Roger Hopkins Burke

Vandalism and anti-social behaviour

1. Towards a Cultural Criminology of Vandalism and Anti-Social Behaviour 2. Exploratory and Drift Vandalism 3. Target Vandalism 4. Context Vandalism 5. Collateral Vandalism 6. Hate Vandalism 7. The Anti-Social and Vandalistic State 8. The Pro-Social Political Vandal 9. Vandalism and Cyberspace 10. Vandalism and Anti-Social Behaviour across Late Modern Societies 11. Conclusions

The Anti-Social and Vandalistic State

So much of orthodox criminology is built upon an uncritical acceptance of the black letter law notion that ‘crime’ is simply what the statute book says. Critical criminologists have reminded us that because of this there is an unhealthy focus on the activities of ‘blue-collar’ criminals rather than paying due attention to the crimes of the powerful. In this context the term ‘vandal’ is associated with the adolescent standing by a shop window armed with a brick in hand or the youth armed with a knife ready to slash car tyres. This chapter asks the question whether these sort of vandalistic practices pale into insignificance when compared to the abominations committed by the state in terms, for example, of environmental destruction and damage caused through warfare.

Vandalism and Anti-Social Behaviour across Late-Modern Societies

It has been a central argument of this book that vandalism is far from random and sporadic, but when it is ‘filtered’ through the lens of cultural criminology we can see that it is highly patterned and systematic, if not predictable. Vandalism may be predictable to a certain extent, but as we have argued using many examples, it is multifaceted, in places sophisticated and inspirational in others, asinine, repulsive and offensive. The focus of much of this work has been on the United Kingdom — although we have used examples from around the world, in particular, Australia and the United States — but it is now time to systematically cast our gaze towards other countries, to develop a more international and comparative perspective. In doing so, we can see that in some cases the experience of the United Kingdom is repeated in other countries, but in other instances there are marked social and cultural differences in terms of the experience of vandalism.

Exploratory and Drift Vandalism

In this chapter we consider what we have chosen to term the ‘exploratory’ and the ‘drift’ vandalisms perpetrated by both children and adolescents respectively. In beginning to classify and label vandalism, we must acknowledge the original typology which the late Stan Cohen (1973) developed over four decades ago. One of his typologies was ‘play vandalism’, which is carried out by children and characterised by an apparent lack of overt malice. It is our contention that much vandalism is committed by children in the spirit of mere curiosity and in the spirit of discovery; hence, our term exploratory vandalism. In terms of this conceptualisation, property damage may be incidental rather than intentional.

The Pro-Social Political Vandal

In his original typology of vandalism, Cohen (1973: 35) referred to ‘ideological vandalism’ as that which is perpetrated with the intention of furthering a particular cause or political issue. In referring to a ‘science of ideas’, the French Enlightenment philosopher and aristocrat Destutt de Tracy (1754–1836) was one of the first to use both the notion and term ‘ideology’. His Elements d’ideologie (1817–1818) was foundational in terms of future social scientific work around shared belief systems and culturally taken for granted assumptions (see Hart, 2008). Indeed Emmet (1979: 355) maintained that the ‘science of ideas’ was the first ‘science’ and that all other science would spring forth from the pivotal notion of ‘ideology’, including conceptions of logic, grammar, education and morality. The over-arching goal of ideology was to offer some kind of regulation of society.

Towards a Cultural Criminology of Vandalism and Anti-Social Behaviour

All of us will have broken something on many occasions in our lives — it could be in a domestic context like a plate or a vase. It could be in a social context, like a glass. Accidental damage aside, evidence suggests that at some point or other in our lives, many of us will have also wilfully broken something. It is the shift from the former as in the ‘accident’ to the latter in terms of intentionality, which signifies what we term ‘vandalism’ in our culture. We begin this chapter by asking what this term actually means and by tracing where it actually comes from.

Vandalism and Cyberspace

According to Internet Live Statistics (2014), an estimated 40 per cent of the global population has access to the World Wide Web, with much higher levels among the industrialised ‘first world’. The pace of social change is considerable with the worldwide figure standing at just 1 per cent only two decades ago. Between the end of the last millennium in 1999 and 2013, global Internet usage has increased tenfold. In usage terms, the first billion was reached in 2005, the second in 2010 and the third billion by the end of 2014.

Theorizing the Criminal Justice System: Four Models of Criminal Justice Development

This article identifies and discusses four models that seek to explain the development of the criminal justice system and in whose interests it operates. Three existing, apparently competing, and contradictory models are identified: (1) the orthodox social progress model; (2) the radical conflict model; and (3) the carceral society surveillance model. This article introduces a fourth, the left realist hybrid model, which recognizes the strengths and complementary potential of the other three models and which proposes that a synthesis of all provides a more comprehensive explanatory tool. At the same time, this hybrid model importantly recognizes the interest and collusion of the general public in the creation of the increasingly pervasive sociocontrol surveillance matrix of the carceral society of which the contemporary criminal justice system is a central component.