I. Introduction

The issue of "crime in the streets" has become a major political controversy in recent years. In the following editorial, we address three aspects of this issue: (1) We examine the controversy of whether crime is on the increase. The conventional view on this matter is that it is on the increase. We agree with this assessment, but qualify it in two important respects. First, we point out that the rise in criminal activity is not limited to the working class and unemployed, but that crime is class specific and that corporate crime represents a far greater danger to the social order. Second, we relate the rising crime rate to the increasing contradictions and deteriorating social relations of advanced capitalism. (2) We discuss the material basis of "street" crimes, especially trying to correct widely held romantic views about criminals as "political rebels." (3) Finally, we offer some general guidelines for addressing the street crime problem and indicate how we differ from the standard "law and order" approach.

II. The Scope of Crime

It is commonly believed that working people and small property owners are victimized primarily by "street people" and members of racial minorities. While many ordinary violent crimes are indeed committed by these persons, the theft of property and earnings in the form of unfair labor practices, misrepresentation in advertising, fraud, and the restraint of trade cannot be primarily attributed to these same people. The magnitude of white collar crime indicates that crime is not concentrated among the lower economic classes. A 1949 study by Edwin Sutherland of law violations of 70 corporations indicates that if the criteria applied to official criminals were equitably applied to corporations, 90% of the large corporations studied would be considered habitual criminals. In 1967, the president's commission on crime found that corporate crimes outweigh by a factor of five other types of property crimes such as theft, robbery, burglary, and larceny, which are committed by ordinary criminals. That this finding underestimates the difference will be revealed in a study that is now being prepared by the Nader group. The magnitude and seriousness of corporate crimes increase further when occupational health and safety are taken into consideration. Innumerable deaths and injuries occur every year with monotonous regularity because profits are more important to corporations than human lives.

A look at ordinary crimes, on the other hand, indicates that conventional forms of violence (such as murder, aggravated assault, armed robbery, and forcible rape) and ordinary property offenses (such as theft, larceny, burglary, and robbery) are concentrated among the urban poor and in particular among the marginal adolescents and young adults. The category of marginalization here refers to the marginal position of individuals in the labor force, to the phenomena of unemployment and underemployment, to dead-end jobs and job instability. Today the processes of marginalization are largely based, first, on the inability of capital to provide jobs for the expanding labor force, and second, on the labor-force segmentation that places millions of poor and minority peoples in unstable, low-wage employment. Finally, we have the processes of marginalization within the family and the school, which are important for understanding a population of working-class and middle-class delinquents, who commit the most serious offenses.

Forty-five years ago, the International Association of Chiefs of Police developed the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) system and selected seven felony offenses for index purposes on the grounds that the victims, or someone representing them, would more likely to report such crimes to law enforcement agencies. The seven offense groups include: homicide, robbery, aggravated assault, forcible rape, burglary, larceny (grand theft), and auto theft. These are the crime statistics from which trends in the incidence of criminality are calculated and which are regularly reported in the media. When these reported crimes are converted into rates per 100,000 population and comparisons are made across time, for example, 1968 to 1973, each of the index crimes, with the exception of auto theft, has increased from 25 to 50%.

Critics have argued, on the other hand, that the increase in crime rates in recent years is misleading since they reflect the influence of increased reporting of the more minor offenses, technological improvements in data processing, and better record keeping and reporting by law enforcement agencies, rather than an actual increase in general crimes. Indeed, crime rates have gone up since 1930. Through close scrutiny of other indices of crime we can discern that victims of crime do not always report their victimization to law enforcement agencies. For example, in 1973, the U.S. Department of Justice conducted a criminal victimization survey of 13 cities, which included Oakland, San Diego, and San Francisco. When we compare the survey findings with the 1973 reported crimes for these cities, enormous differences are revealed. The reported robberies totaled 2,879 for Oakland, 1,422 for San Diego, and 4,823 for San Francisco. The survey found twice as many robbery victims in Oakland, four times more in San Diego, and three times more in San Francisco. Reported rape victims totaled 220, 173, and 540 in the three cities respectively. The Justice Department survey included attempted rape, but the findings produced similarly sharp contrasts: rape victimization was three times higher in Oakland, six times higher in San Diego, and three times higher in San Francisco. These highly significant discrepancies are indicative of the even greater magnitude of difference encountered when examining crimes such as assault and theft, for which definitions are less precise. Obviously, then, we must surmise that crime is much more widespread than is generally reported by official sources.

Yet another way of examining the crime problem is to ask people whether they have engaged in lawbreaking behavior within the past year and at what frequency. This method is used in self-reported delinquency studies. The studies show that people of all races and from all socioeconomic backgrounds systematically commit crimes. The studies also show that some racial/ethnic groups are not picked up by the police, and that people from privileged backgrounds are less likely to be adjudicated as delinquents or criminals. Serious questions, then, are raised regarding the theories that assume crime and delinquency to be an intrinsically working-class phenomenon.

Despite the fact that lawbreaking behavior occurs in all sectors of American society, the face of the penal population has changed dramatically since the end of World War II. In 1940, about 80% of California prisoners, for example, were white. In 1950, it was down to 65%; in 1970, 52%; and in 1975, around 50%. The changing face of the penal population would indicate that prisons are becoming increasingly places for poor people and people of color. This trend is occurring despite findings that show that lawbreaking behavior is characteristic of people from all socioeconomic and racial backgrounds.

This increasing rates of crime, victimization, and imprisonment must be seen as only one aspect of a total historical process. Along with the proliferation of criminal laws and steady expansion of the state apparatus, they are indicators of the intensifying contradictions and deteriorating social relations of advanced capitalism. As Engels observed in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, there is a tendency for the coercive apparatus to become "stronger in proportion as the class antagonisms within the state become sharper...."

III. Criminals Are Not Rebels

Crime and Social Justice has been quick to support the defense committees of the San Quentin Six and Joan Little, to name two of the more recent celebrated political trials, while consistently refusing to join the conservative call for law and order in response to crime in the streets. Does this mean that we hold some twisted notions about right and wrong, that we uncritically view people ripping off citizens on the street as modern Robin Hoods or as individuals attempting to survive in the sense of Victor Hugo's Jean Valjean? Our response is an emphatic "No"!

Recent studies in criminology tend to either gloss over the issue of street crime or to portray it in romantic terms. Crime is often characterized as a form of primitive political rebellion or a rational attempt to survive under oppressive conditions. For some activities in specific historical periods, such as the spontaneous urban rebellions of the 1960s, this is certainly correct. But for most street crime, this Fanonist imagery serves to distort and glorify acts of reactionary individualism.

Where does this romanticism come from? Jock Young, in his essay on "Working Class Criminology" (in Critical Criminology), suggests that it is an overreaction to the positivist tradition that regards criminals as "irrational" and "pathological." According to Young, "to attack 'false ideas' of another without being clear about one's own ideas merely leads into the construction of theories which are mirror images of the false ideas being attacked." The glorification of crime is prevalent among intellectuals and students who are especially susceptible to ideas that are left in form but liberal in substance (radical chic). The petty bourgeois character of the academy, the separation of intellectuals from the working class, and the desperation often felt by those in the "middle" class who see their privileges declining -- all these conditions contribute to what Lenin called "infantile leftism" and a tendency to look for adventuristic panaceas as a substitute for "perseverance, organization, discipline, and steadfastness."

Until recently, the progressive criminology movement has not developed an analysis of street crime. Rather, we were primarily engaged in gaining a historical understanding of crime and its control institutions, working on developing a new definition of crime, and placing the popular struggle against crime in the context of the class struggle. However, with the development of new theoretical material -- see, for example, the articles by Melossi and the Schwendingers in this issue -- it has become possible to advance our analysis and political understanding of delinquency and street crime, which correspond to the actual conditions of people's existence.

Street crimes, defined as mugging, forcible rape, brutal attacks of the elderly and of women in the community, and other similarly oppressive acts, are primarily an intra-class phenomenon. In other words, the victims of these acts are mostly poor and working people. The street criminal is a product of the relations of society as a whole. The autobiographies of Malcolm X, George Jackson, James Carr, and the interviews of (mostly white) convicts by Bruce Jackson provide a glimpse of the cruelty, despair, and viciousness of conditions in oppressed communities. These accounts depict the victimizing of people on the streets, "gang-shacking" a rape victim, exploiting "welfare mothers," and otherwise engaging in violent behavior both inside and out of prison. There is nothing to indicate that their acts were either politically motivated or purely rational measures of survival. There is, however, a tendency to set them apart from the rest of humanity and to deny the very existence of their conditions. This is precisely what the state does by legally separating them as criminals and making them wards of the state.

The conditions of capitalism, which have become a regular feature of our lives, have produced the absolute deterioration of a segment of the working class. The decades of exploitation and racism created the modern slums, and for James Carr, George Jackson, and thousands of others like them who were born and raised in American ghettos, their social reality became the streets. This is the meaning of George Jackson's opening sentences in Soledad Brother: "I could play the criminal aspects of my life down some, but then it wouldn't be me. That was the pertinent part, the thing at school and home I was constantly rejecting in the process. All my life I pretended with my folks, it was the thing in the street that was real."

The creation of the modern slums was a historical process involving pushing people off the land and thereby divesting them of the means of subsistence. They were pulled to the cities during times preparing for, and in the course of carrying out, wars. In a commodity producing economy, the laborer her/himself is a commodity, "who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital." For example, the internal migration of people in search of work during World War II, concentrated, through racism, people of color in urban slums and then cast them aside as so much surplus population in times of commercial crises. "In these crises a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed" (Communist Manifesto). The processes of marginalization are largely based, first, on the inability of capital to provide jobs for the expanding labor force, and second, on the labor force segmentation that places millions of poor and minority people in unstable, low-wage employment. The concentration of these people into slums was further exacerbated by institutions such as welfare, education, and urban renewal agencies; and while they provided important needed services, they also legitimized the material conditions of the slums.

The destruction of productive forces entails severing people's relationships to the means of production, thereby eliminating the social relations arising between people in the process of that production. Thus, insofar as productive relations are social under capitalism, even in their alienated form, the social beings of marginalized members of society are negated. Furthermore, to destroy relations of production is to destroy the social consciousness that supports the juridical and political superstructure of society.

IV. Law and Order

The conservative's call for law and order does not signify a society governed by democratic social relations. Instead, it means the legitimation of official violence and economic exploitation, as well as the legitimation of the bourgeois state and its institutions -- the school, the welfare system, the police and courts, and the penal system -- which attempt to hold in check the insoluble contradictions of class society. As Lenin noted in The State and Revolution, "the state is an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another; it is the creation of 'order,' which legalizes and perpetuates this oppression by moderating the conflict between the classes. In the opinion of petty bourgeois politicians, order means precisely the reconciliation of classes, and not the oppression of one class by another; to moderate the conflict means reconciling classes and not depriving the oppressed classes of definite means and methods of struggle to overthrow the oppressors." We reject a law and order that serves to mystify or legitimate exploitation.

This does not mean, however, that we wish to ignore or glorify street crimes. We support many specific programs of reducing street crime that have been proposed by various government agencies -- such as better street lighting, escort services for the elderly, decriminalization of status offenses, etc. We differ from the conventional liberal approach, however, in two important respects. First, we call for the transfer of power over the crime control apparatus from the state bureaucracies to worker and community controlled programs. As long as the criminal justice apparatus is controlled by special bodies of professionals who are systematically and increasingly alienated from ordinary working people, then we expect little in the way of effective crime control. Lessons can be learned, for example, from the experience of the struggles of Chicano and Black political organizations against the illegal drug market and by women's organizations against rape. In both of these cases, the possibility of a solution is created only when popular organizations confront a problem that has for so long been either ignored or aggravated by the state apparatus.

Second, we differ from the conventional approach to "law and order" in that we link the immediate struggle against crime with the criminogenic nature of the capitalist system as a whole. In other words, "crime" is not a problem to be technocratically solved within the framework of bourgeois democracy. Rather it is something that is basic to the functioning of capitalist social relations. Although crime, of course, predates modern capitalist development, the systematic reproduction of exploitative social relations (which is at the heart of criminal conduct) flourishes under advanced capitalism in a far more extensive and brutalizing form than was possible under precapitalist society.

Consequently, we think that it is crucial for crime control programs to be linked with an analysis of the political economy. To do less than this is to feed into corporate liberal reforms and to give people the illusion that exploitation can be conquered under capitalism. This does not mean, however, that we should not make reasonable demands of the state apparatus -- for example, to abolish "red" squads, enforce laws against police brutality and organized crime, call for the enforcement of health and housing codes and the control of usury practices, defend the democratic right of progressive groups to exist and organize, and demand, for example, the reordering of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration's priorities so that funds for police hardware are used instead for human needs like child care and educational services. These kinds of demands are important partly because they provide a means for exposing the hypocrisy of bourgeois democracy and partly because they provide important support for the institutions and rights that the working class has gained during the last hundred years.

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