Elliot Currie Su Left Realism

Plain left realism: an appreciation,and some thoughts for the future

Elliott Currie

Published online: 24 July 2010# Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

Let me begin with a small anecdote.Im speaking as part of a panel that includes academics and practitionersall of

whom are progressive, some of them long-time activists for a better criminal justicepolicy in the United States. Were discussing the prison crisis generally in Americaand more specifically California, where the swollen prison system has contributed toa fiscal crisis of historic, and currently unmanageable, proportions.

Were agreed that the restoration of anything approaching a functioning society inCalifornia will require spending less on prisons. I argue that if we want topermanently reduce spending on prisons while also ensuring that we treat thosepeople in confinement in ways that are humane, restorative, and productive, wellneed to think holistically. Well need to change the way we now do business onseveral levels at once: reforming out-of-control sentencing practices: providing real(not bogus) help for offenders already in trouble to address the issues that helped toput them on track to prison in the first place.

But also that there can be no enduring solution to the prison problem unless wesimultaneously address the crime problemin particular, by creating strategies thatcan reliably shut down the pipeline that shunts people with distressingpredictability from our most devastated communities into the criminal justicesystem. I argue that as long as we continue to tolerate (or foster) the socialconditions that continue to produce stunningly high levels of violence andvictimization in the United States, we will remain stuck in a crime/prison cyclefrom which no amount of tinkering with sentencing for nonviolent offenders, or withthe conditions of parole, will really free us.

But I then say, on a more positive note, that against the thinking of entrenchedconservatives, timid technocrats, or pessimistic liberals, challenging those conditionsisnt nearly as hard to do as most people have been led to believe. Thats especiallytrue given the growing evidence of the extraordinary concentration of serious violent

Crime Law Soc Change (2010) 54:111124DOI 10.1007/s10611-010-9248-3

E. Currie (*)University of California, Irvine, CA, USAe-mail: [email protected]

crime in a relative handful of extremely distressed communities, both in Californiaand in the United States as a whole (a pattern that shows up in other countries aswell). I argue that the lesson of this evidence is ultimately a hopeful one. The badnews is that these are places that have been horrendously abused and neglected byforces well outside their control, and have suffered enormous damage as a result: butthe good news is that, realistically, it wouldnt take all that much to turn themaround. It isnt hard to envision the kinds of social investmentsparticularly increating legitimate work for the youngthat would radically transform thosecommunities, reduce serious crime significantly and enduringly, and accordinglyreduce the flow of offenders that sucks so much of our public resources into theprisons.

All of this seems pretty uncontroversial, but as I say it I sense some discomfortamong my fellow panelists. They are not, of course, opposed to providing moreopportunities in economically devastated communities for young people whoselevels of legitimate employment have recently fallen toward the single digits. Butthey are not comfortable with the idea that the social conditions in thesecommunities have much to do with why our prisons are overflowing. They are, inshort, uncomfortable with the idea that these adverse conditions are actually linkedto crime. And, accordingly, they are somewhat resistant to the idea that addressingthose conditions could have much if anything to do with reducing the footprint ofthe prisons. As the panel continues, a couple of my fellow panelists gently chide mefor failing to point out (or perhaps failing to understand) that the reason people fromthese communities are disproportionately behind bars is not because they commitmore serious crime but solely because of the higher levels of surveillance theyresubjected to. Theyre not in prison because of crime, one says: theyre in prisonbecause of the surveillance.

These exchanges are friendly, but Im left with the troubling feeling that myfellow speakers and I are living in different worlds. I dont have the time to say itthen, but I want to say something like this: sure, differing levels of surveillance arepart of the reason why people from inner-city communities go to prison more oftenthan those from better-off places. But thats not the whole story. It surely holds, to adegree, for drug offenses. It doesnt work for serious violent crime. Many of thecommunities were talking about are, and remain even after our celebrated crimedrop, places of routine violence and pervasive fear. In a time when a young blackman in the state of Louisiana is more likely to die by violence than his counterpart inEl Salvador, the argument that its only heightened scrutiny by the agencies of socialcontrol that creates the (false) appearance of a particularly severe crime problemamong the minority poor is startling.

I leave the proceedings thinking glumly that these earnest progressives, whosehearts are surely in the right place, are living in a peculiar state of denial. And that ifthey are going to be the standard-bearers who we hope will lead a challenge to ourpresent social priorities, the prospects for real change are pretty dim.

This exchange reminded me why, if questioned about what to call myself, I tendto respond that Im a left realist. And it serves to introduce my main argument in thispaper: that Left Realism (or what I will call here left realism, without capitals) isnot only an essential perspective on the problems of crime and justice in the early21st century, but that it is the perspective that offers the best hope of providing the

112 E. Currie

intellectual underpinnings for a genuinely progressive approach to crime around theworld.

Let me explain what I mean by left realism without capitals. Left Realism withcapital letters emerged at a particular place and timeamong British criminologistsin the 1970s and 1980s who were troubled both by the increasing dominance ofright-wing policies toward crime and by the stance of parts of the left, in and out ofacademia [10, 13, 14, 23]. That very important and productive movement incriminology has its own roots and its own trajectory, its own internal debates andchanges of heart. And not least, it provided the name left realism. But I wouldargue that most of its central themes and crucial insights could apply to a muchbroader swath of criminologists working today, in the U.K., the United States andelsewhereindeed, that much of the best work in criminology around the world isnow being done by people who fit what we might call a big tent definition of leftrealism, whether or not they would use that term to describe themselves.

I believe that this kind of plain left realism (to borrow from C. Wright Mills[18] famous concept of plain Marxism) is by now a much more influentialandcompellingposition than we may superficially assume. Its not yet true that weare all left realists now. But Id argue that, intellectually, there is no longer, if thereever was, a really serious challenge to the central vision and key tenets of plain leftrealism.

Thats not to say that left realism is a finished work. Above all, its not to say thatleft realisms intellectual achievements have had a corresponding impact on socialaction and policy. And Ill come back in a moment to suggest ways in which leftrealism might both grow intellectually in the coming years and become moreeffective as a force for social justice and rational criminal justice priorities. Buildingon left realisms successes, Ill argue, is critically important now, at a time whenthere is a kind of vacuum in public discourse and policy around crime and justicethat an assertive and energetic left realism may be able to fill, if we seize themoment. If we dont, it is likely that others will, and we will all be the worse off ifthat happens. But the bottom line is that it is difficult to see, on the criminologicallandscape, any competing perspective that offers a credible challenge to the centralinsights of plain left realism. Such a perspective, after all, would by definitionhave to be either not left, or not realist. And neither of those nots, I suggest,can withstand much scrutiny.

To explain this fairly large claim, its important to set out what it is about leftrealism, in this broad or plain sense, that makes it left, and what it is that makesit realist.

Some principles of plain left realism

The bedrock principle of plain left realismand the thing that most renders itrealistis the idea that crime (emphatically including ordinary crimes in thestreets and homes) should be taken seriously, not just as an intellectual category but,above all, as a part of the lived experience of real people in real communities. Thatsby no means to deny that it is also socially constructedthat some kinds of actionthat demonstrably harm others get called crime while others do not, or that some

Plain left realism 113

peoples crime is much more likely to result in surveillance and prosecution thanothers. But the key point is that crime isnt just a matter of social constructionnorjust a phantom issue stirred up by governments, right wing politicians, or the massmedia, playing on the exaggerated fears of a deluded (or racist) public.

The latter idea, to a large extent, was the view expressed in the forum I justmentioned. Im always a little startled at how widespread this view remains, in somecorners of academia and of the world of activism. But its easy to understand thecontinuing pull of this view for many progressives. In most of the countries of thepost-industrial world, the threat of street crime has indeed been often deployed, withgreater or lesser effectiveness, to advance pernicious and repressive agendas and tostir up public fearin the service of shifting social and economic priorities to theRight or, at least, of getting elected. It can be tempting, in those circumstances, tocounter the political distortions and exaggerations about crime by single-mindedlyminimizing it. But whether you call that approach left idealism, as the pioneeringLeft Realists in Britain did, or (as I have sometimes done in responding to adistinctively American version) liberal minimalism [3], its both empiricallymisleading andsome of us would arguepolitically disastrous, because by pooh-poohing the very real concerns of large parts of the public, it has consistently helpedto deliver the crime issue to the Right.

For plain left realists in the United States, in particular, that outcome isespecially frustrating given that it is precisely the long dominance of essentiallyright-wing social and economic policies that is largely responsible for theexceptional American crime problem in the first place. By denying that streetcrime is much of a problem, minimalists have given up what ought to have beenan important political advantage: the ability to point to high levels of crime as aproblem that has happened on the Rights watch: to firmly define crime as a cost ofneoliberal policies, and one more reason to reject them. The same bias has also led toa concentration on the origins and irrationalities of criminal justice policies at theexpense of serious efforts to tackle the question of what a progressive justice systemwould look likethus effectively taking much of the left out of the public debate onwhat to do about crime.

But another central theme in plain left realism is that crimeat least in its mostserious formsaffects some people, in some kinds of places, far more than others.Serious violent crime, whether it takes place in the street, in the home, or for thatmatter in the larger environment, is disproportionately concentrated in places thatsuffer other kinds of victimization and disadvantage as well. High levels of violencego hand in hand with social exclusion, economic inequality, deprivation, politicalmarginality, poor health and inadequate social supports. In that sense, violence tendsdisproportionately to be an affliction of the already afflicted. It is a fundamentalaspect of the larger pattern of inequality in societies at every level of development.And that concentration of the risks of harm among the already disadvantaged may beincreasing in many parts of the world [7, 19].

That isnt to deny that differential enforcement and surveillance are also very realproblems that urgently need addressing. It is, again, to say that they are not thewhole story. Both the intense surveillance that helps funnel African-American youthin Detroit into the prisons and the failure to protect them from violent death or injuryare part and parcel of the same over-arching set of social circumstances. Both the

114 E. Currie

decimation of the young male population of these communities by stratosphericlevels of incarceration and the continuing threat of routine violence faced by youngwomen in their streets and homes [17] are inseparable aspects of the reality of life inthe most socially excluded communities.

It is important to remind ourselves of the scale of this affliction in the placeswhere violent crime is most pervasivethe extent of the human disaster thatviolence represents. Observers around the world were shocked and appalled whenHurricane Katrina took the lives of a little more than a thousand people in NewOrleans, Louisiana, in 2006. But over the past 25 years, violent crime in the UnitedStates has left a death toll equal to several hundred Katrinassimilarly concentratedamong the poorest and most vulnerable parts of the population. For the plain leftrealist, this quieter, ongoing disaster represents both a massive social policy failureand a moral challenge.

Thus the idealist or minimalist tendency to downplay the reality of ordinaryviolence flies in the face of all credible evidence on the social distribution of seriouscriminal harm. Whether its the risk of being gunned down in a drive-by shooting,sexually assaulted on the street or in your home, beaten by a parent or by yourmothers boyfriend, forced to breathe high concentrations of toxic chemicals orsuffer the long-term damage from automobile exhaust fumes, it is sharply higher inplaces suffering high levels of social deprivation and economic marginality.Governments and the better-off (and the occasional criminologist) may choose toturn their heads away from that reality, but that doesnt make it go away.Confronting it head-on is an important part of what makes left realism realistand what makes it right.

For plain left realism, that unequal distribution of the risks of harm isntsurprising, because left realists have always argued that serious violent crime is bredby inequality, community fragmentation, deprivation and lack of supportiveinstitutions (and some would add an accompanying culture of predation, harshcompetition, and neglect). For many plain left realists, that recognition leadsdirectly to a critique of the criminogenic effect of some forms of capitalism or, insome variants, of market society [4, 21]. This, again, is part of what makes leftrealism left. Plain left realism is distinct from more tentative liberal perspectives inits insistence on seeing these adverse forces not as isolated misfortunes or failures ofsocial integration within a generally unproblematic social order, but as integralaspects of a socioeconomic system that, left to its own devices, predictably generatesinequality, injustice, social fragmentation and a hard and unsupportive culture. Butplain left realism is also distinctive in its central recognition that there are manyvarieties of capitalism, and that some of them are far more criminogenic than othersthus distinguishing itself from more maximalist perspectives on the left.

Thus left realism tends to be, as the late Ian Taylor often put it, socialdemocratic in its core analysis and implications. Again, thats social democraticwith a small s and a small d. Its not to say that any actually existing left realistwould necessarily identify with any particular Social Democratic political organi-zation or regime (though some would, and do). But Id argue that a corecharacteristic of small-l left realism is the belief that macro level social policiesfrom the left undertaken within the context of a capitalist economy can make a verylarge difference in reducing crime and, hence, the victimization of communities by


violence and fear. Again, that assertionlike much of the core of left realismisbroadly and deeply supported by both empirical research and historical experience.Societies that have set out to reduce inequalities of class and gender, to provide moregenerous social supports for vulnerable families and individuals, to counter thedominance of market relationships and imperatives generally, are less wracked byserious violence than those that havent [4, 9, 12].

To the left realist that central social fact seems unassailable, even obviousa no-brainer. But its important to realize how fiercely it has been resisted, across thepolitical and intellectual spectrum. The argument that social democratic strategiesmatter directly challenges both the central tenets of conservative criminology and ofthe kind of left maximalism that insists that not much can be done about crime shortof a thorough overthrow of the capitalist state. But the great differences amongvarious forms of capitalism have created something like a natural social experimentin the effects of progressive policy on serious crime, and the results of thatexperiment are in: in this realm, as in others, the unfettered free market loses, andsocial democratic strategies win.

Id argue that this social democratic sense of both the necessity and thepossibility of making large social and economic changes that could matter a greatdeal for crime is a fundamental and distinctive quality of left realism with smallletters. It implies, also, a compelling moral imperative to do our best to tackle themacro conditions that are ultimately most important in shaping the level of violencea society suffers. But that doesnt rule out the potential virtue of less sweepinginterventions. Another central quality of plain left realism has been its insistencethat some kinds of interventions, both on the level of the criminal justice system andthat of working with vulnerable children and families, can make a difference. Heretoo the empirical evidence is robustboth on the uses of such micro-levelinterventions and on their limits. That is particularly true for early childhoodintervention programs, from the Perry Preschool Project to the Prenatal-EarlyInfancy Program [5]. But it is also true for efforts to work with people alreadycaught up in the justice system. In the United States, plain left realists have longbeen engaged in what is, by now, a moderately successful battle to overturn the stockconservative claim that nothing works to rehabilitate offenders (with a landmarksalvo by Cullen and Gilbert [2] leading the charge). Again, its important tocomprehend the significance of that intellectual victory, both for public policy andfor the discipline of criminology. There are still, to be sure, plenty of people whocontinue to put stock in theories that insist that nothing we do later can undo thefailure of parents to instill proper self-control by the age of eight. But no seriousempirical evidence backs up that claim, which appears increasingly as ideologyrather than social science.

But the flip side of this affirmation of the useful possibilities for early interventionand rehabilitation is an equally staunch refusal to expect too much from such effortsin the absence of broader social change. Plain left realists would agree, for example,that even well-designed programs aimed at helping offenders to reintegrate intowhat we rather vaguely call the community are certain to be limited if thatcommunity remains massively deprived of economic opportunity and functioninginstitutions of social support, and is indeed a community in only the most abstractsense. Left realism has limited patience for what I call as if criminology: that is,

116 E. Currie

the kind of criminological scholarship and practice that narrows its focus to minoralterations in the justice system or social programs, as if there were not massivesocial forces relentlessly producing social insecurity and violence and predictablyundercutting even the most technically proficient interventions.

As Ill argue in more detail in a moment, I think that developing a richer and moreprogressive vision of what it means to rehabilitate offenders ought to be a highpriority for left realists in the future. But what I take to be the basic left realist stanceskepticism about how much can be accomplished by micro-level interventionalone coupled with optimism about the potential of well-designed programs whenlinked to a larger strategy of social change and community reconstructionoffers agood starting point.

Another key theme in what Im calling plain left realism is, of course, itsfundamental critique of repressive criminal justice strategies in controlling crime.Here too, the critique is not merely instrumental but also moral and political. Plainleft realists argue, based on what is by now very robust evidence, that massincarceration in particularthe core crime-control strategy of conservative realismis both an ineffective and a socially destructive way to approach crime. Mostwould agree that in its most extremethat is, Americanform, it has wrought anunprecedented social disaster, again dramatically concentrated in the most vulnerablecommunities. Indeed, in the United States the prisons have become an integral partof the deepening crisis of what I call Americas Third Worlddraining alreadyscarce funding from more productive purposes, saddling entire generations of youngpeople with a surplus load of obstacles to opportunity, and radically undercuttingthe capacity of families and communities for informal social control [1, 22]. And allof this while demonstrably failing to protect the hardest-hit communities from tragiclevels of victimization by violence.

Increasingly, the failure of mass incarceration as a crime control strategy isacknowledged even by many scholars who hardly fit the left realist profile [20]. Butthe left realist understanding of these realities is very different from that oftechnocratic criminology, in part because it begins from the understanding that whatappears to be a need for massive investments in incarceration in the first place is aproduct of remediable social conditions. The tendency of technocratic criminologyto assess the prisons effectiveness in narrow cost-benefit terms divorced from anyacknowledgement of that larger context appears, to the plain left realist, as afrustratingly limited and blinkered vision.

At the same time, left realism doesnt shrink from the responsibility to explorehow the criminal justice system could be made both more effective and more just.Here too it is sharply distinct from left idealism/liberal minimalism, which is toooften satisfied with charting the growth and spread of repressive and inhumanepolicies, registering opposition to themand stopping there. Left realists take forgranted that we will, in every country, have a criminal justice system for theforseeable future, and that accordingly one of our central tasks is to figure out how toshape those systems in ways that maximize human rights, social inclusion andsolidarity. So its incumbent on left realists to describe, for example, what a policeforce would look like that is effective in keeping people from victimization, but alsoresponsive to community needs and governed by a commitment to human rights. Itsincumbent on left realists to ask what a genuinely progressive approach to truly


dangerous people would look like. As Ill discuss more fully in a moment, I thinkthis is one of the areas where we will need to do the most work in the future. But,again, the bottom line is that here too left realism stands out favorably against thealternatives. Conservative realism institutionalizes a brutal and counterproductiveinvestment in mass repression as the centerpiece of its criminal justice strategy. Theleft idealist position tends to avoid thinking about a criminal justice strategy at allbeyond simple non-intervention. Technocratic, as if criminology operates with abloodless commitment to technical efficiency unmoored from any clearly definablesocial valuesmuch less the left values of social justice, human rights, andautonomy. Against these competitors, left realism once again stands out as uniquelypositioned to help in the creation of a just and effective response to crime.

Some steps for the future

Taking crime seriously; recognizing that it disproportionately afflicts the mostvulnerable; understanding its roots in the economic disadvantages, social deficits andcultural distortions characteristic of (but not limited to) predatory capitalism;insisting that those conditions are modifiable by concerted social action, andacknowledging the usefulness of some smaller-scale interventions that stand the testof evidencewhile rejecting as counterproductive and unjust the massive expansionof repression as a response to crime: those are, Id say, the fundamental principles ofplain left realism. And whats important to understand is that they are not justpolitical preferencesthough for most left realists, they surely are politicalpreferences. They are also propositions that are well supportedindeed, uniquelysupportedby the evidence, both of research and of history. This is a record thatshould give us considerable confidenceand maybe even a little prideparticularly,again, when we compare ourselves to the alternatives.

But thats not to say that the work of left realism is done. I see two broad areasthat are especially important for left realists in the future: first, deepening andbroadening our own analysis, both of the roots of crime and of the ways in which itcan be combated while simultaneously enhancing democratic principles and theprospects for social justice: and, second, creating the organizations and institutionsthat can more effectively disseminate that enhanced knowledge and translate it intosocial action.

1. Left realism has done a highly creditable job of explaining the social andeconomic sources of crime in the global post-industrial world. A chief task forthe futureespecially if we want to have a greater impact on social policy bothwithin and beyond the criminal justice systemsis to more clearly articulate avision of what we might do about it: a vision of how to achieve stable and safecommunities and deal with the genuinely troubled and damaged, whilesimultaneously promoting social justice and human rights. This, in turn, hasseveral components:

a. Outlining a progressive justice systemThe logic of left realism points clearly to the need to grapple with the

very complex question of what a genuinely progressive criminal justice

118 E. Currie

system would look like. Thats not really an issue for technocraticcriminologists, for whom the very idea of searching for a progressivejustice system would be befuddling. But left realism acknowledges that thepersistence of deeply destructive social conditions has created truly volatilecommunitiesand truly volatile people. That in turn creates both a practicaland a moral obligation to outline what we propose to do about them in waysthat flow from our core values.

Clearly, plain left realists agree that we want the smallest possiblefootprint for the formal criminal justice system thats consistent with thejob of public safety. Left realists have been consistent critics of the heedlessgrowth of incarceration and of the more subtle spread of coercive forms ofsocial control into the community. They surely want an end to the punitivetreatment of minor drug offenders and, more generally, to get nonviolentpeople out of secure custody. But then what? What does that smaller,humane, and genuinely rehabilitative system look like? What do we reallydo with truly violent offenders? Simply saying that we propose to treatthem rather than imprison them is hardly an adequate position, and byducking the question of what that treatment should look like, could help tousher in practices that are even more troubling than what we already have.What do we propose instead, and why do we think it will work? Whatmodels can we build on? Again, there is a role for left realists in this workthat I dont think anyone else can fill: the conservative model is bothreprehensible and ineffective, the idealist model has largely abdicated thisjob, and the technocratic model cannot move beyond mere data to the levelof fully articulated social values. I hasten to add that Im not suggesting thatwe havent already done useful work in this vein. We have: but we need todo more.

One important piece of this vision, as Ive suggested elsewhere [8, 15], isa revitalized conception of rehabilitation. Once we acknowledge, as wemust, that a predatory (and deeply sexist) society creates people whosebehavior and values we cant tolerate, its incumbent on us to figure outways of helping them, when we can, to change in ways that both mesh withour values and allow them to live their lives in productive and non-violentways. Here too, simple nonintervention isnt enough. People who offend indestructive ways have real issues that need to be addressedat the veryleast, in order to keep them from coming right back into the penal system.

In the current deep fiscal crisis in the advanced societies, there isconsiderable pressure to cut back (or abandon altogether) even the limitedinvestment in rehabilitative programs that now exists. Left realists need tooppose the decimation of already inadequate programs in education, jobtraining, and drug treatment. But that doesnt imply a blanket acceptance ofany program or tactic that promises to reduce recidivism or claims themantle of being rehabilitative. As critics since the 1960s have pointed out,there is much that goes on under the name of rehabilitation that is at leasttroubling and at worst downright scary. This is an issue that promises tobecome even more important as technological and pharmacologicaladvances increase the capacity of authorities to control behavior in the


name of treatment. Sorting out what we wish to mean by rehabilitationand figuring out what kinds of intervention are both effective and compatiblewith our valuesis a complicated task that weve barely begun to tackle.What would these more socially conscious rehabilitative programs looklike? Who would run them? Here, as elsewhere, left realists need to developa greater capacity to create new kinds of programsbased on our analysisand our principlesand to evaluate them, accumulating our own base ofknowledge about what works in this deeper sense.

b. Creating blueprints for social reconstructionBut we need to simultaneously develop better proposals for how to create

the stable communities of dignity and opportunity without which even thebest efforts at personal transformation will often fail. We need to focus muchmore intensively on how to achieve what I like to call deep prevention,well beyond the pallid concept of crime prevention that dominates as ifcriminology. We need to develop the capacity to be able to say withconfidence how we would transform, say, the South Side of Chicago, orGlasgows Gorbals, in ways that would enduringly increase opportunity andsupport and reduce victimization and fear. This requires both developingboth the capacity to intimately comprehend the contours of local social andeconomic problems, and the capacity to apply lessons learned from aroundthe world in grappling with them.

It might be objected that this would take us far beyond the boundaries ofcriminology as we know it. But thats the point. For plain left realists, crimedoes not exist in isolation from the broader social forces that generate it, andcannot be enduringly addressed without confronting them. We cantsimultaneously believe that and shirk the responsibility of developing adetailed analysis of how to change those criminogenic conditionswhatmix of anti-poverty and employment strategies, family supports, health andmental health interventions, education strategies, and more, will bring intobeing the kinds of communities, streets, homes in which people can livesecurely and with dignity. This too requires that we learn from otherssuccesses (and failures): and that we join forces more effectively with peoplein other disciplines. And we need to be able to seek out examples ofthis kind of best practice in community reconstruction wherever theyrefoundin the developing world as well as the developed...

c. Becoming truly globalThats especially important because of the vast disparity between the

distribution of the problem of violence and what most criminologists nowfocus on. As Ive argued elsewhere [9], there are two worlds of violence,and with some exceptions (notably my own country) the world that suffersmost is found overwhelmingly in poor to middle-income countries. That istrue whether we are talking about violence among young men against oneanother or violence against women on the streets and in the home. Yet theenergy of criminology as a discipline does not map well onto that globalreality. We know less about the pervasive and life-shattering violence in, say,the Congo, or Nigeria, or even Brazil, than about the minor delinquencies of

120 E. Currie

American middle schoolers. Indeed, because our issues have becomeincreasingly global ones, we need to become more international in ourfocus even to really comprehend the reality of violence in a single place. Wewont understand, say, gang violence in Long Beach, California, withoutunderstanding the flow of people from places as distinct as El Salvador andCambodia (and often back again), and the social and economic conditionsthat have driven it.

Mexico offers a startling example of the mismatch between thedistribution of criminal harm and the emphasis of criminology. The leveland ferocity of violence in Mexico today has made normal life all butimpossible in some parts of the country and threatens the integrity of most ofits institutions. The media tend to reduce this social catastrophe to a simplestruggle among rival drug cartels. In reality it represents the accumulatedimpact of a toxic mix of neoliberal economic policies that have ravagedcommunities and livelihoods throughout the country, massively failed drugpolicies in the United States as well asMexico, the absence of even rudimentarygun control policy in the United Stateswhich has fostered a massive flow offirearms south across the borderand more. The Mexican government hasrecently acknowledged the failure of its effort to control this crisis throughmilitary force. But what next? The international criminological community hasbeen remarkably silent about this. A perspective that takes seriously the fearfultoll of violence while rigorously linking it to larger social and economicforcesi.e., left realismoffers the best hope for clarifying the roots of thiscrisis (and others in the developing world) and putting forward crediblestrategies for addressing it.

d. Taking crimes against humanity seriouslySimilarly, I believe that an important part of the task for plain left

realism in the future is to devote more attention to mass crimes againsthumanity. I wont labor this point, since it has been made eloquently byDaniel Maier-Katkin and his colleagues (2009), John Hagan and WenonaRymond-Richmond [11], and a handful of others. Suffice it to say here thatthe principles of left realism fit well with the imperatives of the study ofcrimes against humanitya study that is still in its infancy. Left realismscommitment to taking crime seriously: its insistence that crime comes fromsomewhere, and is driven by some kinds of social organization more thanothers; its willingness to take on the difficult job of looking for workablesolutions to crime that flow from its causal analysis, and its insistence thatdoing so is part of the duty of the criminologistall of these will necessarilybe part of the tool-kit of scholars who want to seriously explore these mostdestructive of crimes, and who see their reduction as a social and moralimperative. Might we have important things to say, for example, about theroots of the catastrophic unleashing of violence against women in Congo? Ithink we probably do: and I think we should.

2. The second big task for the future is to work to close the gap between theintellectual accomplishments of left realism and its less than overwhelmingimpact on social policy and the practice of justice in the real world.


Conservative criminology may be brain-dead intellectually and may even havelost some of its voice in public debate. But crime policy in some countriesremains largely dominated by right-wing principles, to the extent that it isguided by principles or clear ideas at all. And in most countries, even thosewhere neoliberal social policies are less dominant, crime policy is at best in astate of drift and technocratic tinkering, and at worst increasingly susceptible tothe very ideologies that have failed every test of evidence and effectiveness. Theissue, then, is how we can translate the good ideas of left realism intomeaningful social action. Not that there havent been successes along these lines(and as Ill argue, part of the job is to develop the capacity to share those moreeffectively), but we need to do bettermuch better.

One of the most curious things about the recent thrust of crime policy in theUnited States and the United Kingdom is the political triumph of ideas aboutcrime and its remedies that diverge so dramatically from the accumulated bodyof knowledge about them. The reasons for that split are doubtless complex, butone of them is surely the success of conservative organizations in building thekinds of institutionsthink tanks, publications, regular conferencesthroughwhich their ideas, however wrongheaded, could be widely disseminated. A morepolitically effective left realism needs to learn from that experience. We willneed to build new and more publicly visible organizations through which we cando a better job both of catalyzing left realist work and sharing it within the leftrealist community, and disseminating it widely to broader constituencies. As itstands, too much of our workeven the bestdoesnt get much past theuniversities and the professional organizations that are closely tied to them (Isuspect that this is more true in the United States than it is in the U.K.).

As Ive argued before [6], an important part of this job will be to workassertively to reshape the processes and incentives of the academic world itselfin ways that make the universities a more hospitable place for the more engaged,holistic, and progressive work that left realists do. But another part shouldinvolve the creation of more organizations beyond academia. Given what Ivesaid above, I think its clear that those organizations and institutions will need tobe both seriously international and genuinely trans-disciplinary. Again, the corelogic of left realist analysis points to the need to consider crime holistically, notin isolation from such problems as unemployment, concentrated poverty ordisruptive economic development. A criminology that wants to take the socialand economic context of crime seriously will need to work more closely withothers working on anti-poverty strategies, job creation, educational transforma-tion and public health. And it will need to broaden the conversation, and theworking relationships, past the relatively few, and mostly developed, countrieswhere criminologists now usually speak with one another.

Those institutions should also bring together not only academics andresearchers but also people involved in NGOs and community organizations.As it stands, there is a wide gap separating the work they dosome of which isin fact left realist in its assumptions and aimsand the work that academicsdo, even if they share similar views. In the absence of mechanisms to encouragea systematic sharing of research and experience, both sides lose: communityorganizations miss out on scholarship that could help guide their work, and

122 E. Currie

scholars miss the wealth of knowledge generated by real-world experience inputting ideas and programs on the ground. I think of the many years ofimportant work done by NACRO in the U.K., for example: much of this workhas important lessons for us in the United States, but most of it is unknown toAmerican academics or American activists.

Along the same lines, it will be important to shift the focus of engagementwith the world outside the academyfrom the attempt to gain insider accessto policy-makers, toward developing enduring relationships with a muchbroader public. In the United States in particular, criminologists have beenrecurrently seduced by the idea that bringing sound analysis of crime tolegislators will lead to real change in policy. But while there is certainly roomfor developing and firming channels for that kind of political access, weve seenthe results of relying too much on itwhich is to say, no results at allin theabsence of a more direct engagement with the public: one that opens thepossibility of changing hearts and minds and catalyzing a shift in the broaderpolitical culture around crime and punishment. Public opinion studies havegiven us, for a long time, tantalizing suggestions that even without mucheducating, the public is more open to progressive strategies of crime control thanwe may have thought. But so far, at least in the United States, we havent beenable to work effectively to deepen the publics understanding, much less tomobilize them into political action. We need to develop the capacity to speakwith broader publics in ways that are both compelling and understandable: thatstraightforwardly acknowledge public fears while educating them about the realreasons why theyre afraid, and about what will and what will not work to makethem saferand that provides them ways of turning that enhanced knowledgeinto social action.

The increasingly obvious failure of the conservative model offers us a realopening to move our ideas center stage and to put a genuinely progressive visionof crime policy on the table [16]. And the potential is increased by the currentfiscal crisis that wracks most countries around the world. Especially in theUnited States, and to a lesser extent the U.K., where huge increases in prisonspending are now increasingly seen as simply unsustainable, there appearsatleast for nowto be a new receptivity to more progressive ideas about how toreduce the footprint of the prisons and develop alternative approaches to bothcrime prevention and the rehabilitation of offenders. (Weve been fooled by thisbefore, of course: In the U.S., we started thinking that fiscal realities would soonput a limit on prison expansion as far back as the early 1980s. That economicimperatives were routinely trumped by political ones has been an important, andsobering, lesson). But the danger is that either this opening will disappear when,or if, governments return to a more stable fiscal footing: or, worse, that theresponse to continuing high levels of violent crime and social disorder in thecontext of ever-deepening fiscal crisis will become very scary indeed. In theabsence of a compelling set of alternatives that can be put before the public, itseasy to imagine a scenario in which governments seek out cheaper ways ofdealing with crime that are even more inhumane and/or intrusive than they arenow: ranging from simply abandoning vulnerable communities altogether andleaving them to cope with persistent violence and disorder on their own (we do


this already, after all, to a large extent in the U.S.), to investing in yet moresophisticated means of technological and pharmaceutical control of populationsconsidered volatile and dangerous.

We cant afford, in other words, to simply let the pathologies of neoliberalsocial policy take their course and grumble impotently from the sidelines. Weneed to be confident that we indeed have something to say and can offer a wayforward where other ways have patently failed. And we need to both get betterat defining that way forward and convincing others that its the right one.

References

1. Clear, T. (2007). Imprisoning communities. New York: Oxford University Press.2. Cullen, F. T., & Gilbert, K. (1982). Reaffirming rehabilitation. Cincinnati: Anderson Publishing.3. Currie, E. (1992). Retreatism, minimalism, realism: Three styles of reasoning on crime and drugs in

the United States. In J. Lowman & B. D. MacLean (Eds.), Realist criminology: Crime control andpolicing in the 1990s. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

4. Currie, E. (1997). Market, crime, and community: toward a mid-range theory of post-industrialviolence. Theoretical Criminology, 1(2).

5. Currie, E. (1998). Crime and punishment in America. New York: Metropolitan Books.6. Currie, E. (2007a). Against marginality: arguments for a public criminology. Theoretical Criminology, 11(2).7. Currie, E. (2007b). Pulling apart: notes on the widening gap in the risks of violence. Criminal Justice

Matters, (70, Winter 20078).8. Currie, E. (2008). Social consciousness as prevention and rehabilitation. Paper presented at the annual

conference of the American Society of Criminology, St. Louis, MO., November.9. Currie, E. (2009). The roots of danger: Violent crime in global perspective. NJ: Upper Saddle River.10. DeKeseredy, W. S., & Schwartz, M. D. (2006). Left realist theory. In S. Henry & M. M. Lanier (Eds.),

The essential criminology reader. Boulder: Westview Press.11. Hagan, J., & Rymond-Richmond, W. (2009). Darfur and the crime of genocide. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.12. Hall, S., & McClean, C. (2009). A tale of two capitalisms: preliminary spatial and historical comparisons of

homicide rates in Western Europe and the USA. Theoretical Criminology, 13(3, August).13. Hayward, K. (2010). Jock Young. In S. Maruna & J. Mooney (Eds.), Fifty key thinkers in criminology.

London and New York: Routledge.14. Lea, J., & Young, J. (1984). What is to be done about law and order? Harmondsworth: Penguin.15. Matthews, R. (1992). Developing a realist approach to penal reform. In J. Lowman & B. D. MacLean (Eds.),

Realist criminology: Crime control and policing in the 1990s. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.16. Matthews, R. (2009) Beyond so what? criminology: rediscovering realism. Theoretical Criminology,

13(3, August).17. Miller, J. (2008). Getting played. New York: New York University Press.18. Mills, C. W. (1962). The Marxists. New York: Dell.19. Nilsson, Anders, & Estrada, F. (2006). The inequality of victimization: trends in exposure to crime

among rich and poor. European Journal of Criminology, 3(4).20. Raphael, S., & Stoll, M. (2009). Do prisons make us safer? New York: Russell Sage Foundation.21. Taylor, I. (1999). Crime in context: A critical criminology of market societies. Cambridge: Polity Press.22. Western, B. (2008). Punishment and inequality. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.23. Young, J. (1992). The ten principles of realism. In R. Matthews & J. Young (Eds.), Issues in realist

criminology. London: Sage.

124 E. Currie

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

Author:

Title:

Source:

ISSN: DOI:

Publisher:

Currie, Elliott

Plain left realism: an appreciation, and some thoughts for the future

Crime Law Soc Change 54 no2 S 2010 p. 111-24

0925-4994

10.1007/s10611-010-9248-3

Springer SBM B.V.

Gustav Mahlerlaan 10, P.O. Box 283, 1000 EA Amsterdam, The Netherlands

The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and it is reproducedwith permission. Further reproduction of this article in violation of the copyright isprohibited. To contact the publisher:http://www.springerlink.com/content/1573-0751/

This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub- licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.

Documents

Elliot Currie Su Left Realism