Crime, Class, and Culture

The origins of poverty and crime are at once both cultural and social-economic. But, because specialists and policymakers usually understand crime as either one or the other, the two reinforce each other in ways that have derailed efforts to eradicate crime or improve the lives of the poor and that insure the continuation of hooligan responses to efforts at crime control.

In late imperial Russia, judicial and crime experts first of all rarely looked outside the lower-class milieu for explanations of juvenile criminality. They could imagine youths’ motives to have been shaped only by the deplorable conditions of their own world. That slum children might possess a vision of society as a whole and resent their own subordinate place within it or that they might act in response to external stimuli did not enter the middle-class experts’ calculations. Nor did they see hooliganism or juvenile crime as a rebellious response to the difficult transition from childhood to adulthood common to members of various classes.^[158] In fact, the appeal of the streets lay neither in some mysterious magnetism nor in some inherent moral weakness among bezprizornye juveniles. The streets, billiard rooms, tea shops, and beer halls were places where their own culture flourished far from the disapproving gaze of respectable society. However fatal the adolescents’ attachment to taverns and flophouses, or for that matter to parents who abused them, it was within this whole environment that their identities were formed. They were not oblivious to the larger society; they were temporarily escaping its weight and its glare. Ultimately, some youths, like Shlezinger’s, may have forsaken the most destructive aspects of lower-class culture that prevented them from feeding and housing themselves, but even they refused to abandon wholesale the world they knew. The experience of living between two cultures, and partially adapting to each, is always a painful one. The youths’ responses to the efforts made to introduce them to respectable culture show how even assistance or advice that is universally perceived to be “good” can run up against resistance if it comes bound in a package with alien cultural values and expectations. The social workers and judicial reformers underestimated the power of culture to divide people and to divide individuals within themselves. Thus they had little conception of the ways in which people tend to view their own lives positively and to find value in their existence no matter how desperately poor or abused they are. The young juveniles of the Petersburg streets had few models to begin with, but social workers criticized not only the abusive parents and illegal activities; they also attacked the youths’ only sources of conviviality and entertainment. Some youths were able to respond by picking and choosing which sorts of advice they might follow, but others must have felt that their whole way of life was under attack.

Second, although the criminologists and justices who studied juveniles did a great deal to publicize the wretched conditions poor children were growing up in, they were not in a position to change the social and economic structure that perpetuated those conditions; therefore they focused their efforts on what they believed they could do. It is important to realize, however, that they chose to focus on cultural measures, as opposed to economic and social ones, to attain their goal of helping “juveniles carry on a life of honest labor.” Yet these were youths who had already rejected the world of work. Unless they were teenage—that is, temporary—rebels, in which case they would not become serious hooligan recidivists anyway, these were people who would need tangible enticements to take up a life of respectability. The cultural measures reformers offered were reasonable steps toward a healthier environment for the youths, but they provided few of the economic and social advantages that produced respectable culture in the first place. So by stressing discipline, cleanliness, temperance, and the like, instead of finding them jobs or training or education these programs failed to have lasting impact. It does not even seem to matter that this was a period of social and economic upward mobility for many workers in Russia. Upward mobility was available only to a chosen few, and in the lowest of the lower depths the choices were still bleak.

Finally, when the people bearing cultural improvement were representatives of an economic and political elite—middle-class social workers and Justices of the Peace—their power to intrude must have been readily apparent to the poor and powerless youths. Even good advice and attractive programs can be tarnished as a result. If those same people also bring contempt and disgust for lower-class culture and suggest that the youths’ problems stem entirely from their own families and their own streets, there is likely to be conflict, even when areas of agreement can be found.

In some ways, ironically, the juvenile crime specialists came closer to an understanding of hooliganism than anyone else because they realized that crime had a cultural component. They understood the importance of family acculturation, the influence of behavioral models to which children were exposed, and the utility of providing alternative models and activities. But because they did not understand that the poor valued aspects of their lives others considered unsavory and destructive, they cut themselves off from the engrained mental world of their subjects and therefore did not understand why their own way of life did not immediately and fully appeal to slum children. In fact, it was exactly the values that the reformers were trying to instill that hooligans, in their public manifestations, flouted with such bravado on the streets. Therefore, although the justices and social workers were motivated by the need to prevent hooliganism, they may have contributed to its continued growth. Criminologists assumed that bezprizornost’ blocked juveniles from acquiring knowledge of respectable culture, whereas hooligans not only did not lack such knowledge, they understood respectable culture well enough to mock it vigorously.

Small wonder then that hooliganism remained such an annoying problem. Even sympathetic professional reformers did not know what they were looking at. They thought they saw moral dissipation where a war of values was being waged. They knew that hooliganism was a crime of a different order from childhood pranks, but they believed that hooliganism was the result of increasing exposure to depravity, either through the influence of already demoralized adults or through the juveniles’ own experiences in prisons and on the streets. To be sure, these were major influences, but they cannot explain the element of hooliganism that stood outside of such social and moral factors. It does not seem surprising at this remove that a life of petty crime might offer more in the way of pleasure and satisfaction (especially if it brought publicity and notoriety), at least in the short run, than the long, oppressive day in the factory or the capricious tyranny of the workshop. The pervasive fatalism juveniles expressed was ordinarily treated as evidence of the juveniles’ weak moral development or lack of imagination, but it is equally possible that the youths were resigned to their life of crime because they did not find any of the other alternatives appealing.

In the late twentieth century we have come to expect the kind of hooligan behavior that alienated poor youths were exhibiting in prerevolutionary Petersburg. But in early twentieth-century cities, urban concentrations of population were still rare enough that many societies were just beginning to examine the special conflicts they created. New interpretations based on a faith in scientific analyses of society and a dimly understood recognition of cultural conflict led Russian reformers and judicial specialists to believe that they were dealing with a new kind of problem. Unlike many liberal jurists of national prominence, they were unwilling to dismiss its importance, but they could not develop an effective policy to deal with it. When cultural measures failed to prevent the growth of hooliganism, they did not question the methods used but proposed more stringent forms of the same methods. Then, as more members of respectable society became disillusioned, they began to question the capacity of the people to respond to enlightenment cultural measures or to develop into what respectable society considered civilized beings. Skepticism about the efficacy of cultural measures and disappointment with the cultural development of the urban lower classes were on the rise just as acute social unrest and hooliganism began to resurface in St. Petersburg and throughout the empire in the 1910s. The specialists’ negative views of the lower-class family and their inability to recognize positive features in lower-class culture, both of which were publicized in the respectable and the boulevard press, must have played a role in the subsequent skepticism. The fact that hooliganism, with its implicit iconoclasm and its challenge to respectability, haunted the whole discussion of juvenile crime, the lower-class family, and the culture of the streets had a paradoxical effect. The shadow of hooliganism aroused fears and alerted attention to crime in ways that both reinforced ideas about the need for cultural development and barred understanding of cultural difference. The paradox here is rooted in the conflicting functions served by the discourse on reform.

The criminologists, court officials, and voluntary social workers who studied and worked with urban youths saw themselves as champions of the poor. Their reforms did not constitute, as some Western historians once thought, simple efforts to coerce and control poor youths, and their commitment to cultural improvement was more than a rhetorical facade used purely to exert “social control.”^[159] The problem with “social control” theories is that they presented the words and deeds of social reformers as little more than disguised weapons of class conflict, without appreciating the complexities of the interaction involved in cultural development projects. In contrast, Foucault’s excavation of nineteenth-century reforms stressed the power of culture, and the way we talk about culture, to organize societies. In Foucault’s terms, the late imperial Russian reformers redefined deviancy and youth as new categories and new problems: deviant youths were to be corrected and reintegrated rather than ostracized and punished. Correction and rehabilitation provided “modern” and “rational” methods for dealing with deviance (in place of brutal physical punishment), which allowed reformers to consider themselves progressive, but they were never intended to transform the social hierarchy. In fact, as Foucault makes clear, even when such projects provided the poor with tools for attaining a certain level of security and integration into the industrial economy, they could be as oppressive as sheer political domination, by ensnaring the powerless in a process of “normalization.”^[160] Russian reformers defined deviancy as an unwillingness or inability to work and to behave peaceably as well as lawfully. Thus work became not only necessary economically; it was society’s admission ticket. That some members of the lower classes shared the cultural aspirations of respectable society only served to reinforce the existing structure. By establishing respectable culture as society’s norm—making it available to everyone while ignoring the conflicts that it created—reform projects both stabilized society structurally and prevented it from resolving the problems of poverty.

While Foucault describes the larger context in which European societies enforced order and conformity, he does not account for the dynamics of cultural interaction on the individual level; he does not address middle-class motivation underlying reform projects or popular responses to them; and he does not deal with the ways in which subordinate classes interpreted commonly held values, such as the centrality of the family or the need for social harmony, quite independently of efforts to impose cultural conformity.^[161] In other words, Foucault does not deal with contemporary perceptions of stability, social problems, resistance, or reform.

To say that the Russian judicial reformers and social workers believed society as a whole would benefit if the lives of poor city youths more closely resembled those of the respectable middle classes is not to accuse them of deliberately or even unconsciously seeking to destroy lower-class autonomy only to serve their own interests. To be sure, assimilation was predicated on the elimination of lower-class culture, but reformers sincerely believed that that would serve the best interests of the poor as well. And when social mobility has been available, certain aspects of middle-class culture have in fact benefited those who found their way into the middle class. But the judicial professionals had little conception of the dynamics of cultural difference; indeed, they did not view lower-class habits and values as a legitimate culture in the first place. For them, lower-class culture was not something radically different from that of the respectable, civilized classes. It was seen as deficient, an empty vessel to be filled with the proper values and ideas. So while reformers did rescue some boys and girls from abuse and despair, their efforts prompted only partial successes, which reformers usually misread.

Such policies and attitudes provoked particular kinds of reactions: rebellion and resistance were directed toward the contested cultural issues or took the form of idiosyncratic adaptations of the welfare system or of periodic destructive rage, rather than of organized demands for radical structural or revolutionary change. Nonetheless, as social theorists and historians of social welfare systems show us, the powerless subjects of reform and normalization often act as if they existed in an autonomous sphere, free from state or other interference. Distortion and adaptation of social welfare, refusal to obey the laws or play along with the conventional rules of behavior, and strategic public displays of defiance and self-assertion could have significant, long-term impact on policy and on everyday life.^[162] Such acts never seriously undermined the existing structures of power in Russia, but they forced respectable society to live with heightened fears, ranging from anxiety about personal vulnerability to abstract concern for the future of civilization. In the midst of Russian discourses about hooliganism and judicial reform, society was both more stable and less: the social hierarchy was reinforced by the trivializing of criminal challenges and the ostracizing of lower-class culture, but the respectable classes felt more vulnerable at the same time. During the revival of popular unrest after 1912, similar tactics would be employed by an increasing number of authorities and public voices. The lower classes as a whole were tarred with a brush reserved earlier for hooligans alone, and reports of labor unrest highlighted workers’ hooligan characteristics, which cast doubt on the legitimacy of their strikes and demonstrations and heightened their immediately violent and destructive power.