Crime and morality: the significance of criminal justice in post – 2 modern culture (original) (raw)

2002, International Journal of the Sociology of Law

Book reviews Crime and morality: the significance of criminal justice in post-2 modern culture Hans Boutellier; Kluwer Academic, Dordrecht, xii+181 pp., $115 hardback This book confronts a topic that has taken on increasing significance in the last 10 years or so. The author seeks, as Michael Tonry states in the preface, to uncover why public anxiety about crime has not declined in conjunction with a drop in crime rates. According to the author, one reason why conventional criminology has been unable to explain this phenomenon is that the criminal event has been stripped of moral significance. Control-oriented criminology, which the author sees as deriving from Hirschi's work, and which would include most facets of situational crime prevention, views the moral significance of crime as consisting of a breach of the criminal law. The morality of crime is treated in a positivistic fashion, as it is assumed from the existing corpus of law rather than thematized. Critical criminology sees the moral significance of crime as residing within a set of social relationships beyond the connections between offender and victim. In Boutellier's pithy phrase, for the former, crime constitutes a technical problem and, for the latter, a political one. By contrast, Boutellier wishes to treat crime as a moral problem, an act that signifies something relevant about the morality of a society. Whilst official agencies may prefer to gloss over this position, the public are well aware of the moral resonance of crime, and it is this acknowledgement that provokes such strident responses. In his second chapter, Boutellier examines the practical consequences of putting the moral significance of crime is abeyance by recounting the progress of the debate on crime in the Netherlands. The work of the Roethof committee, reiterated in the government white paper in 1985, analysed petty crime as resulting from the 'depillarization' of Dutch society, the subsidence of general moral standards, particularly those derived from religion. External forms of control had not filled the space vacated by internalized control. Initially, crime prevention policy was reticent about 'moralizing' the problem of crime, but subsequently policy sought to 'confirm essential norms in society'. The problem is what, in an increasingly fractured society, can serve as the basis for these norms, administrative criminology sees it as axiomatic that the criminal law reflects morality and thus crime prevention policy is normatively sanctioned. But this complacency is attacked by critical criminologists who accuse the state of unjustified repression. As Boutellier says, 'the assumption that the population endorses the conventional order is too superficial'. Yet he does not align himself with critical criminology due to its allegedly blas! e