Crime in the Market Society

...The United States has long been the most market-dominated of Western industrial countries, the one with the least developed alternatives to the values and institutions of the market...

...In the 1990s, the process of social disintegration has accelerated beyond what the commission could have imagined...

...Such a strategy means extending the fundamentals of social citizenship to those now excluded from them—including public health care, effective schooling, early intervention with "high-risk" children, adequate public safety, family support and child care, and decent housing...

...Crack thus becomes an oddly comforting scapegoat for a crisis whose roots are deeper and more tangled...

...Still more ominous, that rising violence exists together with the institutionalization of a larger and larger proportion of our population...

...q SPRING • 1991 • 259...

...Beyond the bare numbers, the violence in our cities reflects a deepening social and spiritual disaster...

...There is no magic solution that can stop the violence that plagues us without addressing its causes and without spending money...

...That has given us a generation of parents, especially young parents and single parents, who have virtually no leisure time and who are under constant stress...

...If we add those on probation or parole, we have a city of four million, making it the second largest in the United States...

...The verdict on programs like Head Start and family support is in...

...To recognize the troubling results of these strains isn't to blame the parents...

...but they are only a part and not necessarily the most important part...

...The conservative ascendancy of the last decade undercut already meager public services, which could have stalled some of the damage inflicted by economic deprivation, family stress, and community disintegration...

...These connections are deep and complex: it isn't just, for example, that a decade of conservative policy has increased urban employment...

...It is predominantly a city of the young and the poor and especially, but not exclusively, the young minority poor...

...Today, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the figure is closer to one in nine...

...But it's time to grow up...

...The Concept of Market Society First let me make a distinction between "market economy" and "market society...

...Skimping on the former, which tend to be less expensive, means pouring scarce resources into the latter...

...Bonger would surely be amazed by the degree to which "covetousness" has suffused American social life in the 1990s...

...And we need to consider the long-term political impact of market society—in particular, its tendency to eclipse alternative political means by which the SPRING • 1991 • 257 Crime—From Bad to Worse dispossessed might express their frustration and desperation...

...When we build new public institutions to serve basic human needs in the cities, we are simultaneously creating jobs that can stabilize communities and families and offer the young a better deal than Burger King or selling dope on the corner...

...and we are telling them that life is about something other than the scramble for consumer goods...

...Much violent street crime in America today directly expresses the consumerist values of immediate gratification...

...As we move closer to a full-fledged market society in America, young people are increasingly left to grow up on their own, without consistent support or guidance, sometimes with untended physical or psychological damage...

...our neglect broadcasts a message that 258 • DISSENT Crime—From Bad to Worse the lives of other people, especially those more vulnerable, are not very important...

...These trends have had their strongest impact on the young...

...In the words of another keen critic of market culture, R.H...

...It is sometimes argued that the rising tide of urban violence in the United States only reflects the deadly imperatives of the drug trade— especially the crack "epidemic...

...schooled, and made healthy...

...In market society all other principles of social organization become subordinated to the overarching one of private gain...

...seven killings in seven hours in New York City, including the shooting to death of a sixteen254 • DISSENT Crime—From Bad to Worse year-old as he tried to defend a friend from robbers who wanted his Chicago Bulls jacket...

...Under the sustained impact of market forces, communities suffer both from the loss of stable livelihoods and from the excessive geographic displacement that results from that loss...

...always with the lure of the consumer marketplace before them and with little opportunity to participate fully in that marketplace...

...This cultural context helps explain why economic deprivation is so significant a source of crime in a market society and not necessarily in others...

...they are typically much poorer...

...The long-term economic marginalization of entire communities inhibits the formation of stable families in the first place—as the sociologist William Julius Wilson has argued— by diminishing the "pool" of marriageable men—men seen as capable of supporting a family...

...It's that the policies of the right are moving us toward a way of life—a civilization— that is destructive of the institutions that sustain personal character and social order...

...in New York State the size of the prison budget is increasing by a stunning $50 million a month...

...Twenty-five years after the President's Commission, twenty-two since the Kerner Commission warned of the destructive potential of the "vast unmet needs" in the cities and pointed to the growing gap between the "two societies, separate and unequal," we are witnessing the collapse of the institutional matrix of social life in the inner city and the exclusion of a broad stratum of Americans from citizenship...

...One possibility is a fund—we might call it a "Fund for Citizenship"—to be used for that kind of preventive social expenditure...

...To pretend otherwise is to feed into the paralysis and evasion that now ensure a legacy of fear and brutality for the next generation...

...As we enter the nineties, according to a recent analysis by Marc Mauer of the Sentencing Project, nearly one-fourth of young black men in the nation aged 20 to 29 are either behind bars, on probation, or on parole...

...The real incomes of families headed by someone under 256 • DISSENT Crime—From Bad to Worse twenty-five dropped by over 23 percent between the early 1970s and the late 1980s, and that level has been maintained only because family members are working harder and longer...

...In the United States the rise in violent crime has gone hand in hand with the sharpest rise of economic inequality in postwar history...

...The fear and outrage generated by endemic violence is compounded by a sense of helplessness...

...There are no shortcuts...

...We must move beyond our stalemated thinking about public spending—our failure to distinguish between those forms of social expenditure we can regard as constructive investments and those that are responses to the failure of economic and social policies—to sustain labor markets, families, and communities...

...Worse, the risks of violence in America have risen in the past few years: and they have risen in the face of what by conventional measures was (until recently) touted as one of our longest sustained periods of "prosperity...

...5. Market society promotes crime by magnifying a culture of Darwinian competition for status and resources and by urging a level of consumption that it cannot provide for everyone...

...Comprehensive health care centers providing preventive medical care and help with drug and alcohol abuse in distressed communities...

...they are cost-effective, saving considerably more money than they absorb in the beginning...

...The corrosive effects of market culture on social stability have been a theme in the study of crime for close to a century...

...The savings tend to be long-term, the costs up front...

...According to recent data from the U.S...

...The year 1990 may prove to have been the most violent ever in many of our cities: the rate at which Americans killed one another in the first half of 1990 was a stunning 20 percent higher than in the same period in 1989 in cities of over a million population—and rates for 1989 were already an all-time record in many of those cities...

...since then, we've spent hundreds of billions of dollars to contain the consequences— far more than we would have needed to put its recommendations into practice...

...the rape, beating, and stabbing one hundred thirty-two times of a young black crack addict in Boston by a gang of kids looking for "a female to rob...

...and, like children or juvenile delinquents, we have great trouble taking the longer view...

...We should do no less here...

...We also need to consider the impact on crime of the specifically psychological distortions of market society—its tendency to produce personalities less and less capable of relating to others except as consumer items or as a means to the consumption of goods or the attainment of social status...

...Today we not only have about seven million more poor Americans than at the end of the 1970s...

...It's not accidental that states that have poured billions into prisons can't find money for people to police their streets, to teach preschoolers, or to help troubled kids...

...Before the eighties, the United States was already notable for the absence of health care and family supports for all its citizens...

...The rise in economic inequality can be traced to SPRING • 1991 • 255 Crime—From Bad to Worse several trends...

...And as the job structure has narrowed and income support shriveled, it is now far more difficult for them to get out—at least through legitimate means, a fact that is not lost on the urban poor, especially the young...

...It is dramatically apparent that the conservative "solution" to crime has failed, but the vision of feasible alternatives has also receded...

...These losses are compounded in the United States by the crisis in housing for low-income people, as market forces drive up the cost of shelter at the same time that they drive down wages...

...the beating, slashing, and, in one case, hacking to death of homeless men in New York that same Halloween by a gang of masked young men shouting "trick or treat...

...Conservatives talk endlessly about the importance of family values, but the reality is that market policies have brought disaster to low- and even middle-income families across the country, and that disaster is deeply implicated in the crime problem...

...through the lowering of the real value of the minimum wage, which ensures that new job creation has been overwhelmingly concentrated in poverty-level employment...

...Let me suggest several ways in which conservative policies have aggravated the criminal violence that has made most of our cities nearly uninhabitable...

...One is the deterioration of the private and public labor markets, in which a great many former "middle-level" jobs— especially but not exclusively in blue-collar industry—have disappeared, replaced by a significant rise in extremely well-rewarded jobs at the top—and a much larger increase in poor jobs, including unstable and part-time ones, at the bottom...

...Local communities suffering these stresses begin to exhibit a phenomenon some researchers call "drain...

...The basic outline of this American tragedy is easy to sketch...

...Looking at the role of these factors through a more holistic perspective helps us understand why poverty, for example, predictably breeds crime in some societies, at some point in their development, and not in others...

...We may single out several especially pressing needs: • The extension of Head Start-type programs to provide early education, nutrition, and social supports to all eligible children...

...I'm not calling for an "urban Marshall Plan" but for something more akin to a postindustrial version of the "basic needs" strategy often advocated for developing countries...

...In many countries far poorer than the United States — China, Sri Lanka, Costa Rica—governments allocate enough resources to meet those needs so that minimum levels of social health and participation have risen dramatically...

...Economic deprivation and community fragmentation have put enormous pressures on family life...

...A serious attack on the roots of violent crime in the cities means a campaign to rebuild the social infrastructure...

...A decade's "unleashing" of the forces of the market on the cities has drastically eroded an already weak social infrastructure...

...In Washington, D.C., for example, while homicides have risen to new highs in 1990, the drug-related proportion has fallen substantially (to about a third) in the past few years...

...But he stressed that he meant "prosperity, not luxury": for "[t]here is not a weaker spot to be found in the social development of our times than the evergrowing and ever-intensifying covetousness, which, in its turn, is the result of powerful social forces...

...As the ability of families to support themselves and their children drops below a certain critical point, they can no longer sustain those informal networks of social support that might be a buffer against the economic grinding of the market...

...The resulting tendency toward an "hourglass" income distribution is compounded by two other effects of conservative market policy: the erosion of income-support benefits for low-income people and the unemployed and a pattern of systematically regressive taxation...

...What perceptive observers have said about urban crime for thirty years and more remains true...

...through the weakening of the labor movement's capacity to organize in areas of new job creation and to hold the line against wage cuts...

...It can strengthen the institutions through which the young are brought up to participate in a common social life...

...Such a strategy can accomplish several things at once, all of which will help to reduce urban violence...

...This, in turn, helps us understand the third link: 3. Market society promotes crime by isolating the family and subjecting it to stress...

...some of our delinquents will cheerfully acknowledge that they blew someone away for a pair of running shoes (or a suede jacket...

...And under the Reagan and Bush administrations, that domination has significantly increased...

...Conservatives, of course, make much of this result in their own explanations of rising crime but conveniently ignore its causes...

...The answer is that we can no longer afford not to spend for basic needs in the cities...

...For many Americans, the roots of the disintegration of social life in the cities remain mysterious, the remedies elusive...

...Meanwhile, since 1977 the top 1 percent of income earners have seen their pretax income rise by 85 percent and their tax burden drop by 23 percent, while the bottom 20 percent of the population suffered a real income decline of about 12 percent and saw their tax burden rise by 3 percent...

...How, it will be asked, can we afford to provide prenatal care or preschool education for all in the inner city when New York City can't even find the money to hire a couple of thousand more police, and a mobile police station in Philadelphia has been repossessed by the bank...

...Rising crime is only one of those consequences—but one of the most visible...

...Twenty years ago we abandoned the vision of urban reconstruction offered by the Kerner Commission on the ground that it was unrealistic and expensive...

...Public Health Service, a young American male, aged fifteen to twenty-four, is seventythree times more likely to die of deliberate homicide than his counterpart in Austria, forty-four times more likely than a Japanese youth, and about twenty times more likely than a young Englishman or Dane...

...For an understanding of urban crime, we can single out the effects of declining preventive health care and mental health services that might help some of the children most "at risk" of delinquency and drug abuse, the absence of intervention for families at high risk of severe child abuse, and the lack of adequate child care for low-income families whipsawed by low wages and overwork...

...Increased low-income housing construction and rehabilitation, both to combat homelessness and to provide community-oriented jobs for the inner-city young...

...2. Market society promotes crime by eroding the capacity of local communities for support, mutual provision, and effective socialization of the young...

...In New York State, as a study by the Correctional Association of New York and the New York State Coalition for Criminal Justice points out, twice as many young black men are under "correctional supervision" as are attending college...

...Partly, too, it is because those of us who see those connections have failed to bring them sufficiently to light...

...More subtly, we are sending two important messages to people now excluded from full citizenship: we are telling them that we care what happens to them and that there is a place for them in society...

...Today, we impress upon the inner-city young that life is a Darwinian struggle in which only the hardest survive...

...The private economy has pronounced its verdict on the inner city...

...This neglect is a recipe for disaster, and it helps explain why our American cities are the most dangerous in the developed world...

...That hope leads many to urge yet further fiscal assaults on our already reeling urban public sector, in the belief that austerity today will pave the way for growth tomorrow...

...That is partly because of the quite successful effort by those now running the country to minimize the connections between the mounting urban violence and a decade of their own social and economic policies...

...As a result, we are something of an experiment in the consequences of market-driven social policy...

...Here are five links between the advance of market society and the rise in crime...

...A family having tough times can't lean on neighbors or cousins—even if they still live in the same community —because they are having tough times too...

...Family-support programs—like the Prenatal/ Early Infancy Project in Elmira, New York, and the Family Support Center in Yeadon, Pennsylvania— that have demonstrated effectiveness in reducing child abuse among "high-risk" families...

...The commission urged that the single most important thing we could do to reduce crime was to "seek to prevent crime before it happens by assuring all Americans a stake in the benefits and responsibilities of American life...

...Perhaps the most crippling barrier to doing anything effective about crime is the stubborn belief that the decay of urban institutions will be reversed by the expansion of the private economy...

...But "market society" is a different animal altogether...

...I say somewhat misleadingly because in existing market societies some groups are increasingly able to protect themselves against the market's uncertainties...

...Those advanced industrial societies whose cities have weathered the wrenching social transformations of the past twenty years have done so by building the public institutions through which individuals can be nurtured...

...Today we are a nation reeling from rates of violent crime that in many places outstrip anything we have seen before in our history...

...It has been driven by conservative social policy in several ways: • through the flight of capital and jobs to low-wage havens in the United States and overseas...

...In the late 1970s our income-support benefits— already among the most meager in the developed world—brought about one in five poor families above the poverty line...

...But if we've learned anything over the past generation it is that public tasks get done only by public institutions...

...It helps explain why some factors taken individually —say, the unemployment rate, or levels of poverty—may not always fit well as explanations of crime, a point much seized upon by some conservative observers...

...And it is a city whose staggering costs have helped to bankrupt our other cities...

...Crack—and other hard drugs—are certainly a big part of the reason for the violence in the cities...

...In recent years our most distressed urban areas have descended into Third World conditions in which the most fundamental human needs for shelter, nurturance, and livelihood are routinely unmet...

...Alternative sources of livelihood, social support, and cultural value— even personal identity —become increasingly weakened, so that individuals, families, and communities are more and more dependent on what we somewhat misleadingly call the "free market" to provide for their needs—not only material needs but cultural, symbolic, and psychic ones as well...

...And the first step must be to reverse the damage to public institutions that have been savaged by the policies of the past ten years...

...Whatever the specific mechanism, what's clear is that a strategy to meet basic needs in America's cities requires a serious public commitment of resources...

...Some examples, drawn almost at random from a pile of newspaper clippings: • the annual burning of parts of Detroit on Halloween, which this year destroyed nearly two hundred buildings and left over a dozen families homeless...

...A market culture promotes crime by holding out standards of economic status and consumption that many cannot legitimately meet, thereby creating pressure for meeting them in illegitimate ways: and, more subtly, by weakening values supportive of the intrinsic worth of human life and well-being...

...4. Market society promotes crime by withdrawing public services from those already stripped of economic security and communal support...

...The resulting "social impoverishment" fuses with economic deprivation to produce overwhelming stresses—stresses long associated with domestic violence and child abuse...

...The loss of stability of shelter, in turn, helps destroy local social cohesion...

...At the same time, the deterioration of the labor market and the spread of poverty-level wages have meant that many families— especially young families—can only stay afloat by working at two or even three jobs...

...It's not simply by increasing one or another discrete social ill that conservative market policies stimulate crime: it's through the growth and spread of a way of life that at its core is inimical to social order and personal security...

...All societies make some use of market mechanisms to allocate goods and services...

...Tawney, it is a "false magnetic pole that sets all the compasses wrong...

...Expanded youth-service programs to employ the young in entry-level human-service roles in hard-hit communities (with children, the elderly, the ill...

...Expanded high-quality public child care, making use—as the psychologist Edward Zigler has suggested—of the existing facilities of the public schools...

...Assessing what the market does well and what is best accomplished by other means is often an empirical question...

...1. Market society promotes crime by increasing inequality and concentrated economic deprivation...

...Our prison and jail population, having passed the one million mark in 1989, now constitutes a city about the size of Detroit...

...A "Basic Needs" Strategy for the Cities Twenty-five years ago, the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice worried that the "social institutions generally relied on to guide and control people in their individual and mutual existence" were "not operating effectively" in the cities...

...I do not think it's an accident that the foster-care caseload in New York City has tripled during the reigns of the Reagan and Bush administrations— or that child-abuse reports in California have risen by over 300 percent...

...That shift in the labor market is not a matter of "fate" or even of politically neutral changes in technology or demographics...

...That is the opposite of what has happened...

...Almost sixty years ago the great Dutch criminologist Willem Bonger argued that "Rio make prosperity and culture as general as possible" was the "best preventive against crime...

...The potential of many of these efforts is widely understood: the tougher issue involves paying for them...

...Looking at several of those effects at once is crucial to understanding crime in the United States...

...But it is true that the nurturing capacities of many families have been weakened and their children too often thrown back on their own resources and their own peer groups...

...By market society I mean one in which the pursuit of private gain becomes the organizing principle for all areas of social life—not simply a mechanism that we may use to accomplish certain circumscribed economic ends...

...Our incarceration rate—more than triple that of our closest Western European competitor, the United Kingdom—has been rising even faster than the criminal violence it was supposed to stop...

...The point is not simply to bemoan the ascendancy of such values among the urban young but to recognize that they are, as Bonger said, the "result of powerful social forces...

...The implication is that when the epidemic subsides, so will the plague of violent crime...