition Act seven years after he resigned from Parliament due to failing health. The relevance of this Act to Trump’s immigration policies is the legal foundation for treatment of unaccompanied minors, especially those who make claims of being victims of human trafficking, their petitions for political asylum, and the application of the provisions of this Act to their cases. By law, Trump is required to abide by this statute in dealing with the migration of unaccompanied minors. However, the application of this Act to accompanied minors does not pertain unless their claims of being victims of human trafficking can be established.

The Secure Fence Act of 2006 The Secure Fence Act of 2006 was signed into law on October 26, 2006 by President George W. Bush to “help protect the American people” and “make our borders more secure,” and he viewed it as “an important step toward immigration reform.” Notable votes in favor of this legislation were Senators Barack Obama (Democrat – IL), Hillary Clinton (Democrat – New York), Barbara Boxer and Diane Feinstein (both Democrats from California), and Charles Schumer (Democrat – New York).

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This authorized the continuation of a border barrier building program which took different forms and actually began in 1990 under President George H. W. Bush. The border barrier program continued under President Bill Clinton, who initiated Operation Gatekeeper, which concentrated resources at the San Diego, California ports of entry with increased fencing, underground sensors, and additional agents. The focus in this region forced migrant streams to divert entry through the Arizona desert, and led to a rising death toll of migrants. By May 2011, the DHS reported that more than 649 miles of border barriers had been erected along with the latest surveillance technology developed by the military in the wars abroad. What is important here is that Trump’s proposed border wall is not new. It has been in the making since 1990 (it was even discussed during President Jimmy Carter’s administration, ridiculed as the “tortilla curtain” proposal), and has successfully been erected over 649 miles on different types of terrain and through multiple states. This has been authorized with the corresponding budget appropriations by both Republican and Democratic presidents and Congresses. It has been a two-party assault against migrants over 60 years, notwithstanding the recognition that migrants and immigrants (legal permanent residents) have played a fundamental role in the American economy in multiple sectors of the economy – even high tech.

The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act is considered the most pernicious immigration statute enacted in the US since the Immigration Act of 1924, the National Origins Act, and the Asian Exclusion Act of that same year. Known as the IIRIRA Act, it was passed by a Republican-dominated Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton on September 30, 1996. Many believe that the IIRIRA Act is responsible for the ballooning growth of undocumented migrants in the US due to its criminalizing character, border barrier construction and enforcement, and the legal bars to legal immigration due to previous unlawful entry and stay in the US. When the law was enacted, the estimated number of undocumented immigrants in the US hovered around 3 million, but by 2016 it had reached 11–12 million. The IIRIRA Act did the following: it precluded migrants from obtaining legal resident status if they entered the US unlawfully and stayed for more than 180 days but less than 365 days, so applicants were required to remain outside the US for three years before applying for legal status, unless they were able to obtain a pardon due to hardship. If they remained in the US for 365 days or more, they were required to remain outside the US for ten years before applying for legal status, unless they were able to obtain a pardon. If they returned to the US without a pardon, they were subject to summary removal and not able even to apply for a pardon for ten years.

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The Act went into effect on the heels of the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement between Canada, the US, and Mexico, which went into effect on January 1, 1994, and not so coincidentally also marked the beginning of the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, one of the poorest states per capita measurement. The upshot of the IIRIRA Act is having created a trapped undocumented population in unlawful status almost in perpetuity. Under the IIRIRA Act, even if an undocumented individual has an eligible and willing sponsor to apply for legal status, due to the “unlawful” entry the undocumented individual would be required to return to his or her country of origin for three to ten years, and thus be separated from his or her family in the US for the duration. The result in the great majority of cases is that the undocumented do not leave the US, so this population has continued to grow over the years. The number of pardons for unlawful entry approved by the immigration authorities is miniscule. The statute permitted the Attorney General to revoke legal permanent resident status and deport individuals due to criminal infraction convictions, including misdemeanors, and additionally, allowed prolonged incarceration pending resolution of an immigration civil offense.

Trumpism is the modern version of Know Nothingism In the 2016 election campaign, many commentators analogized Trump’s antiimmigrant rants with the Know Nothing nativist orientation of an earlier era. The Know Nothings, expressed politically as the American Party, were a nativist and xenophobic movement in the 19th century, of a Protestant Anglo-Saxon composition and anti-Catholic and anti-immigration bent, which reached its peak in 1855. The American Party became popularly known as the Know Nothing Party. It advocated for mass deportations of immigrants and even a 21-year waiting period to obtain naturalization. In California, it was successful in passing antiChinese legislation and policies. While it arose in 1844 as a secret society and movement in reaction to the significant influx of Irish (in the east) and German (in the mid-west) immigrants who were Catholic for the most part, the Know Nothings were successful in electing members to the US Congress and a myriad of state and local political offices. The influence was national, but concentrated in the industrial northeast, with the exception of California. Immigrants were attacked as workplace competitors with the native-born. While its influence declined after the 1860 national elections, when it split around the issue of slavery, its nativist themes continued to appear in the rhetoric of the American Protective Association in the 1890s and the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. Some of the very rhetoric of that time is parroted by Trump in rallies around the country today – just directed at a different set of people, color, countries of origin, and faith.

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What could be different? Which way America? First, America must acknowledge the contributing role migrants and immigrants have played in establishing the country as the first in many fields in the world, but foremost in the economy. Today, that economy and workforce are changing radically and very rapidly. The country is on the cusp of a historic change in the composition of the workforce. The graying of the US labor pool translates to 70 million baby boomers (those born between 1946 and 1964) on the retirement train and collecting social security. This is considered the most educated, technically and professionally trained, and culturally groomed, wealthiest, and consumeroriented (with buying power) workforce in the history of the US now transitioning to their sunset years. Excluding Latino immigrants from the US demographic pool, the country is in a demographic deficit and not replacing itself in sufficient numbers to sustain a growth pattern of population, savings, and financial wealth. Immigrants have always played the role of reserve army of labor for America, particularly Mexican migrants, brought in to specific industries when and where their labor was required, and then removed according to the economic cycles of boom and bust. This is more clearly observed in agriculture, manufacture, and construction. It is also observable from the perspective of deportation numbers of Mexican laborers during the 1930s, 1950s, 1970s, and continuously thereafter. It is not lost on us that President Obama steered the country through the Great Recession from 2008 to the close of his second term, which witnessed the greatest job loss, financial loss, and home foreclosures since the 1930s, but also the highest deportations since that same era. Today, it is theorized that immigrants, like women, no longer play the role of a reserve army of labor. They are fully integrated into the economy permanently. Immigrant labor is now a permanent fixture in the US labor market in the industries where it is predominantly employed – agriculture, construction, light manufacture, service, and high tech. The North American Free Trade Agreement – the integration of the North American market economies in the so-called “neoliberal economic model,” resulted in a massive export of Mexican labor to the US (ruined small farmers from 1994 to 2010 competing with US agro-corporations) and produced cheap Mexican labor on both sides of the US–Mexico border. The corollary was a massive export of manufacturing jobs from the US to Mexico, particularly automobile plants and assorted parts plants, but also many others. Second, the United States currently has an opportunity to recognize the vibrancy and youth of the immigrant workforce and continue to train it in the skills required, language proficiency, and cultural nuances of work rules and customs, and racial and gender diversity in today’s workplace. Additionally, this is human capital not formed by the US, and therefore represents an investment windfall and savings from the perspective of human capital development. Ironically, a US Department of Labor report published in 1988, the final year of President Reagan’s administration, titled “Workforce 2000,” estimated that the US

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would experience a 20 million-person workforce shortfall by the year 2000, and recommended that immigration laws be adjusted to conform to that probability, and prioritize the immigration of skilled and English language-proficient workers over family reunification. It is difficult to determine whether this prediction still holds considering the rapid loss of jobs due not to outsourcing, but automation and robotics in the American workplace. However, there is no doubt that in certain employment fields there is a lack of available workers. Recently, reports have surfaced regarding a huge lack of home-healthcare workers to attend to the elderly. Third, the Pew Research Center calculates that the 11–12 million undocumented population have been in the US on average ten years. Most of the adults have US-born children who have never visited their parents’ country of origin, and who are not proficient in those countries’ languages. This group could easily be integrated through a new legalization or “amnesty” program similar to the 1986 IRCA precedent. In fact, the threshold to qualify was only four years of having been in the US to be eligible to apply for legal status. Fourth, the US could consider a rolling legalization program, for example every ten years, or simply offer employment visas for extended periods of time (say, five years) in multiple industries, not just agriculture, and allow such workers to adjust their legal status from temporary worker to permanent legal resident upon complying with terms and conditions. Currently, there are numerous temporary work visa programs, predominantly used in agriculture and high tech, but the annual number of visas available is inadequate to meet industry demand. The major opposition to such programs comes from organized labor, which believes the temporary workers undermine native-born workers and undercut wages and employment conditions. Nevertheless, an expansion of the visas is warranted by the demand while also ensuring contract workers’ labor rights, standards, and ability to join or form a labor union. Native-born workers should have a first right of refusal of employment opportunities, however. Fifth, various presidents have been faced with the periodic influx of migrant refugees due to either extreme natural disasters or civil strife and civil war. The US has been directly involved militarily in the countries of El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Honduras, and refugees from these countries have obtained Temporary Protected Status (TPS) by executive action prerogative. Haiti has also been a beneficiary over various cycles of calamity. This status must be certified annually by the Department of Homeland Security, which then requires the TPS status holder to renew the temporary legal status. If the certification is not issued, the permit holders are required to return to their countries of origin. There are approximately 350,000 such refugees in the US today, and in 2018 the Trump administration declined certification and ordered them removed within the following 18 months. Many of these permit holders have been in the US since the early 1980s and have families with US-born children. These are people who are integrated into the workforce and can easily be absorbed by offering permanent legal residency.

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Sixth, “go to the back of the line to enter the US legally” is an argument that has been heard repeatedly. The reality is that the US issues 270,000 family reunification visas annually, set against a 20,000 annual visa allocation per country for those seeking to enter lawfully. There are high- and low-user countries. The high-user countries are vexed with a perennial backlog, while the low-user countries have a surplus visa allocation. An easy fix to the backlog problem, minimizing the incentive for migrants to enter the US unlawfully, would be to re-allocate the surplus visa allocation to those countries with a high demand – like Mexico, El Salvador, the Philippines, and China. Seventh, the elimination of the three- and ten-year bars for unlawful entry imposed by the IIRIRA Act of 1996 would result in the legalization of 80 percent of the undocumented population through a family relative petition, especially for those with a US-born child. According to federal law, this could only occur through legislation. Eighth, significantly reducing the undocumented in the US by the means outlined above, and not by forced removal, which has been demonstrated to be ineffective over the past 50 years, would reduce the need for increased border enforcement. Minimally, it would change the focus of enforcement to the interdiction of drugs introduced into the US, and arms trafficking which moves in the opposite direction. Ironically, the election of a radical Mexican social democrat and revolutionary nationalist, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, may do more to resolve the perceived immigration problem for the US than anything Trump or Congress could do. His platform and that of his political party, MORENA (Movement for National Regeneration), seek to attack corruption from the top down, reverse privatization schemes detrimental to national interests, particularly in the energy industries, double pensions for seniors, extend educational scholarships and apprentice positions to 3 million youth, aggressively invest in the countryside and become food self-sufficient, and invest in regional economic development projects in the southern migrant sending states and along the border. The president-elect has already proposed approaching the Central American countries with a Mexican “Alliance for Progress” program designed for economic uplift and reducing social insecurity. The elimination of the narco-violence in Mexico, according to Obrador, aims to end poverty, especially the endemic kind. “No one migrates to the US for pleasure, but due to necessity. We intend to end the necessity,” Obrador declared repeatedly on the campaign trail. Now he is president of Mexico.

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American Immigration Council. (2017, March 15). The 287(g) Program: An overview. Retrieved from www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/287g-programimmigration Bacon, D. (2008). Illegal people: How globalization creates migration and criminalizes immigrants. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Balderrama, F. E., & Rodriguez, R. (2006). Decade of betrayal: Mexican repatriation in the 1930s. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press. Bennett, M. T. (1966). The Immigration and Nationality (McCarran-Walter) Act of 1952, as amended to 1965. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 367, 1, 127–136. Boissonealt, L. (2017, January 26). How the 19th-century Know Nothing Party reshaped American politics. Smithsonian. Retrieved from www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ immigrants-conspiracies-and-secret-society-launched-american-nativism-180961915/ Chan, J. (2016, January 13). Immigration detention bed quota timeline. National Immigrant Justice Center. Retrieved from www.immigrantjustice.org/staff/blog/immigrationdetention-bed-quota-timeline Cillizza, C. (2018, June 18). The remarkable history of the family separation crisis. The Point with Chris Cillizza. Retrieved from www.cnn.com/2018/06/18/politics/donaldtrump-immigration-policies-q-and-a/index.html CQ Researcher. (2018). Deportation of aliens. Washington, DC: CQ Press. Daniels, R. (2010). Immigration and the legacy of Harry S. Truman. Kirksville, MO: Truman University Press. Funderburk, B. (2018). Operation Wetback: United States immigration enforcement campaign. Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved from www.britannica.com/topic/Oper ation-Wetback Gomez-Quiñones, J., & Vásquez, I. (2014). Making Aztlán: Ideology and culture of the Chicana and Chicano movement, 1966–1977. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press. Gonzalez, G. G. (2006). Guest workers or colonized labor? Mexican labor migration to the United States. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Gonzalez-Barrera, A. (2015, November 19). More Mexicans leaving than coming to the U.S. Pew Research Center: Hispanic Trends. Retrieved from www.pewhispanic.org/2015/ 11/19/more-mexicans-leaving-than-coming-to-the-u-s/ Human Rights First. (2016, February). The Flores Settlement: A brief history and next steps. Human Rights First. Retrieved from www.humanrightsfirst.org/resource/floressettlement-brief-history-and-next-steps Illegal Immigration and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 2006. H. R. 104–828. (1996, September 24). Retrieved from www.congress.gov/congressional-report/104th-congress /house-report/828/1 Illegal Immigration and Immigrant Responsibility Act, H. R. 3610, Pub. L. 104–208, 110 Stat. 3009 (1996). Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, Pub. L. 82–414, 66 Stat. 163 (1952). Jacobson, D. (1997). Rights across borders: Immigration and the decline of citizenship. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Johnson, J. (2016, October 17). United States Border Patrol Southwest Family Unit subject and unaccompanied alien children apprehensions fiscal year 2016. U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Retrieved from www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/southwest-borderunaccompanied-children/fy-2016 MacDougall, I. (2018, June 19). Behind the Criminal Immigration Law: Eugenics and white supremacy: The history of the statute that can make it a felony to illegally enter

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the country involves some dark corners of U.S. history. ProPublica. Retrieved from www.propublica.org/article/behind-the-criminal-immigration-law-eugenics-andwhite-supremacy McCarran, Senator P. (1953). Congressional Record, March 2, p. 1,518. Retrieved from www .govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRECB-1953-pt2/pdf/GPO-CRECB-1953-pt2-3.pdf Mize, R. L., & Swords, A. C. S. (2011). Consuming Mexican labor from the Bracero program to NAFTA. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press. Morin, R. (2013). Among the valiant: Mexican Americans in WWII and Korea. Los Angeles, CA: Valiant Press. Ngai, M. M. (2014). Impossible subjects: Illegal aliens and the making of modern America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Palacios, J. M. S., & Ruiz, M. A. V. (2016). En la senda del TLCAN: Una visión critíca. Hermosillo, Mexico: Universidad de Sonora. Pineda, A. R. (2011). Entre los repatriados: Autobiografia de un Mexico Americano. Bloomington, IN: Xlibris. Planas, R. (2015, August 19). Hillary Clinton defends call to deport child migrants. Huffington Post. Retrieved from www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/hillary-clinton-child-migrants _us_55d4a5c5e4b055a6dab24c2f Secure Fence Act of 2006, H. R. 6061, Pub. L. 109–367, 120 Stat. 2638 (2006). Sessions, J. B. (2018). Memorandum for federal prosecutors along the Southwest border: Zero-tolerance for offenses under 8 U.S.C. 1325(a). Washington, DC: Office of the Attorney General. Smith, L. (2018, January 29). “Operation Wetback” uprooted a million lives and tore families apart. Sound familiar? The 1950s scheme to deport Mexicans was as racist as its name. Timeline. Retrieved from https://timeline.com/mass-deportation-operationwetback-mexico-eb79174f720b Thompson, G. (2018, July 13). Watch the 6-year-old Salvadoran girl heard on a secret recording out of a Border Patrol detention facility finally being reunited with her mom. ProPublica. Retrieved from www.propublica.org/article/child-separated-at-borderreunited-with-her-mom Tichenor, D. J. (2002). Dividing lines: The politics of immigration control in America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Truman, H. S. (1952, June 25). Veto of Bill to revise the laws relating to immigration, naturalization, and nationality. The American Presidency Project. Retrieved from www .presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/veto-bill-revise-the-laws-relating-immigrationnaturalization-and-nationality Trump, D. (2017a, January 25). Executive order: Border security and immigration enforcement improvements. The White House. Retrieved from www.whitehouse.gov/presiden tial-actions/executive-order-border-security-immigration-enforcement-improvements/ Trump, D. (2017b, January 25). Executive order: Enhancing public safety in the interior of the United States. The White House. Retrieved from www.whitehouse.gov/presidentialactions/executive-order-enhancing-public-safety-interior-united-states/ Trump, D. (2017c, March 6). Executive order protecting the nation from foreign terrorist entry into the United States. The White House. Retrieved from www.whitehouse.gov/presi dential-actions/executive-order-protecting-nation-foreign-terrorist-entry-united-states-2/ U.S. Customs and Border Protection. (2017a, December 12). U.S. Border Patrol apprehensions from Mexico and other than Mexico (FY 2000–FY 2017). Retrieved from www .cbp.gov/document/stats/us-border-patrol-apprehensions-mexico-and-other-mexicofy-2000-fy-2017

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U.S. Customs and Border Protection. (2017b, December 12). U.S. Border Patrol fiscal year staffing statistics (FY 1992–FY 2017). Retrieved from www.cbp.gov/document/stats/ us-border-patrol-fiscal-year-staffing-statistics-fy-1992-fy-2017 U.S. Customs and Border Protection. (2018, July 2). U.S. Border Patrol total monthly UAC apprehensions by sector (FY 2010–FY 2017). Retrieved from www.cbp.gov/document/ stats/us-border-patrol-total-monthly-uac-apprehensions-sector-fy-2010-fy-2017 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. (2017, April 2). Issuance of Immigration Detainers by ICE Immigration Officers. Policy Number 10074.2. Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000, H. R. 3244, Pub. L. 106–386, 114 Stat. 1464 (2000). Vigil, J. D. (2012). From Indians to Chicanos: The dynamics of Mexican-American culture (3rd Ed.). Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press. Watson, L. (2018, June 18). How crossing the border became a crime. Splinter. Retrieved from https://splinternews.com/how-crossing-the-border-became-a-crime-1827160001 Weber, D. J. (2004). Foreigners in their native land: Historical roots of Mexican Americans. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press.

EPILOGUE Pitfalls and possibilities Elliott Currie

The idea for this book came in a conversation in the hallway at the American Society of Criminology convention in New Orleans, Louisiana, just after Donald Trump’s election to the American presidency, when Walter DeKeseredy and I discovered that we had something important in common: neither of us was altogether surprised that Trump had won. Both of us, in fact, were surprised that so many other people on the left were as surprised as they were. We both felt, too, that the widespread surprise among progressives reflected a troubling obliviousness to the reality that the Democratic mainstream in the United States was remarkably out of touch with the feelings of large parts of the American population and with the social and economic conditions that gave rise to those feelings: and that those feelings were not confined to a relatively small and marginal group of what Hillary Clinton had with epic insensitivity described as “deplorables.” Much of the established Democratic Party, and much of the liberal community, seemed oddly desensitized to the larger currents in American life that were bringing long-simmering and widely shared discontents to a boil – and that had helped to propel one of the most unqualified candidates ever to ascend the higher reaches of the political stage into the most powerful position on the planet. We thought that Trump’s election was a wake-up call, especially because it meshed with similar right-wing successes in Europe and elsewhere. We believed there was an urgent need to think through the roots of the troubling political situation we seemed to be in, and to contribute to what we hoped would be a broad and deep strategic rethinking on the part of the serious left. That would require revisiting with fresh eyes some key issues where progressives – who by all rights, reason, and evidence should have had the upper hand by now – were so often losing, and, as in the case of Trump’s victory, losing big – losing in

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ways that could have enormously fateful consequences for the quality of global life, and for the values and aspirations that we’ve long cherished. The intervening time has driven home the urgency of these concerns. In the United States, Trump’s administration has served as a battering ram against many of the already shaky bulwarks of America’s rather halting steps towards equality, economic security, and social support. With the appointment of two Supreme Court justices, the assault against the best of American institutions seems likely to continue through the lifetimes of the editors, and probably longer. This book is the result of that conversation. We asked our diverse and distinguished group of contributors to write about issues that they knew well, and to give us both a clear-eyed sense of where we are now and, as importantly, how to think about getting to a better place. Some of the chapters we sought involved analyses of our general political situation in the Trump era, and of how we might move forward; others involved asking our authors to look hard at particular issues or institutions – from the police to immigration and much more – and suggest new ways of thinking about them in the light of current social and political developments. We think the responses we got are remarkably rich and helpful, and that a close reading of them will contribute a great deal to our collective ability to develop credible strategies for progressive change in an age of palpable regression. We are certainly not the only people trying to engage in that kind of serious thinking – one of the brightest spots in an otherwise dark time has been the emergence of a great deal of innovative thinking and collective action among committed people on the left, stimulated by the sense that we are indeed in a period of crisis and that fresh thinking and new approaches are imperative if we are to prevent much worse to come. Nevertheless, we are proud of the work that our authors have put in, and I want to thank all of them for their contributions. I won’t claim that our contributors have managed to solve all the issues that they have turned their minds to here, but they do provide a great deal to talk about as we move to build more effective movements for change, including a great many specific strategic ideas, spanning the spectrum from short to long term, which we hope will help fuel debates for some time to come. I want to be clear that not all of our authors necessarily share the same overall political vision, much less particular strategic perspectives. We did not ask for uniformity, but for thoughtfulness and creativity. But while I would not be able to summarize neatly what these 14 contributions have told us, I do think that there are a number of themes that appear often enough that they are worth singling out for some comment. One of those themes, unsurprisingly, is that of urgency. A number of our contributors point to the reality that we are not only in difficult times, but that we are in some sense at a turning point or, as Rob White puts it, at a “crossroads.” It is not simply that conditions are increasingly difficult for people around the world, but that the successful resurgence on the right has put us in a position where we stand to lose a great deal if we are not able to mobilize an effective

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opposition, and to mobilize it quickly. As Simon Window, Steve Hall, and James Treadwell put it, we must “change track, and fast.” That the stakes are very high is perhaps most apparent when it comes to global processes of environmental destruction and climate change, which, as Rob White reminds us, are “planet-wide, transformative, and catastrophic.” But the sense that we are at a potential tipping point is also apparent when it comes to other issues – as, for example, the potential erosion of women’s rights to control their own bodies that has accelerated under the impact of the Trump administration’s policies. As Meda Chesney-Lind points out, these threats are troubling enough within the United States itself, as the Roe v. Wade decision, which has structured access to abortion since 1973 in the United States, is put at risk more than ever before by the installation of a firmly conservative majority on the Trump Supreme Court. But they may have even greater human impact through the effects of policies like the “Global Gag Rule” and the denial of basic health care to great numbers of women who, particularly in the developing world, will be even more vulnerable to needless illness and suffering than they already are. As that suggests, one source of the frequent sense of urgency among our contributors is their shared awareness that the issues on the table today are not abstract, nor simply the stuff of ideological debates: they have enormous impact on the lives of real people – whether they are impoverished women in Bangladesh, dispossessed and adrift white working-class men in the north of England, or – as Joseph Donnermeyer reminds us – similarly dispossessed young people overdosing in the restroom of a rural gas station on the fringes of Appalachia. As Rob White reminds us, “from a global perspective, living conditions for the majority are worsening by the day.” It is ultimately because the political and economic changes now accelerating as we write are ones that translate – to use C. Wright Mills’ famous expression – into “private troubles” among great numbers of people around the world that the sense of urgency on the left is and should be most pressing. But along with a common recognition of the sense of urgency in our current situation, a number of our contributors also remind us that it is a very big mistake to imagine that the recent and spectacular instances of global right-wing resurgence are wholly unexpected, or that they represent a sudden and surprising break from the past. So to the theme of urgency I would add what I might call the theme of continuity. As several of our authors point out, the current resurgence of the global right did not come from nowhere. In the United States, the 2016 election reflected long-brewing political developments that greatly pre-date the emergence of Donald Trump himself on our political stage. Perhaps even more importantly, the terribly fraught social, economic, and ecological conditions we confront today didn’t emerge overnight: they have been evolving, in often glaringly apparent ways, for a long time. We see this, for example, in Donnermeyer’s account of the enduring history behind the recent surge of opiate abuse in many parts of the United States. It is not merely a sudden epidemic, over which we must wring our hands and scratch our heads, but an

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endemic problem deeply rooted in conditions that we have known about for as long as many of us can remember. That doesn’t diminish the human costs of the tragic increase in deaths from overdoses on heroin and synthetic opiates in the last few years. It does mean that any intelligent approach to those personal tragedies must be grounded in the recognition of just how long and how deeply they have been woven into the fabric of life in many American communities, driven by structural conditions that have been “exacerbated by past administrations (both Republican and Democrat).” Something similar applies when it comes to immigration. People across the United States were understandably appalled by the Trump administration’s brutal forced separation of migrant children and families during the summer of 2018, and took to the streets in the hundreds of thousands in protest. Yet, as James Diego Vigil and Nativo Lopez Vigil remind us, harsh policies of detention and deportation of immigrants from the Global South have been a feature of every US administration in recent years. And across the Atlantic, Winlow, Hall, and Treadwell remind us that the state of working people in the UK has been declining for a very long time – a decline that has been matched by an equally long-term neglect on the part of much of the left. It is remarkable, then, that so much of the current discourse among American liberals does in fact treat Trump’s presidency as if it were a sudden, catastrophic turn in an otherwise relatively placid American trajectory. It is as if Trump had suddenly been deposited on our shores from Mars (or perhaps Vladivostok). Beneath this sense of fundamental discontinuity, I think, lies a new, tacit American celebration that rests not far beneath the surface of the consciousness of many liberals in the United States. That celebratory attitude, rarely articulated systematically, emerged strikingly during the National Convention of the Democratic Party in the summer of 2016, which often presented an unusually upbeat story about the state of contemporary America – coupled with a quite scornful denigration of those people, whether on the left or the right, who seemed not to understand what great shape we were all in. I watched that convention with a growing sense of dismay that evolved into alarm. I could not help but think that if I, as a reasonably secure occupant of a solid academic job, reasonably well paid and among the few people remaining in the United States who continue to enjoy a fairly generous package of benefits – if the painful dislocations and deprivations of American life were so apparent to me, how much more so must they be for the people who were actually bearing the brunt of the massive economic and social dislocations of our time. And yet one Democratic spokesperson after another trooped up to the stage to declaim in all seriousness before millions of television viewers that things had really never been better here in the United States, and that therefore supporting mostly the same policies and the same vision that had shaped the country’s current situation was not simply the right choice, but a blindingly obvious choice. As Winlow, Hall, and Treadwell note, this is not just a tactical or strategic political failing, but a moral one as well: we cannot “in good conscience encourage millions of ordinary people, struggling to

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make ends meet, to vote for political parties that promise nothing other than the continued reproduction of what already exists.” The election of Trump should have precipitated a deep rethinking of that fundamentally smug and ultimately class-bound vision of America. Too often the response has instead been a kind of militant denial – a defensive insistence that Democratic and liberal losses were simply the result of Trump’s perfidy, the meddling of Russians, and the intellectual and moral limitations of resentful white people left behind by the otherwise beneficent march of progress. This suggests another theme, closely related to the idea of continuity, that is crucially important in understanding the roots of the current resurgence of the right and the design of strategies to retake the issues as our own. It is what I’d call re-affirming the importance of thinking systemically – that is, of viewing recent political developments in terms of underlying national and global economic and social forces, rather than simply the malign influence of particularly destructive personalities. That kind of systemic thinking has always been fundamental to the left project, but it seems to have gone missing in much of the day-to-day talk that I encounter, even among progressives, about life in America under Trump. Instead, there is a common tendency to regard Trump himself as the principal source of most of the problems that we now face, to the neglect of any sense of the structural nature of those problems or, again, of how deeply and enduringly they are embedded in our trajectory as a society (I find myself often in the position of speaking as if I were a kind of grizzled elder trying to remind people of good hearts and good intentions that there were deep problems in our society, including deeply frightening political developments, well before Trump ever arrived on the political horizon). A corollary is that Americans, even on the left, often seem endlessly fascinated by the antics now emerging from the White House – a preoccupation that is fed eagerly by our mainstream media, which lately seem to report on very little else. But the result of this focus on the topical and often trivial doings of Trump and his associates as individuals is to divert us from a steady gaze at the underlying political, social, and economic forces, increasingly global in nature, that are actually most salient in affecting the state of our country and to which many of our most regressive political sentiments are a response. What makes the retreat of systemic thinking so troubling is that it hobbles the ability of the left to offer the kind of analysis that can both illuminate the sources of people’s troubles and point to ways of surmounting them – analysis that can convincingly replace the distorted, but too often persuasive, views of the right, which become compelling by default rather than real substance. Several of our contributors suggest that we are in the place we are in precisely because we have so often failed to take on this most fundamental job of the left: that the right has been quicker to perceive and act upon the widespread personal suffering, pain, and sense of loss that public policies, often promoted under the banner of economic growth or efficiency, have generated, from rural Ohio to Newcastle and nearly everywhere else in an increasingly interconnected world.

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They share a deep sense of frustration that, as Winlow, Hall, and Treadwell put it, many people who are now in the rank-and-file of the resurgent right around the world “could have been recruited to the cause of socialism.” They point to an extraordinary failure on the left to mobilize the people who should naturally be our constituency, and to educate them about the links between their private troubles and the global forces of a political economy that is fundamentally inimical to their interests – that routinely undermines their chances of living a good life on a planet that is healthy and secure. It is indeed remarkable that (not for the first time) so many of the people who are the worst victims of that global system are among its most fervent supporters. But it’s important to keep in mind at the same time that it is not only the victims who support that system, but also those at the top who benefit from it the most – who, unsurprisingly, provide the bulk of the support, financial and otherwise, for the policies that undercut the lives and futures of most Americans. The dramatic failure of the mainstream of the American Democratic Party to point this out helped to distance them from large numbers of people who felt, understandably, that the Democratic presidential candidate was considerably more in touch with the people who ran Goldman Sachs then with the single working mother in Racine, Wisconsin, trying to put food on the table for her family. That crucial failure of progressives to do the core job of the left – to educate, mobilize, and organize those who have a stake in fundamental political and social change – is very much related to another theme that appears in some of these chapters: the crucial importance of solidarity to a successful and morally defensible progressive project. The idea of solidarity has, of course, always been central for the left: it serves both to remind us that we are all in this together and to promote a vision of inclusive and welcoming political action. But as many of our contributors point out, that sense of solidarity is painfully lacking in much of the left today around the world. Central to a renewed commitment to solidarity is the understanding that many of the grievances of working people caught up in movements of the right – the folks who vote for Trump (or for nobody) or the nationalist movement in Britain or populists of the right in Italy – are grounded in systemic deprivations and long-standing dislocations that are very real and that cut across lines of class, race, and gender – no matter how egregiously and regressively they may be expressed. “We cannot fight the rise of the right by daubing ordinary people with the symbols of absolute evil,” write Winlow, Hall, and Treadwell: Walter DeKeseredy similarly cautions against demonizing the “angry white men” whose sense of loss and uselessness, mostly unaddressed by either mainstream political party, played a critical role in Trump’s election. Their attitudes are never pretty, and sometimes abhorrent. But they have flourished in the absence of a coherent political vision, embodied in strong and inclusive national and local organizations of the left, that energetically offers a different interpretation of the plight of those who are increasingly ground down and

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rendered marginal by opaque forces well beyond their control. It is stunningly odd that the right has often been strategically better here as well – reaching out, however insincerely, to those whose lives have been savaged by their own policies. It’s as if, having just beaten someone half to death, the attacker holds out a hand to the victim and assures them that he feels their pain. But, in the absence of anyone else expressing empathy, it may just work. My own chapter argues, along with some others, that the imperative of solidarity also applies to our capacity to think empathically about the victims of the violence and insecurity that are so pervasive in some places under the impact of a disruptive and depriving social order: to grasp the plight of the girl afraid to walk home from school in the afternoon in a community whose streets – and homes – are unsafe for women, or of her parent living in fear that something will happen to her. Our job is not to try to persuade people that their fear of being victimized by violence is irrational – in the hardest-hit parts of the United States, much less Central America, it isn’t irrational at all. Our job is to offer an understanding of where that violence comes from and to work to empower communities to mobilize to combat it on their own terms and in opposition to policies of repression, abusive policing, and mass incarceration – as emphasized also in Randy Myers and Tim Goddard’s chapter on justice for youth. Providing the kind of perspective that can help people gain a collective awareness of where their troubles come from – whether violence or unemployment or unaffordable housing or pollution – has always been a core part of the job of the left, and so it is not surprising that another running theme among many of our authors is the need to reinvigorate the fundamental progressive understanding that, since many of the problems that beset us in the modern world are deeply structural in nature, they call for structural remedies. They cannot be resolved by business as usual – even if the business as usual is reasonably well intended. The systemic nature of the crises that affect us – whether it’s the plight of poor youth of color caught up in a system of repressive social control that stunts their lives in the name of helping them, or the problems of those most affected by global climate change or the heedless disposal of toxic wastes, or the families of young people of color gunned down by police – calls for much more than the application of immediate and politically palatable reforms. It calls for what we might describe as thoughtful audacity. That theme shapes several of the chapters in this book, including those by Sonya Goshe on the limits of the much ballyhooed criminal justice reforms of the United States in recent years, Alex Vitale’s dissection of the fundamental limitations of many police reforms that have proliferated in response to the current crisis of over policing and abusive policing in the United States, Randy Myers and Tim Goddard’s proposal for a thorough reorientation of the way we think about justice for youth, Gregg Barak’s critique of “well-worn tinkering efforts” in the face of the global banking system’s fundamentally anti-social character, Rob White’s discussion of the elements of an effective left strategy against the looming disasters related to climate change, and many others. Several of our authors

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independently conclude that what Sonya Goshe calls “structural nihilism” – the ideological belief that nothing much can be done about the structural roots of critical social problems – operates today as a formidable inhibitor of meaningful social action, pushing relatively minor if superficially appealing reforms to the forefront of political dialogue and policy discussion while leaving the fundamentally regressive role of institutions intact. Alex Vitale captures this need to distinguish real from superficial reforms neatly in pointing out that “a kinder, gentler, and more diverse war on the poor is still a war on the poor.” It could be said that many of these chapters put on the table once again the concept of “structural reforms” that was a vibrant part of progressive discussion in the 1960s and has periodically resurfaced in discussions of political strategies from the left. They express a shared sense that we should not be confined in our thinking to relatively small-scale efforts that do not challenge the existing parameters of social and economic relations – whether those relations have to do with the role of the police in a fundamentally unequal society, the nature of the juvenile justice system, or a production system tied to the massive generation of climate-altering chemicals. It is not simply that those efforts don’t take us far enough – but that they often compound and perpetuate the problems that brought them into being in the first place. Thus the flip side of the theme of the importance of audacity is what we might call the pitfalls of timidity in progressive approaches to social ills. This does not by any means rule out the value of shorter-term and incremental steps: far from it. We see in the chapters by Rob White, by Randy Myers and Tim Goddard, and by James Diego Vigil and Nativo Lopez Vigil, to take only a handful of examples, an explicit commitment to thinking in both the long term and the short to medium term. The trick for progressives is to design those shorter-term measures to align with a coherent longer-term strategy. They should not be adopted simply because we don’t think we can do anything better, or because they’re more likely to gain political support next month in a fragmented, pessimistic, and increasingly cowed political culture. Myers and Goddard put this well with respect to programs for youth: while “individualized approaches may have their place,” they write, they need to be “nested within broader community and structural-level policy changes that address the larger forces that push young people to the margins and often into carceral institutions.” A number of our authors, accordingly, admirably abandon timidity to propose genuinely visionary solutions – from Rob White’s suggestion of a global “green police” to Gregg Barak’s call for treating banking as a public utility to Walter DeKeseredy’s call for rethinking the meaning of work. In a generally timid political climate, where many people on the left have been mostly licking their wounds in recent years, even less fundamental proposals might seem fatally out of touch with the political realities of our time. But that perspective, as several of our authors suggest, is unduly pessimistic. Another theme in some of our chapters, indeed, is the recognition that we are in a time of opportunity – a time not just of very real peril, but also of very real possibilities. The very fact that so

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many people around the globe are increasingly in the same boat is both a sobering reality and an unprecedented opportunity, if we are willing to seize it. It is fundamentally appalling that only a minority of people even in the richest countries of the world truly benefit in the long run from the kinds of policies promoted (with dismaying success) by the resurgent right, but it is also an opening for change. That’s a simple truth, but one we too often forget. One of the most troubling tendencies on the left is to think of ourselves as a besieged and outgunned minority surrounded by a vast sea of deeply conservative opposition. But that reflects a critical misunderstanding of the balance of progressive and regressive forces today that leads us to restrict our expectations for what is achievable. Peter Squires’ analysis of the situation with respect to gun control in the United States offers one case in point. Far from being usefully understood as a deeply rooted historical tradition, inexorably embedded in the American psyche, the stridently “pro-gun” culture in the United States is mainly a modern phenomenon, heavily the creation of systematic marketing efforts by particularly asocial and aggressive corporations. And it is a culture not shared by the majority of Americans. That makes for a far more hopeful sense of what might be accomplished by way of more intelligent gun policies if we are able to turn that “background” public sentiment into “more effective political action.” The flip side of the “rise of the right,” too often neglected by the more pessimistic parts of the left, is that alongside it there has been in some places a parallel resurgence of a serious and “audacious” left. In the United States, not only did a committed democratic socialist become a major presidential candidate in 2016, but we continue to elect people with similar views to federal, state, and local office, along with unprecedented numbers of women. In the UK, a longtime left activist often relegated by mainstream commentators to the kooky fringe of British politics now heads a Labour Party that is a vibrant presence despite the prediction that it was doomed to extinction. In a time when political power and political dialogue have swung narrowly between hard conservatives and cynical neoliberals for decades, these are truly noteworthy developments – and ones that we would be foolish to discount. This movement is a work in progress, to be sure, but nothing like it has appeared in these countries for a very long time: it is energetic, visionary, and vocal. So this book shouldn’t be taken as offering a message of doom and gloom. There is plenty to be frightened about, for sure, but there is also opportunity – born both of the forced solidarity of our time and of a budding but unprecedented progressive political response. But it will take much stronger political movements and more effective political institutions to make the most of that opportunity. And that points to another theme that emerges in some of our chapters: the pressing need for a much greater degree of collaboration, both across different demographics and constituencies and across different countries around the world, than the left has been able to muster so far. To me, this is perhaps the biggest and most thorny issue before us as we try to develop strategies that

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are designed not just to bemoan the state we’re in, but to begin to gain control over the institutions that can affect enduring change toward a more secure, healthy, and just world. There are important specific suggestions made by a number of our authors about how to build that kind of collaboration, both on the community level (as Myers and Goddard’s piece explores) and on an international scale, as Rob White and others discuss. This is, of course, very closely related to the theme of solidarity I’ve raised before. If we are to have a realistic chance of changing the trajectory of political discussion and political action on a global scale, we will need to create much more effective global institutions, as well as local ones, than we have been able to muster so far. And to do that, we will need to create a big tent – and the audacity to build the kind of global collaborative movement that is our best hope for a livable, just, and secure planet.

INDEX

‘350.org’ campaign 164 abortion 134–152, 214 activism 157–166, 168 actuarial justice 92, 93 advertising 114, 116–117, 118–128, 220 affect 160–161 Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) 135 affordable housing 108 agency 92, 96, 153 Agger, B. 118 aggregate risk enhancers 122 aggression 12, 74, 75, 118; see also violence aggrieved entitlement 11, 18 algorithmic financial trading 107 algorithmic justice 86, 93–94, 96 alt-right 32 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) 141, 198 American Civil War 116 American Dream 11, 14, 33 American exceptionalism 113–114 American Immigration Council 200 American Party 205 American Protective Association 205 Amish communities 43 Amnesty International 144 Anderson, J. L. 115 anger, politics of 28, 30, 40 angry white men/boys 11–12, 14, 18, 217 animal rights 155, 156 Ansbro, M. 93 anthropogenic era 153

anti-collective efficacy 48 anti-elitism 110 anti-establishmentism 27 anti-feminism 2, 11, 12, 18 anti-immigrant sentiments 2, 28, 196, 205 anti-oligarchic positions 32 anti-science 48 anti-trust legislation 107 anti-violence protests 71 anti-war positions 32 Appalachia America 43–45, 47–49 Arms Trade Treaty 113 artificial intelligence 15, 53; see also robots Artz, L. 12 Ashley, J. 105 aspiration 21 assault rifles 123–128 austerity 26, 27, 37, 110, 173 Austria 27 automation see robots backlashes 38 backwater regions 47 bailouts, government 102 ‘balancing the budget’ 27 Baltimore 4 Banfield, E. 75 Bangladesh 144, 146 bankers 32, 99–100, 218 banking cartels 100 Barak, G. 2–3, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 106, 218, 219 Barclay, E. 6

Index

Bayley, D. 74 Bellesiles, M. A. 116 Berk, R. 93, 94 Bernstein, P. L. 93 Bessant, J. 168, 173, 174, 176 better angels 115 bias: in algorithms 94; implicit racial 77, 78, 83; in risk assessment 94, 95 big data 96 big lie techniques 160 biodiversity 156 bipartisan efforts 123–124, 183 Bishop, Bill 53 #BlackLivesMatter movement 114, 128, 165, 177 Blagg, H. 95 Blair, Tony 28 blame 28 Bloomberg, Michael 127 Blumstein, A. 120 body cameras (police) 81 Bolourian, L. 148 Bonger, William 66 “Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements” order 196 borders 193–211 Bowker, L. H. 21 Boxer, Barbara 203 boycotts 178 Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence 127 Brennan, T. 94 Brexit 35, 36–40 Brisman, A. 6 Britain First 29 broadband 54 Broadhurst, K. 93 “broken windows” policing 75, 76, 79 Brown, David 82 Brown, J. 90 Brown, Jerry 197 Brown, Mike 78 Brown, W. 118 bullying/harassment 17–18, 20 bump stock components for guns 123–124 bureaucracy 5 Bush, George W. 101, 146, 203, 204 Cambridge Analytica 28, 36 Canada 2 capitalism: climate justice 162; corporate crime 99–100, 102–106; democratic capitalism 110; ecological crime 161; environmental damage 154; everyday violence

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63, 66; guns 116–117; hegemonic masculinity 20; “with the lid off” 8; and the new left 34, 40; poverty 169–170; predatory capitalism 61, 66, 69, 178; privilege 33; profit motives 41, 69, 101, 110, 140, 160, 170, 178, 188; resilience of 15; securitization of capital 99; social power relations 32; and spectrum politics 162–163; strategies towards sustainable economies 107–111; see also free markets; neoliberalism carbon emissions 161, 164 career death penalty 108–109 Carlson, J. 114, 121 Carrington, K. 7, 14, 95 Carsey Institute 53 cartels 100 Carter, Jimmy 204 Catholic Church 142, 143 Catte, E. 48, 51 celebrity justice 89 Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law 194 Center for Reproductive Rights 146 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) 142, 187 chaos, as opposite of justice 86, 95–96 Chesney-Lind, M. 2, 214 Chevron 101 Chicago 4, 67, 120 child abuse 4, 5, 169 Christian Democratic Union (Germany) 27 Christie, N. 89 Citigroup 101 Citizens v. The United States 107 civic engagement 42, 158 civil liberties 81 civil penalties 103, 104, 105, 107, 205 civil rights movement 76 civilizing thesis 115, 117 Clark, K. 176 climate change 102, 107, 108, 153, 155, 160, 162, 218 Climate Justice Network 161, 163 Clinard, M. B. 2 Clinton, Bill 28, 200, 203, 204 Clinton, Hillary Rodham 11, 12, 32, 140, 194, 203, 212 cognitive behavioral treatment 185, 186 collaboration 110, 220–221 collective activism 177–178 collective consciousness 45 collective efficacy 48, 54 collective freedom 118

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collective interests 87 collective ownership 110 collective safety versus personal safety 122 Collins, V. 2 collusion, criminal 100 colonialism 35, 53, 74, 116 Colt, Samuel 116 Comfort, M. 171 commodification 135, 163 common but differentiated responsibility 161 common-sense gun reform 125 commonwealth principles 110–111 Communism 201, 202 communitarianism 110 community: community control 161; community policing 80–81; community-mindedness 45, 53; compassionate community 20; and diverse social networks 49; nature of communities 80 Compas algorithm 94 competitiveness, economic 16–17, 30, 31, 33, 37 Connell, R. 7, 12, 18, 95 consciousness-raising 174–176 conservatism: and abortion 138, 139, 140, 214; and everyday violence 63; neoconservativism 75, 82, 122, 126; and the police 75, 76; Republican Party 135; and Trump 135 Conservative Party (UK) 30 consumerist culture 30, 31, 109, 121–122, 175, 178 consumption 105, 106, 109, 114, 117–118 continuity, theme of 214–216 contraception 137–138, 140, 142, 143, 147, 148 Cook, P. J. 120, 125 cooperative models 110 Corbyn, Jeremy 176, 220 Cork, D. 120 Cornbread Mafia 53 Corporate Accountability International 101 corporate criminality 2–3, 99–112 corporate death penalty 108–109 corporate elites 32, 35; see also multinational corporations corporate environmental damage 158, 159, 160, 161 Corporate Hall of Shame awards 101–102 counter-activism 160 counterhegemonic measures 19, 21, 154, 160, 161

credit default swaps 100, 107 crime mapping techniques 171 crimes against humanity 153 criminal justice system: criminal justice reform 4, 5, 79–80, 168, 181–192; definitions of justice 87; and drugs 54; just justice 7, 86–98; justice for youth 168, 173–178; justice reinvestment projects 171; procedural justice 79–80; and race 74; as revenge factory 83; risk assessment practices 92–96; and the victims of crime 87–88, 91–92; and young people 168, 173–178 criminalization: abortion 135, 136, 139, 140, 144, 148; immigration 193–194, 204; police reform 80, 81, 82, 83; youth justice 171 criminogenicity 66, 183 criminology 2–3 crisis of disconnection 184–188 critical criminology 7, 13, 48, 154–157 critical discourse 8 cultural criminology 48 cultural sensitivity training 77 culture of control 92 cultures of support and inclusion 19–21 Cunneen, C. 95 Currie, E. 1, 4, 8, 12, 17, 19, 21, 44, 67, 170, 177, 184, 185, 186, 187, 189 Customs Border Protection (CBP) 194, 195, 197 De Sousa Santos, B. 95 debt 37, 106, 108, 110, 171 decarceration movements 182 decentralization 163 decline versus social change 48 decriminalization 100, 182 deferred prosecution agreements (DPAs) 104–105, 109 deficit reduction 27, 162 deforestation 154, 161 deindustrialization 29, 47, 48, 50, 53, 56, 57, 170 DeKeseredy, W. S. 6, 8, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 217, 219 democracy: and climate justice 161; democratic socialism 16–17, 28, 110, 172, 176, 208, 220; nationalism versus status quo 26; and nationalization of multinational corporations 110; need for robust 84; and public spaces 160 Democratic Party: Bernie Sanders 172; everyday violence 62, 63, 65; failures of

Index

leftist politics 217; gun control 126; immigration 202, 203, 204; out of touch 212; see also Clintons; Obama Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) 177 demographics 50, 106, 114, 126, 144–145, 206 demonization 30, 38 denial 62, 67 Denmark 16 Dennis, B. 82 deportations of immigrants 196–197, 201, 202, 205, 206 deregulation 14, 55, 66, 100, 148 derivative trading 100, 107 desensitization 63 detainer requests 198 Diaz, T. 114, 119, 120 dignity 70, 73, 78 disconnection 184–188 discursive-cognitive accommodation 28 disposable people 170, 175 diversity 20, 31, 51, 78–79 Dodd-Frank 107 domestic/intimate partner violence 6, 15, 17, 128n2 Donnermeyer, J. 6, 7, 42, 46, 48, 49, 214 Dow Chemical 101 Downey, B. 46–47 Dragiewicz, M. 6, 11, 12 drugs: criminal justice reform 182–184; and everyday violence 63, 67; long history of 42–60, 214–215; and the police 73, 79, 81, 82; rural areas 7, 42–60 Dunbar-Ortiz, R. 114 Dunblane shooting, Scotland 113 Durkheim, E. 45 earned privilege 33 ecocide 109, 153–167 eco-justice 154–157, 162–163, 166 ecological crime 6, 109–110 economic crisis (2008) 26, 36, 99–100, 102, 106, 206 economics: austerity 26, 27, 37, 110, 173; and Brexit 36; and the class system 32–33; competitiveness 16–17, 30, 31, 33, 37; and corporate crime 99–112; and drugs 7; and ecological crime 155, 160; hegemonic masculinity 13–17; neoliberalism in Europe 27; rethinking the nature and purpose of work 16; root causes of crime 5;

225

sustainable economies 107–111; see also capitalism; neoliberalism; poverty ecotage 159, 160 eco-terrorism 159 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 202 electoral reform 107 Elias, N. 115 elites: corporate elites 26, 32, 35; criminal justice reform 185; eco-justice 160, 162; liberal middle classes 31; and the police 74; right-wing populism 38; rural communities 56–57 emasculation 14, 18 emotional contexts: anger politics 11–12, 14, 18, 28, 30, 40, 217; and gun advertising 118–119; and hegemonic processes 160–161 empathy 110, 218 Empire, nostalgia for 29, 32, 35, 39 Engels, F. 66 English Defence League 29 “Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States” 199 Enloe. C. 136, 147 Enron 103 entitlement, aggrieved 11, 18 environmental damage 3–4, 55, 100, 101, 102, 108–110, 153–167, 214 ethnocentric nationalism 26, 28–29, 40 ethnographic research methods 29, 47–48, 54, 126 European Union: Brexit 36–40; integration project 27 evangelical Christianity 135 Everytown for Gun Safety 127 evidence-based practice 20, 182 Ewert v. Canada 95 “Executive Order Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States” 202 extremism 27, 63 fake news 160 Faludi, S. 13 far right groups 15, 27, 28, 29–40 Farage, Nigel 36 far-left politics 173 farming communities 14, 43, 46, 53, 101, 162 fascism 28–29, 31, 35, 40 fear, politics of 28, 166 fear of crime 68, 69, 71, 122, 187, 218 Feeley, M. 92 Feinstein, Diane 203

226

Index

feminism: abortion politics 134–152; definitions of justice 87; feminist criminology 2; feminist resistance 136–137, 147–149; gender versus sex 12; and hegemonic masculinity 11; intersectionality 129n4; second wave 138; and the victims of crime 88; young people 176 Ferguson protests 73, 78 feudalism 57 filibustering 107 film/cinema 118 financial crimes/fraud 99–112 Financial Stability Oversight Council 107 financialization 99, 105–106, 110, 163 Finland 16 Fisher, L. 125 Flavin, J. 12 Flores Settlement Agreement 194 Florida school shooting (Parkland) 114, 123, 125, 127, 164–165, 177, 178 food banks 32, 37 food sovereignty 163 Ford, Doug 2 forecasting crime 94 fortress Earth mentality 161 fracking 101, 109 France 26, 27 Fraser, N. 34 fraud 99–112 free markets 35, 100, 110, 116, 169, 172, 176 freedom, concepts of 118 Frey, W. H. 127 Friedman, M. 75 Gabor, T. 125–126 Galbraith, J. K. 13 gangs 54, 63, 81 Garland, D. 87, 92, 115 Garland, J. 28 Garner, Eric 75, 76–77 Garrett, B. 105 Garriott, W. 55, 56 gender: discrimination in reproductive rights 147–148; and mass shootings 3; not the same as sex 12; and right-wing extremism 2; and risk 92; rural gender orders 14, 16; and work 14, 16; see also feminism; masculinity; women general will 73 genocide 114 geo-politics 92 Germany 27, 170

gig economy 171 Gingrich, Newt 200 Ginsburg, Ruth 141 Glass-Stegall Act 100, 108 Global Gag rule 146–147, 214 Global South 6, 99, 215 globalization 16–17, 53, 68, 110 Goddard, T. 6, 168, 174, 175, 177, 178, 218, 219, 221 Goldman, Emma 137–138 Gorsuch, Neil 140 Goshe, S. 4, 188, 218, 219 Goss, K. 125, 127 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act 100 Gramsci, A. 160 grassroots movements 127, 165, 177, 178 greater good 110 green criminology 6, 154–157, 158 green infrastructure 71 green police 219 greenhouse gases 161 greenwashing 159 Guardian, The 88, 128 gun control 69, 71, 113, 164–165, 178, 220 Gun Control Network (UK) 113 gun culture 62, 66, 67, 113–133 Guttmacher Institute 137, 139, 142, 143 Haag, P. 114, 116, 117, 118, 119 habitat loss 156 Hall, S. 1, 28, 31, 37, 214, 215, 217 Halliburton 101 Hall-Sanchez, A. 17 Hannah-Moffat, K. 94, 96 Harrington, M. 3 Hart, S. D. 95 Hart-Celler Act 203 health care 108, 189 Hegel, Georg 28 hegemony: counterhegemonic measures 19, 21, 154, 160, 161; and ecological crime 160; hegemonic masculinity 2, 11–25 Heller and McDonald Supreme Court rulings 115, 122 Henning, R. A. 117 Herbert, S. 80 Hillbilly Elegy (Vance, 2016) 47–48 Hochschild, A. R. 12 Hogg, R. 7, 14 Holder, Eric 182 Hollande, François 28 Hollywood 118 Holmes, Takiya 67

Index

homicide rates 65–66, 67, 120, 122, 170, 183 homophobia 12 Hulse, C. 127 human rights 76, 137, 144, 145, 148, 160, 163 Human Rights First 194 human trafficking 203 humiliation 14, 18 Hungary 27 Hyde Amendment 141 hyper-masculinity 46 hypodermic model 36 ideal victims 89 idealist complacency 4, 21 identitarianism 35, 36 identity politics 39–40 ideological polarity 125, 184–185 ideological struggles, nature of 159–160 ideology of necessity 187 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act 200, 204–205, 208 illiberalism 11–12 immigration: and abortion 141; anti-immigrant sentiments 2, 28, 196, 205; and Brexit 38; middle-class liberal views on 31, 34, 35; nationalist parties in Europe 27; separation of migrant children from parents 5, 193–195, 215; and Trump 69, 134, 193–200, 215; and xenophobia 193–211 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) 198, 199 Immigration and Nationality Act (1952 - McCarran-Walter Act) 200–203 Immigration and Naturalization Act 200 Immigration Reform and Control Act 195, 207 impunity 100, 102–105 incarceration: and criminal justice reform 181–192; undocumented migrants 197; youth justice 171, 174 Incels (involuntary celibates) 18–19 India 144 Indigenous peoples/indigenous peoples 7, 95 individualism 53, 55, 110, 115, 117, 118, 121–122, 185 Indonesia 144 inequality: and AI/robots 15; and corporate crime 105; and ecological crime 161; educational inequality 169–170, 186; and everyday violence 68; and invasive

227

criminal justice systems 170; and neoliberalism 26, 106; normalization of 11; and the police 5, 74, 76, 82; and poverty 185; and privilege 32; root causes of crime 5, 183, 184–185, 189; sustainable economies 107; young people 169–173, 176 infrastructure improvements 71, 108 inner city violence 4 insider trading 100, 103, 104 Inter-American Commission on Human Rights 144 interdependency 110 interdisciplinary scholarship 7 interest rates 100, 103, 104 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights 148 international law 108 Internet: and drug production methods 54; gun sales 124; social media 88, 89, 128, 177–178 intersectionality 45, 47, 128, 175 intimate partner violence 6, 15, 17, 128n2 intolerance 11–12 inverse socialism 56 Ireland 47, 148 Islamic extremism 38 Islamophobia 27, 38 Japan 50, 170 Jenny Lizette Flores vs. Janet Reno, Attorney General for the United States 194 job creation policies 5, 13, 15, 70, 108 Jobes, P. 6 judicial review 102 just justice 7, 86–98 justice for youth 6, 168, 173–178 justice reinvestment projects 171 juvenile prisons 184 Kaine, Tim 140 Kant, Immanuel 86–87 Kaori Gurley, L. 12 Katz, J. 11, 12 Katzenbach report 79 Kelling, G. 75 Kemshall, H. 93 Kennett, L. 115 Kerner Commission on Civil Disorders 79 Kimmel, M. 2, 11, 12, 14, 17, 19, 21, 47 Klein, J. 17, 19, 20 Klein, N. 109–110 Know Nothingism 205 Knudsen, L. M. 138, 145

228

Index

Koch Industries 101 Koper, C. 121 Kramer, R. 157 Ku Klux Klan 205 labor protection laws 107, 207 labour movements 177–178 Labour Party 30, 220 lack, sense of 29 Lake, Marianne 102 Lankford, A. 113–114 Las Vegas shooting 123 laws: attempting to deal with hegemonic masculinity 19; normalization of gender relations disadvantaging women 2 Le Pen, Marine 26, 27 Lee, T. 7, 126 left realism 4, 13, 16 left-behind communities 51, 216, 217; see also poverty; working classes leftist politics: failures of 216–217; increasingly middle-class 31; insults to angry white men 12; lack of new generation of 26–27; misunderstanding gendered politics of 2016 election 12; need for change 3, 8, 34–35; need for systemic thinking 216; and the rise of right-wing populism 26–41; rise of the audacious left 220; young people 173, 176 legal reform: green criminology 157, 158; gun control 115, 122; immigration 196–200; sustainable economies 107, 108–109 leniency 101 Lerner, G. 135 liberalism: and algorithmic justice 94; and everyday violence 62; framing of crime 65–66; justice as a ‘public good’ 87; liberal ideology on crime in 2016 campaign 62–63; liberal middle classes 31, 37–38; liberal minimalism 63–67, 68; out of touch 212; and the police 73; and right-wing populism 26, 28; shared philosophical commitments of left- and right-wing 33; urban decline 76; see also neoliberalism Libor (London Interbank Offered Rate) violations 100, 103, 104 Liepins, R. 49, 52, 55, 58n4 living wages 108, 189 Lloyd, Scott 141 loitering ordinances 171 Loomis, Eric 94

Los Angeles Times 64 Lowery, W. 114 Ludwig, J. 120 Luke, T. W. 118 Lynch, Loretta 182 MacIntyre, A. 87 MacLean, B. D. 9 MacLeish, K. T. 124 Macron, Emanuel 26 Maguire, D. C. 143 ‘Make the Planet Healthy Again’ 161 Manafort, Paul 65 March for Life 140, 141 Marcuse, Herbert 117–118, 122 marijuana 52–53, 56, 67, 182 marketing 114, 116–117, 118–128, 220 Martin, N. 140 Martin, R. 79 Marxist scholarship 14, 32, 66 masculinity: angry white men/boys 11–12, 14, 18, 217; and breadwinning 14; and guns 3, 18, 114, 115, 117, 119; marginalized masculinity 18; masculinities studies 12, 13, 20, 21; and presidential qualities 12; privilege 136; and righteous violence 115; and right-wing extremism 2 mass consumption/consumerism 114, 119; see also consumerist culture mass demonstrations 160 mass market advertising 117 mass murders 19 mass production 101, 116 mass shootings 3, 18, 63, 71, 113, 114, 123, 125 McCarran, Pat 200, 201–202 McCarran-Walter Act 200–203 McCourt, F. 47 McDonald’s 101 McGarry, R. 87 McKibben, Bill 154 media: 24 hour media 87; Brexit 36, 37; disinformation 28; and everyday violence 62, 64; mass shootings 114; media discourse about working classes 35; moral panics 42; portrayals of communities as “backwaters” 47; and racism 39; and Trump 216; victims of crime 87, 88–89, 90–92 megabanks 102, 106, 109 Mellet, Amanda 148 Melzer, S. 114, 126 Mencken, H. L. 13

Index

Mendez, Juan 147 Menino, Thomas 127 mental ill health 124, 186 meritocracy 33, 172 Merkel, Angela 27, 28 Messerschmidt, J. 13, 18, 19, 20 methamphetamines 53–54, 56 #MeToo movement 71, 89, 165 metropolitanism 34, 37 Metzl, J. M. 124 Mexican drug cartels 54 Mexico City policy 146 Mexico-US border 193–194, 195, 197, 202, 206 Michalowski, R. J. 3 middle classes 31, 37–38, 43, 170 militarization 56, 77, 120 Million Mom March 127 Mills, C. W. 58n4, 214 Minassian, Alek 19 minimum wages 108 misogyny 18, 35, 134, 136, 147 mitigation 89 Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America (MDA) 127 Monitoring the Future Study 54 Monsanto 101 moonshine 52, 56 moral indignation 66–67 moral panics 42, 44, 48, 51, 55 MORENA (Movement for National Regeneration) 208 multiculturalism 32, 34, 35, 36 multiethnic world 27, 34, 41 multinational corporations 99–112, 154, 161, 162 Murakawa, N. 74 Muslim immigrants 38, 40 mutualism 111 Muzzatti, S. L. 48 Myers, R. 6, 168, 174, 175, 177, 178, 218, 219, 221 Mythen, G. 92, 93, 96 NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) 5, 205, 206 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine 142 National Front 26, 27 National Institute of Justice (NIJ) 120 National Rifle Association (NRA) 115, 122, 123–124, 125, 126, 164–165

229

National Youth Law Center 194 nationalism 26, 27, 28–29, 31, 33–34, 40, 217 nationalization 106, 107, 110 Native Americans 7, 169 nativist populism 134, 205 natural disasters 207 necessity ideology 187, 189 Neocleous, M. 74 neoconservativism 75, 82, 122, 126 neoliberalism: carceralism 171, 174–175; corporate crime 99, 105, 110; drugs 49–55; ecological crime 160; and the EU 37; everyday violence 67–68; farm crime 46; France 26; Germany 27; guns 115, 118; hegemonic masculinity 13; immigration 206; individualism 53, 55, 110, 115, 117, 118, 121–122, 185; inequality 26, 171–172; neoliberal centrism 28; police 75; poverty 105; ‘progressive neoliberalism’ 34; and right-wing populism 26; shift to the right 126; ‘slow apocalypse’ 3; Trump 1, 51; in the university sector 8–9; using neoliberalism to challenge neoliberalism 6, 177–178; and the victims of crime 87; young people 168, 173, 176 Nepal 143–144 Nestlé 101 Netherlands 27 New Statesman 88, 90 New York Times 64, 104 news avoidance 1 Nicaragua 144 nihilistic philosophy 185, 188, 189–190, 219 Nike 101 Nolan, J. 17 non-for-profit corporations 108 nonhuman species 155, 156, 162 non-intervention policies 188 nonprosecution agreements (NPAs) 104–105, 109 Noonan, R. 52 Nordic social democracies 16–17, 170 normalization 121 normativity 136 North, M. 113 Northern hegemony of criminology 7, 95 Norway 16 nutrition 5 NYPD Twelve 83

230

Index

Oakland 4 Obama, Barack: abortion politics 146; Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) 135; and criminal justice reform 182; and the Great Recession 206; gun control 124, 125, 126, 127; immigration 194, 196–197, 199, 203; police reform 73, 79, 81; race of 12, 126 Obrador, Andrés Manuel López 208 occupation of the senses 95 oligarchies 26, 32 oligopolies 104, 106, 110 Oliver, W. L. 94 O’Malley, P. 92, 94 O’Neil, Paul 81 online shopping 57 Ontario provincial election, Canada 2 Operation Gatekeeper 204 Operation Wetback 202 opioid epidemic 42, 52–55, 214–215 Orban, Viktor 27 ordinary violence 4 organized crime 48, 53 outsiders, blame of 44 oxycontin 48, 53, 56 painkillers 53 Panama Papers 162 Paradise Papers 162 Paris Agreement 161 Parkland school shooting, Florida 114, 123, 125, 127, 164–165, 177, 178 parole boards 90–92 Parsons, T. 58n4 partnership working 177 patriarchy: and abortion 2, 134–152; hegemonic masculinity 11–25; ideology of familial patriarchy 14; and marginalized masculinity 18; rural communities 46; and the ‘slow apocalypse’ 3 “pecking orders” 17 Pence, Michael 140, 141 Peters, J. 141 Pew Research Center 15, 207 Pickard, S. 168, 173, 174, 176 Pinker, S. 115 Pitts, L. 12 Planned Parenthood 141 Planned Parenthood v. Casey 139 plea bargaining 104 plutocracy 32 police: “broken windows” policing 75, 76, 79; and guns 114, 119–120; police

reform 5, 73–85; in rural America 48; undocumented migrants 198, 199–200; and victims of crime 90 polite society 115 political homelessness 29 Population Action International (PAI) 147 population growth 143, 144–145, 206 populism 117, 118; see also nativist populism; right-wing populism post-industrial society 29, 46, 110 post-modernism 29 post-structuralism 31 poverty: and abortion 142–143; child poverty 169, 185; deserving and undeserving 33, 76; diseases of destitution 37; drugs 43, 47, 55, 56, 57; everyday violence 68; Mexico 208; and neoliberalism 105; and the police 75–76, 82, 83–84; poor, white, working classes 29; and reproductive rights 138, 141; root causes of crime 4, 76, 79, 184–185, 189, 214–216; in rural America 50; seen as moral failing 76; and social disorganization theory 48, 52; and trickle down theory 13 power: concentrated at the top 32; and ecological crime 154; and risk 92; speaking truth to power 164–166; in sustainable economies 110; see also hegemony precariat 13, 172 predatory capitalism 61, 66, 69, 178 presidential election 2016 12, 62–63, 172 President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration Justice 79 Pringle, HHJ Ian 88, 89 prison 70, 101, 168–180 privacy 81, 137 privatization 99, 105, 110 privilege 32–33, 161, 177 procedural justice 79–80, 89 profit motives 41, 69, 101, 110, 140, 160, 170, 178, 188 ProPublica 193 protest votes 51 protests 71, 114, 127, 147, 157 public commons 110, 111 public goods 87, 94, 110 public health 37, 68, 101, 107, 146–147 public interest standards 107, 160 public sector employment 70 public spaces, resistance over 160 public utilities 106, 107, 219

Index

punishment-light reforms 188 punitive justice: and abortion 140; everyday violence 69; and guns 115; incarceration 171, 174, 181–192, 197; inequality of sentencing 89; and marginalized groups 87; and the police 80; and revenge 82–83; root causes of crime 4, 182, 184–188; in schools 20 puppet politicians 32 Quakers 164 quality of life 66, 67–68 Quinney, R. 2 Quinones, S. 48 quota system for immigration 201, 203 race: and abortion 142; #BlackLivesMatter 114, 128, 165, 177; child poverty 169; and crime 67; and drugs 43; educational inequality 170; election of Barack Obama 12, 126; and gun control 126; and incarceration 171; racial profiling 78; and reproductive rights 138 racism: assumed of rural white US voters 11–12; assumed of white working class English 30, 31, 35; Brexit 36, 38–39; everyday violence 62, 63; gun control 115; immigration 5, 201, 202–203; implicit bias 77; and misogyny 136; myths of superiority/inferiority 39; and ‘overpopulation’ 145; police 5, 74, 75, 77, 78–79, 80, 82, 83, 114; separation of migrant children from parents 5; and social control 187; and Trump 134 Ramirez, M. 105, 108–109 Ramirez, S. 105, 108–109 Reagan, Ronald 146, 195, 206–207 realistic utopianism 3 recidivism 89, 92, 182, 183, 186 reciprocity 110 reconciliation 91 Redhead, S. 9 Reedy, D. C. 121 refugees 207 rehabilitation 174, 182–183, 186, 189–190 religion 137, 140–141, 142, 143 Rennison, C. M. 18 Reno, Janet 194 reproductive rights 134–152, 214 Republican Party: anti-abortion 139; conservatism 135; everyday violence 62, 63; gun control 123; immigration 200, 204; neoconservativism 126; see also Trump

231

resentment, politics of 28 respect, encouraging 19, 20, 78 restorative justice 83, 188 retributive justice 82–83, 91, 187–188 revenge 82–83, 118 revisionist thinking 122 revolving door 184, 188 righteous violence 115, 118 right-wing populism 1–2, 26–41, 134, 172–173, 213–214 right-wing press 28 risk assessment practices 7, 92–96, 107–108, 171, 181, 186, 187, 189 risk society thesis 86 Robinson, A. L. 93 robots 15, 50, 53, 207 Rodger, Elliott 18 Roe v. Wade 138, 139, 140, 214 root causes of crime 4, 5, 183, 184–186, 189–190, 218–219; see also inequality; poverty; structural inequalities Rowbotham, S. 128 rural communities: and green criminology 6–7; hegemonic masculinity 11–12, 14; lack of criminological research in 6–7; rethinking the nature and purpose of work 16; rural criminology 46; social change and drugs 42–60 Russia 28, 36, 215, 216 sameness, focusing on 35, 40, 41, 175 Sampson, R. 48 sanctuary jurisdictions 198, 199, 200 Sanders, Bernie 172, 176, 220 Sandy Hook 113, 123, 127 Sanger, Margaret 137–138 Sarbanes-Oxley Act 100 Savings and Loans (S & L) 103 Scandinavia 16, 170 school shootings 3, 18, 20, 114, 123, 125, 127, 164–165, 177, 178 schools: bullying/harassment 17–18, 20; counterhegemonic measures 19; creating a culture of support and inclusion 17–20; educational inequality 169–170, 186; and everyday violence 68; proposals to arm teachers 124; suspensions and expulsions 171 Schumer, Charles 203 Schwartz, M. D. 4, 13, 15, 16, 19 Scott, Walter 81 Second Amendment and gun control 115, 122, 126, 127 Secure Fence Act 203–204

232

Index

Securities and Exchange Commission 104 securities crimes 100, 102–105, 107, 108, 109 securitization of capital 99 Segal, L. 129n4 self-defence 115, 118, 121, 122, 123 self-determination 114–115 self-medication 53 self-regulation 106 self-reliance 12 Selman, K. J. 168, 174 semi-automatic pistols 120, 121 sentencing 88, 89, 90, 181, 183, 189 service sector jobs 14, 16, 50, 171 Sessions, Jeff 183, 194, 200 sexism 31, 136 sexual assaults 17, 90–92, 134; see also #MeToo sexuality: as dominant theme of hegemonic masculinity 12; teaching in schools 19, 20; women’s 135–137 shadow banking 100 shadow carceral measures 171 shadow wages 16 Shalhoub-Kevorkian, N. 95 Shell 102 Sherman, J. 15 Shetland Islands 45, 49 Short, J. 92 Shukla, R. K. 54, 55 Silver, A. 74 Simon, J. 92 skepticism 3 slavery 67, 74, 114, 164, 203, 205 slow apocalypse 3–4 Smith, K. 14, 16 social capital 52 social class 36–40, 51–52, 135, 160, 172, 177, 216; see also elites; middle classes; working classes social cohesion 83 social commons 110, 111 social construction of knowledge 160 Social Darwinism 19 Social Democratic Party (Germany) 27 social democrats 16–17, 28, 110, 172, 176, 208, 220 social disorganization theory 48, 52, 76 social economy 16 social equality 16 social justice 87, 154, 166, 174, 176–177, 178, 184 social media 88, 89, 128, 177–178 social networks 45, 49, 52–53, 55–56, 160

social regulation 158 social responsibility 106 social safety net 16, 17, 37, 172, 175; see also welfare benefits socialism 31, 33, 66, 110, 176, 217 solar power 163 solidarity, principles of 40, 67, 68, 217–218, 221 Somerset, A. J. 117 South, N. 6 southern criminology 7, 95 sovereignty 117, 118, 121–122, 197–198, 199 Sozzo, M. 7 species justice 154, 155, 156 speculative trading 108, 110 Squires, P. 3, 115, 121, 122, 220 Stallwitz, A. 45, 49, 53, 55, 58n4 state crime 2, 154, 159 state power, and the police 74 state-level environmental measures 161–162 state-owned corporations 106 state-owned multinational corporations (SOMNCs) 110 state-perpetrated violence against women 2 stereotypes 32, 77 Stilwell, M. 162 Stoll, S. 48 stop and frisk 79 Stoughton, S. 77 structural change, need for 51, 70, 105, 218–219 structural inequalities 2, 47, 56, 57, 66, 70, 80, 82, 166, 218 student loans 108 subprime mortgages 100, 103 subsistence-wage jobs 30 substantive justice 79, 82 subversive activities 201 Sun, The 88 Sunday Times, The 90 sunshine laws 81 Supreme Court 109, 115, 122, 138, 139, 140, 194, 213, 214 sustainable economies 107–111 sustaining society, a 9 SWAT teams 77–78 Sweden 16 systematic thinking, need for 216–217 Tapper, Jake 65 tariffs 15

Index

Task Force on 20th Century Policing (Obama) 73, 79 Tauri, J. 95 taxation: and multinational corporations 162; and neoliberalism 105; rethinking the nature and purpose of work 16; sustainable economies 107; Trump 13, 135 Taxman, F. 183 technological innovations: algorithmic justice 94, 96; in rural America 51, 53; and those left behind 30; see also Internet Telegraph, The 88 terrorism 159, 160 theriocide 156 Thompson Reuters Foundation 16 thoughtful audacity 218 timidity, pitfalls of 219 tokenism 123 Tombs, S. 102, 106, 154 toxic stress 68 trade unions 30, 178 tradition, and guns 116–119 trafficking 203 Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse 104 transformative politics 157–166 transnational activism 158 transnational corporations 99–112, 154, 161, 162 transparency 79, 96, 107, 109, 110 trauma, healing from 189 Treadwell, J. 1, 28, 31, 37, 214, 215, 217 trickle-down theory 13 Truman, Harry 201, 202 Trump, Donald/Trump administration: abortion politics 140, 141, 146–147; and the conservative establishment 135; and criminal justice reform 183; economic policies and hegemonic masculinity 13–17; election of causing a deep pessimism 1; environment 3–4, 161; everyday violence 61–72; gun control 123–125, 127; hegemonic masculinity 2, 11; immigration 5–6, 193–211; ‘Make America Great Again’ 161; misogyny 134; popularity in rural areas 51; reflecting deeper structural problems 213–221; rural America and drugs 42–60; separation of migrant children from parents 5, 193–194, 215; theme of continuity 214–215;

233

unsurprising victory 212–213; and women’s reproductive rights 2 trust 83 UK 29–40 UKIP (UK Independence Party) 36 unaccompanied (migrant) minors 194–195, 203 unaccompanied alien children (UAC) 195 Undesirable Alien Act 194 undocumented migrants 193–211 unearned privilege 33 unemployment: and intimate partner violence 17; and masculinity 14–15; and racism 39; as root cause of crime 4; rural communities 14, 47, 56, 57; and trickle down theory 13; white, working class English people 30, 37; youth unemployment 17 United Nations: and climate justice 163; human rights 145, 148; and reproductive rights 145, 148; UN Programme of Action on Small Arms and Light Weapons (SALW) 113 universal basic income 108 universality, principles of 40 universities, corporatization of 8–9 urban communities: drugs 45, 54; everyday violence 62, 64; guns 115, 126; police 75, 80–81; urban decline 76; violence 4 urgency 213–214 us and them 87 utopianism 3, 159 Van Gundy, K. 54 Vance, J. D. 47 Vegh Weis, V. 14 vehicle-based massacres 19 victims of crime 87–88, 165, 185, 188 Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000 203 Vigil Lopez, N. 5, 215, 219 Vigil, J. 5, 215, 219 violence: everyday violence in the age of Trump 61–72; falling rates of 64–65; and mental health 124; prison sentences for 184; revenge 83; righteous 115; root causes of 183; rural communities 46–47; unaddressed forms of 71 Vitale, A. S. 5, 218, 219 Volcker Rule 108 Wainwright, H. 129n4 Waldron, J. 87, 94, 96

234

Index

Walklate, S. 7, 87, 90, 91, 92, 93, 95, 96 wall (Mexico-US border) 197, 204 Wall Street Financial Reform and Consumer Protection Act 100 Walter, Francis 201 War on Drugs 73, 79, 82, 182, 183 weaponization 116, 117 welfare benefits 5, 13, 33, 37, 105, 107, 189 Werth, R. 93, 96 West Virginia Teachers’ Strike 177–178 white, middle-class male as default 87 White, R. 3, 6, 7, 157, 158, 161, 162, 213–214, 218, 219 white masculinity and guns 114, 126 white working classes 29, 31–32, 36, 40, 161, 172 white-collar crime 99–112 Whole Woman’s Health et al. v. Hellerstedt 139 whore/Madonna complex 136 Whyte, D. 102, 106, 154 Wild West 46, 117, 118 Wilders, Geert 27 William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act 203 Williams, K. 74 Wilson, J. Q. 75, 76 Winchester, Oliver 116 Winlow, S. 1, 3, 8, 9, 21, 28, 31, 37, 214, 215, 217 Wintemute, G. 120 Witkowski, T. H. 117 witness reliability 90 Wolff, C. 119 women: abortion 134–152, 214; gun advertising 118–119, 126; gun control 126, 127; misogyny 18, 35, 134, 136, 147; perpetrators of crime 88–89; rights of 2, 14, 134, 137–142,

214; rural communities 14, 15, 17, 46–47; state-perpetrated violence against women 2; US dangerous for 17; as victims of crime 17, 91 Women’s March 147 Woodward, Lavinia 88–89, 91 Worboys, John 90–92, 96 work, rethinking the nature and purpose of 15–16, 219 Workforce 2000 report 206–207 working classes: and ecological crime 161; and everyday violence 63; left behind by neoliberalism 37–38; left behind by the new Left 31–34; and the police 74; UK 29, 215; US 11–12, 14, 18, 217–218; white working classes 29, 31–32, 36, 40, 161, 172 World Economic Forum 16 World Health Organization 143 Wyatt, E. 104 xenophobia 30, 31, 35, 40, 172, 193–211 Young, J. 13, 172 young people: and abortion 142; challenging authority 128; compassionate community 19–20; expendability of 168–180; guns 118, 120, 126, 127–128; justice for youth 6, 168, 173–178; Social Darwinism 19–20; and social justice 168–180; victims of crime 185; witnessing violence 185 Younge, G. 114, 118, 128 Zapatista movement 205 Zawitz, M. W. 120 Zimring, F. 115