Criminalising Social Policy: Anti-social behaviour in a de-civilised society.

By John J Rodger
Portland, Oregon: Willian Publishing, 2008

Criminalising Social Policy is an ambitious book that covers issues relevant to students and professionals working in the fields of social policy, criminal justice, or both. In fact, the book’s central theme is how the New Right agenda in the UK and US expands the number of people who work in this final category where criminal justice and social policy collide. In discussing this phenomenon, the text traverses a dizzying amount of topics, including chapters on youth subculture, fear of crime, child welfare, housing, ‘third way’ politics, and dysfunctional families. Rodger’s main argument within each chapter is that post-industrialization and neoliberal reforms cause growing intolerance of anti-social behaviour and increasingly punish this behaviour by replacing welfarist social policies that focus on social problems with punitive criminal justice measures that focus on problem populations.

Rodger contributes to the existing literature on criminalization and social policy by extending Norbert Elias’ idea of the ‘civilization process’. The main argument that Rodger draws out of Elias is that increased interdependence among social groups led to functional democratization and helped replace physical punishment with more humane programs of social control. Similar to recent work by John Pratt,¹ Rodger supplements Elias by arguing that a de-civilization process now characterizes the UK and US. This entails reversing the civilization process by eroding the welfare state and responsibilizing individuals under neoliberal political directives. This reversal segments the US and UK, dissolves empathy, and heightens intolerance towards the actions of those left behind by the globalized post-industrial economy. Rodger argues that people in communities marginalized by neoliberal globalism revert to the de-civilized, unrestrained, violent actions that Elias found in early societies. Responses to these behaviours are, according to Rodger, similarly anachronistic and rely heavily on criminalization. Rodger lists the UK’s Anti-Social Behaviour Orders and the state’s threats to withdraw welfare benefits from those who commit anti-social acts as examples of this type of response. The trend in these reactions is one of “defining deviance up” (pg. xiv), bringing acts that are not necessarily criminal into the grip of criminal justice.

At first blush, the claim that marginalized communities are becoming de-civilized seems moralistic. Rodger avoids these charges by consistently declaring that state agents display similar behaviours and that these trends have larger socio-economic causes; he employs the term ‘de-civilization’ as a conceptual tool and not as a condemning label. In place of criminalization and individual moral regulation, Roger suggests that we address the socio-economic conditions behind these changes. His prescriptive vision is to reimplement welfarist social policy and couple it with “educational policies” and a “community development strategy that focus[es] on the cultural dimension of anti-social behaviour” (pg. 192). This solution, however, is not thoroughly defended in the text. Rodger criticizes ‘third way’ politics, yet it is unclear how what he proposes will not be co-opted by the political programs and processes he outlines in earlier pages.

Although Rodger most consistently focuses on Elias’ concepts and the topic of family, the text also explains how numerous other sociological perspectives apply to the issues discussed in each chapter. Included in Rodger’s overview are the works of Bourdieu, Bauman, Matza and Sykes, Durkheim, Piven and Cloward, Young, and Merton, to name only a few. Rodger, however, does not seriously engage the governmentality literature that documents the welfare state’s disciplinary functions.² An author cannot cover all the criminalization literature, but the governmentality critique of welfare severely damages Rodger’s claims that the welfare state can be associated with functional democratization and that we ought to replace criminalization with welfarist provisions and grass-roots education. The interconnection between welfare and behavioural control requires far greater attention than it receives from Rodger.

Rodger draws many of his assertions about the process of de-civilization from the literature he reviews. Unfortunately, Rodger does not substantiate previous authors’ claims with empirical evidence that convincingly demonstrates these processes in the US and UK. For instance, central to Rodger’s position is the claim that functional democratization is in decline because communities of elites and marginalized persons are less interdependent and have less contact with one another in post-industrial societies. However, to prove this alleged trend, Rodger relies heavily on Wacquant’s analysis of “hyperghettoization” and lists only anecdotal evidence about the existence of gated communities and suburbs (pgs. 32, 112). Rodger could improve his central arguments by providing more empirical grounding and relying less on other authors.

The new research that Rodger presents in this book is an analysis of UK social housing policy. In these pages, Rodger introduces original material that supports his de-civilization thesis. Regrettably, in order to provide an extensive review of existing scholarship, Rodger does not spend more time applying his unique Elias-inspired framework to this particular policy. Readers already familiar with the previous scholarship on criminalization will wish that Rodger devoted more pages to this analysis. Extending this interesting section, while condensing the chapter on youth subculture, would better showcase Rodger’s strong theory-building abilities, while giving the book a tighter focus on de-civilization and domestic life.

Although a survey of criminological theories is not the book’s explicit goal, the text will be a helpful resource for those looking for an undergraduate level sampling of criminological theory that maintains a policy focus. Rodger’s thorough literature review is the book’s greatest strength. Overall, despite the shortcomings listed above, Criminalising Social Policy will remain useful to those who are looking to familiarize themselves with the scholarship on criminalization and neoliberal politics.

¹ John Pratt. (2005). ‘Elias, Punishment, and Decivilisation’, in J. Pratt et al. (eds) The New Punitiveness. Cullompron: Willan. John Pratt. (1998). ‘Towards the “Decivilising” of Punishment?”, Social and Legal Studies. 7(4): 487-515.

² See, for example, the works in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, & Peter Miller. (1991). The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.