Nineteen—
Criminals' Passions and the Progressive's Dilemma

Jack Katz

Introduction

Progressives in the United States, defined here as those who are at once critical of business elites and supportive of policies that directly benefit the lower classes, now face street crime as a daunting political problem. Conservative politicians triumph in stirring up fears of street crime; they can maintain a broadly moralistic posture even as they discard particular leaders who have become tainted by scandal. But progressives, who occasionally have their own problems with corrupt leaders, have become virtually speechless on criminal violence. Progressives risk alienating important constituencies—especially supporters of civil liberties, minority groups, and socialists—if they rail against violent predatory crime; and they appear morally weak to many voters when they drop a posture of indignation and speak in positive tones on behalf of remedial programs.

The current quandary created for progressive politicians by criminal violence is not simply the result of right-wing campaign advertising tricks, as apologists too often believe; the current difficulty is deeply rooted in the structure of progressive thought. The makeup of progressive thought is itself a complex matter. Over this century, the American progressive agenda has not had a uniform or constant partisan character. Before World War I, "progressives" were often Republican; and Democrats, since World War II, have been deeply divided between progressive and conservative wings. But despite these partisan shifts, and underlying the complexities of support for specific policies, progressives have adopted several distinctive positions on crime.

Since 1950, three lines of initiative, corresponding to three independent intellectual sources, have shaped progressive policies toward violent criminals. In the 1950s, theories of depth psychology were invoked to depict violent criminals as emotionally disturbed and to reform criminal court procedures and penal institutional policies that had been charac-

terized as insensitive, cruel, and ineffective in reducing crime. In the 1960s, sociological writings that attributed criminality to a contradiction between materialist culture and inadequate economic opportunities, were drawn on to develop various governmental programs in an effort called the War on Poverty. In the 1970s, progressive forces in the legal profession succeeded in implementing norms of legality in various American institutions, with significant if unforeseen consequences for the ability of government to implement progressive policies in criminally violent sectors of the population.

In the following pages, I will argue that the progressive's current dilemma with violent crime has been structured by: (1) an emergent awareness of the repressive consequences of reforms inspired by psychological theory; (2) the inadequacies of sociological theories of crime for appreciating the passions in criminal motivations; and (3) the success of efforts to institutionalize legality, which has placed deviant sectors of the population at a historically unprecedented remove from the conventionally respectable centers of American society. The result has been a thoroughgoing failure to develop policies that can grasp the realities of criminal violence, either intellectually or practically.

Depth Psychology and Criminal Justice

Early in twentieth century, progressive forces operated through social networks that coordinated academic research and private philanthropic efforts. Progressives produced a large body of social research criticizing criminal justice institutions as insensitive to the urban poor, and they mounted recurrent waves of pressure demanding institutional reforms from state legislatures. Their most celebrated permanent success in the domain of criminal justice was the creation of specialized courts and confinement facilities for juveniles. Depicting a process in which the age-indiscriminate housing of offenders led to the socialization of youths into mature criminal life-styles, and calling for institutions responsive to the individual needs of youths, the progressives created a national climate of opinion in which resistance to the differentiation by criminal justice administration of adolescent and older offenders was regarded as barbaric and archaic. Beginning in Chicago in 1898, juvenile courts were soon established throughout the nation.^[1]

Progressives originally appreciated juvenile delinquents, in a sociological perspective, as members of vulnerable social groups, namely as residents of impoverished, usually immigrant, urban neighborhoods. By the 1950s, progressive thought about juveniles had become dominated by psychological perspectives. Settlement-house and related local-action philanthropic agencies became self-consciously "professionalized," in

part through their increasing governance by psychological social workers. When publicity about "gang" violence in American cities created a sense of crisis in the 1950s, the psychologically trained incumbents of the old-line social agencies called for further differentiation in the treatment of juvenile delinquents, not only by age category but by type of personality disorder.^[2]

During the 1960s, progressive opinion on the juvenile court shifted in a way that came to characterize disenchantment with a series of criminal justice reforms that had been instituted to promote greater sensitivity to individual needs. If the juvenile court system had minimized earlier problems of physical abuse and moral corruption of young by older offenders, critics pointed out that the juvenile justice system had also extended the reach of state control, providing justification for state funding of an increased confinement capacity and for confinement criteria, such as being a "person in need of supervision," that were inherently vague and administratively arbitrary. Juvenile court judges, operating in a special adjudicatory environment, sought to distinguish "good kids" from "hardcore offenders" within proceedings lasting a matter of minutes.^[3] This prototypically modern criminal justice institution hardly seemed to exercise power in an enlightened manner.

From the 1930s to the 1960s, the insanity defense had been treated as a vehicle for bringing compassionate, progressive social science into the criminal justice process. Legal academics demonstrated the sophistication of their scholarship by bringing psychological theory into their teaching and treatises. When violent crimes drew extraordinary journalistic interest, psychological arguments were promulgated to the general public by writers intent on opposing capital punishment.^[4] But discontent about discretionary power grew rapidly in the sixties, and an early target of criticism was the realm of discretion authorized by psycholegal interpretations which held that impassioned violence reflected insanity.

In the early 1960s, a criticism emerged that pointed to the ironically repressive implications of the insanity defense.^[5] In some jurisdictions, the prosecution had been able to invoke the charges of insanity, over defense objections, in order to reduce its burden of proof. More generally, a defendant who had been adjudged insane and unfit to stand trial, or one who had escaped conviction on a successful insanity defense, faced a liability to confinement beyond set statutory terms and might be placed interminably under the administration of institutional psychological experts. In the 1970s, Western intellectuals found it increasingly difficult to ignore disturbing resonances from revelations of the repressive use of insanity issues in Soviet criminal processes.^[6] Psychological science, previ-

ously thought to be a perspective of enlightened compassion working for the defense, now became seen as a tool of limitless state repression.

Progressives promoted the following debate over the proper content of an insanity defense: should the traditional standard, that exculpation depended on showing that the defendant did not know the difference between right and wrong, be replaced by a deeper psychological understanding that, even knowing the moral meaning of given behaviors, a person might be unable to control his or her actions because of an underlying mental disease or defect? The inclination of progressives to adopt psychological theories alleging that criminal conduct might be caused by "mental disease or defect" rather than by a person shaping his or her behavior according to a coherent, if idiosyncratic, frame of understanding, was intellectually as well as administratively problematic. Throughout the shift among progressives away from trust in psychological expertise and toward a suspicion of repressive state power, there was little effort to appreciate the details of the lived experience of criminal violence. Progressive thought was consistently unable to grasp the non-rational, moral, and sensual logic of impassioned personal violence.

Even though offenders may not formally think out the rationale of their behavior, their violence has a tripartite coherence.^[7] First, impassioned attacks typically are righteous efforts to defend some version of the Good. A father who beats a five-week-old child to death may initially seem to have gone berserk, but the details of his mounting violence—the issuance of orders to stop crying, the shaping of violence into forms of discipline rather than into more expeditious methods of killing—commonly describe an effort not so much to kill as to restore respect according to the biblical injunction that parents be honored. Similarly, a spouse, in fatally attacking an adulterous mate, will not simply and temporarily go mad, but may become mad about defending the sanctity of the marital union. A fellow taking up a shotgun and leveling it at a driver who has blocked his driveway will understand himself to be standing up for the rights of property owners in general. Two fellows, enraged and in a violent struggle, will typically be refusing to accept insults that not only they, personally, but that any "real man" should refuse to tolerate. Far from giving way to dark or evil impulses, the attackers will understand themselves as trying to be Good in some sense that they, at the moment, feel is widely embraced by the community.

Second, the violence in righteous attacks is not simply a "release" or a resolution of frustrated emotions, but a positive, creative act. In essence, the attacker attempts to write the truth of the offense he has received in the body of the person attacked. The attack at once reconstructs and attempts to transcend the offense. This is sometimes evident in a struggle

to turn the mouth into a compliant tool for delivering curses. Sometimes it is seen in the homologous relationship between the attacking acts and the background they respond to: he burned my school books in a trash can, I'll burn him in his bed; she insulted my taste in music, I'll smash her record player.

And third, the extremity of the act is felt and specifically desired by the offender, who acts out of a sense that he must take a last moral stand in defense of his respectability. Many of the paradoxes of impassioned homicide—that these serious acts occur so often during leisure times and in casual social settings, that they occur so rarely against superiors at work—make sense if we appreciate that enraged attacks, although emerging from humiliating situations, tend not to emerge when the humiliated person feels there is some other time and place where respect might be taken for granted.

Righteously impassioned violence is typically employed to coordinate an array of activities (insulting gestures and curses, pushes and shoves, attacks on inanimate objects, strategies to scar the victim's body, and so on). Such violence emerges from a logic that is profoundly moral and sensual, if not reflectively generated. These are not simply aberrations or "mental explosions"; righteously enraged violence emerges through universal interpersonal rather than unique psychopathological dynamics. Yet these acts are also products of idiosyncratic systems of brutal meaning, emerging over an extended period of time and through multiple attacks, through an elaborated, private semiotics of violence. And there lies at least a small promise for effective intervention.

Shortly after the attack, offenders often "wake up" to regret their new existence as criminal killers in a world that regards them not as protagonists in immortal dramas written in biblical terms, but as mortals caught in the prosaic workings of the criminal justice system. The most recent progressive policy response to impassioned domestic violence, supported now by some suggestive experimental evidence, encourages early and sustained intervention in domestic disputes by local criminal justice agencies. Such intervention appears promising in part because arrest, confinement, court appearances, and mandated counseling may together significantly undermine the moments in which transcendent myth governs experience.^[8]

What lends a perhaps surprisingly progressive character to this new impetus toward police intervention into the most intimate regions of private life is its affiliation with the feminist and anti–child abuse social movements. But the state's social welfare bureaucracies do not operate in a manner indifferent to social class. Through the administration of income and housing assistance, foster care and adoption programs, drug treatment and public medical services, the state massively and thor-

oughly interrogates the private lives of the poor. (The middle class knows nothing comparable. The forms used by mortgage loan officers, for example, have no place to record suspicions of spouse and child abuse.) And so, over the course of a generation, the progressive perspective has moved from a posture of compassionate, deep psychological understanding of the offender toward a moral alliance with the victim in an outraged call to expand the state's punitive and constraining powers into the private lives of the lower classes.

Sociological Materialism and Criminals' Passions

About fifty years ago, Robert K. Merton, in his paper "Social Structure and Anomie,"^[9] formalized what became the dominant sociological version of the progressive view of crime causation, at least in journalism and in the public's understanding. Once counted as the most frequently cited professional article in the history of sociology, Merton's argument had both theoretical and political appeal.

Merton developed two now-familiar themes: deviance is the result of a commercial culture that stimulates desires, within a social structure that unequally distributes the opportunities to fulfill material goals. Published when the Depression was well advanced and the Democratic party was well entrenched in national office, the theory cast a chastising eye in familiar directions, appealing to widespread sentiments that structural problems could unjustly put masses of otherwise good people to desperate choices. The argument also appealed to culture critics who disdain the false gods of mass advertising.

While positing the emergence of an intermediate state of anomie from which various lines of deviant action might emerge, Merton's theory put materialistic motives and opportunities for material gains at the driving foundation of deviance. A brief review of some central patterns in youth crime and in predatory adult crime will indicate the massive irrelevance of this materialist version of progressive thought to the lived experience of deviance.

Delinquency

Merton's theory made its most rhetorically successful appearance in statements on youth crime, or "delinquency." Revised and applied specifically to juvenile delinquency by Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin,^[10] "opportunity theory" became part of the intellectual foundation of the Democratic administration's War on Poverty in the 1960s.^[11] Three patterns indicate the broad inadequacies of this version of progressive thought in application to youth crime.

First, despite a popular tradition of locating in the lower class a dis-

tinctive culture of toughness, a fascination with aleatory risk taking, and the death defying pursuit of illicit action, mortality statistics on males aged fifteen to nineteen point to a quite different contemporary social reality. In the United States, the mortality rate for white males in late adolescence is not clearly lower than the rate for blacks; in some years it is slightly higher. Teenage white males die from motor vehicle accidents at about three times the rate for their black counterparts. Teenage black males die from "homicide and legal intervention" at almost five times the rate for their white counterparts. The white rate is not simply the product of the greater availability of cars to white adolescents; the adolescent white male rate of death from auto accidents is several times that of white female adolescents, just as the black male adolescent rate of death from "homicide and legal intervention" is several times that of the black female adolescent rate.^[12] White male adolescent mortality seems related not simply to access to automobiles but to the way they are driven.

These mortality data indicate criminogenic forces that operate powerfully across the lines that progressive theory traditionally addresses: the fascination with tempting fate is common among young men, and is often combined with a widespread preoccupation with the cultures of alcohol and drug use. As with "gang" violence, youths' reckless driving typically emerges spontaneously and without connection to material, instrumental objectives. In the domain of fatal criminal activity by young males, social inequality appears to structure the form more clearly than the incidence of deviance. C. Wright Mills's old argument that social pathologists are biased to focus on deviance in urban, lower-class, ethnic minority settings is still worth heeding.^[13]

The irrelevance of materialist causes and intentions explains the similarly general neglect by sociologists of relatively innocent forms of youthful criminal activity. Vandalism, for example, has rarely been studied. Vandals take material destruction, not acquisition, as their objective, except when they take an item as a souvenir of an adventure. "Joyriding" forms of auto theft are not typically instrumental efforts to remedy problems of access to transportation. Adolescents who shoplift often have the money to buy the stolen goods in their pockets, or they discard the booty soon after it has served its function as trophy. And young burglars often break and enter successfully and then wonder what they might reasonably do once inside. Some act out a version of the Goldilocks story, sitting here and there, messing up this or that room, perhaps taking a beer from the refrigerator. When caught, these amateur offenders frequently experience a metaphysical shock as they simultaneously realize, prospectively, the conventional criminal definition that their activity may be given; and retrospectively, that they had been operating in a world of myths.

None of the powerful attractions of these sneaky thrills has mattered much to social research and social theory. But precisely because these forms of deviance have cross-class appeal to amateurs, they can lead us to recognize motivational dynamics that social theory should grow to appreciate. In part, these forms of sneaky thrills are attractive as games: they have goal lines, tricky maneuvers to fake-out the opposition, and a concern to "get away with it" that justifies action, regardless of the value of the "it." In part, they are seductive plays with sexual metaphors of foreplay, penetration, and orgasmic climax. In part they are strategic interactions over social visibility in which the line between what others think and what one knows about oneself is put to the test.

And they all share as well the temptations of desecration. Vandalism pursues a pure fascination with defiling the sacred. Its outrageously senseless character, to victims, points toward its explanation. The common view misunderstands vandals as simply trying to destroy; but destruction appeals because it is a strategy to release positive powers. Across social and ethnic divisions, adolescents live in a world of material goods that, independent of their market value, serve, through orderliness and surface perfections, to provide a sense of cosmological coherence to adults.^[14] Wherever things soiled and things out of place stir anxieties not rationally related to instrumental activities, there adolescents can find objects that are treated as possessing totemic power.

But it has been common to see only a negative force—"frustration" or "deprivation"—behind vandalism, just as it is common to see only "acting out" or "frustration" behind a child's knocking down of a pyramid of blocks. Yet the construction has a compelling majesty for the child; as parents celebrate it with mock expressions of awe, the whole obviously attains a spiritual presence that is infinitely greater than the sum of its parts. Drawn to the visible majesty that is obviously before him, the child seeks to touch the untouchable, acting more in the spirit of exploration than of malevolence. Observers who can see only "anger" and a "mess" speak more about the limits of their own theories than about the lived experience of youth.

More clearly than in any other area of criminal behavior, the traditional progressive view has dominated popular and academic understandings of street "gang" violence. Related to the great rhetorical appeal of "opportunity" theory and the call for expanded job opportunities to which opportunity theory predictably leads, has been the extraordinarily tired intellectual texture of the field. For a while in the 1960s, books on delinquency won awards from professional research societies without working their arguments through data of any sort, quantitative or qualitative.^[15]

Part of the narrowness of traditional inquiry into group delinquency

has been a neglect of comparative class analysis. At least since World War II, a series of forms of collective deviance have been embraced by middle-class youth: beats, hippies, punks. What makes a comparative examination important is not simply that it makes analysis more deeply sociological; it helps isolate the essential attractions of violence to ghetto youth gangs.

Middle-class and ghetto forms of collective youth deviance have been regularly and radically different along a series of dimensions. While members of ghetto fighting groups profess a proud affiliation with a local neighborhood and with identities as "homeboys," middle-class youths cover up their affluent and suburban origins in tawdry dress and in trips to city locations. While middle-class youth develop "gender blender" styles of deviance (jeans for everyone, makeup for males and females alike), ghetto gangs organize power around males and sustain emphatically dominant relations with female acquaintances and groups. Middle-class collective youth deviance movements identify with underclass and pariah groups, symbolically integrating diverse classes and ethnicities. Meanwhile ghetto gangs have a segregating thrust, dramatizing inherent, irremediable, deadly differences with just those others in society who are most like them in age, sex, geographic location, social class, and usually ethnicity. And middle-class forms of collective deviance typically take leftist overtones, often defining themselves as collective movements through historically decisive battles with police and the "Establishment." Ghetto gangs, on the contrary, are by and large fascistic. Even when they are being hunted by the police, they treat official authority as essentially outside their sovereign reality and employ various symbols of aristocratic, in-born rights of absolute authoritarian rule.

In crucial respects, the traditional progressive understanding of ghetto gang violence has it precisely backwards. Far from being a response to limited opportunities to enter the larger society, the gang encourages its members to look backward and downward; the gang has its attractions as a vehicle for demonstrating elite status by dominating others as aristocrats would dominate a lower caste. Thus Mexican-American barrio warriors do not emulate the advertised models of modern commercial affluence, they mimic the arrogant posture of premodern landed elites. And contemporary black gangs in Los Angeles continue to enact a fascination with the legacy of their southern rural heritage in which one group dominates another group on the bare basis of color (in this case, red and blue colored clothes).

The ghetto gang's principles of social organization and culture are those of childhood: stay close to home, relate primarily to members of the same sex, engage the myths and symbols of Knights and Lords and other fantastic premodern rulers. Ghetto violence is, then, not a cause of

gang formation; the fabric of gang life has its own fascinations, and violence is valued, indeed treasured, as a way of transforming what might be seen as a "punk" affiliation with childhood ways into a heroic loyalty to the neighborhood or group.

The social divisions central to violent ghetto gangs are not between the ghetto and the affluent ethnic majority society; they are divisions within ghetto communities. The arrogant style of gang domination shows up vividly in juxtaposition to the humility of others in the gang's generational or neighborhood background, and not at all in anticipation of a dismal occupational fate within a long biographical view or a larger socioeconomic framework. What progressive commentators have not wanted to acknowledge is that America's distinctive, century-old youth gang problem is related neither to a more avidly commercial culture nor to a greater degree of rigidity in stratification in this country than in economically comparable Western societies. It is related to the distinctive external and internal migration patterns in U.S. history that have repeatedly brought in masses of ethnic minority, peasant-origin peoples who maintain traditions of deference toward authority and vivid concerns over respectability. Along with such strange bedfellows as the Ku Klux Klan and Hell's Angels, ghetto gangs are the form that the mass appeal of the fascistic spirit, which revels in lording nativist advantages over humbled ethnic minorities, has taken in our country.

With respect to the ghetto gang phenomenon, progressive theorists have been caught on the horns of an inescapable dilemma. They cannot confront the sensual and moral attractions that inspire gang members and then turn to present these youths as petitioners for leftist policies. And they cannot acknowledge the central contribution of rural-urban migration patterns in establishing the framework for gang formation without turning cruelly against morally compelling masses of optimistic newcomers.

Stickup

The contemporary social reality of robbery provides superficial support for ideas that offenders calculate crimes as instruments for obtaining material goals. Robbers, after all, typically demand money, and in interviews, robbers often say that they do it for the money. But:

• Robbers are often employed when they commit their offenses, and their jobs sometimes provide them with information, and with opportunities for emotional hostilities with superiors, that generate an insider's knowledge and resentments as resources for the offense. The instrumental, materialist perspective rebounds with an appreciation of the low pay and status of the jobs robbers generally hold.

But the progressive's perception of white-collar crime turns the debate around once again. If good jobs don't stifle criminal motives, why assume that bad jobs breed them?

• A look at how little planning goes into the typical street robbery, and the very limited rewards and high risks of capture the offense entails, suggests that the instrumental perspective is applicable only superficially, if at all.

• If there are instrumental, materialist reasons for robbery, it is striking that poor women can virtually never grasp them. And in places where the ethnic comparison can be made clearly, as in Southern California, poor black males commit robbery four to five times more often than do poor Hispanic males. This disproportion is much greater for robbery than it is for nonproperty violent offenses, such as assault and homicide, or for nonviolent property offenses, such as burglary.^[16]

• The fact that robbers are typically well aware of alternative opportunities to make more money at less risk through other illegitimate activities, in nonviolent property crime and in vice markets; and the fact that many burglars, check forgers, pimps, and drug dealers abjure robbery as a fool's game should persuade researchers to attend to the special, nonmaterial attractions of robbery.

• If lack of legitimate opportunity motivates entry into and persistence with robbery, the progressive is well aware that, after the many years in prison that virtually all persistent robbers will serve, legitimate job opportunities will not be any better. And yet, when the ages of robbers are noted and compared to the number of people in the population of the same ages, it appears that robbery peaks in the early twenties and declines precipitously a few years later.

• And, what is perhaps most neglected about the social reality of robbery, early experiences with robbery often show that materialist motives are clearly secondary during the formative stages of the robber's criminal career. Robbery as a "professional" line of criminal work typically grows out of adolescent years spent cultivating an awesome presence as a badass. Teenage badasses will often go out of their way to embed robbery in a transcendent immoral project.

A repeat offender's first robberies will often victimize peers and even friends, and will not be limited to situated action, but will make robbery an ongoing feature of his identity. A fearsome fellow may, for example, ask a series of acquaintances for small "loans" that are, it is initially promised, to be paid back at some future date. When those dates come, and when repayment dates are rescheduled again and again, the cynicism behind the debtor's excuses and promises, delivered with casually subtle in-

timidating undertones, will become increasingly transparent, with the result that both parties will realize retrospectively that the "loan" was the first stage in an artfully interminable robbery.

In recent years, the instrumental, materialist perspective has reached into the patterns of robber-victim interaction to find supporting evidence. Asked to generalize about the matter, robbers will typically say that they don't want to use violence and only do when a victim's resistance makes it necessary. A great variety of studies have seemed to show support in the form of high correlations between resistance by victims and their experience of suffering injuries in robberies. The ironically inverse relationship between the means of intimidation used by a robber and the probability of injury to victims seems to provide further support. Considering nonfatal injuries, robbers who use guns are less dangerous than those who use knives, who in turn are less dangerous than those who use clubs or strong-arm force, presumably because the more lethal the means of seeking compliance, the less likely one will be required to use it. Various demographic characteristics of offenders and victims—age, sex, number of co-offenders—significantly distinguish robberies from assaults and nonrobbery homicides, also indicating that a different, presumably more rational, framework governs robbery than governs impassioned violence.

But a more intimate view of the meaning of robbery within its full social and processual context undermines the persuasiveness of a rational, instrumental understanding of the robber's behavior. Correlation, we must always recall, does not establish causation; but more troubling is the distinct possibility that there is a causal relation between victims' resistance and robbers' use of force that runs in a direction opposite to the one that the rationalist view would presume. Resistance by victims may be their response to a robber they perceive as bent on gratuitous violence.

Moreover, even if victims resist and trigger the offender's violence, considering the nature of the resistance victims produce, they often do not provide very compelling reasons for a violent response. What is usually coded by researchers as "resistance" by victims is an array of behaviors, such as a slow pace in complying with the offender's demands, shouts for help, or attempts to escape, that do not threaten the offender physically and that increase the offender's risk of capture less than the offender's own violent response. Given the lack of planning typical of the robbery, the offender would often be much more rational to abandon the current victim and move on to the next criminal opportunity he encounters.

Most importantly, offenders have so many reasons to use violence in robberies that virtually all, and thus ultimately virtually none, of their brutality can be explained instrumentally. After taking all the betting

money at a crap game held in a public housing project, robbers are well advised to fire a few warning shots because their victims are likely to have guns and to use them. When robbing a pimp or drug dealer whom they know, and who knows them, robbers are "rational" to defend themselves from subsequent attack by killing their victims. Because they often rob with others who are equally as or more fearsome than they, and because they cannot bring to legitimate forums their disputes over how to split the take, robbers send an instrumentally sensible message to their co-offenders when they viciously attack victims. And because they are frequently involved in vice activities that make them well-known carriers of large amounts of cash in their communities, robbers have additional reasons to display a random proclivity to "nonrational" violence.

Given the context of the typical robber's social life, gratuitous violence carries so many instrumental benefits that it may almost always be "rational." Most fundamentally, the uncertainties in robbery are so numerous and so inherent in the offense that offenders cannot rationally anticipate using violence rationally. They know that they cannot know if the victim will have the means and inclination to respond irrationally to their offer to forbear violence in exchange for money. They often suspect that even if they make their use of force precisely contingent on the victim's compliance, their co-offenders, who are often under the influence of intoxicating substances and who often boast badass reputations themselves, may not. At some point in their careers most offenders will realize that they do not know themselves well enough to know whether they will respond rationally to an unexpected occurrence within an offense. In the end, those who would persist in robbery know that to engage in this type of offense, they must steel themselves to it beyond rational calculation. And toward that end, gratuitous violence is an especially valuable self-portraying resource.

In referring to their offense as "stickup," robbers summarize the attraction in the offense that makes an instrumental understanding superficial. At once phallic and fiercely willful in its connotations, "stickup" is attractive almost exclusively to males and to males who are inclined to treat personal relationships as well as robbery scenes as spontaneously subject to violent domination by their will. "Stickup" promises to freeze the will of victims so that the offender can become the only being present with a purpose that must be respected. Within such an egocentric cosmological project, the robber need not have reasons for his behavior because he need not attend to the reasons of anyone else.

White-Collar Crime

Contemporary realities, broadcast so vividly and continuously that they can no longer be ignored, undermine social theories that would attribute deviant motives either to materialist culture or to inequalities in social

structure. White-collar crime generates waves of publicity far out of proportion to the little puddles of criminal cases that are officially filed against political and business elites, and white-collar crime does not fit neatly into the critique of commercial culture. The motivational dynamics behind great political scandals, such as the abuses of power in "Watergate" and "Irangate," are connected less clearly to material self-seeking than to an image of national identity under attack and needing extraordinary measures of defense. When they are committed for economic gain, white-collar crimes are incompatible with notions that deviant motives are bred in disadvantaged sections of society, and they are not neatly limited to any particular national culture. International bribery scandals have demonstrated that political corruption at the highest levels effectively tempts royal families, socialist party officials, and bureaucrats throughout the Third World. And the business forms of America's white-collar crimes—from the price-fixing scandals of the 1950s, with their anti–free market design, to inside traders operating on capitalism's heart in the 1980s—show well-placed executives criminally financing conventional life-styles, and arbitragers taking in money in amounts so fabulous that they far outpace the capacity of commercial culture to stimulate the offenders' desires. The latter talk about money not necessarily as a means to an advertised life-style, but in terms strikingly reminiscent of street criminals, as a way of keeping score in a gamelike pursuit of high risk "action."

In the light of white-collar crime, the progressive view of crime causation has been pushed back from explaining the emergence and incidence of deviant motives to the politically less inspiring claim that social inequalities only shape the form or quality of deviance. But here, on the qualitative turf of common crime, the traditional view of progressives is even less convincing. In its lived details, street crime does not clearly exhibit materialistic motives but, rather, hedonistic pursuits sometimes united with gratuitous patterns of violence that border on the sadistic.

Legality and the Marginalization of Deviance

Several indirectly connected, long-term patterns of social change that have been promoted by American progressives have had the joint, unintended consequence of increasing the social distance between the criminally violent sectors of the population and the conventionally respectable centers of society. One broadly relevant pattern of development has been the long-term expansion of higher education from the large-city-based, private universities that dominated academic research earlier in the century to rural and small-city-based state universities that became major research centers in sociology after World War II.

First-hand, qualitative, individual-case-based research on crime and

deviance has typically been produced in research centers located in large cities, often through private universities that had no local public university competition and that were responsive to community concerns to address urban problems. The development of large public universities, historically justified in part as a way of opening opportunities to those not favored by family wealth, created major research centers that were commonly located at great distances from the high-crime urban areas. As national police case data, first produced in the 1930s, and national victim survey data, first produced in the 1970s, became increasingly available, researchers could participate in the development of empirical knowledge about crime without disadvantage due to their location, provided that their research was statistical, and especially if they pursued demographic and ecological questions.

In the 1960s and 1970s, American sociology received the products of a small number of intensive field studies, many of them on youth gangs, conducted by academically based researchers located in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Philadelphia. At the same time, American sociology and criminology journals received voluminous contributions in which academics, housed primarily in state university research centers located primarily outside of major cities, used statistical data bases to analyze demographic and ecological issues about crime. Graduate students who today are looking for a dissertation focus can find ready access, at any major research center, to nationally administered, computerized tapes containing police, victim, and census data. Similarly convenient access to sites for first-hand field research are not as widely distributed. Despite some crosscurrents (for example, the more recent growth of public universities in some urban centers; individually negotiated grants that enable the conduct of research away from an academic home base), the dominant trend is for academic social research on crime to be conducted at a greater social remove from the deviants studied, both in geographic terms and in terms of the methodology and types of data employed.^[17]

But geographic and technological changes in the social institutional basis of academic research on deviance have played a relatively minor role in moving the lived experience of deviance to the obscured peripheries of American society. Of far greater importance has been the pursuit of legality through a variety of indirectly related social movements, movements that have promoted civil rights in racial relations and in prisons, and that have attacked political corruption and union racketeering. Without any ideological planning directing the pattern, progressive forces have been more or less consistently successful in infusing the rule of law, principally ideals of due process and equal protection, through American society; while progress in reducing substantive social inequali-

ties has been stalled, abandoned, and reversed. One of the results of the uneven implementation of the progressive agenda has been the displacement of criminal violence to the margins of the American social structure.

One dimension of this change, the historical ironies of the Civil Rights Movement in separating an Afro-American underclass from white and black middle-class society, has now been frequently noted. By reducing racial barriers to education, employment, and housing, the Civil Rights Movement created pathways out of racially segregated southern communities, and out of northern urban ghettos, that were especially useful for upwardly mobile African-Americans.^[18] As one experienced fieldworker of American ghetto life has put it, the "old heads"—the locally respected, well-educated, professional and small-business elite of the black community—had become far more scarce in ghetto areas by the 1980s than they had been in the 1950s.^[19] The American black ghetto, once a multiclass area containing the black bourgeoisie, the black working class, and the black urban poor, became increasingly dominated by a black "underclass." Young men who are tempted by life-styles characterized by criminal violence have always been concentrated in ethnically segregated, poor urban neighborhoods. But over the last twenty-five years, young African-American men attracted to a dangerous life-style of illicit "action" have had decreasing personal contacts with conventionally respectable black men, except in one area—through their frequent contacts with increasingly integrated police forces.

Related to the race relations side of the Civil Rights Movement, a number of ancillary movements brought legality into institutions that traditionally governed the relationship between the criminal population and the centers of societal authority. In prisons, Black Muslims, who combined freedom of expression and freedom of religion claims with complaints about racially motivated oppression, initially spurred the judicial reform of authority relations.^[20] Once begun, prisoners' rights movements spread to represent white and Hispanic complainants, stimulated the formation of specialized legal action support groups, and became national. In the Wolff decision in the early 1970s, the U.S. Supreme Court made clear that the courts would broadly place procedural requirements on prison administrators' power to discipline inmates.^[21] In several states, federal courts have taken control of prisons away from incumbent officials and have appointed monitors to supervise the reconstruction of everyday authority relations.

Currently, the impact of the prisoners' rights movement on prison social order is the subject of great methodological controversy. Conservative critics of activist judges have charged that judicial intervention has stimulated unprecedented waves of inmate violence directed against inmates and staff. They appear to have been right, but only in the short

run. Judicial intervention typically meant the destruction of "tender" systems in which prison administrators delegated tasks of control, including the perception of deviance and the recommendation of disciplinary action, to inmate leaders. When judges became responsive to complaints about the discretionary exercise of disciplinary power, the ultra vires power of inmate leaders was replaced with formal systems in which correctional officers "write up" alleged infractions by inmates, who then have the opportunity to contest major charges before independent hearing officers. In several major prison systems, judicial intervention appears to have stimulated inmate violence by breaking the old system of prison authority and signalling to inmates that a judicial audience now existed for their protests. But in the longer run, sometimes after a full decade of administrative resistance to judicial control of prisons, the new, constitutionally sanctioned system of prison authority has taken hold and inmate violence has receded.^[22]

Yet even with the decline of inmate violence, the "legalized repression" that now characterizes prison administration has two enduring consequences that progressives must find disturbing. One is a dramatic increase in caste-like segregation among inmate groups and between inmates and staff. Initially spurred by Black Muslims, who rode the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s into federal courts, judicial intervention has authorized inmate associations and has undermined the ability of prison administration to select inmate leaders and shape the social structure of the inmate world,^[23] with the result that U.S. prisons today are dominated to an unprecedented extent by fascist-styled gangs organized around a bizarre array of racist mythologies, from Black Muslims to Mexican Familias to Aryan Brotherhoods. We should not flinch from the historical paradox that the most highly rationalized, modern form of enlightened beneficence, as represented by progressive judges battling cruelty and arbitrary power in prisons over the last twenty-five years, has led to the most intense expressions of peer-directed racist hatreds among contemporary inmates, whose vengeful and creatively vicious acts of maiming and mutilation^[24] are strangely reminiscent of the ancient and spectacular official brutality that the Enlightenment revolutions aimed to eradicate.

Second, and more subtly, the legalization of prison authority, which was finally achieved on a national scale during the 1980s, has reconstituted the control capacities of prisons, expanding enormously their organizational powers to incarcerate. Before the judicial revolution, correctional officers in many state systems were "good old boys" who, through patterns of violence, corruption, and limited educational achievement, maintained social ties with inmate leaders. Now, correctional officers are better educated, much more often female, preoccupied with the legali-

ties of power (such as the proper form to "write up" inmate infractions), and increasingly professional in their career orientations. More socially distant from inmates in gender, education, and everyday culture, correctional staffs now equip prisons with a greatly enhanced organizational sophistication. It is not a coincidence that as prisons finally became "legalized" in their daily operations during the 1980s, the raw size of the inmate population doubled on a national scale (and in California, which has been a leader in the acceptance of legality in the prisons, the prison population quadrupled), even as crime rates ended the decade at a lower level than existed when it began. Without the professionalization and legalization of prison administration, this increase in incarcerative capacity would have been opposed by judges who, when confronted with resistant "good old boy" administrations, have in extreme instances ordered the release of inmates subject to arbitrary, discriminatory, and "cruel and unusual" treatment.

Legality, in the forms of judicial oversight, the reshaping of the exercise of authority to conform with published rule, and the introduction of intraorganizational procedures for questioning authority, has changed the relationship of deviant populations to the center of American society by dismantling traditional, subterranean social bridges between the conventional center and the deviant periphery. The attack on the corruption of prison authority was paralleled by interrelated attacks on corruption in urban political machines, in police departments, and in local criminal courts. Even before Watergate, an uncoordinated but nationalscale legal campaign against local political corruption had begun, as federal law enforcement institutions became gradually more professionalized and, in the nonpartisan style of pre–World War I progressives, became mobilized to "clean" government.

The historical marking point of the modern onslaught against corrupt "machine" politicians was Robert Morgenthau's leadership of the New York U.S. Attorney's office in the 1960s against Carmine De Sapio and the vestiges of Tammany Hall politics. Before Watergate, in sporadic bursts of prosecutions in Los Angeles, New Jersey, and Maryland, and after Watergate in a national wave of political corruption cases affecting jurisdictions as diverse as Chicago and Oklahoma City, federal prosecutors targeted local political organizations whose members had profited financially by selling the powers of their offices to respectable businessmen and "connected" criminals alike.^[25] Along with numerous other social trends that undermined political "machines," anticorruption prosecutions dismantled a complex network of ties between inner-city deviants and respectable government officials.

When urban political machines mobilized the vote in ethnic neighborhoods, neighborhood toughs, who traditionally hung out around social

and athletic, especially boxing, clubs, were appreciated as politically valuable symbols of ethnic group pride and were at times literally as well as figuratively publicly embraced by ward bosses.^[26] If intervention in the criminal justice system could not always be counted on for an efficacious "fix," many local criminals found that it made sense to keep "connected" lawyers on "retainer" and disposed to exercise "influence." A reader of the life histories of common criminals who operated in U.S. cities from the West through the East coasts will find matter-of-fact descriptions of corrupt influences on local criminal justice institutions continuing through the 1950s,^[27] descriptions that have no parallel in the ethnographies and life histories that trace criminal careers within the last twenty years.

By the time in American history that African-Americans were able to be elected municipal leaders, the traditional infrastructure through which ethnic leaders reached and were reachable by residents in ethnic neighborhoods had been severely weakened by force of law. The dismantling of corrupt bridges to deviant inner-city populations is significant for progressive policies in at least two respects. The absence of subterranean connections in contemporary cities presents special difficulties for implementing remedial programs. A new educational, job opportunity, or drug rehabilitation program must now bootstrap its own social mechanisms for reaching its targets. On the other side, the increased social distance of predatory criminals from conventional social organization hardens the boundaries of their deviant life-styles and makes their motivations less ambiguously antisocial.

Consider the transformation in the role of the criminal hardman that was shaped by the legalization of labor relations through the structuring of a national legislative framework for administering labor relations, from the 1930s through the 1950s, and by "labor racketeering" prosecutions that began in the 1960s, scored major successes in the 1970s and 1980s, and are continuing to date. From the 1930s into the 1950s, there were hundreds of labor racketeering murders in New York City alone, and uncounted employment opportunities for strong-arm activities; in many cases the toughs conducting violent criminal activity on behalf of unions had acquired records for robbery and other forms of criminal violence in their youth.^[28] For today's criminal hardman, political and labor organizations are as foreign as businessmen's clubs downtown; the life-styles of criminally violent young men now easily take them into illicit drug distribution networks at the street level, and virtually never connect them with the subtleties of the union's "business agent" role.

The moral universe in which the contemporary violent criminal typically operates has been isolated gradually but firmly by the broad institutionalization of legality throughout American society. Consider the impli-

cations of the transformation of local neighborhood commercial culture, from the days of the urban American Jewish ghetto, as documented by Louis Wirth early in this century, to the realities of the African-American ghetto today. In Wirth's ghetto, market transactions were routinely moralized; price, quality, and service were constantly subject to bargaining; fraud was an everyday risk; any transaction could provide evidence of one's acumen or prove one a fool.^[29] The implementation of mass merchandising and consumer protection legislation has eradicated the routine moral dramas of negotiating consumer transactions. The poor still pay more, but they usually pay it up front; large-scale and legally reviewable marketing has made retail negotiations too costly and bothersome for most merchandisers. Today the predatory criminal, whose objectives are superficially material but whose motives are fundamentally centered on transcending humiliation and "taking" victims by making them fools, stands as a harsh, extreme, archaic representative of a lost moral world.

Conclusion

The challenges that criminals' passions represent for contemporary progressive thought reflect essentially two troublesome empirical patterns. First, while legality, or procedural justice, and substantive equality, or social class justice, have frequently been joined in progressive thought, legality has made a much steadier empirical advance in recent decades. Progressive thought has failed to adjust to this emergent disjuncture in its ideals. The increasing institutional commitment to legality in the United States has made it more difficult to reach populations of the criminally violent; in addition, legality increasingly confuses social class interpretations of crime by enhancing public awareness of white-collar crime. While progressives may take ideological comfort from the expanded prosecutions of conservative political and business elites for corruption and fraud, they cannot in the same breath blame socioeconomic conditions for deviant motives. If social class position shapes the form more clearly than it shapes the incidence of crime, reducing crime inequalities cannot as easily be promoted by a promise of improved collective moral character.

Second, and more disturbing, as political advertising effectively parades the details of criminal victimization before the public, the lived experience of contemporary street crime is dominated by moral and sensual dynamics, not material strivings.

If the lived experience of crime poses fundamental difficulties for progressive politicians, there are equally troublesome implications for modern social theory in general. My overall argument, that criminality

is best explained by moral and sensual dynamics, will seem to some antiprogressive, in part because of the nature of its approach to social explanation. Crime is neither the product of extraordinary emotional pathology ("insanity" or "sickness") nor the instrumental execution of materialist plans. Its coherence is deep and detailed, but it is sensually embodied, not reflectively produced. But so is much of our routine, conventional, everyday behavior. When we write, walk, or talk, we do so interactively, anticipating how our lines of action will be seen and responded to by others, but we do not live our interactive awareness rationally; we do not produce our routine action reflectively. Rather we rely on rhythms and holistic senses of the projects we are engaged in, such that our writing is better grasped as a kind of prosaic drawing; our talking, as a usually banal singing; our walking, as a dancing that typically does not parade its aesthetic dimensions even as we rely fundamentally on them. Were we able to see the moral and sensual dimensions of everyday behavior more clearly, an analysis of the moral and sensual dynamics of crime would not stand out as damning. But we still teach a legacy of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century rationalism in our social theory classes; and our version of interactionist analysis overplays the role of reflection ("the looking-glass self") and thought, to the neglect of the embodiment of conduct (we read classic interactionist theory on "mind, self and society," but not on "body, self, and social interaction").

Considering the distinctive anxieties of twentieth-century life and the special horrors of its massive deaths, our clinging to centuries-old theoretical perspectives is a deep and pathetic intellectual failure. Existentialism and phenomenology, the philosophical movements that arose with the twentieth century's unprecedented, vicious chaos, remain outside the mainstream of empirical research and of American social thought. So do the central sticking points in American policy development on crime, where sensual and moral dynamics are as central as they are to crime causation.

If homicides commonly arise out of quickly developing passions, we should reduce the availability of guns so that enraged attackers might turn to less lethal instruments of violence. But guns remain symbols that are embraced with uniquely profound passions in America. The key research question about guns and American violence is not how much or whether removing guns will reduce violence, but why guns have acquired such strong moral and sensual meanings in the United States.^[30]

And if robbery grows out of a fascination with dominating social interaction so that it provides signs of respect, we should acknowledge the special challenges of humiliation that are maintained within ethnically bounded, and particularly black, poverty communities. But policies of racial integration that would specifically address the unique roots

of America's criminal violence evoke fears that repeatedly turn progressive political leaders to more broadly defined, and less specifically relevant, institutional solutions. Ironically working in the same direction, the recent rise of African-Americans to local political leadership positions, through electoral successes that are based on the size of segregated voting blocks, has itself contributed to the deterioration of the national commitment to integration.

And if robbery pays so poorly that a commitment to it can only be sustained when intermixed with more economically rewarding opportunities in gambling, prostitution, and illegal drug markets—vice worlds that, when combined with robbery, sustain the moral and sensual attractions to a way of life characterized by illicit action—then we should appreciate that our criminal legal framework, through making vice activities so remunerative, provides crucial support for the robber's career. But the sensualities of vice activities stir such powerfully moralized passions that we are barely able as a community to bring alternative regulatory frameworks into rational political discussion.

Dominated by a materialist, instrumental perspective on crime, progressive thought has misled us because it has directed attention away from those distinctive features of American ethnic relations and moral culture that are most closely related to the exceptionally violent dimensions of the crime problem in the United States. The progressive's failures are mirrored rather than avoided by the Right. Indeed, no voice on the contemporary political scene speaks to the distinctively national character of America's criminal violence. In a notable way, both political sides share a materialist, instrumental perspective on crime causation, the one calling for more "opportunity," the other for higher "costs" to offset the "benefits" that criminals are presumed to calculate. If we would abandon the instrumental, materialist framework that supports tired remedial policies and turn research attentions to the moral and sensual dynamics that animate criminal violence, we might generate an empirically grounded progressive response to crime.