US EXPORTS ZERO TOLERANCE

Penal 'common sense' comes to Europe

As gigantic industrial and financial mergers are sweeping across the United
States and Europe, to the seeming indifference of the governments concerned,
political leaders everywhere are vying with each other to think up and
implement new ways of cracking down on crime. The mainstream media, often
forgetting that urban violence is rooted in the generalisation of social
insecurity, contribute with their own biases to defining these alleged
threats to society. Many of the remedies commonly proposed ('zero
tolerance', curfews, suspension of social allowances to offenders' families,
increased repression of minors) take their inspiration from the American
model. And, as in the United States, they are bound to lead to the extension
of social control compounded with exploding rates of imprisonment.

FOR the past several years now a moral panic has been welling up across
Europe that is capable of redirecting government policies and reshaping the
structure of the societies it affects. Its object is juvenile delinquency,
"urban violence", and the disorders for which "sensitive neighbourhoods" are
taken to be the breeding ground. There are so many terms that one is advised
to keep in quotation marks, since their meaning is as vague as the phenomena
they are alleged to describe. Yet these terms seem to be self-evident. They
swell the speeches of politicians, they saturate the daily papers, they
invade television.

These notions did not spring ready-made from reality. They are part of a
constellation of terms and theses from the United States, on crime,
violence, justice, inequality and responsibility, that have insinuated
themselves into the European debate to the point of serving as its framework
and focus. They owe their power of persuasion to their omnipresence and to
the prestige of their originators (1). The banalisation of these terms and
theses conceals a stake that has little to do with the problems to which
they refer: namely, the redefinition of the mission of the state, which is
everywhere withdrawing from the economic arena and asserting the need to
reduce its social role and to enlarge and stiffen its penal intervention.

Like a father who has been over-tender and lax, the European welfare state
would now be duty bound to become "lean and mean", to "downsize", and then
deal severely with its unruly flock. This means making "security" paramount.
It means the withering away of the economic state, diminution of the social
state, expansion of the penal state. Civic "courage", political "modernity",
even progressive boldness (marketed under the name of "the Third Way"),
would now demand that governments embrace the most worn-out law-and-order
cliches and measures.

We would need to reconstitute the chain of institutions, agents and
discursive supports by which the new penal common sense aiming to
criminalise poverty is being internationalised.

This process originates in Washington and New York City, and reaches Europe
via London. It is anchored by the complex formed by the organs of the
American state that are entrusted with implementing and showcasing "penal
rigour". Among these are the federal Department of Justice and the State
Department (which proselytises, through its embassies in each host country,
ultra-repressive criminal justice policies, particularly in regard to
drugs), semi-public and professional associations tied to the administration
of police and corrections. The media and the commercial enterprises that
partake of the business of imprisonment are also part of this process.

The private sector makes a decisive contribution to the conception and
implementation of public policy. In fact, the role of neoconservative
think-tanks in the constitution and internationalisation of the new punitive
doxa spotlights the bonds between the decline of the social sector of the
state and the deployment of its penal arm.

Indeed the think-tanks that paved the way for the advent of "real
liberalism" under Reagan and Thatcher by undermining Keynesian notions on
the economic and social front between 1975 and 1985 have, a decade later,
fed the political and media elites with concepts, principles and measures
designed to justify and speed up the establishment of a prolix and protean
penal apparatus. The same parties, politicians, pundits and professors who
yesterday advocated "less government" as regards capital and labour, are now
demanding, with as much fervour, "more government" to mask and contain the
nefarious social consequences of the deregulation of wage labour and the
deterioration of social protection.

On the American side it is the Manhattan Institute (even more than the
American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute and the Heritage
Foundation) that has popularised the discourses and policies aimed at
repressing the "disorders" fostered by those whom the French political
writer Alexis de Tocqueville called "the lowest rabble of our big cities".
In 1984 this organisation, founded by Anthony Fischer (Thatcher's mentor)
and William Casey (CIA director during Reagan's first term as president) to
apply market principles to social problems, launched Losing Ground, the book
by Charles Murray that would serve as a "bible" for Reagan's crusade against
the welfare state. This book misinterprets data to "demonstrate" that the
rise in poverty in the US is the result of the excessive generosity of
policies meant to support the poor Such support, it claims, rewards sloth
and causes the moral degeneracy of the lower classes, and especially the
"illegitimacy" held up as the source of all the evils of modern
societies---among them "urban violence".

The Manhattan Institute was soon consecrated as the premier "idea factory"
of the New American Right, federated around the triptych of free market,
individual responsibility and patriarchal values. In the early l990s the
institute organised a conference on "the quality of life". Its dual premise
was that the "sanctity of public space" is indispensable to urban life, and
that the "disorder" in which the poorer classes revel is the natural
breeding ground for crime. Among the participants in this "debate" was the
star prosecutor of New York City, Rudolph Giuliani, who had just lost the
mayoral elections to the black Democrat David Dinkins, and who would draw
from it the themes of his victorious campaign of 1993. In particular, he
adopted the guiding principles of the police and criminal justice policy
that would turn New York into the world showcase for the doctrine of "zero
tolerance" that gives the forces of law and order carte blanche to hunt out
petty crime and drive the homeless back into dispossessed neighbourhoods.

Again it was the Manhattan Institute that vulgarised the "broken window
theory" formulated in 1982 by James Q Wilson and George Kelling in an
article published by Atlantic Monthly magazine. A derivation of the popular
saying, "He who steals an egg, steals an ox", this so-called theory
maintains that by fighting inch-by-inch the small disorders of every day,
one can vanquish the large pathology of urban crime. The Manhattan
Institute's Centre for Civic Initiative, whose objective is "to research and
promulgate creative, free-market solutions to urban problems", financed and
promoted the book by Kelling and Catherine Coles, Fixing Broken Windows:
Restoring Order and Reducing Crime in Our Communities (3). This theory,
though it has never been validated, served as a criminological alibi for the
reorganisation of police work spurred on by police chief William Bratton.

The primary aim of this reorganisation is to soothe the fears of the middle
and upper classes---those who vote---by continually harassing the poor in
public spaces. Three means are deployed to achieve this goal: large
increases in the manpower and equipment of the police, the devolution of
operational responsibilities to local superintendents with mandatory target
goals, and a computerised monitoring system that allows the ongoing
redeployment and almost instantaneous intervention of police forces. This
results in an inflexible enforcement of the law, particularly against such
minor nuisances as drunkenness, disturbing the peace, begging, solicitation
and "other anti-social behaviours associated with the homeless", according
to Kelling's own terminology.

City authorities and the media credit this new policy for the decline in the
crime rate posted by New York City in recent years. ln doing so they ignore
two salient facts: the decline preceded the introduction of these police
tactics by three years, and crime has also dropped in cities that have not
app]ied these measures. Among the "lecturers" invited last year by the
Manhattan Institute to a forum to enlighten the upper crust of politics,
journalism, and philanthropic and research foundations on the East Coast was
former police chief Bratton, promoted to "intemational consultant" in urban
policing. Bratton has cashed in on the glory of having "reversed the crime
epidemic" in New York City with his autobiography, in which he preaches the
new credo of "zero tolerance" to the four corners of the globe
(4)---beginning with the United Kingdom, the first country to welcome these
policies on their way to the conquest of Europe.

On the British side the Adam Smith Institute, the Centre for Policy Studies,
and the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) have worked in concert to
disseminate neo-liberal ideas in economic and social matters (5), as well as
the punitive theses elaborated in the US and adopted by prime ministers John
Major and Tony Blair. For example, in late 1989 the IEA (also founded by
Anthony Fischer, under the intellectual patronage of Friedrich von Hayek)
orchestrated at Rupert Murdoch's initiative a series of meetings and
publications around the "thought" of Murray. Murray implored the British to
cut back drastically on their welfare state to check the emergence of an
"underclass" of alienated, dissolute and dangerous poor, close cousins to
the hordes said to be "devastating" American cities in the wake of the "lax"
social measures taken in the 1960s.

This intervention was followed by a blizzard of laudatory articles in the
British press. It led to a collection of essays in which Murray ruminates on
the need to bring the weight of the "civilising force of marriage" to bear
on "young black men who are essentially barbarians". Alongside this is a
chapter in which Frank Field, then in charge of welfare within the Labour
party and later Blair's minister of welfare reform, advocates measures
designed to prevent single mothers from having children and force "absentee
fathers" to assume financial responsibility for their illegitimate offspring
(6). One discerns a consensus taking shape between the most reactionary
segment of the American right and the self-proclaimed avant-garde of the
European "New Left", forged around the idea that the "undeserving poor"
ought to be brought back under control by the state, and their behaviour
corrected by public reprobation and by increasing the weight of
administrative constraints and penal sanctions.

By the tirne Murray returned to the attack in 1994, the notion of
"underclass" was well established in the larlguage of UK policy and he had
no difficulty in convincing his audience that his dismal predictions of 1989
had come true: "illegitimacy", "dependency" and crime had increased among
the UK's new poor and, together, threatened the death of Western
civilisation (7). And so in 1995 it was the turn of his ideological
comrade-in-arms, Lawrence Mead, the neo-conservative political scientist
from New York University, to explain to the British that if the state must
refrain from helping the poor materially, it must support them morally by
requiring them to work. This is the theme. since turned into a canon by
Blair, of the "obligations of citizenship", that justifies the institution
of forced wage labour under conditions that exempt from social and labour
law individuals i'dependent" on aid from the state---in 1996 in the US and
three years later in the UK (8).

The paternalist state that dictates to the poor how they should behave must
also be a punitive state. In 1997 the IEA brought Murray bach yet again,
this thne before an audience of political olficials and hand-picked
journalists, to promote the idea that iXprison works" and that corrections
expenditures are a well thought-out and profitable investment for society
(9). A few months after Murray's visit the lEA invited Bratton to a
symposium, in which eminent British police olficials were taking part, for
the purpose of popularising "zero tolerance".

Zero tolerance is in effect the necessary police complement to the mass
incarceration produced by the criminalisation of poverty. Bratton told the
meeting: "There is growing agreement between British and US police forces
that criminal and subcriminal [sic] behaviour such as littering, abuse,
graffiti and vandalism must be dealt with firmly to prevent more serious
criminal behaviour from developing."

The debate was prolonged by the publication of the book Zero Tolerance:
Policing a Free Society. Its title summarises its political philosophy:
"free" means (neo)-liberal and non-interventionist "above" in matters of
taxation and employment, and intrusive and intolerant "below" for everything
to do with the public behaviour of the working class, trapped by widespread
under-employment and precarious labour, on one hand, and the retrenchment of
social protection schemes and the indigence of public services, on the
other. Widely diffused among experts and members of Blair's government,
these notions have directly informed the 1998 Law on Crime and Disorder,
easily the single most repressive legislation on juvenile delinquency of the
post-war period. And to avoid any equivocation as to the target of these
measures, Blair justified support for zero tolerance in these candid terms:
"It is important that you say, 'We don't tolerate the small crimes.' The
basic principle here is to say, 'Yes it is right to be intolerant of people
homeless on the streets' " (10).

>From the UK, the notions and measures promoted by the neo-conservative
think-tanks of the US have spread throughout Europe. So much so that it is
difficult for any European official nowadays to express on security without
mouthing some "made in America" slogan, be it dressed up, as national honour
no doubt demands, with "a la French, Spanish or German", and so on.

The export of these law-and-order themes and theses hatched in America is
thriving only because it is has the approval of the authorities of the
importing countries. This approval assumes a variety of forms, ranging from
the jingoistic enthusiasm of Blair to the shameful and awkwardly denied
acceptance of the French prime minister, Lionel Jospin. Thus one must
include, among the agents of this transnational enterprise aimed at
diffusing the new punitive ethos, the leaders and officials of the European
states who are rallying around the imperative of "restoring" order after
converting to the benefits of the ("free") market and the necessity of a
smaller (social) state.

In those areas where the state has given up on bringing in firms and jobs,
it will put up police stations, perhaps in anticipation of building prisons
later. The expansion of the police and penal apparatus can even contribute
to the creation of jobs through the surveillance of the rejects of the world
of work: in France the 20,000 "adjunct security officers'' and 15,000 "local
mediation agents", who are supposed to be massed in France's "sensitive
neighbourhoods" before the end of 1999, represent a 10th of the "youth jobs"
promised by the Jospin government.

The countries that import the American instruments of a resolutely offensive
penality are not content just to receive these tools. They often borrow them
on their own initiative and adapt them to their needs and national
traditions. Such is the purpose of those "study missions" that have
multiplied in recent years across the Atlantic.

Following in the steps of Gustave de Beaumont and De Tocqueville, who set
out in the spring of 1831 on an excursion in the "classical soil of the
penitentiary system", elected officials, high-ranking civil servants and
penologists of the EU regularly make the pilgrimage to New York, Los Angeles
and Houston, with the aim of "penetrating the mysteries of American
discipline" and the hope of activating the "hidden springs" of its inner
workings back in their own homeland (11). Thus, it was in the wake of a
mission financed by Corrections Corporation of America, the world's leading
private incarceration firm, that Sir Edward Gardiner, head of the Commission
on Domestic Affairs, was able to discover the virtues of prison
privatisation and steer the UK towards for-profit imprisonment. He later
joined the board of directors of one of the main firms that compete for the
booming and lucrative punishment market: the number of inmates in British
private prisons has rocketed from 200 in 1993 to nearly 4,000 in 1998.

Another medium for the diffusion of the new penal common sense in Europe is
official reports. Politicians cloak their decisions in the garb of the
pseudo-science that those researchers most attuned to the politico-media
problematic of the moment are particularly apt at producing on command.
These works rely on the support of reports produced under analogous
circumstances and according to similar canons in those societies taken as
"models" or singled out for a "comparison" that typically boils down to
projection. Thus the governmental common sense of a country finds a warrant
in the state common sense of its neighbours through a process of circular
reinforcement.

For example, in an appendix to an official report on responses to juvenile
delinquency entrusted by Jospin to two socialist representatives, Christine
Lazerges and Jean-Pier}e Balduyck, there is a note by Hubert Martin, adviser
for social affairs at the French embassy in the US, that delivers a
panegyric of the curfews imposed on teenagers in the major American cities
(12). This civil servant parroted the results of a dubious survey published
by the National Association of Mayors of the big cities of the US with the
aim of defending this police gimmick that occupies a choice place in their
media "showcase" on crime and safety.

Martin has thus made himself the mouthpiece of American mayors who "have the
feeling" that curfews "have contributed to the current decline in juvenile
delinquency". In reality, these programmes have no measurable impact on
delinquency, which they merely displace. They are very onerous in personnel
and resources as they make it necessary to arrest, process, transport and
detain tens of thousands of youths every year who have not contravened any
law. And far from being the object of a "local consensus", as Martin claims,
they are vigorously fought in the courts on account of their discriminatory
enforcement and their repressive purpose, which contributes to criminalising
black and Latino youths in segregated neighbourhoods (13). One sees here how
a police measure manages to generalise itself, each country invoking the
"success" of the others as a pretext for adopting a technique of
surveillance and harassment, which, although it fails everywhere, finds
itself validated by the fact of its diffusion.

It is through academic exchanges and publications that intellectual
"smugglers" reformulate these categories in a sort of political science
pidgin, sufficiently concrete to "hook" state officials and journalists
anxious to "stick close to reality", but sufficiently abstract to strip
those categories of any over-flagrant idiosyncrasy that would attach them to
their original national context. And so these notions become semantic
commonplaces where all those meet up who, across the boundaries of
occupation, organisation, nationality and political affiliation,
spontaneously think advanced neo-liberal society as it wishes to be thought.

There is a striking illustration of this in Sophie Body-Gendrot's Cities
Confront Insecurity: From American Ghettos to the French Banlieues (14). Her
book is an exemplary specimen of false research on a false object,
pre-constructed by the politicaljournalistic common sense of the day,
"verified" by data gleaned from news magazine articles, opinion polls and
official publications and "authenticated" by a few quick trips to the
neighbourhoods incriminated. The title alone is a sort of prescriptive
precis of the new state doxa on the question. It suggests what it is now de
rigueur to think about the new police and penal rigour.

Here we have all the ingredients of the pseudo political science that is
gobbled up by the technocrats of ministerial staffs and the comment and
analysis pages of the dailies.

Everything that follows, a kind of catalogue of American cliches about
France and French cliches about America, allows Body-Gendrot to present as a
"middle way", the penal drift advocated by the current French socialist
government if the country is to avert disaster. The back cover of the book
declaims: "It is a matter of great urgency: in 'reinvesting' entire
neighbourhoods, we are seeking to prevent the middle classes from sliding
towards extreme political solutions [for which read the National Front]."
(To which one must add: in reinvesting them with police officers, not with
jobs.)

Body-Gendrot also manages to tack on to French neighbourhoods with high
concentrations of public housing the American mythology of the ghetto as
territory of dereliction, and to force the ghettoised areas of New York City
and Chicago into the French administrative fiction of the "sensitive
neighbourhood". Hence we have a series of pendulum swings passing themselves
off as an analysis. The US is utilised, not as one element in a methodical
comparison but as a bogeyman and as a model to be imitated. By raising the
spectre of "convergence", the US serves to elicit horror--- "the ghetto,
never in our society!"---and to dramatise the discourse so as to justify
taking "entire neighbourhoods" into police hands. It then remains only to
take up the De Tocquevillian refrain of grass-roots citizen initiative to
justify the importation into France of American techniques for the local
enforcement of public order.

Thus a new penal common sense, which has come from America, is being
propagated in Europe. It centres on increased repression of minor offences,
the hardening of penalties, the erosion of the specificity of the treatment
of juvenile delinquency, the special targeting of populations and areas
considered "at risk", and the deregulation of prison administration. All of
this is in perfect harmony with neoliberal common sense on the economic and
social front, which it completes and bolsters by disposing of any
consideration of a political or civic kind in order to extend the
economicist mode of reasoning, the imperative of individual
responsibility---the flip side of which is collective irresponsibility---and
the dogma of the efficiency of the market into the realm of crime and
punishment.

The expression "Washington consensus" is commonly used to designate the
panoply of measures of "structural adjustment" imposed by the rulers of
global finance on debtor nations as a condition for international aid (with
the disastrous results that have recently been in glaring evidence in Russia
and Asia), and, by extension, the neo-liberal economic policies that have
triumphed in all advanced capitalist countries over the past two decades
(15). It would be proper to enlarge this notion and to encompass in it the
punitive treatment of the social insecurity and marginality that are the
socio-logical consequences of such policies. And, just as France's socialist
governments played a pivotal role in the mid-1980s in the international
legitimation of submission to the market, today Jospin's administration
finds itself poised in a strategic position to normalise, by lending it
backing "from the left", the policing and carceral management of poverty in
advanced society.

references:

(1) On the social conditions and mechanisms of cultural diffusion of this
new planetary vulgate, whose fetish terms, seemingly shot up out of nowhere,
are nowadays everywhere---globalisation, flexibility, multiculturalism,
communitarianism, ghetto or underclass, and their "postmodem" cousins:
identity, minority, ethnicity, fragmentation, etc.---see Pierre Bourdieu and
Loic Wacquant, "On the Cunning of Impenalist Reason", Theory, Culture,
Society 16:1, February 1999, pp. 41-57.

(2) See Donziger, "Fear, Politics, and the Prison-lndustnal Complex", in The
Real War on Cmne, Basic Books, New York, 1996, pp. 63-98.

(3) Kelling and Coles, Fixing Broken Windows: Restoring Order and Reducing
Crime in Our Communities, The Free Press, New York, 1996.

(4) Knobler and Bratton, Turnaround: How America's Top Cop Reversed the
Crime Epidemic, Random House, New York, 1998.

(5) Keith Dixon, Les Evangelistes du marche, tlditions Liber-Raisons d'agir,
Paris, 1998. They have recently been joined by Demos, who plays a similar
role from "across" the polidcal line.

(6) Charles Murray, The Emerging British Underclass, Institute of Economic
Affairs, London, 1990.

(7) Institute of Economic Affairs, Charles Murray and the Underclass: The
Developing Debate, IEA, London, 1995.

(8) Alan Deacon (ed.), From Welfare to Work: Lessons from America, IEA,
London, 1997. See also Loic Wacquant, "Quand M. Clinton 'refomme' la
pauvrete", Le Monde diplomatique, September 1996.

(9) Charles Murray (ed.), Does Prison Work?, IEA, London, 1997, p. 26.

(10) Norman Dennis et al., Zero Tolerance: Policing a Free Society, IEA,
London, 1997. See Tony Blair's declaration in the Guardian, 10 April 1997.
Richard Sparks, Professor of Criminology at Keele University, has provided
invaluable infommation on thus subject.

(11) The expressions in quotation marks are those of Beaumom and De
Tocqueville, "The Penitentaq System in the United States and its Application
in France," in Alexis de Tocqueville, Oeuvres completes, Gallimard, Paris,
1984, vol. IV, p. 11.

(12) C. Lazerges and l.-P. Balduyck, Reponses a la d61inquance des mineurs,
La documentation fran,caise, Paris, 1998, pp. 433-436.

(13) Eg, Ruefle and Reynolds, ~Curfews and Delinquency in Major American
Cibes", Crime and Delgnquency, 41:3, July 1995, pp, 347-363.

(14) Sophie Body-Gendrot, Les Vilks facc a l"inse'curite', Paris, Bayard
ltditions. 1998. "Banikue" is roughly equivalent to imier city in social
terms.

( 15) Yves Dezalay and Bqumt Garth, "Le Washington consensus: contribubon a
une sociologie de l'hegemonie du neoliberalisme", Actes dk la recherche en
scienecs sociaks, DO. 121-122, March 1998.