Volume 1, No. 7 (October, 1991), pp. 107-111
THE POLITICS OF STREET CRIME: CRIMINAL PROCESS AND CULTURAL
OBSESSION by Stuart A. Scheingold. Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1991.
Reviewed by James Eisenstein (Pennsylvania State University)
As its title suggests, this book examines two distinct but
related themes. One, broad in scope and speculative in nature,
deals with society's cultural responses to crime and the conse-
quences of this response. The other, drawing on an investigation
of effects of the politics of street crime in one jurisdiction,
focuses on narrower and more empirically grounded questions.
Those familiar with Stuart Scheingold's other books will not be
surprised to find his treatment of the first theme provoking and
insightful. He tackles a significant topic, "the forces
driving America's understanding of and response to street
crime." (p.172) His argument, which I will try to summarize
below, is sophisticated and stimulating.
Scheingold identifies several useful conceptual distinctions and
skillfully applies them to his analysis. In both the intro-
ductory and concluding chapters he distinguishes between two
overarching explanations for crime: the "volitional,"
which focuses upon individual characteristics; and the
"structural," which examines material conditions in
society. He describes three models which criminal justice systems
can adopt in dealing with crime --the punitive model, the
communitarian model, and the justice model -- and argues that all
three share the premises to the volitional school's
understanding. He asserts that the increasing politicization of
street crime in American society plays out differently at the
national and local levels. National politicians engage in a
symbolic politics rich in the rhetoric of punitiveness without
incurring obligations to commit material resources. Local
officials, faced with the reality of operating and paying for
criminal justice systems, are less anxious to politicize crime;
they produce inconsistent policies (for exam- ple, police policy
drawn from the "communitarian model" and moderate
sentencing policy based on the "justice model") and
thus less punitive, even moderate, outcomes.
How can local officials sustain this pattern of inconsistent and
relatively moderate policies in the face of pressure toward
punitiveness generated by the politicization of street crime in
society generally? Central to his argument is the assertion that
local justice systems are effectively (but not completely)
insulated from such pressures. Other factors, such as a public
only intermittently concerned enough about crime to make its
demands felt, the random effects of political events and the
personal views of key decision-makers' also contribute to this
conclusion. Scheingold correctly qualifies his conclusion on the
insulation of local justice officials from the politics of street
crime, stating that "things have changed during the last
twenty- five years" (p.164) in the public's attitudes and
demands that have permanently shifted policy toward greater
harshness.
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Finally, Scheingold describes some enduring dilemmas and problems
produced by the politics of street crime. The divergent views of
national and local politicians create a continuing tension.
"Structural dislocations" in American society produce
an underlying dissatisfaction among Americans. But the pressure
for fundamental structural reform that might arise from this
dissatisfaction is displaced and frustrated because the public's
attention is diverted to the politicization of street crime. This
both prevents structural reform and guarantees continuing
conflict and uncertainty over what society's policies toward
crime should be.
As Scheingold observes, although a number of disciplines deal
tangentially with the cultural meaning of street crime, none make
it their central concern. He does, and the argument out- lined
above makes a good contribution to the task of addressing the
cultural meaning and political effects of the politicization of
crime.
This broad argument, as Scheingold acknowledges, is "avowed-
ly speculative and exploratory," and is based on
"extrapolations from my research rather than its manifest
findings." (p.164) This raises a troubling question: just
what is the relationship between his general theory and the
empirical study of the politicization of crime and its effects in
his research site, "Cedar City?" How successful was he
in accomplishing the diffi- cult task of examining the politics
of street crime and in utilizing his results to draw general
conclusions?
Here my judgment is considerably less positive. Ultimately, the
description of the nature and effects of the politicization of
street crime in "Cedar City" and "Park
County" is unconvincing and usually less sophisticated and
insightful than the discus- sions of the first theme. Two notable
exceptions deserve men- tion. Scheingold's description of the
evolution of the police department's policies and changes in its
personnel and the relationship between the chief of police and
the mayor provides a rare glimpse into the dynamics of the
interaction between city politics and police policy. His analysis
of how the electoral defeat of two "liberal" judges
resulted in "judicial prudence" in sentencing provides
some intriguing glimpses into the intersec- tion of politics,
perceptions, and decision makers.
Space does not permit a full description of the theoretical and
methodological weaknesses of the empirical study. A summary of
the major problems, however, may convey a sense of their nature
and scope.
First, explicit operational definitions of key terms are often
not provided, or are buried or change. No clear definition of
what are defined as "street crimes" is given; at times,
rates of the FBI's "Part I" crimes are used as a
measure of street crime. Elsewhere, specific offenses (murder,
sexual assault, aggravated assault, robbery, and burglary) are
included in the analysis, while others that also might arouse
public anxiety are not.
Similarly, the concept of the "politicization" of
street crime is not carefully enough defined. At one point
(p.31), he states that "to politicize crime is to put it on
the political agenda." He further distinguishes
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between the "systemic" and "institutional"
agenda. But the measures used to determine presence on either of
them are often unclear or incomplete. For instance, only a
content analysis of newspaper stories provides data on crime as
an issue on the systemic agenda; missing are an examination of
television news and advertisements. Much of the analysis of the
presence of crime on the institutional agenda draws upon ballot
initiatives and elections, which are cited as examples of the
"most advanced stage of politicization," but electoral
outcomes are incomplete measures in the absence of indicators of
the perceptions of participants, budgetary outcomes, and the
like. Scheingold presents a conceptually strong outline of how to
study politicization when he notes that it "seems to follow
an interac- tive course based on complex relationships among
elected offi- cials, influential elites, media messages, and
public percep- tions." However, the research design does not
allow him to investigate these relationships.
The operationalizations of outcome measures also are weak. Most
striking is the failure to emphasize what I consider to be the
most significant effect of the politicization of crime -- the
increase in the number of people incarcerated and the length of
their sentences. We are told little about the capacity or
population of the local jail and the state prison system, and
little about how they changed during the period covered by the
research. Thus, the effort to link street crime, its
politicization, and its effects is rendered problematic by the
failure to define and to operationalize well these concepts.
A second problem rests in the absence of sufficient descrip- tion
of the research methodology. Although a description of the
newspaper content analysis appears in footnotes, important
details remain unclear. Were editorials and letters to the editor
included? How about articles describing what judicial and
district attorney candidates' said in campaign appearances? Were
the campaign ads of district attorney candidates analyzed?
Further, nowhere are we told how many people in what positions
were interviewed, nor what the interview schedule consisted of.
A related problem stems from some weaknesses in the research
design. Because a major research question involved the impact the
politicization of street crime might have had on judges,
prosecutors, and other key participants, explicit questions about
their perceptions should have been asked and the answers ana-
lyzed. Though at one point Scheingold cites research on the role
television plays in shaping public attitudes, we learn virtually
nothing about the content of local television coverage of crime.
Even impressionistic descriptions of how local TV news broadcasts
cover crime would have been helpful. Including the producers of
these shows (and the publisher and editor of the local newspaper)
in the list of persons interviewed would have been even better.
Measures of policy shifts in the police department's assignment
of personnel, perhaps available from internal documents or
budgets, are not attempted.
One of the strengths of the study is its examination of changes
over time. However, most of the information analyzed only goes up
to 1978. Important questions about what happened subsequently (to
give one example, the fate of the police department's efforts at
community policing during the Reagan era) are
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not answered. Even some impressionistic descriptions of what
happened after 1978 or 1980 in a book copyrighted in 1991 would
have added to the richness of the book's insights, especially
given the continued emphasis on crime by national politicians in
the 1980s.
The book cites a rich variety of prior research. Nonethe- less,
it does not utilize concepts from this research that would have
added to the power and credibility of the empirical analy- sis.
It looks at changes in sentencing policy, but does not draw upon
the notion of "going rates." In the first section of
chapter 4, it assumes that prosecutors determined sentences; in
the latter part of the same chapter, it assumes that judges
determined them. It explicitly rejects looking at organizational
characteristics of the principal sponsoring organizations. Its
focus on the divergence between national and local politicians
leaves almost totally ignored the role of state government. The
legal structure of sentencing, the definitions of crimes and the
penalties associated with them, and the capacity of the prison
system, all important in shaping outcomes, depend on decisions
made at the state level. The failure to look at state level
politics and policies and how the politics of street crime affect
them constitutes a major conceptual weakness.
Problems also exist in the analysis of the data. Differenc- es
among judges' sentences could not be examined. The analysis of
differences in prosecutors' policies looks at the percentage
distribution of various sexual assault charges, but fails to
inquire into why the total number of prosecutions for one was 281
and for the other 785. In general, the analysis and interpreta-
tion of the quantitative data and (usually) the qualitative data
lack the sophistication and substance of the discussions of the
broader issues examined in the beginning and concluding chapters.
Scheingold argues that the local criminal justice system was
largely insulated from local politics; yet he presents counter
evidence that renders this conclusion suspect. In fact, his final
conclusions are not clear to me regarding the degree to which
local politics and opinion shaped policy in the criminal justice
system. I also am confused about the extent to which he qualifies
his generalizations based on the results of his re- search in
Cedar City. One the one hand, he recognizes that it is
"hardly 'typical.'" Its black population was only about
10%; its crime problem not especially pressing; its political
culture emphasized low conflict and civility; its newspaper
encouraged low-key campaigns and criticized incendiary rhetoric.
He recog- nizes street crime achieved greater salience in
Indianapolis, Newark, and Philadelphia and intruded into politics
less than in Boston or Minneapolis (p. 70). Nevertheless, he
asserts the appropriateness of generalizing more broadly, as when
he states that "both the empirical record and the logic of
politicization suggest that Cedar City experiences reveal
important general- izations about the politicization of street
crime in the United States," and goes on to conclude that
"street crime was not a particularly promising target of
opportunity for local political entrepreneurs." (p.66)
Despite the many serious problems with the conceptualization and
implementation of the empirical portion of the research reported
in this book, it makes a useful contribution to our general
understanding
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of the politics of crime in America. Empirically researching this
issue is devilishly difficult. Scheingold has made a pioneering
start. To the extent he has stumbled, the book provides useful
lessons for others who have the good sense and the courage to
tackle such a challenging and important topic.
Copyright 1991