CRIME AND THE CULTURE OF INCIVILITY
Hausknecht, Murray
From field notes on city life: A woman is seriously injured by a mugger who follows her to an apartment door and snatches her purse. A couple out for an evening returns to find the apartment...
...76 No, that we are not supposed to see in newspaper photos and not on live television...
...The other reservoir of anger is endemic racism...
...But civility is also eroded by the response to crime...
...Abel's rhetoric—the state is "nothing until it retaliates and treats the criminal as nothing by taking his life"—suggests a conception of the state as a sacred object and crime as an act of sacrilege: "Vengeance is mine...
...The conventional distinction between crimes against the person—the mugger's physical assault, for example—and crimes against property can be misleading...
...The privacy of others was respected even in public places...
...Street crime, because of its immediacy, determines the meaning of crime as a social issue...
...These fears, while sometimes exaggerated, are more often solidly based in reality...
...but to renounce the notion of "rehabilitation," because of the criminals' presumed "propensities," represents a souring of the spirit of generosity...
...Here an ideological perspective like Abel's can become a vehicle for venting the hostilities of prejudice in the guise of dealing with the moral issues of crime...
...Any attempt to suppress the inevitable tension in favor of "implacability" is another manifestation of an authoritarian outlook...
...At any given moment it is not at all certain that a debate over crime and punishment will be resolved in favor of further mitigation...
...A newcomer is also introduced to the norms and folklore of security...
...The victims of the crimes I reported are members of many, and some overlapping, social circles...
...it is part of the fabric and consciousness of everyday life and is far more "real" than, say, the periodic red scares That blow through the landscape of American politics...
...a major function of reading the daily newspaper, for instance, was to help people maintain a civil inattention to others...
...Not a few of us in New York have been witnesses to killings— killings, mind you, of the innocent...
...Those opposed to capital punishment, Abel says, are victims of "hubris" induced by a utopian belief in "the nearness of an end" to the present order of society...
...A walk in the park becomes a combat patrol: the stroller must be alert to the approaching stranger and the possibilities of the clump of bushes ahead...
...the wish to punish those who have hurt us is part of being human...
...They also share the fears and distrust that are consequences of living with high crime rates...
...It is not ungenerous to believe that prisons as they are now constituted cannot "rehabilitate" criminals...
...Mailer assumed that Abbott's literary talent and—given Mailer's eccentric views on violence and social injustice—even his history of violent behavior indicated a possibility that Abbott could become something other than what he was...
...Mailer was almost universally condemned for having urged Abbott's parole...
...If anger and the desire to lash back at the criminal are elements of being human, then we must reconcile ourselves to living with the paradox that being human also implies a spirit of generosity toward even the meanest of criminals...
...In this way his crime is annulled...
...Quoted in Steven Lukes, Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 261.] This contradiction cannot be resolved...
...These measures, we are told, will reduce crime, but more often than not they are embraced without any questioning of whether, or under what circumstances, they would lower the overall crime rate or deter given criminal acts...
...An immediate response of the criminal's victim is an impulse to strike back, a desire for revenge...
...This seeming vote for capital punishment is consonant with his belief that it is necessary to be "implacable" in the treatment of criminals, even those who, like Abbott, do "not strike one as having a criminal mind...
...this is the sympathy and the same horror which incites that very anger...
...To talk of a culture of incivility implies underlying values and specific perspectives on the world...
...Fear, because it is an unpleasant emotion and an affront to self-esteem, feeds anger...
...By focusing on muggers and "safe streets," it is possible to appeal to traditional prejudices and to avoid the boomerang effects of overt racism...
...Munson's major premise is the opposite of Mailer's...
...When this happens, we begin to sense that the culture of incivility also entails an authoritarian vision of the world...
...The contrary assumption, that Abbott has a "propensity to harm others" —that is, an innate tendency—means that he can never behave differently...
...Hard times now represent a defeat of legitimate expectations of a "good" or "decent" life...
...Durkheim, on the social functions of punishment, sounds very much like what Abel tells us are Hegel's views...
...In New York City he will be cautioned to seek out a car with other passengers when riding the subway, especially at night...
...Civility cannot be maintained or nurtured by people whose state of mind predisposes them to volatile and aggressive behavior...
...it can only be alleviated by mitigating the punishment as much as possible...
...that is, prisons are justified as places where criminals can be punished and "rehabilitated...
...A good example is found in the opening sentence of Lionel Abel's recent comment on the Norman Mailer–Jack Abbott affair...
...Mailer and others who have not heeded Hegel are "indulgent of crime and criminals" because they "foresee the end of our own society...
...Murder and the Intellectuals," Commentary, November 1981...
...A recent example of "the spirit of vengeance" overriding an impulse toward generosity is the success of California's Proposition Eight, which, among other provisions, permits the use of bail for preventive detention...
...What appears to Abel as a defect of character may be something more complex and subtle...
...many of us live with the expectation of seeing such things...
...To stand on a subway platform engrossed in a magazine or book can open one to attack...
...Durkheim's is, of course, the long view...
...A similar perspective frequently animates proposals for mandatory jail terms, long prison sentences, and abolishing parole...
...The coarsening of sensibility on display here is latent in the culture of incivility, and it is a necessary prerequisite for invoking "the spirit of vengeance...
...Some complain that too much attention is paid to this kind of crime and too little to whitecollar crime, which is of greater social consequence...
...The anger aroused by the mugger becomes fused with the hostility of the ever-present racial and ethnic prejudices, and these amplify the emotions surrounding the issue of crime...
...Today, though, no one can afford too much inattention...
...But, as Emile Durkheim argued, the criminal injures the community as well as the individual, because the crime violates and subverts the moral code that transforms individuals into a community...
...Mailer's is a generous perspective, seeing the possibilities of change in human behavior, while Munson's, given the lack of evidence for inborn tendencies to harm others, suggests a willed meanness of spirit...
...The loss of civility changes our expectations of others, and it changes the way we live and experience our lives...
...One must continuously scan the environment, therefore, paying attention to others while appearing not to do so...
...By reacting to the crime with punishment the community repairs, so to speak, the damage done to its common morality and reinforces its conunitment to that morality...
...For many people a car is psychologically salient, and to steal their car is to strike at a sense of self...
...Crime as a social issue easily lends itself to exaggeration and emotional response...
...The complaint misses an essential point...
...The city has always been a place of strangers where a sharp eye is kept on possessions and doors are locked...
...Not a few" and "many"—vague terms— create the illusion that witnessing a killing has become an ordinary experience of daily life, and that expecting to see someone killed is rather like expecting to encounter a traffic jam...
...None of this means that crime is not a "real" issue...
...The 19th-century ring to the last phrase seems particularly appropriate to a Commentary essay...
...Politicians, for example, find it easier to talk of crime and "solutions" to the problem than to concentrate on a malfunctioning economy and economic policies...
...To steal a person's car is not simply to appropriate property...
...Mailer's assessment of Abbott as a parole risk was a result of sloppy thinking and illusions spawned by his peculiar theories...
...Since morality is social, the outrage and anger establish a kinship between victim and nonvictim...
...To say that the rise in the crime rate represents a decline in civility is in one sense a 75 tautology...
...While many New Yorkers, he says, expect to see a killing, few, on the other hand, expect to see foul murderers "being taken to the gas chamber or to the chair...
...the criminal damages its power, and punishment restores that power...
...A 13-year-old car, bearing all the scars of its advanced age and already stolen and recovered four times, is stolen once again...
...The sight may be too uncivilizing...
...When the criminal, in taking a human life, treats the state as nothing, the state becomes indeed nothing until it retaliates and treats the criminal as nothing by taking his life...
...Anger, fear, meanspiritedness, the loss of tolerance, the ideology of vengeance—all can be as destructive to the social fabric as crime itself...
...Rage is rooted in the assault on the person, and outrage is the response to a morally offensive act...
...The loss of civility is a social and cultural phenomenon...
...In modern societies, people tend not to accept hard times as an inevitable part of the human lot...
...Still, if we must guard against this sort of exaggeration, we must also recognize that there is a high crime rate...
...crime by definition is uncivil behavior...
...That vision encompasses more than just the criminal...
...But it is quite another thing to condemn Mailer because of an assumption that Abbott's "propensity" puts him completely beyond the possibility of change...
...Crime evokes rage and outrage...
...These commonplace observations help explain the current concern with "street crime...
...It is important, he will be told, never to make eye contact with strangers...
...I will repay, saith the Lord...
...Ignoring the stranger can be one's undoing since he may be the neighborhood mugger...
...Again Durkheim provides the counterpoint: punishment that is the result of "collective anger" tends to be mitigated over time by the "sympathy" we feel for anyone who suffers the horror which all destructive violence produces in us...
...Rather, the real function of punishment is: to restore the state, injured by the criminal act, to health...
...Victims are not the only persons affected by a crime...
...It hardly needs saying that the argument itself is not therefore racist...
...And because crime is a real problem of the here and now, the response in the form of the culture of incivility is particularly subversive...
...It takes a certain achieved callousness to believe that watching people die in gas chambers and electric chairs on prime-time television would be a salutary experience...
...white-collar crime does not have the psychological thrust of the mugging, the burglary, or the car theft...
...But its very reality is what makes it so easy to use as a distraction from other issues...
...Hard times generate their own anger, and some of those "free-floating" emotions can be channeled and focused on crime and criminals...
...He finds his justification for implacability in Hegel who believed, Abel instructs us, that punishment has nothing to do with deterrence or rehabilitation...
...The pains and injuries we suffer from crime and criminals are added to and made more intense by the culture of incivility...
...the punishment of a criminal for his crimes makes the state stronger...
...And the sheer number of crimes is not the only reason for our anxiety...
...people are surprised when they learn, from the victims' stories or dull official statistics, that not all car thieves, muggers, and rapists in New York City are black and Puerto Rican...
...So it serves a traditional function: the ideology of vengeance diverts attention from pressing problems of deprivation and so screens institutional structures from criticism...
...One such reservoir is hard times, and with that the experience of economic deprivation that follows from high rates of unemployment, inflation, and structural changes in the economy...
...Consequently it is easy to empathize with the victims, and this increases our sense of the prevalence of crime...
...The burglar who invades the home is also invading a person's self...
...In a fairly typical comment, Naomi Munson wrote that Mailer "decidedly does not regard the propensity to harm others as a measure of unfitness to live in the free world...
...The same mental state drives us to punish and to moderate punishment . . . there is 77 a real and irremediable contradiction in avenging the human dignity offended in the person of the victim by violating it in the person of the offender...
...Some of the implications for public policy of this mean-spiritedness can be seen in Lionel Abel's comments...
...If one can imagine the reaction to all this of a recent arrival in the city who is not yet aware of "crime in the streets," it will be easy to see how the mere existence of the paraphernalia of security might itself engender fear and distrust...
...But if we recall that now, as in the past, most cases of homicide involve people who are at least acquaintances interacting in private rather than public places, then very few of us can be witnesses to homicides and not very "many of us" live with such expectations...
...crime as a social issue has its base in reality...
...This is so normal a reaction that it is reasonable to be suspicious of the victim who denies having felt it...
...The Literary Life of Crime," New Republic, September 9, 1981...
...When questions of this order are ignored, it is fair to say that anger and the unqualified desire for vengeance are the dominant impulses...
...This conception of punishment is congruent with "the spirit of vengeance" that quite properly "has ruled our laws...
...Abel's central concern is not the community's morality but "the health" of the state...
...yet eye contact may provoke the very assault to be avoided...
...that is, an ideological dimension...
...We ought to remember that Mailer's assumption is the formal rationale for the prison system...
...that is, victims and nonvictims are not segregated or socially distinguishable from each other...
...A couple out for an evening returns to find the apartment burglarized...
...Some aspects of this ideology are revealed in the polemics set off by the Mailer–Abbott affair...
...For Mature Audiences Only...
...Distrust of the stranger is nothing new, but there was always another side of the coin...
...But to talk of hubris is to talk only of a character flaw that in Greek tragedy was punished by the gods...
...There is, however, a critical difference...
...In this and similar instances, at least two other reservoirs of anger and outrage reinforce the culture of incivility and allow "the spirit of vengeance" to guide policy...
...All three incidents occur in a predominantly stable working-class and lowermiddleclass neighborhood of apartment buildings and two- and three-family houses...
...The angry, fearful, distrustful person is not prepared to extend, perhaps not even capable of, the minimal courtesies and the tolerance of others that make up day-to-day civility...
...Now it will not do to exaggerate the degree to which urban life has been changed by the loss of civility...
...Abel does not distinguish the premeditated murder from those committed, say, in the course of a drunken dispute or as a panicstricken response of a frightened armed robber —all who kill must be reduced to "nothing...
...One of the most visible aspects of contemporary urban life is the technology of security— the proliferation of locks, keys, bars, gates, and guards...
...Every crime which goes unpunished weakens the state...
Vol. 30 • January 1983 • No. 1
