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The Will to Deviance
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16275 |
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BOOK WORLD
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3 / 1989 |
3,843 Words |
| Author
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Jeffrie G. Murphy
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In his novella Billy Budd, Herman Melville struggles to explain the malicious evil present in his character John Claggart--the master-at-arms who sets in motion the chain of events that ultimately destroys the innocent and beautiful Billy. Despairing of gaining understanding either through common sense or ordinary science, Melville finally lights on the concept of "natural depravity"--a concept that transcends our ordinary secular consciousness of ordinary badness and engages a perspective (one of extraordinary evil, seductive sin, and self-chosen loathsomeness) that seems mythic and theological.
In his Seductions of Crime, Jack Katz is also struggling to understand evil--mainly the kind present in those cases of extreme criminal violence that make the TV news and terrify us all--and he finds the traditional patterns of explanation that dominate the behavioral sciences lacking in their power to illuminate. Behavioral scientists tend to practice what the philosopher Robert Nozick has called "normative sociology"--the study of what the causes of social problems ought to be.
Since most of these writers are from the political Left, it is not surprising that they want the primary cause of crime to be economic, or material. For if this is the cause of crime, several views of appeal to the Left will seem to gain support--for example, criminals, portrayed as alienated victims of economic discrimination and oppression, will not be viewed as fully to blame for their wrongdoing, and the curer for crime will thus not be viewed simply as more and harsher punishments. The primary cure will rather be the elimination of poverty (and thus the climate that produces alienation) through more extensive programs of social welfare and perhaps even a transition to socialism.
Even some writers on the libertarian Right are also drawn to certain economic models of criminality. While not charmed by the concept of alienation and other bits of the jargon of Marxist economics, they do like the idea that criminality is economic in the sense of being a mater of rational calculation for the advancement of self-interest. On this model, the solution to the crime problem is obvious: Increase the severity and certainly of punishments until you make the business costs of a criminal career too great for most potential criminals. To think of crime control in deterrence terms is in this sense to think economically, for punishment is here viewed as a price tag on social deviance--a price set so high that most rational calculators will not be willing to pay it.
These material or economic approaches strike Katz as hopelessly inadequate for understanding the mystery of evil he sees at the heart of much criminal violence. In purely economic terms, most violent crime does not pay--at least not very well--and most violent criminals, if they give it any thought at all, are vaguely aware that they could better advance their economic well-being either by pursuing noncriminal careers or careers in crimes not directly involved with violence. (Drug dealing, for example, tends to be much more profitable than armed robbery.) Also, the vast majority of even very poor people are not criminals but are indeed very law-abiding citizens. Thus, though poverty may be one of many background conditions that increase the probability of violent crime, it tells us nothing about why a particular person, at a particular time, unleashed terrifying violence against another particular
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