Criminal Identities and Consumer Culture:
Crime, Exclusion and the New Culture of Narcissism

By Steve Hall, Simon Winlow and Craig Ancrum
Portland, OR: Willan Publishing, 2008

In the advanced capitalist world, consumer culture has largely come to delineate the boundaries of normalcy, providing images of the good life to which all should aspire, and setting forth criteria for achieving social status, recognition and inclusion. At the same time, strands of critical thinking within and beyond the academy have increasingly linked this culture to a range of pathologies surfacing within contemporary life, from environmental destruction, to public health crises, the loss of distinctive local cultural traditions, and a pervasive sense of personal meaninglessness. In their new book, Hall, Winlow and Ancrum offer a provocative exploration of consumer culture as a site where normality and deviance overlap and fuse. In their view, criminological theory needs to take on board a forthright critique of this culture, to the extent that it is now one of the key drivers of harmful crime, a central factor in contemporary identity-formation, and an important index of the “ethico-cultural direction” of society as a whole.

The growing centrality of consumerist values and aspirations to crime and anti-social behaviour at all levels of society has, the authors argue, tended to be overlooked because of critical criminology’s lopsided focus upon crime as a hegemonic social construction fed by media representations and the alarmist cries of “law and order” politicians. By breaking with this “left-liberal” consensus and re-engaging with the motives of criminal activity itself, they seek to offer not another conservative jeremiad against demonic thugs, but a “radical social democratic” response to neoliberalism and its array of negative socio-economic and cultural consequences. The centerpiece of their analysis is a detailed ethnographic study of criminal identities within low-income areas in northeast England which have been particularly hard-hit by deindustrialization, the curtailment of state services, and the emergence of a service economy based on precarious forms of labour. In such environments, crime and violence has become a routine part of everyday life, offering working class youth a means of bridging the gulf between their own limited social opportunities and the inflated lifestyle expectations fostered by consumer culture.

The book’s extensive interviews with the predominantly white, male working class youth involved in low-level criminal activity in these economically disadvantaged areas reveal how closely “deviant” behaviour is entwined with an allegiance to the approved values and status distinctions of mainstream consumer society. Rejecting the impulse to regard crime as “an unfairly labeled act of proto-rebellion driven by a latent and frustrated sense of social justice” (p. 198), the authors highlight the extent to which underclass criminality is consonant with the competitive individualism promoted by neoliberalism itself, and at odds with the oppositional impulses of more collectivistic working class traditions. Their interviewees evince no understanding that the difficulties they face are rooted in an oppressive socio-economic order, tending to see themselves as one lucky break away from a life of fantastic wealth and unrestrained indulgence. Attempting to salve their fractured narcissism and lift themselves into the “simulated aristocracy” of consumer society through the ongoing acquisition and display of symbolically potent goods, they feel little but contempt toward the “losers” who visibly embody the deprivation and exclusion which they otherwise share.

This book offers a timely contribution to criminological theory, and to a range of related debates within the sociology of consumption and cultural studies. While its critique of consumerism is admirable in its theoretical scope and interdisciplinary range, it overstates the extent to which consumption has vanquished all other sources of personal identity, to the point that its interviewees sometimes seem less like conflicted and contradictory individuals than ideal types or allegorical characters in a morality play warning us of the impending “ethico-cultural implosion” of society as a whole. Although the authors argue that criminologists have often shied away from making "real suggestions" (p. 20) about how to reduce crime and improve everyday social life, they also fall short on this count. At times, their focus on the psycho-cultural motivations of criminals seems to suggest that deviant individuals should simply “stop believing” in consumerism’s false promises (p. 217) and engage in self-willed moral transformation. In other instances, their effort to understand contemporary criminal identities in relation to the emergence of neoliberalism seems to imply the need to somehow resurrect the post-war Fordist compromise, without considering its own relationship to the gestation of consumer society and the gradual demobilization of working class movements. In spite of such lacunae, this book is a very theoretically and empirically rich piece of scholarly work that is bound to spur much productive debate in criminology and beyond for many years to come.