to be uncovering new needs. In a sense, they are correct. The
social reaction to crime does not only reinforce social solidarity
(as left and right functionalists suggest) but has the opposite
'latent function' - to expose the cracks and wounds in the social
body. As the prospects get bleaker for a genuinely caring welfare
state, the awful tragec,iy is that someone·has to commit an offence
(or be considered 'at risk') before the state will provide the services
it should have provided anyway. But should crime-control systems
be used in this way?
I argued earlier for doing good and doing justice as positive
social values to 'counter' purely utilitarian crime-control theory.
As it stands, this argument has two enormous flaws. The first is
that it does nothing to resolve the inevitable clash of values between
goodness and justice. Here I can only restate the difficulty
of finding a fixed and absolute ordering of priorities. Each policy
decision becomes an arena for clarifying these values and knowing
where they compete.
The second flaw is that utilitarianism can never be really avoided:
crime-control systems are utilitarian by definition. Social policy
is the choice of means to achieve ends (even if these ends are themselves
largely expressive or symbolic). The declared purpose of the
crime-control system (and its mimesis in academic criminology) is
to reduce or prevent crime. The blatant historical failure of either
the system or the discipline to deliver the utilitarian goods - in
the form of a crime-control policy that 'works' - cannot itself be
an argument against utilitarian thinking. We can state in analytical
terms that the 'real' purpose of the system is something else
(endless classification, increased discipline, norm clarification or
whatever), or even show that in-built failure is the required condition
for the system and discipline to thrive. But it would be an
irrelevant type of crime-control politics that deliberately rejected
common-sense utilitarian criteria, as if to assert that such matters
as death, injury, loss or insecurity as a result of criminal victimization
are of no importance at all.
In a whole range of crimes and delinquencies too obvious to
enumerate, we have to accept the most utilitarian of all commonsense
justifications for punishment, namely, deterrence. And in
those same examples, doing good for the individual offender must
have very low priority, both in instrumental and expressive terms.
One of the most banal of criminological truisms - again, the type
stated on the first pages of textbooks and then forgotten (as I
have throughout this book) - is that there are different types of
crime and that no policy or causal generalizations can cover them