Chapter 8 PDF

MIchael C.K. Ma (MM): When we think about poverty, we often imagine it to be connectedwith crime. It is common for people to imagine areas where there is more crime to be areas of low socioeconomic status or neighbourhoods that are colloquially understood to be “poor.”Poverty is generally understood...

MIchael C.K. Ma (MM): When we think about poverty, we often imagine it to be connectedwith crime. It is common for people to imagine areas where there is more crime to be areas of low socioeconomic status or neighbourhoods that are colloquially understood to be “poor.”Poverty is generally understood to refer to a lack of money. Both the general public andscholars alike may imagine poor areas to be incubators of crime, especially street level crime,and official crime statistics do show a correlation between social deprivation and crime. Butwhen we think about poverty it is not just crime that is attached to poverty, but rather, it is alsoconnected to low socioeconomic status, lack of employment, lack of education, lack of housing,lack of food security, lack of health services, lack of finances, and/or lack of financial stability.cxxxii What may be missing when we consider the relationship between crime andpoverty is that, at a societal level, it is the economy that determines whether people areengaged with crime or become criminalized. It is the economic condition of poverty that is thething we must address. It is not the economic “result” of a poor neighbourhood or poor peoplethat should be blamed for crime. We should examine the cause. That is the thing we should address in this chapter. With lower socioeconomic status there may come behaviours that are“deviant” and/or anti-social and which then are criminalized, but what is the origin of thesesocial behaviours? You cannot have one without the other; they are combined or synergistic.Conditions of deprivation, poverty and inequality come about because of economic conditionsthat people did not actively choose. The acts of crime and poverty are co-creators. They existsimultaneously. People do not choose poverty, but we assume that people choose crime.Mike Larsen (ML): It is interesting that when we think about crime there is often an inclinationto seek explanations for the causes of crime that are centered on the individual, on individualchoices, individual decisions and individual pathologies. Sometimes a discussion about therelationship between inequality and socioeconomics and crime involve pushing back againstassumptions of crime being caused by criminals who are pathologically amoral or predatory andwho tend to congregate in particular kinds of neighborhoods. For example, assisted and high-density subsidized housing developments, which, by definition, exist in poorer areas, are often assumed to be hotbeds of street crime. We are familiar with the concept of ‘badneighbourhoods’, and we know that people often avoid these places because of theirreputation. 143When you think about it, though, we take it for granted that many other phenomena in society are shaped by economic forces. For example, it is easy for us to see that access to highereducation is connected to socioeconomic status. If you cannot afford tuition, then you will findit difficult to attend a university and focus on your studies. Here in British Columbia, we havebeen experiencing an extraordinary explosion in real estate values, and this, coupled withinflation, is giving rise to important conversations about whether it is possible for people whodo not have inherited wealth to access affordable housing and make ends meet. Individual choices may play a role in particular cases, but we understand housing prices and inflation to beconnected to economic trends that cannot be altered by any one person. However, it can bedifficult to get people to use the above framework to think about crime and deviance as phenomena shaped by similar broad socio-economic factors. This is, in part, because our legalsystem is designed to focus on individual responsibility and accountability, and in part, becausemajor branches of criminology have historically taken as their starting point the assumptionthat there is something different or abnormal about individual offenders.The poverty and crime discussion has been going on for centuries in terms of criminology. Whatis the relationship between social disorganization, ecology, and crime? This question animatedcriminological debates in the early 1900s. By contrast, the connections between poverty andcriminalization have been explored only comparatively recently, and typically by criticalcriminologists.cxxxiii The central idea here is that our legal system itself is designed in a way that reproduces a particular ‘status quo’ - one that benefits wealthy groups and disproportionatelyreflects their interests, while maintaining an image of equality and justice. As the poet AnatoleFrance once noted, “In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep underbridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread". I always find that to be a powerfulstarting point for discussion because it invites us to think about how the contents of criminallaw—the content of our statutes, what we criminalize, and how we go about enforcing it—aredeeply attached to questions of inequality and poverty. MM: I could not agree with you more. The rich do not have to choose to sleep under a bridge.It is quite common these days to hear critics and pundits talk about the social determinants of health, the social determinants of poverty, or the social determinants of success in society. Thatis, they agree that social support and social status is intimately connected to what a person is able to choose or act out in practice. If there are social determinants (e.g., lack of income, lowerincome, or lower socioeconomic status), which help cause criminal behavior, or thecriminalization of behaviours, then it stands to reason we should try to address or fix the causeof lower socioeconomic status as a response to crime. That is, fix poverty and you fix a greatdeal of crime.cxxxivcxxxv And yet, we know police and the courts have no tools to address lowersocioeconomic status or solve poverty. If we have crime and it rises and falls based on poverty,then the question for us to ask would be: why do we continue to deploy police to address thesymptoms of lower social economic status? And, in the context of courts, are the courts theright tool to use to solve lower socioeconomic status? Even judges when deliberating onevidence might see that it is the complete trajectory of a person who appears before the court;that it is their socioeconomic status that has brought them before the courts, and yet, there is no mechanism for a judge to use to rectify it except the tool of court sentencing. The crux of the problem is that we do not have the correct tool, agency, or social service that can properly 144address lower socioeconomic status and the behaviours that might go along with it. The lawcannot fix it, nor was it designed to fix the social economic determinants of crime.ML: That is a good point. To return to France’s quote, the result is a system that can enforcelaws around panhandling, sleeping rough, and petty theft, but cannot meaningfully addresshunger, poverty, and lack of housing. Indeed, the former are readily conceptualized as crimeand disorder problems, and the latter are considered beyond the purview of the courts. Weshould note that the places where one would expect to encounter panhandling, homelessness,and petty theft are also the places that are routinely patrolled by police and private securitywhose mandate is to maintain and enforce order. Members of wealthy groups also commitserious forms of wrongdoing, but their actions generally occur in places that are ‘unpatrolled’ - in private residences, corporate offices, and within institutions.If we are interested in addressing crime as a social problem, then we must understand itsintimate connection to marginalization in a variety of ways, including economic marginalization.The challenge is that we understand marginalization to be a problem of social structure, andstructural problems cannot be ‘solved’ via individualized processes. However, our legal systemand its institutions are designed with individualized process in mind. They focus on questions of individual responsibility—onactus reus andmens rea (I.e.,did you do it, and are youresponsible for it?), and this leads into questions of individual-level sanctions and responses,including rehabilitative and punitive processes. Regardless of the merits of such processes in individual cases, they are fundamentally incapable of addressing the structural problems that give rise to conditions of marginalization. For example, we know that we are living in a time of massive and increasing wealth and income inequality,cxxxvicxxxvii and we know that this placesextraordinary pressures on a growing class of people who must struggle to make ends meet,and who may be one emergency away from losing their housing. We know that thesepressures can put people in situations of desperation and conflict. The criminal justice system is not designed or empowered to address this problem in any meaningful way, though. In fact,from a critical perspective you could argue that the system was designed to protect preciselythis kind of accumulation of wealth and inequality. It is meant to perpetuate such a structure. It is primarily a symptom alleviation mechanism, rather than a justice mechanism. There is nothing I can think of that police organizations, judges, courts, and prisons can do to addressthe determinants of marginalization in society, and yet, they are consistently treated and calledupon as the key institutions that will best respond to these issues.MM: Of course, I agree. Being poor, working in a dead-end job, or working for rock-bottomwages is understood to be a choice freely made by free individuals. And yet, once we put it likethat, it is easy to see that we arenotfree to choose. On the one hand, France’s quote brings upthe absurd notion that a rich person could choose to sleep under a bridge but declines andchooses to sleep in their own bed in their own house. On the other hand, France’s quote bringsup the question of why does hunger, poverty and lack of housing occur in society? Why would someone sleep under a bridge or why would someone panhandle or beg for money? What arethe social causes of such individual action? And, most importantly, can the police help someonewho is panhandling? The quick answer is no. People who are very poor—and hence are hungryor have no housing—cannot be helped by police. Police can only help control them, furthermarginalize them, or criminalize them. Police cannot feed people or get them housing. The 145subtitle of this chapter could be phrased as: what causes poverty, and can police, courts, andcorrections solve the problem of poverty?ML: That would be a good subtitle! But it is also a rhetorical question answering its own query.We know police, courts, and corrections have no power to correct poverty and socio-economicdeprivation. So,perhaps this is a good time to shift gears. The title of this chapter is inequalityand poverty and thus far we have been focusing on the poverty aspect of the equation, andparticularly on the relationship between economic marginalization, social structures, andinvolvement in criminalized activities. However, inequality cuts both ways, and in a societywhere you have a marginalized class or under class, you also have powerful corporations andthe ultra-rich. While poor and working-class communities have historically been the focus of both criminological inquiry (for example, through theories that focus on subcultures and social disorganization) and formal social control efforts, there is a branch of criminology that addresses the crimes of the powerful and, indeed, the forms of injustice, harm, and exploitationembedded in the system itself.MM: Yes, we should shift gears. You are referring to the study of white collar and corporatecrime where criminologists such as Edwin Sutherland helped coin the term “white collar crime.”The invention of this term turns our attention from criminalizing the petty criminal to identifying those in positions of social authority and power who may act in an equally deviantor criminal manner.cxxxviii When thinking about this, it is important to bear in mind our earlierdiscussion about the social and legal construction of deviance. It might help us understand that the powerful has influenced the way the law tends to focus on crimes and deviance in waysthat absolve the powerful. We can say that powerful groups and interests have a disproportionate capacity to shape and influence society.By shifting gears, we can examine how inequality is not just a product of disproportionatepoverty but also of disproportionate wealth. When we use the word inequality, or unequal, it refers to people living in poverty and often does not refer to people living in wealth. It is a funny thing about the word inequality because our mind immediately goes to people who areat the bottom of the economic pyramid. So, it might be fruitful to also investigate wealth as a form of deviant behaviour and social practice. That is, wealth and its pursuit often involve a self-centred pursuit of profit enriching an individual at the expense of their employees and/orthe social environment. But we should bear in mind that “wealth” is not just a reference to thesuper wealthy. When we examine wealth as a factor of social inequality or unfairness it is notjust those who are extremely wealthy like celebrities, sports stars, or CEOs of Fortune 500companies, but rather, it also involves examining those who have marginal wealth or middle-class wealth that affords them a significant leg up. Both the very wealthy and the middle classhave a significant advantage in termsof where their starting line is in life. Their starting lines in education, health, housing, and social networks are significantly superior to those who do nothave comparable wealth. So, we might ask the question: Is wealth and economic superiority a kind of deviance since it helps you influence and navigate society in a way that benefits you at the expense of others? Is wealth criminogenic?ML: These are important points, and it is also important to note that the economic system is a systemand needs to be understood as such. By this I mean that there is a relationship between 146a poor underclass living paycheck to paycheck, in conditions of precarity struggling to securehousing, and a thriving upper class, accumulating exponential wealth and striving to ensure that it is taxed as little as possible. You do not get to be in “the 1%”cxxxix, as it is often described,without being involved in some degree of exploitation. As you point out, it is easy for us to think about conditions of poverty as being abnormal or problematic (even ‘criminogenic’), whileat the same time admiring, or at the very least accepting the existence of billionaires. It is important for us to acknowledge that the social and economic system that we live in creates,and perhaps more provocatively,requiresinequality. In this sense, poverty is not an aberrationbut a function of our economic system and if we understand that criminalization is disproportionately associated with conditions of poverty, this raises some important questionsabout the justice of our justice system. What do you think?MM: I cannot agree with you more. Another way to frame this question is with the concept of unearned privileges. People with great wealth are receiving unearned privileges often becausethey were born into conditions of great wealth not of their own making or “choosing.” When we look at great wealth we can cite Thomas Piketty's study,Capital in the 21st Century,regarding inheritance in France.His research demonstrates that wealth is consolidated,funneled, and congealed into the hands of smaller and smaller groups of people. His workshows that once wealth is passed on through inheritance it continues to increase as you pass it to your children and your children pass that wealth to their children.cxl Piketty’s research is a persuasive historical study showing that wealth becomes concentrated in an unequal manner as time progresses. The wealth is not re-distributed through taxation or through some otherredistribution mechanism. Piketty’s study shows that wealth comes to be held in perpetuity bya very small select group of people.We can accept that some people will succeed where others fail, but what happens when only a small segment of the population succeeds, and that group passes its success to futuregenerations? That is exactly what I would term economic inequality and its effects go far beyond the economy. That effect means not only are you economically wealthy, not only areyou socially successful, not only are you physically healthier, but you are--as you alreadypointed out--are able to affect the way in which laws, in which social programs, in which healthcare regimes, and other social institutions are created. Those systems of social organization willnaturally reflect your interests because you and your family have greater wealth as anindividual or social unit. Through wealth you have greater social capital and greater economicwealth. You are able to better create, mold, and shape the way society looks to better favouryou and not those who are weak, poor, or who lack wealth!ML: We can also note that corporations and economic elites in Canada are able to anticipatethat formal institutions of social control will mobilize to defend their interests, especially when these interests are challenged by communities and social movements. In the Summer of 2021,we saw police in British Columbia mobilized to arrest over a thousand people who wereopposing the logging of old-growth forest at Fairy Creek on Vancouver Island.cxliicxli We also sawpolice in Toronto aggressively dismantling an encampment of unhoused people that had beenset up in a public park. In the latter case, police worked alongside private security to forcibly‘clear’ the park, arresting or displacing people and destroying or confiscating their property.In both cases, the ‘legal violence’ of the state was directed ‘downwards’, in furtherance of the 147protection or promotion of the status quo. These are depressingly common scenes. By contrast,think about how extraordinary it would be to wake up and read the news that dozens of policehad been deployed to the corporate offices of retail companies that engage in wage theft or to the headquarters of banks that directly benefit from (and enable) housing inequality through the commodification of real estate?MM: I really like what you say about the legal violence of the state and then also the way in which this legal violence is disproportionately or unequally served to the public. The legal violence is served as you say to protesters, but not served to those who work in corporateoffices. And that would be a question for us to ask: why is this type of state violence served in a disproportionate manner? Why are police deployed to solve or curtail the problems produced by poverty or inequality? We know that deploying police—and I think we have talked about thisin other chapters—is not the best service to deploy if you are trying to solve say a housing or mental health problem. Similarly, we also know it is not the best service to deploy if you wantto say curtail corporate or income tax fraud --which are common problems in Canada andelsewhere. It is telling that the practice of police solves neither the problems of poverty (I.e.,street crime) nor wealth (I.e., white collar crime).We can also ask why the law criminalizes shoplifting whereas the law does not criminalize mis-stating your taxes or mis-stating your income? Those offenses could be criminal but areunderstood by law as civil problems. Crimes that are “economic” are are often understood as administrative problems that can be solved by non-criminal penalties (e.g., fines, complianceagreements). We can return to our original question: does poverty cause crime and can policesolve poverty? That is a pregnant and leading question because it points to the bigger question:are laws, which are created to address crimes linked to poverty, just or fair?ML: Over time, I have come to the conclusion that our legal system, and particularly theenforcement institutions associated with it, exist and function primarily to preserve andreproduce a status quo. I mean this at a structural level. That is an important point to emphasize. I am certain that there are people who go into policing or the practice of criminal law with the sincere intention of reducing injustice in society and protecting vulnerable people.And I am certain that there are people in these professions who strive to realize theseobjectives daily. However, if we pull back and look at the system and its institutions as a whole,it seems apparent that the primary function of the system is to ensure that the way thingsarestays relatively stable (this is the ‘order’ part of ‘law and order’). It follows that if the statusquo—the way things are—is based on an unequal distribution of wealth, resources, andprivilege, and on the exploitation of certain groups for profit by other groups, this is the order that will be reinforced, normalized, and protected by our institutions.MM: I like your use of the example of police and lawyers, and how police officers and lawyersenter into their professions in good faith and with good intentions. But this also reminds me of the saying that good intentions pave the path to ruin. That is, we know that neither policing norlawyering leads to very much social change at the end of the day. When you finish your shift as a police officer, or you close a case that you are defending through law, the social structuresthat surround your work has remained intact and unchanged. So, the question we must ask is: what is the purpose of policing and what is the purpose of lawyering? I would submit to you 148that the purpose of these vocations is exactly to maintain an existingnot equalor not fairsystem of society. These professions maintain the status quo as you have suggested. Theymaintain inequality in society. Therefore, they never can solve the problems of inequality thatarise because of social economic and structural inequality. You might have good intentions, but those intentions do not solve social structural problems. And the laws, the structure of lawyering, the structure of policing, the institution of policing, and the use of them as stateviolence—to solve social problems like mental health, unemployment, or housing—are notremediated in any way whatsoever.ML: We can think about this through the imagery of the tools that are associated with theseinstitutions. There is nothing in a police cruiser or on a police utility belt, or in the sentencingpowers available to a judge in a provincial trial court, or in the selection of correctional programs available to workers in prisons that will address, or could address, systemic inequalityand exploitation. And so, if we understand crime to be correlated with inequality andexploitation, we are left with the uncomfortable conclusion that our system is not equipped to respond to the symptoms of these problems, but not equipped by design to truly solve them at a deeper level.MM: But to play devil's advocate and to voice what might be on some of our readers' minds I might ask: Does not policing temporarily alleviate a problem in a positive way? Does not a practice of lawyering temporarily resolve a legal issue in a beneficial way? For example, if youdeploy a police officer to a public disturbance (e.g., someone having a mental health episode in a public space) and they are able to stop that disturbance, detain that person, arrest that person, or remove that person, then the public has benefited from the removal of the noise or disturbance. In so doing, they create public good. Similarly, we could ask: Does not a lawyercreate more fairness in determining guilt or innocence by representing a client? And cannot a judge—through the use of fair sentencing—create more safety and justice within the confinesor limitations of the law? In both cases, policing and the courts have created increased publicorder or public safety, albeit in a very restricted manner.ML: Those are good questions. And I would simply answer by saying that these interventionsare not true forms of justice and those are not true solutions because they do not solve muchdeeper and much more complex social problems that underlie the crimes. We should note thatthese critical ideas are certainly not exclusive to the two of us. In criminological research on therole, function, and everyday practice of policing, there have been numerous studies over theyears that address the gap between the ambition of police officers and the entrenched natureof social problems. Peter Manning, in a famous study, concluded that since police werefundamentally incapable of truly addressing and resolving the root causes of the social problems that had come to define their mandate, their role had subtly shifted to managingappearances and showing that they were actively responding to the symptoms of theseproblems.cxliiiMM: To build on Manning’s critique, we can also ask the question of whether the criminaljustice system is the ideal system designed to address everyday problems in society? One sucheveryday problem, if we continue to focus on street crime and justice, is the example of someone who is having a mental health episode or someone committing a petty crime like 149shoplifting of batteries or cosmetics. If we look at just these everyday issues of crime, then it is quite clear that we would not design an overly muscular system of policing to deal with suchless significant or less-risk-to-society problems around public safety. We do not need a muscular police force to deal with the repeat offender who keeps stealing batteries at theShoppers Drug Mart Pharmacy. We might need to have a muscular police force to deal with a bank robbery or deep social emergencies like a hostage situation. In this regard, policeorganization and training are well set up to deal with hostages or bank robberies, but thoseforms of crime are so rare that they are akin to lightning strikes. Why should society create andfund a system of response to lightning strikes when they are so rare? Lightning strikes maycreate fires, but our fire departments were never created as a response to lightning. Similarly,why should we spend precious social resources to create such a response service (i.e., policeservice) when the design of the service itself is poorly aligned with the social problem at hand?Shoplifting as a “crime” has moreto do with economic inequality than it does with publicsafety. But we know the police service does not address or solve economic inequality.ML: I think that it is helpful for us to use metaphors and analogies when thinking about theseissues. Another way to think about this would be through the problem of fire. Historically,massive fires were a commonplace and deeply destructive scourge of early urban environments. The combination of increasing density, flammable materials, and a lack of anymeaningful regulation around what could be built – or burned – in particular locations createdthe conditions of possibility for fires that would engulf entire districts. Most of the City of Vancouver was destroyed by fire in 1886, for example, when fires started to clear brush to make way for development spread out of control. The solution to this problem was not moreand better equipped firefighters alone. Rather, it was regulatory, educational, and preventativeefforts that were geared towards preventing fires from occurring in the first place. I am thinkingof things like building codes, requirements for fire extinguishers, and innovations in alarms anddetection systems. We still have and need firefighters, particularly in a context where due to climate change the world around us is burning, but perhaps we can learn something from thismore foundational and preventative approach to addressing serious social problems and applyit to our thinking about crime and criminal justice.MM: I agree. The fire of poverty and social inequality cannot be put out by police, courts, or corrections. And that leaves us with the final question of: if you cannot put out the fire of poverty and inequality with our existing criminal justice system, then what is the criminal justice system designed for and what could it be replaced with?