A Mass Psychology Of Punishment Crime And The Futility Of Rationally Based Approaches

A Mass Psychology of Punishment: Crime and the Futility of Rationally Based Approaches
Author(s): Lynn Chancer and Pamela Donovan
Source: Social Justice, Vol. 21, No. 3 (57), Crime and Justice in the Clinton Era (Fall 1994),
pp. 50-72
Published by: Social Justice/Global Options
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A Mass Psychology of Punishment:
Crime and the Futility of Rationally
Based Approaches
Lynn Chancer and Pamela Donovan
No, I'm not going to vote for Dinkins: I want a mayor who's going to be the
mayor of all the people, not just the blacks and minorities who are
committing all the crimes.... You voted for Jackson in the primary that time,
didn't you? Yeah, you're always on their side. You don't care about the fact
that those animals are out beating people up, mugging people. They should
all be in jail, locked up for life.
SO PRONOUNCED A RELATIVE ON THE OCCASION OF A SMALL FAMILY GET-TOGETHER,
raising a disturbing issue that frames this essay's larger concerns. Perhaps
what is most worrisome about these statements has less to do with what was
being said (though this, too, is surely of major concern), but how and under what
conditions this relative was saying it. The anger was utterly palpable in the facial
expressions, as well as in the overall bodily tensions, visible as these deeply
interconnected attitudes about crime and race were being stated. Moreover, efforts
to change the subject were to no avail since there seemed to be a virtual investment
in repeatedly coming back to the theme and attacking not only the criminal
population, but also the family "liberal" being addressed much closer at hand
around the dinner table.
As it happened, this particular relative was slowly going out of business, beset by
increasing worries about how he would make ends meet as he edged toward his
middle sixties, with hardly enough money to pay for his own and his wife's health?
care insurance. His savings were by now meager, slowly vanishing, and he perceived
that age discrimination made his prospects for reemployment slim. In this respect, his
Lynn Chancer is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Barnard College (Columbia University, 3009
Broadway, New York, NY 10027-6598), where she teaches courses on social problems, criminology,
and feminist and social theory. She is the author of Sadomasochism in Everyday Life: The Dynamic of
PowerandPowerlessness (Rutgers, 1992) and is currently working on a forthcoming book entitled
Provoking Assaults: Gender, Race, and Class in High Profile Crimes (University of California Press,
1996).
Pamela Donovan is an Adjunct Lecturer in Sociology at Queens College of the City University of New
York (New York, NY 10019). She is a principal organizer of the Socialist Scholars Conference and is
working on a dissertation concerning contemporary crime folklore.
50 Social Justice Vol. 21, No. 3

A Mass Psychology of Punishment 51
situation was little different from that of people Labor Secretary Robert Reich has
dubbed an "anxious class" (as quoted by Louis Utrichelle in a recent article seeking
to understand the November 1994 Democratic electoral debacle) "consisting of
millions of Americans who no longer can count on having their jobs next year, or next
month, and whose wages have stagnated or lost ground to inflation" (New York Times,
1994a). This family member has since gone out of business and one of the authors
worries about him steadily, despite the racist views she finds so repugnant, misplaced,
and self-reproducing.
The other author also has recently argued with relatives over the issue of crime.
Her latest approach, after having exhausted her usual repertoire ? how prison
doesn't work, it messes with the Bill of Rights, crime is not really rising, have you ever
considered the role of the economy ? is to dangle the threat of a gulag society over
her own family-gathering table. From these arguments, she has since concluded not
to try this at home. The gulag idea is not as innately repellent as one would hope. One
relative, who had conceded only months earlier that he indeed would not want to live
in such a society, a dystopia filled with largely racially segregated bantustan-type
prison encampments and hyper-surveilled suburban enclaves, now believes the
crime problem has become so acute?statistics about its leveling off, or decreasing,
notwithstanding1 ? that if a third of the population needs be locked up, so be it.
However, not to be seen as insensitive to what he terms the underclass, such a
conclusion is now reinterpreted not as vicious, nor as absurd in a manner reminiscent
of Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal, but as potentially beneficial to the functional
poor who at least would now find the "vipers" removed from their midst.
Crime is the issue that these relatives are most eager to express outrage over and
discuss. In this respect, they may not be very different from other people our friends
and colleagues also tell us about arguing with in their own households, workplaces,
or in their own families?to some extent across race and class, in other ways varying
with race and class quite specifically. There, too, they say, the issue of crime rises to
the top of the most engaging and most effectively distracting list of favored
conversational topics. If so, in one sense this should surprise neither progressives,
left-radical scholars and activists, nor historians, sociologists, and criminologists
who have long noticed a relationship between economic insecurity and the emer?
gence of demonized groups, between chronic social anxieties and the demise of the
Weimar Republic, for example, or cyclical political reactions during times of
recession/depression in Britain or the U.S. Individuals or individual groups begin to
emerge as the sole problem, almost entirely divorced from the social context that has
created this demonization or that (as with crime) would help explain the frequency
of violent and extremely self- and other-destructive acts in certain contexts, times,
and places.
The thoughts that follow are organized into several sections conjoined by this
basic argument, already implied: however well intended or logically unassailable,
rationalistic approaches will be largely futile at times like our own when it is the crime

52 Chancer and Donovan
issue's emotional appeal that best explains the problem's centrality to, and success
within, a conservative agenda. It is this very emotiveness that may best illuminate
why crime is dealt with increasingly through punitively oriented policies rather than
through policies aimed at social prevention. Because it enables relatively concrete
targets of blame to be identified, crime has an unusually powerful capacity to facilitate
the channeling of anxious insecurities into rage ? again and again, and whether or
not the causes of those insecurities are indeed related exclusively, or even predomi?
nantly, to feelings about the issue of crime itself. To the extent that this argument has
validity, it must be reflected upon with the utmost sobriety by those wishing to alter
the current right-wing direction of thinking about crime. For as a society, we may be
collectively deceiving ourselves insofar as at less-than-conscious or socially uncon?
scious levels, there may be a deep investment in perpetuating the very crime problem
we ostensibly so much deplore. Section II of this essay briefly elaborates upon the
recent historical and intellectual context in which such a thesis suggests itself. In
Section HI, we attempt to document this argument through three interrelated ideas and
numerous examples drawn from contemporary culture, selected so as to illustrate
how the current popularity of the crime issue may have as much (or more) to do with
emotionality than with logic: (1) the generality of desires for retribution, whether or
not rehabilitative or deterrent in social effect; (2) the notion of identification with the
criminal; and (3) the possibility that social psychological processes enacted vis-?-vis
crime have not just an identifying, but a sadomasochistic quality underlying them.
Section IV, finally and again extremely briefly, hints at broader and longer-range
implications of this perspective.
It should be stated in advance that no particular "answer" or "answers" are likely
to be forthcoming from this analysis. Rather, our intention is to conclude by raising
questions on which we hope others will continue to reflect, evaluating past ap?
proaches in the process of trying to present and re-present them anew. Our wish is for
others to begin again, in greater detail and depth, where we will only have left off with
the stating of a problem and the highlighting of a need.
Formulating the Problem and Sketching a Context
The iniquities of the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act
passed by Congress are legion and well documented. Draconian, repressive, and in
certain respects deeply contemptuous of the Bill of Rights, this is apiece of legislation
that hammers home just how little the 1992 election of Bill Clinton did to afford the
progressive left "breathing space." Little space was created to recover from disarray
and incoherent ambitions in order to develop positive programs based on the
revitalization of traditional left and progressive constituencies.
In terms of recent history, it seems a fair generalization to note that at least in the
U.S., most progressive responses to crime have been rationally oriented, aimed at
showing the logical flaws in authoritarian and repressive responses to social, political,
and economic disorder. The "Left" ? however amorphous a term, which vaguely

links liberals with those preferring to call themselves radical, socialist, left-libertar?
ian, and perhaps anarchist or postmodern in orientation ? has nonetheless been
united in its willingness to acknowledge both social and individually based causes,
definitions, and solutions to problems of crime and violence. Unlike the Right, of
course, and related to this social orientation, it has also been willing to admit the
presence of virulent racist and class-biased presumptions hidden within allegedly
neutral discourses about crime. With regard to criminal justice policy, what flows
from this shared social orientation has been the position that massive jail-building
programs, mandatory sentencing, and "three strikes and you're out" refrains are both
fundamentally ineffective and paradoxically costly on numerous levels. Still, while
agreed on these common theoretical and policy matters, recent liberal, left, and
progressive perspectives can be further subdivided into at least three categories with
regard to their differing relative emphases:
1. Criminal justice policy critiques that have relied primarily on statistically
quantitative and analytic modes of documentation and that have overtly
sought to anticipate and respond to conservative arguments;
2. Ethnographic studies conducted much more directly and closer to the lives
of those labeled "criminal" or "deviant" inside dominant socioeconomic
structures; and
3. A "social problems" literature, both British and North American in origin,
usually aimed at investigating social constructions of crime at specific
points in history.
In the first group, myriad criminal justice policy critiques of left-liberal-progres?
sive genealogy have been well reasoned, principled, and thoroughly documented. It
has been insightfully shown, for instance, that locking up more and more people has
failed to redress whatever real or imagined social ills confront us as a society;
moreover, often perverse, unintended by-products (such as jail itself being
criminogenic) are produced. In this vein, Elliot Currie wrote the still superlative and
germane Confronting Crime: An American Challenge (1985), which systematically
and point-by-point responded to punitive anti-1960s-liberalism arguments made by
James Q. Wilson in his also still influential (among conservatives) tract, Thinking
About Crime (1975). Currie continues to provide prescient commentary, most
recently criticizing the overall national move toward increased punitiveness in the
criminal justice system in the pages of The Nation (1994). Nor has Currie, of course,
been alone. The inefficacy of current crime policies in stemming criminal activity, the
undemocratic effects produced by such policies, and the crime bill legislation's place
in a constellation of "national insecurity" moves manifested in attacks on welfare
(read AFDC), public education, non-nuclear families, and immigrants, have been
nicely described by many other liberal-left observers as well. At the same time, and
usefully also, Currie and others have tried to mitigate against an overly mechanistic
structural-deterministic view of crime that has come to be associated with the Left.

A second, more ethnographically oriented approach has focused more on altering
hegemonic views of people who turn to crime and who have been thoroughly
dehumanized in the media and culture in the course of becoming virtually the
exclusive target of policy initiatives. Social researchers, themselves ranging within
asmaller gamutthat includes, among others, Mercer Sullivan (1989), Terry Williams
(1989), and Martin Sanchez Jankowski (1991), have conducted wonderful ethno?
graphic and participant observation studies ? all too insufficiently acted upon by
policymakers ? that try to fight one-dimensional depictions of "underclass crimi?
nals" or gang members by redirecting attention to life circumstances that have been
ignored and to the talents and capacities of people U.S. society systematically
overlooks. Whereas Currie's approach directly takes on conservative ideas and
contentions floating in public dialogue, this literature's subtler overriding political
import is to blur the divide between subjects and objects, between "us" and "them,"
through accounts that try to render such distinctions illusory and altogether untenable.
In what could be taken as a third approach with potential to debunk right-wing
thinking about crime fits another, also admirable, "social problems" literature. This
literature calls upon not only Emile D?rkheim's much older idea about a basic need
for criminalized boundaries in society, but also upon Stan Cohen's more contempo?
rary study of created "folk devils and moral panics" (1972) as well as Hall et al.'s
excellent description in Policing the Crisis (1978) of the conjuncture surrounding a
specific 1970s British panic over mugging. This third group could be described as
shifting social attention again, but this time away from the criminal altogether (who,
after all, is still the object of the more ethnographically oriented literature) back
toward society, toward power and general social relations that interconnect observers
with the observed. For Cohen, it was the particularities of British history in the 1960s
and 1970s that led to the targeting of "mods" and "rockers" or, as is applicable to the
case of U.S. history in the 1980s and 1990s, to obsession with the traits of an
"underclass," "women on welfare," or "lazy" people who just so happen to be poor.
Yet common to these three approaches and to much of the writing from the last
several decades during which criminal justice conservatism little-by-little solidified
its hold is a recurring rationalistic bent. More accurately, this should perhaps be
viewed as a rationalistic bias. Although each of these literatures has been and
continues to be important, taken as a whole, the deeper social psychology of those
observers?the rage of the "labeler" that must somewhere connect up and mirror the
rage that has been projected outward onto "labeled" others?has not yet itself been
adequately studied or understood. In this respect, psychoanalytic and other relatively
more emotionally oriented forms of explanation concerning crime have generally
tended to be ruled out, prematurely discredited, or insufficiently explored (though not
entirely so, and this is possibly a trend that may now begin to change).2 Indeed, such
alternative approaches do not accord with the demanded criteria of a technologically
restructuring universe, in which Weberian processes of rationalization are still the
order of the day and the effects of positivism and "applied" scientific criteria

(narrowly defined) have not yet entirely eluded intellectual internalization. Whether
possibly unmeasurable and unpollable through statistical tools, or just unaccounted
for by rationalistically biased modes of thought that are comfortably familiar even to
left-leaning academics, rage nonetheless seems to surround us. The question arises
as to whether logically skewed and empirically driven approaches really do enough
(or can do enough, the even more crucial question) to defuse the feelings those family
relatives expressed so blatantly in our opening anecdotes, a rage most likely
experienced as cathartic ? because otherwise, why return so compulsively to the
subject of crime? If logic is thereby a necessary but insufficient element of any
adequate forthcoming response from a badly needing-to-become credible "Left,"
what additional queries must be posed?
For the Right, despite all its indubitable flaws, has somehow made people feel
better. The Right has been quite a natural learner at imbibing social psychology,
whether it studies it or not. It has managed to define "the facts" around crime
according to its own interests, leaving liberals to squeak mildly on occasion from the
sidelines, "not too much repression, please, and more basketball." Looking back at
how it accomplished this so effectively, any walls we may routinely construct in our
own perceptual systems between "personal psychic" and "impersonal political"
levels of reactions ought to be recognized as non-existent or collapsible, or even as
having collapsed long ago. (Somehow, we seem better at recognizing the breakdowns
and unworkability of more overtly visible, more conventionally political, walls ?
like in Berlin.) Yet crime obsession bespeaks a rage certainly real and visible in its
consequences, quite materially manifest eventually because it elects politicians who
make policies and legislate money for prisons, which repeatedly reproduce the very
circumstances that make the United States the second most incarcerative society in
the world (post-Communist Russia having taken first place).
However much critical approaches have sensibly argued against focusing on
individuals to avoid the almost complete eclipsing of the social, and however much
left-leaning perspectives have reasonably been distinguished by superior historical
understandings of current criminality, part of the reason why their/our adduced
"facts" have slipped right off the table as soon as they are offered is precisely because
we come across as so cool-headed and logical, so emotionally distant. This leaves the
impression that we are only barely enraged by crime, seemingly knee-jerk and weak,
incapable of providing a different conceptual language through which general social
insecurities, fears, anxieties, and anger might be expressible with less reactive and
reactionary consequences.
Overall, the much too easily underestimated insight of feminism about "the
personal as political"?better stated here, perhaps, as "the rational as emotional" or
"the social as psychic" ? has yet to be fully incorporated into the heart of theories
about crime or social theory generally. Nonetheless, we must close this brief
contextual overview on the assumption that it will be difficult, perhaps even
impossible, to stave the tide of populist appeals to "tough talk on crime" unless we

begin from a more holistic set of givens about human needs and reactions. By this we
mean continuing to study what numerous Frankfurt School thinkers, like many
feminists, had only started to do in trying to combine Freud and Marx or psychology
and sociology. Vis-?-vis crime, this suggests thinking through how the victories of
right-wing criminal justice rhetoric have been founded on emotionally, much more
than rationally, seductive claims. Challenging this hegemonic social-psychological
success, then, may involve deeply reflecting on how to meet people's emotional and
logically based needs in some other ways.
By Way of Illustration: Three Ideas/Examples
In a recent essay, cultural critic Ellen Willis (1994: 56,96) writes that what she
calls the "psychopolitics" of crime, such as we have been suggesting, is still far from
adequately developed. These psychopolitics:
are as complex as the dynamics of domination itself. This holds true, I think,
not only for criminals but for their victims and for the mass of Americans
who are clamoring that something must be done, or are determined to get
hold of guns and do it themselves. Humiliation, powerlessness, violation
and negation of self, hunger for revenge are common coin ? as is the
outrage that one's assumption of the right to dominance (I am a man! I am
a white middle-class American!) has been contravened. My point is not that
there's a moral equivalence between criminal and victim, but that the issues
of power, control, and hierarchy are the air we all breathe. The discussion
of crime is always about these issues, whether we admit it or not. Crime and
punishment, victimization andretribution, repression, explosion, and crack?
down are an endless sadomasochistic dance.
These comments deserve lengthy quotation insofar as they provide a thematic
link to this section's three points. If some undoubtedly "complex" and mirror-like
image indeed haunts and contaminates relations between the socially observed (those
committing crimes) and many social observers (those reacting to crimes committed),
several consequences might expectably ensue: there may be a circular process that
interrelates feelings of anger motivating criminal acts in the first place with those
enraged reactions crime produces.
Another way of putting this is that the preoccupations and reactions of those who
wish to express their own rage at the criminal punitively may, ironically enough,
mimic criminal hatred itself?paradoxically contributing to the perpetuation of that
hatred (and thus to the perpetuation of violent crime), to its recycling within contexts
and conditions that thereby remain predictably unaltered in their fundamental
socioeconomic and political structure all along the way. For if such a mutually
reinforcing cycle is really occurring in American society of the 1990s, then it would
mean that certain emotionally based attachments might also tend to be persisting and

prevalent ? once again, not very surprisingly. Examples of such emotional attach?
ments would be:
1. Retribution for its own sake, however unproductive in reducing crime or
even criminogenic;
2. Various forms of identification with the criminal, because a relation of
dependency on others as objects for the expression and reexpression of rage
would thereby tend to result; and
3. Such "sadomasochistically" shaped dances between observed and observ?
ers, between criminals and those who want to kill or electrify them
(electrification of convicts attempting escape being a practice just enacted
in four California federal prisons, a trend possibly to be soon followed in
New York State). Indeed, sadomasochism seems a rather precise concep?
tual analogy through which to describe the push-pull manner in which such
processes of identification may operate ? processes that, virtually by
definition and especially in the case of crime, cannot be openly acknowl?
edged.
If such emotionally dynamic attachments are indeed floating, freely or not, in
the cultural "air we all breathe" (borrowing again from Willis' phraseology), they
might be doing so in ways not necessarily visible or discernible from within those
conventional methodologies or according to empirically based evidentiary crite?
ria. Providing examples is perhaps the best way to persuade others that such a
circular, emotional phenomenon nonetheless exists (and, if so, that its acknowl?
edgment and fuller understanding promises to deliver more?even, ironically, in
pragmatic policy terms?than traditional approaches to responding to the current
punitive environment). We suggest, perhaps evocatively, an array of instances
attesting to the validity of a more emotionally oriented perspective, both from
without and within, which are externally confirmable and verifiable vis-?-vis
one's own internal reactions. Below are a few ideas and examples, taken from
actual cases, current American culture, and criminal justice practices that are cited
to bolster this argument's own inner credibility.
By Way of Illustrating Retribution
One clue to the "unreasonable" aspect of current punitive trends may be the
growing importance of retribution in the American public's current responses to
crime. For instance, witness the ground swell of support for the Singapore flogging
of Michael Fay, who had vandalized several cars in that country last spring. On April
14, 1994, ABC's "Nightline" covered the case, specifically exploring the reasons
why large segments of the U.S. public supported Fay's flogging. The response in
Fay' s hometown of Day ton?a place so "typical'' that it is often used as a commercial
test market?was harsher than in the nation as a whole. According to polling figures
offered by "Nightline," the Dayton populace supported caning by a two-to-one ratio.

Nationally, less than half of those surveyed, or about 38%, said they supported it.
George Fay, Michael's father, told "Nigh?ine's" Ted Koppel, "no one is really
internalizing caning"; according to Fay, the public was just "leaping right into the
social problems of the country by seeking quick solutions to problems that have
evolved over many, many years."
George Fay's pointed comment notwithstanding, newspaper editor Max
Jennings expressed particular surprise at the polling results. As the head of the
Dayton Daily News, Jennings thought he had exerted contrary public influence
through editorials written in decided opposition to flogging. Other newspapers,
more liberal than that of Jennings, had likewise expressed their objections to
caning. For instance, New York City's Daily News (however its urban setting
differentiates it from Dayton) published a series of graphic articles against the
practice and its effects similar to the one printed in the midwestern News. In
addition, like the country as a whole, Dayton had seen a slight drop in its crime rate
over the past few years (though the rate is high relative to the rest of Ohio). Thus,
advocacy of caning seems rather difficult to explain based on the usual rational?
izations one would make to understand this strong outpouring of public support:
for instance, an objective threat of crime or the demonstrated deterrent effects of
this given method, or the influence of mass media, or the influential position taken
by governmental officials (in this case, President Clinton himself summoned
executive authority to take a firm position against flogging).
Certainly, a remaining explanation that seems to make greater sense of this first
example is that of retribution, pure and simple, as an unalloyed drive potentially
meaningful (and perhaps quite satisfying) in its own right to sizable segments of the
public. There was something about the idea of having Fay beaten?talking about and
discussing it, imagining it, if not, strictly speaking, being able to see pictures or films
about it ? that must have struck people as pleasurable in and of itself, at once
emotionally and retributively.
A second example can easily be cited as well. It is difficult to believe that the same
sort of largely retributive desires evoked by the Fay case does not also underlie
growing support for capital punishment?a sentiment journalistically described, of
late, as "sweeping the land" (The New York Times, 1994b). In the second week of
December 1994, five executions are scheduled to take place (three in Texas, one in
Missouri, and one in Indiana); not since 1976 have more than four executions taken
place in any one calendar week. However, when one looks more closely at statistics
for those states that have executed the largest number of people since 1976 (Texas,
Virginia, Florida, and Louisiana), one finds their murder rates per 100,000population
continuing to be steadily above the average U.S. rate and, indeed, to be little different
from other states (such as New York, Michigan, or Tennessee) that have not executed
anyone at all. Conversely, many states with relatively lower numbers of executions
(such as Oklahoma, Washington, or Arizona) have murder rates per 100,000
population that are a good deal lower than the U.S. average. Finally, and most

troublesome for the capital punishment advocate, states with the lowest murder rates
have also not executed anyone over the last 20 years (e.g., Massachusetts, Iowa,
Minnesota, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin).3
From this, one is led again to surmise that retribution in and of itself is likely the
strongest explanation for the ongoing and rejuvenated support for capital punish?
ment. Concerns with deterrence or doing away with crime per se would thus appear
to be secondary considerations, post facto rationalizations for a "rage to kill those who
kill" (as TheNew YorkTimes entitled a recent Week in Review cover story), when little
rational reason exists to believe reductions in violent crime will follow neatly in the
wake of the enactment of capital punishment (New York Times, 1994b). Please note,
however, the tempting habit in this article itself simply to repeat a citation of statistics
in the paragraph above. Once again, societal attraction to capital punishment is
responded to through a predominantly logically based mode of argumentation, as
though this is what could most affect public discourse. Nonetheless, the capital
punishment advocate will likely not be troubled by this type of liberal/left argument,
however well argued, having been armed instead with the seductiveness of retribu?
tion to render his or her claims even more emotionally powerful and successful.
(However, also please note that the authors' intention here is not to eliminate rational/
logical argumentation altogether from debate over crime or any other social problem.
This would be preposterous and as one-sided and potentially ineffectual as ignoring
emotional considerations altogether. After all, this argument itself calls upon logic to
emphasize more emotionally oriented considerations. Rather, our intention is much
more to urge a shift in relative attentiveness so as to compensate for an underexplored
perspective. Our wish is to stress that logically biased arguments are not working, not
connecting, because of their insufficiency at addressing people's emotionally based
needs at certain points in time, which are especially acute in times of overall scarcity
like our own.)
Indeed, statistics about capital punishment, like other well-documented ideas
connected with the punishment complex ? notions about deterrence, recidivism,
reform, rehabilitation, and about the effects of incapacitation and surveillance?lend
themselves much more to detached, reasonable, and scientific terms of debate than
does retribution. Retribution, on the other hand, is a first-order concept. It is inchoate
in appearance: it knows neither logical nor quantifiably restrictable boundaries.
Rehabilitation or surveillance can be measured and delineated in terms of how well
each appears to accomplish definable and policy-specific goals. In contrast, retribu?
tive satisfaction is merely felt, and its vehemence may be almost embarrassingly
infinite in depth. Consequently, retribution retains at once the least precisely
empirical and most dramatically political relationship with crime and questions of
criminal justice policy.
Even if the Michael Fay and capital punishment examples illustrate how
segments of the general public are attracted to retributive forms of punishment,
whether instrumental or not, whether or not reasonably related to "quickly" (accord

ing to the quotation of Fay's father) fixing a specific problem like vandalism,4 a
second problem remains. Let us say desires for retribution are afoot in American
society not only because of crime itself, but also for causes rooted beyond the borders
of criminality narrowly conceived?i.e., in the general insecurities of that "anxious
class" about its own economic precariousness, status, and general life situation. Let
us also say, therefore, that these desires for retribution are then only indirectly and
somewhat unreasonably connected with the prevention and deterrence of criminality
perse.
There is a possibility, then, that much of the U.S. public at this historical juncture
may be unconsciously invested in the perpetuation of criminality ? and in the
demonized/racialized perpetuation of criminalized objects toward whom anger can
aim?because a relationship of dependency has thereby come into being. One needs
criminals to have an (ironically) legitimate target of rage about whose seemingly
intrinsic "badness" we are all in agreement. On the other hand, and beneath the surface
of such publicly agreed-upon consensus, a much less recognized and corollary aspect
of such identification may also subsist: one may also need criminalized others to
vicariously project onto them our own illegitimate, hostile and/or resentful feelings
toward the outer world. As can be gleaned from Jack Katz' phenomenological
exploration of The Seductions of Crime (1988) and applied to this discussion of the
psychological appeals of punishment, "badness" in U.S. culture can be perceived not
only as bad (so that we appear good by contrast), but also as a sign of strength and
power. It may be an indicator of coolness, of a rebellious stance toward the world we
might wish, but are unable ourselves to project.
In this regard, the criminal can become an object of fascination ? of love and
hate, hate and love ? because he or she expresses rage directly and openly,
whereas observers of crime can do so in only mediated ways: through voting for
right-wing candidates who express this rage secondarily, but who at least express
it nonetheless; by spending huge amounts of money on (evidently enjoyable)
movies and programs that represent crime graphically and repetitively in varying
genres and sub-genres (from horror to detective thrillers and suspense modes,
through TV types just as wide-ranging, from reality programming to "NYPD
Blue"); through talking about crime in informal settings and becoming emotion?
ally drawn toward increasingly sadistic modes of punishment, whether caning,
electrification, or capital punishment.
However, even if these aspects of identification with criminalized others take
place on the part of non-criminalized observers, this should not be mistakenly
construed as romantically implying that the two?violent acts and violent reactions
to those acts?are identical. The former hurts, maims, terrorizes, and kills people;
the second contributes less directly, we contend, to the circular maintenance of
conditions within which the former occurs and recurs. Yet both, as Willis analyzed,
are part of the same larger context that is filled with relations permeated by
experiences of dominance and subordination. Both arise within the same hierarchical

complex of social power that is at once classed, raced, and gendered (and/or vice
versa) in its basic organizational structures and modus operandi.
In a related fashion, it also should be remembered that regardless of the extent to
which identifying feelings may exist between observed and observer, criminals and
the non-criminal, neither these emotions nor the appeal of retributive passion for its
own sake are likely to be admitted to. This is so because whether fascinated or not,
one simply does not happily identify on a conscious level with those who commit
crime. Also, how could dependency not exist when our attachment to crime appears
to be emotionally (i.e., retributively) based as much, if not more, than it appears to be
based on reason? The result is maddening and internally contradictory since as a
society, we thereby come to both need and wish not to need criminalized others. From
this dilemma alone, considerable rage might be expected to arise along with a push
pull ambivalence. This push-pull/love-hate ambivalence could also be anticipated to
enact itself sadomasochistically: people may come to experience themselves as both
masochistically and sadistically situated, reacting sadistically as well as masochisti?
cally, in relation to crime and criminality. Before expanding on the relevance of
sadomasochism, however, we now turn back to the concept of identification to further
exemplify this point and its backdrop within contemporary American culture.
By Way of Illustrating Identification
As already hinted, subterranean identification with the objects of social wrath in
the current conservative climate need not only affect crime. Think of the appeals of
"national insecurity" issues more broadly. In a rather obvious case, it is hardly news
to suggest that the sexual obsessions of the Right could be read symptomatically: the
Swaggart and Bakker scandals in the late 1980s, for instance, seem to offer
confirmation. Likewise, as Barbara Ehrenreich discussed in Fear of Falling: The
Inner Life of the Middle Class (1989), resentment over welfare dependency has a
relationship to an "anxious class" feeling disengaged from its own work ethic in the
wake of a consumerist tidal wave; meanwhile, many people sense their own slipping
material horizons. Then, too, hostility toward immigrants fleeing poverty and
oppression, in a nation predominantly peopled by earlier versions of the same (the
authors' respective families, for instance) is obviously a kind of specialized forget?
ting. Now that the national "insecurity du jour" is crime, the transgressor's role in the
libidinal economy of this particular issue takes special shape.
Public investment in retribution for its own sake may correlate with another
factor that is not always noticed or associated with the crime issue: the increasing
salience of newly politicized evangelicals. Recent research on attribution suggests
that renewed emphases on personal moral failures over structural or situational
explanations of crime are due (in part) to the heightened profile of religious
conservative Protestantism in public life (Grasmick and McGill, 1994). Generally,
the relationship between punitiveness and religious affiliation falls along socio?
logically predictable lines ? conservative Protestants are the most punitive,

followed by liberal Protestants and Catholics, with Jews the least punitive.5 (This
profile is likely confounded with certain political traditions as well.) Inasmuch as
the new religious Right has had a society-wide impact on education, sexuality, and
social welfare, influencing the definition and perception of those issues well
beyond the opinions of its own predictable adherents, it would be surprising if
sentiment toward crime had not also been affected. The cultural inheritance of the
Western religious tradition on punishment is an oft-quoted phrase: "an eye for an
eye." Consider the particular literalism of the evangelical movement, its already
amassed organizational and cultural resources, along with its own compulsive
obsession with evil-doing and its need to recover (or shift focus) from recent
embarrassments over sexual corruption in its own ranks. This is a perfect setting
for a home-grown authoritarianism aimed at a less controversial, insofar as
externalized, target: criminals.
Since the left-leaning criminological tradition has long since confronted and
dismantled its own interest in the romantic criminal figure, it may be easy to forget
that this figure still plays a powerful, albeit stealthy, role in the dominant culture's
handling of criminality. The American fascination with criminality typically pits the
family man, who accepts the "burdens" of socialization and collectivity, against the
lone wolf, who finally cut loose of social bonds and headed for a prairie sunset or the
heat, danger, and anonymity of the highway. This imaginary figure draws heavily on
the violent Wild West frontier idea, as well as on the idea of "snapping" or "losing
it," in which an individual with an otherwise unremarkable psychological profile
erupts in an orgy of violence and atavism.
Moreover, with regard to the sources and evidence of such unacknowledged
identifications, consider some of the formal attributes of the expanding "reality crime
programming" genre on television, particularly those like "America's Most Wanted,"
which involve reenactments of crimes. One example of how cultural identification
with criminals operates in this case is through the use of perpetrator-view camera
angles. In the instance of a "serial child predator" we, the viewing audience, are
visually in the shoes of the pervert, leering at cheerleaders practicing their routines.
These cheerleaders are filmed from the waist down, dancing in slow motion, and then
from above through a chain-link fence ("America's Most Wanted,'' October 8,1994).
In the fall of 1993, the show used an opening credit sequence in which the imputed
viewer is the object of cops in riot gear, a zooming patrol car, a descending helicopter,
and finally a blinding camera flash taking "your" mug shot ("America's Most
Wanted," September 13,1993). Similarly, in an "America's Most Wanted" reenact
ment of fugitive FBI agent Brad Bishop's apparent murder of his entire family in
Maryland in the 1970s (May 28, 1994, episode), the viewer visually accompanies
Brad the entire way to witness the look of terror as the shadow of "our own" arm and
fist ? grasping a heavy hammer ? crosses the face of each victim. Both the
cheerleader-predator and the family massacre sequences are accompanied by
"interiorized" heavy and rhythmic breathing.

Romancing the outlaw goes part of the way toward explaining the desire not to
speak of violent crime in social terms. It suggests a loss of independent will or
especially of the personal control that keeps a lid on our "dark sides." Anyone who
has been the victim of a personal crime knows firsthand that the loss of personal
control animates one's internal process of working it through in ways that do not
strictly correspond to the objective harm or threat. There is something deeply
satisfying, then, about dealing with the problem in terms of individual willfulness,
individual violation, and individual apprehension: it reinvigorates our sense of
control, both personal and other-directed.6 To reappropriate a hackneyed metaphor
into a new and literal context, how did it come to pass that we have come to imagine
ourselves as a veritable nation of victims? The question arises of how to explain the
more collectivized aspects of the current crime fixation: as more clearly racialized,
generationally directed (at the young obviously), overtly politicized, or tied into the
politics of public space.
Twenty years of widely experienced austerity, in conjunction with the impover?
ishing effects of deindustrialization, elite-imposed fiscal austerity, corporate
downsizing, the waning of union strength, and grass-roots generated anti
governmentalism have reshaped the interior and exterior landscape of the U.S. The
observer who becomes fixated on the threat of criminal victimization amidst a
panoply of other threats reacts not only from an internalization of images, but also
from awareness of the actually existing material constraints imposed by declining
social conditions. Although economic decline began to affect the marginal working
poor as early as the mid-1960s, the same conditions were neither experienced nor
ruminated upon by the middle classes until around the recessionary mid-1970s.
Certain popular culture images of that period illustrate resultant anxieties.
For example, an anxiety-ridden transition in the cultural politics of crime was
evidenced through the bellwether film, Death Wish (1974), a kind of cinematic primer
for students of crime politics and unsubtle Freudian gestures alike (the title itself
seems to intentionally reference the doctor from Vienna). The protagonist, Paul
Kersey, first appears on the screen in an Edenic tropical grove with his wife, Joanna.
In response to his suggestion that they make love on the beach, she responds that
"we're too civilized." Paul responds, "I remember when we weren't." A rather sharp
cut puts Paul back in his Manhattan office, where he is ribbed by colleagues for being
a "bleeding heart liberal." Civilization, which has been counterpoised to Eden and
Eros, turns out not to serve the Kerseys any better than did liberalism. Soon the plot
is put into motion by the death of Joanna and the beating to a nearly catatonic state
of their daughter by three rampaging hoods, who enter their home on the pretense of
delivering groceries. The hoods (white, it should be noted), who deliver death rather
than nourishment, set in motion Kersey's transformation into a vigilante. Kersey is
further aided by a gun sent to him by an associate he has just visited in Arizona (and
with whom he strolls through a movie backdrop of a Wild West frontier town). Yet
the gun is the second package that Kersey opens that day in New York; the first

contains his photos of Joanna on the beach. The gun will later be used to dispatch
seven non-white muggers, causing the city's crime rate to drop dramatically and thus
embarrassing the police. Thus, the gun restores a potency (referenced unsubtly by the
"return of the photos") eroded by civilization, liberalism, and crime.
Lest this example of mimicking the omnipotent criminal be thought to exist only
in the realm of imaginary cultural representations, we would refer readers to
journalistic accounts about the emergence of armed militias across the country much
closer to the present. One story written in November 1994 described ordinary
citizens, women as well as men, who were linked together in groups commonly
opposed to gun control; they were photographed wearing army fatigues and believed
that both internal and external threats faced them now and in the future (The New York
Times, November 26, 1994). Some sort of identification process is likely to have
taken place insofar as the resort to arms, to guerrilla warfare, led these people to now
resemble the sort of criminalized outlaws they themselves would ordinarily fear.
Among some sections of the militia movement, as The New York Times reported,
even the taboo on exempting police who might interfere has been lifted.
Common to each of these cultural examples is that a relationship of dependency
between observed and observer is implied. Whether we refer to viewers of reality
programming shows like "America's Most Wanted" or "Cops," to those who watch
and relate to characters like Paul Kersey in Death Wish, or to those who enact
projective identification by actually becoming like the "other" as members of armed
and apparently self-protecting militia groups, legitimized anger can only be felt so
long as eicriminalizedparty (or parties) continues to exist. Precisely this dependency,
which links the concept of a need for retribution with that of secret identification with
criminals, is denied and inadmissible. Sadomasochism can here be inserted as a third
and final concept relevant to illustrating the emotional, rather than rationally oriented,
appeals of crime politics.
Imagine tryingtorelatetheargumentjustmadetofiiencfe
described in our opening. Imagine contending that people may not really be as concerned
about eliminating violent crime as they might think. Or try to argue that many Americans
mayevenbesubliminaUya^cfeJtotheongoingexistenc
objects for anxious feelings that seek cathectic objects. Several questions might bolster the
point* How else canitbeexplained that U.S. society has not madealonger-lastingor more
thoroughgoing commitment to eliminating a persistent correlation?if not a relation of
causality ? between impoverished backgrounds and persons eventually locked up for
violent crimes? Even many criminal justice practitioners admit this stubborn association,
these class disparities and inequities that have become just as stubbornly racialized.
Moreover, how could we be absolutely certain that crime would not decrease unless we
triedforatleastafewgenerationstoelir^
of these authors?
Chances are that all such claims would be met with incredulity or, more likely,
considerable hostility aimed at the unpopular messenger. Because such feelings are

experienced by their very character as illegitimate, one could predict a priori that
passions about retribution and identification adopting sadomasochistic shapes,
especially with regard to crime, must be repressed and denied. To treat sadomasoch?
ism a bit more elaborately, we now turn from examples of cultural representations to
those entailing U.S. criminal justice practices in the 1990s.
By Way of Illustrating Sadomasochism
Another example from contemporary newspaper accounts merits quotation. A
front-page New York Times news story entitled " A Futuristic Prison Awaits the Hard
Core 400" recently detailed "state-of-the-art" prison designs that have already been
adopted in 25 states and at a "model" federal facility in Florence, Colorado. The
accompanying illustration pictured a proposed post-modernistic jail cell that could
have been designed by Foucault himself to help envision a Benthamite panopticon.
The article went on to read:
This approach, resorted to after the murders of Federal corrections officers by
hard-coreinmates sentenced to prisonfor life,isasmuchastateofindividualized
captivity as imprisonment... All involve techniques that limit the movement of
dangerous prisoners beyondtheir cells to an hour or lessaday, and then only with
leg-irons, handcuffs, and an escort of two or three guards per inmate.... [EJach
[prisoner] has his own television set, but in strict black-and-white on a 12-inch
screen lest law-abiding taxpayers be rousedby the notion of a felon free to stare
at life in living color.... The maxi design, with cordons of cold steel painted in soft
green and maroon, staggers the cells so that one inmate cannot make eye contact
withhis neighbors. Eachcellhas adouble-entry door, with theclassicbarredcage
door backed up by a windowed steel door that minimizes voice contact among
prisoners....
"An inmate first has to get over the first hurdle ? violent and predatory
behavior," Mr. Vanyur [the associate warden] said, stressing basics in
looking forward to throwing open Florence's cells to the inaugural
incorrigibles and then firmly locking them shut (The New York Times,
1994c, emphases added).
The reader of this article (a piece of reportage not terribly dissimilar from others
that have also lately depicted increasingly severe criminal justice sanctions) is placed
in a position from which he or she consciously identifies with "roused" taxpayers and
with Mr. Vanyur, the associate warden. In other words, there is an implied shared
agreement between writer and readers as to the "badness" of the dangerous criminals
in the jail and the "goodness" of us ? the writer, the reader, the viewer, the spectator
? out here, knowing we only look in.
Yet we are also set up in a quite self-contradictory fashion. We imagine ourselves
in the place of the other and thus may simultaneously identify with those we

ostensibly disown. As George Herbert Meadcommentedfrom asymbolic interactionist
perspective, cognitive processes work so as to force us to take the position of the other
in our minds; or, as Freud might have put it more psychoanalytically, unconscious
processes may operate in a role-rotative manner as do our dreams. Thus, in these
senses, we view that prison cell on the front page of The New York Times both from
outside and from the prisoner's internal viewpoint (just as the reality programming
show or popular thriller/horror film camera often places us in the eyes of the criminal/
monster, here such entertainment genres overlap with the news). The position of the
spectator reading this type of article about proposed punitive criminal j ustice policies,
then, can be seen as intrinsically dual: at once outside and inside, at once distanced
and close, at once fearful and powerless as well as judgmental and powerful.
Consciously, of course, we fear the "dangerous incorrigibles" we have locked up.
Much less consciously, we are also supposedly "looking forward" to the implied
pleasure of punishing "him" (usually the case) with new forms of denial that reach
above and beyond the simple pragmatic goal of getting someone off the streets. If
deterrence and safety considerations were chiefly at stake, and not some excess of
punitive feelings restlessly seeking expression, why is there the complete prevention
of eye contact or the leg-irons? What is the difference if the prisoner watches a 16
inch rather than a 12-inch television screen and then not necessarily in black-and
white? Thus, the position of the viewer/spectator as representative of a general public
perspective seems dual in this sense too: at once masochistic and sadistic. It is
masochistic in that I am the offended one, the good one, the victim who has been
rendered powerless by the threat of crime?in a sense, all this is apt. Yet my position
also becomes potentially sadistic insofar as I have reacted by looking forward to the
door closing on someone now in a state of "captivity" (a term generally used to
describe animals in "cages" ? the latter word is also employed in the article, with
racist connotations). I can now victimize another as I feel or felt victimized myself,
legitimately, above self-protective or even punitive necessity. I now find myself in
a position of relative power over others compared with the perceived powerlessness
customarily (or perhaps the actual, rather than potentially feared victimization)
exerted over me.
As elaborated elsewhere, internal transformability may be a primary character?
istic of sadomasochistic dynamics as they unfold between selves and others (Chancer,
1992). Sadism and masochism are conjoined insofar as a dominant sadist in one
context (the person who committed a violent act, for example) may take the reverse
position, that of a subordinated masochist, in another. On the other hand, the dominant
masochist of one setting (the person who feels potentially, or has actually been,
victimized by crime, for example) may react by becoming subordinately sadistic
elsewhere, such as in his or her eagerness to embrace greater punishment of the
already imprisoned prisoner, or by voting for politicians who wish to build more jails
and favor "three strikes and you're out" displays of toughness. When placed in
complex social settings, both positions can coexist in the same person.

This is where the concept of sadomasochism may be especially a propos of crime
and its "psychopolitics." It is not only the ability of sadism and masochism to reside
side-by-side in the same party, as two sides of a potentially reversible coin, that
renders the notion of possible utility to the case at hand. The tendency for one side to
take precedence in a dominant mode (as above) leaves its opposite not only
subordinated, but also dissociated and disowned. Thus, for instance, the "criminal"
who projects a dominant persona of power sadistically may be loath to acknowledge
a painful and generalized sense of powerlessness that he or she has felt compelled to
bear in much more masochistically structured circumstances of everyday life. Or, as
noted above, the "non-criminal" who has experienced predominant powerlessness
(and an ongoing feeling of fear and victimization much more characteristic of a
masochistic situation) is not likely to acknowledge retributive desires peculiarly
reminiscent of their sadistic nemesis.
Because of this suggested relationship between sadomasochism and the complexities
of crime, this is precisely the point at which the rightward leaning proponent of crime has
the most to gain and the left-leaning critic the most about which to be apprehensive. Not
surprisingly, the observerofcrimewhofeels understandably andpredominantlypowerless
?not only about this issue, but also because of his or her own insecure and/or precarious
circumstances overall?may turn upon those situated low on the socioeconomic totem
pole to express subordinately sadistic resentments. This, too, is symptomatic of
sadomasochistic systems at once social-psychological and socioeconomic in their impli?
cations and effects. It is much easier, more seductive, and less frightening to express
hostility toward those relatively powerless below rather than toward those relatively more
powerful above. Again, the criminal and non-criminal have more in common than meets
the eye. The actions and reactions of both bode poorly at preventing destructive cycles of
crime-and-punishment, punishment-and-crime, from recurring in either the near or long
term. Both either engage in violent acts or react from enraged desires that leave inequitable
social structures and conditions virtually unscathed. Both channel resentment in directions
that similarly point away from holding those with greater power responsible at all for those
glaring inequalities that persist in the background of violent crime and of its comparatively
enormous frequency in urbanized areas and the U.S. as a whole.
There is one remaining caveat, however. This is by no means meant to excuse
those who commit violent crime from the weightiness of personal responsibility.
If this dimension is lost or left out of progressive reconsideration, a picture is
created that is as one dimensional and mechanically overdetermined as its
conservative opposite (i.e., the perspective of rampant individualism). More to the
point is how and why it comes to pass that individual responsibility is all the
current climate encourages us to recognize about the social psychology or
"psychopolitics" of contemporary crime. The image of a mirror, of actions and
reactions, does not occlude the glimpsing of either side. Neither the validity of
fearing and being angry about crime, nor the fallacy of striking back in ways so
individualistically and punitively oriented that some degree of crime (like sado

masochism itself) is likely to somersault and recycle back-and-forth, over and
over, into the future. To the extent that sadomasochism is an apt metaphor for such
an internally self-reproducing cycle in which social conditions have been just
about entirely eliminated as objects of anger themselves, a certain degree of
collective deception is also fairly well ensured. We may indeed end up directing
angry energies into imprisoning more and more people (without much reflection
on sociological issues such as how these people also happen to be quite dispropor?
tionately poor, minorities, and from inner cities) ad absurdum, for why would such
retributive measures ever end or the passions motivating them be appeased?
Paradoxically, there has been little to show in the way of decreased uneasiness
about crime resulting from these punitive policies. On the contrary, people seem
less reassured and just as fearful than ever, despite statistics citing diminutions in
overall crime rates and the moves toward costly jail-building projects, mandatory
sentences, and capital punishment in our midst. Thus, not merely feelings of anger,
but also those having to do with various forms of and reasons behind anxiety ?
amorphous anxieties, perhaps, or a possible relationship between anxiety and
anger, anxiety and/or sadomasochism ? seem to be evoked in our current
concerns about crime. In fact, sociologists and criminologists are increasingly
interested in studying the fear of crime, both in Britain and the U.S., precisely
because of the perception that such concerns are responding to statistically
demonstrable decreases in the reported occurrence of crime.7 Specifically, statis?
tics on reported felonies collected from 22 of the nation's largest cities showed
modest declines in 1994 (the East New York section of Brooklyn, where more
homicides were committed in 1993 than in any other New York City neighbor?
hood, showed a fall of over 25% in 1994); the cities of San Francisco, Seattle, Los
Angeles, El Paso, and San Antonio reported even sharper declines than did New
York on the whole for the first six months of last year (The New YorkTimes, 1995).
Reminiscent of President Clinton's inability to derive benefit from economic
improvement that was only demonstrable in statistical terms in the last congres?
sional elections, it would not be surprising if many people in New York City
remained unconvinced by such evidence. "There is almost disbelief that the
situation is improving," according to a recent report that quoted several people
including "Brigid McGinn, a 33-year-old Brooklyn graduate student, who still
worries about her family' s safety, even though her tree-linked block in Park Slope
did not record a single violent crime in 1994" (Ibid.).
Perhaps this appraisal need not be altogether gloomy in its concluding
prognosis. A first step in breaking such sadomasochistic rounds of crime-and
punishment, punishment-and-crime, is to recognize their existence. If acknowl?
edged, it may be possible to address both people's feelings and the gamut of their
emotional reactions and to disrupt the seemingly ad inflnitum continuation of
crime cycles midstream.

By Way of Brief Conclusion
No clear-cut "answers" emerge from the foregoing analysis. Several implications
can, however, be drawn for the purpose of stimulating discussion and further thought.
Rethinking crime in both emotional and rationalistic terms means placing this single
issue in the context of much more widely reconstituted (and multi-issued) social
movements that encompass radicals, progressives, and leftists of myriad varieties.
This may involve relating crime to movements concerned with racism or gender
related injustices, but also, and perhaps especially, with those that speak to the
inequities of class. In the United States of the 1990s, the issue of class appears to have
inspired the least overt organizing, perhaps because of the heightened lack of power
or diminished relevance of left-leaning groups (conditions more acute than those
facing social movements of the late 1960s and 1970s). Perhaps the 1990s brings with
it a danger that, after social movements and historical events have gone so much in
the direction of correcting for excesses surrounding class (for example, criticisms of
the Marxist paradigm for having been reductionist in underestimating race or
ignoring gender), we may find ourselves now not taking this social dimension
seriously enough.
Ironically, however, if the Times' Utrichelle was at all astute in his journalistic
observations about an "anxious class," the concept may have as much, if not more,
historical pertinence than before, whether perceived or not. It is difficult to believe
that typically contemporary worries are not often burdened with and touched by
economic concerns (though not, of course, in toto). Indeed, our relatives' manifest
insecurities over race and crime seemed much more broadly rooted and their sense
of frustration more generally felt the longer we spoke with them. (It is equally
preposterous to believe that crime itself is related solely to individual and not also to
a more generally social genealogy.)
Second, providing alternative forums and means for feelings about a broad
ranging set of issues to be expressed (including, but not limited to, those economically
affected worries) is an extremely important objective. As part of the "political being
personal" (to reverse the familiar emphasis), cognizance of a need to express
variegated emotions may bear much more directly on the "liberal versus conserva?
tive" responses people have toward crime and to their voter-translated assessments
of its causes and remedies than many activists and academics conventionally
recognize. To incorporate allowances for the expression of emotion?anxiety, rage,
hope, and the affirmation of possibility and pleasure ? into political theories,
language, and innovative practices remains an ambitious project indeed. Yet it may
prove to be the best, and perhaps the only, way to begin "taking back" the issue of
crime from the Right and forming a reinvigorated Left.
Finally, this scenario need not create a state of unrelieved pessimism for people
concerned and dismayed by the social and economic conditions the right-wing drift
leaves untouched. Perhaps the time has come for us to be more passionate ourselves.

For instance, counter-narratives are conceivable. We should be able to begin thinking
of better ways to express frustration about joblessness, poverty, racism, the disinte?
gration of inner cities, and the fears that reside in the suburbs. Perhaps the resonance
of a lost Eden is reconfigurable. Why isn't it possible for a kind of social narcissism
implied by, for example, corporate heads making hundreds of millions of dollars per
year to be a focal point of discussion, rather than the more familiar focus on the
dy sfunctionalities or pathologies of the poor? Such income disparities, en masse, may
themselves certainly contribute to economic anxieties and the general impoverish?
ment that remain invisibly hidden in the background of crime and fears about it.
Today, though, both people who commit violent crimes and those who react
to them cohabit a world in which both often feel unsafe and unhappy, if not often
desperate and insecure. Thus, we would tell our relatives, "Sure, we voted for
Dinkins, but so what?" It makes no sense and brings highly paradoxical conse?
quences (as the history of recent elections may indicate) to apologize or become
defensive about viewpoints held with logical conviction and heartfelt commit?
ment. We would also want to recognize and explore, rather than ignore or belittle,
those feelings of pain, powerlessness, and futility that propel many people to
promote locking others up for life and to resort to racist slurs that are sadistic in
their potential ramifications and embittering or demeaning in their internal and
external effects. Arguments, both emotional and rational in sensitivity and
persuasiveness, need to be made, and the sooner the better. The hauntingly mirror?
like relation that interlocks criminalized individuals and a society of criminalization
begs to be taken seriously if decreasing violence is indeed what is at stake. In the
contemporary climate, not only crime, but also the seductions of punishment must
be pondered more deeply than we have to date.
Acknowledgment
Thanks should be given to people, both past and present, for liberties we have
taken with their respective titles and phraseology. Wilhelm Reich, to whose Mass
Psychology of Fascism we have added a post-modernesque awareness by changing
"the" to "a"; Jack Katz for the much more recent title of his book, The Seductions of
Crime, from which our last sentence shamelessly borrows; and Ellen Willis, whose
excellent Tikkun article and terminology (in particular, the "psychopolitics of crime")
provided inspiration despite being her first foray into criminology.
NOTES
1. FBI figures, for instance, have shown annual national decreases of two percent in 1993 and
three percent in 1992, as recently reported in the Los Angeles Times (December 4,1994: A37).
2. This general tendency has existed in the past, especially with regard to left/liberal approaches.
However, the tendency may be in the process of already changing insofar as the topic of fear of crime

is beginning to interest scholars. Such work does not necessarily, but in most cases cannot avoid,
exploring a panoply of emotions that surround perceptions of crime. In addition, exceptions to this
generalization can be found. A well-known phenomenological approach such as Jack Katz' work, The
Seductions of Crime (1988), certainly deals with emotive reactions even if it is not oriented psychoana
lytically. On the other hand, the focus of Katz' study is the attraction of crime for those who commit it,
not the reactions of persons to crime once it has been committed.
3. See a compilation of these statistics culled from FBI Uniform Crime Reports and the NA ACP
Legal Defense Fund National Coalition Against the Death Penalty, also published in The New York
Times (December 4,1994: IV, 3).
4. If the implied solution is that parents should just be spanking their children more often (and
preferably using painful canes) in order to deter youth vandalism and robberies, how rapidly could this
possibly take hold? It would take at least a generation, one would think, for kids newly spanked to grow
up and not vandalize. Even if this method is presumed to work much more immediately, many of the
present young vandals may not be living at home with their parents or be willing to stay put to submit
to physical punishment, even assuming parents are present and cohabiting. The point, then, is that
rational efficacy is not the point.
5. African-American churches are the exception to the effect of evangelicalism on puniti veness
as are survey respondents with exceptionally high levels of personal religiosity. Both tend to mitigate
the effect of religious conservatism on puniti veness (Grasmick and McGill, 1994:25).
6. This is mimicked not only in reality in the growth of crime programming as a genre, but also
in the popularity of courtroom dramas, which carry social problems and controversies in terms of their
legal incarnation that by definition must deal with individuals as legal entities and not with social
processes.
7. A number of projects dealing with fear of crime in Britain have recently been funded by the
British government. In addition, among others, Ester Madriz is working on fear of crime among women
in the United States (forthcoming, University of California Press).
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Chancer, Lynn
1992
Cohen, Stan
1972
Currie, Elliot
1994
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"What's Wrong with the Crime Bill." The Nation 118 (January 31:21).
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Ehrenreich, Barbara
1989 Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class. New York: Harper Collins.
Grasmick, Harold G. and Anne L. McGill
1994 "Religion, Attributional Style, and Punitiveness Toward Juvenile Offenders."
Criminology 32,1 (February).
Hall, Stuart, with Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts
1978 Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order. London:
Macmillan.
Katz, Jack
1988 Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions in Doing Evil. New York:
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New York Times
1995 "If Not a Safe City, New York Is a Safer One: Crime Rate is Falling." I: 1 and
II: 36-37 (January 1).
1994a "The Rise of the Losing Class." IV: 1 (November 20), by Louis Utrichelle.
1994b "The Rage to Kill Those Who Kill." IV: 1 (December 4).
1994c "A Futuristic Prison Awaits the Hard-Core 400." I: 1 and II: 10 (October 17).
Sanchez Jankowski, Martin
1991 Islands in the Street: Gangs and American Urban Society. Berkeley: University
of California Press.
Sullivan, Mercer
1989 Gettin' Paid: Youth Crime and Work in the Inner City. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press.
Williams, Terry
1989 The Cocaine Kids. New York: Addison-Wesley.
Willis, Ellen
1994 "Beyond Good and Evil: Crime and Cultural Politics." Tikkun (May-June).
Wilson, James Q.
1975 Thinking About Crime. New York: Basic Books.

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