Most political and public discussion of crime, and by extension crime policy, is divisive and unproductive. In fact, it actually pains me to listen to pundits and politicians make their case – especially during short-form, split-screen or roundtable panels where all nuance is lost and sound bites prevail. A few years back, I wrote about how partisans on both sides are consistently wrong about policing and criminal justice matters more broadly.
Deception and bad faith arguments aside, I do believe that the majority of peoples’ intent is fine (I could be wrong, and I’m trying hard to move away from my cynical/pessimistic tendencies). They are making their specific case for how to address crime, reform policing or other aspects of the criminal legal system, etc. Both the causes of crime and the preferred solutions are based on their overall worldview, which is related to and influenced by politics. However, most politicians and *partisans suffer from the inability to see the other side of the spectrum.
Crime and desistance from offending behavior can be attributed to BOTH structural/sociological AND cultural as well as agentic/individual factors.
The biggest issue I see is that liberals and progressives tend to focus, almost exclusively, on the structural/sociological correlates: neighborhood/community characteristics (e.g., concentrated/economic disadvantage, racial/residential segregation, lack of collective efficacy), family upbringing, peer influence, inequality and lack of opportunity. They usually neglect cultural explanations and the belief that people have agency and the ability to make choices whether to offend or not. Or culture and agency are secondary to the structural/sociological factors.
Conversely, conservatives tend to focus on the **cultural and agentic explanations of crime. Regarding the latter, people are in control of their own destiny. Crime and desistance are a decision-making process where we, as rational people, weigh the pros/benefits and cons/costs before acting. People can be deterred by increasing the perceived costs of crime – through certainty of getting caught and the severity of punishment – so that “crime doesn’t pay.” Conservatives usually neglect the broader structural factors that influence offending and, at the very least, lead to bounded rationality.
This may be a bit of an oversimplification, but it is based on Herbert Packer’s crime control versus due process model.
Both groups are wrong, especially the closer that individuals creep to either end of the abovementioned spectrum. We, as a society, run into problems when not considering how both structure and agency are relevant in the causes and solutions of crime.
Structure AND agency. It reminds me of an article that was led by a fellow Ph.D. student at ASU. Kim and colleagues engaged in a bit of theoretical integration by combining elements of a macro, sociological theory with elements of a micro, agentic theory by examining perceptions of deterrence in the broader context of neighborhoods. It incorporated ideas from social disorganization and deterrence theories, finding that adverse neighborhood conditions influence perceptions of certainty and severity. More adverse neighborhood conditions were associated with 1) lower perceived certainty of punishment and 2) less perceived shame associated with getting in trouble. The main takeaway is that context matters when it comes to perceptions of deterrence. Focusing on deterrence at the individual-level is incomplete.
Let’s not let partisanship cause us to miss roughly 50% of the explanation of crime and offending behavior.
* = I am a registered “unaffiliated” voter in the state of New Jersey. I don’t think either political party governs particularly well or looks out for average Americans (relative to how much they both cater to special interests and the corporate donor class). Partisanship clouds one’s judgement, much like a drug. To remain as objective as possible as a researcher and social scientist, it’s best to try to avoid it.
** = Historically, much of the conservative discussion surrounding “culture” in an offending context focuses on the detrimental effects that may stem from being poor and Black: broken families/single-parent households, unwillingness to cooperate with law enforcement, etc. It took Sampson and Wilson in their 1995 “racial invariance hypothesis” for non-conservative scholars to even address culture. They connected the dots between structural factors leading to cultural adaptations – a model that I find provides a more complete explanation of crime and offending behavior.