Stanley Cohen

Whose side were we on? The undeclared politics of moral panic theory

This paper deals with some hidden political dimensions of moral panic theory. It concentrates on the implications of two related claims about what this battle meant: first, that moral panics are inherently normative and can be categorized as good and bad moral panics (the ones that we study are invariably bad); second, that students of moral panics have to take sides in this normative battle. There are differences in the ways this question was originally posed in the late 1960s and today.

Moral Panics and Folk Concepts

This introductory article reviews three controversies raised by the concept of “moral panic” since it was first introduced some thirty years ago. The first deals with two supposed attributes of panics (a) the disproportionality and (b) the volatility of the social reaction. The second, is the moral dimension of the reaction. The third is the implication that the label of “moral panics” is merely a way of making political judgement.

Ideology? What ideology?

In reading Wacquant’s latest work, I was reminded of the famous cartoon where one academic says to another: ‘Well yes, he discovered fire, but what’s he done since then?’ Wacquant has produced highly creative research. (This creativity was already apparent a few years ago in the field of social control, and it is odd that he does not refer to that as his field.) I intend here to discuss some points that ‘need further development’, if I may use a cliché. I will focus more specifically on the role Wacquant attributes in his narrative to knowledge, ideas, academic theories and organisations such as think-tanks. I do not have many problems with the content of Wacquant’s thesis: the massive surge in the use of imprisonment; the penalisation of poverty to curb urban disorders resulting from economic deregulation and the erosion of social care; and the perception of the prison not merely as a technical instrument for implementing criminal justice policy, but as a core political institution for the Leviathan to reveal itself. We are all Foucauldian enough to grasp the inextricable and inevitable link between power and knowledge, but I believe we can still look at the operation of knowledge – and academic and intellectual knowledge in particular – in a separate sphere. I can see three stages in which ideas appear to matter, explicitly or implicitly, in Wacquant’s current books. First, in the original construction of institutional changes; that is to say, the ideas that inform (or ‘lie behind’) the change of the policy. Second, in their continuing role in legitimating power. Here knowledge functions as an alibi for the continued implementation of policy changes (leaving behind ‘deposits of power’). And third – a rather special and specific context –, in the export or transfer of policies, especially from the United States to continental Europe. Wacquant explicitly takes the role of warning the gullible natives, particularly the French. The latter come out rather badly in his caricature; a savage portrait of these stupid and pompous institutions in France’s pretentious and utterly bogus public face, with titles like ‘Institute for Higher Studies and Domestic Security’, which obviously sound even grander in French. Wacquant notes that these institutions neither hide nor even try to hide their fascination for the supposedly novel and amazingly effective methods of community policing and other such American policies, which they just buy into without any question. Such Mickey Mouse ideas as ‘broken windows’, ‘zero tolerance’, ‘community policing’,

Comments on Simon Cottee’s ‘Folk Devils and Moral Panics:“Left Idealism” Reconsidered’, in Theoretical Criminology 6(4)

Simon Cottee’s article depicts our work as a long series of Punch and Judy shows: two puppets slugging out the same dumb name-calling battles for 30 years. Neither of us has much ‘agency’. The hapless Young does not even understand that ‘ideas presuppose agents’; he seems to think that ‘. . . the ideas do battle on their own behalf’ (p. 390). For him, ‘The protagonists of criminology are never humans, but only reified abstractions’ (p. 391). Young comes out altogether badly: his accounts of others’ work are judged as misplaced, misleading, even ‘conspicuous fiction’ (p. 391); his criticisms (of the early history of British criminology, of left idealism, of Cohen’s work) are ‘. . . founded upon a fundamentally inappropriate approach to the history of ideas’ (p. 403). Cohen gets off more lightly. His histories of early 1960s’ British criminology were wrong and unfair; his support for re-mapping the subject into broader social and sociological issues, was, far from being radical, ‘obsequiously conventional’ (p. 397). Cottee’s personal animus against Young, however, is openly stated and the whole article consists of obsessionally textual defences of Cohen-texts against Young-texts. But Cottee’s real target, as we will see, is our common commitment as representatives of (loosely speaking) ‘critical criminology’. C O M M E N T A R Y

Time and the Long-term Prisoner

Those who dislike speculation about past and future can usually see an end to the situation which has induced such relative breaks in the normal scheduling of life; they can consider plans for when they get out of hospital, or prison, or home on holiday. There are still bills to be paid, visits to relations to be arranged, home coming parties to be organised during those times when one is absent from the normal run of life. The ordinary temporal scheduling of one’s affairs is kept in the background of one’s mind by the continued operation of such financial, domestic and social matters. When twenty years of one’s time is taken away, even these routine matters disappear. The landscape of time, the past and the future, and the actual significance of the present moment insistently occupy the mind. The prisoners in E-Wing found Victor Serge’s description of this obsessive state the most accurate.

Visions of Social Control: Crime, Punishment and Classification

Introduction. 1. The Master Patterns. 2. Inside the System. 3. Deposits of Power. 4. Stories of Change. 5. The Professionals. 6. Visions of Order. 7. What Is To Be Done. Appendix. Index.

Psychological Survival: The Experience of Long-Term Imprisonment.@@@Making it in Prison: The Square, the Cool, and the Life.

Psychological survival : the experience of long-term imprisonment , Psychological survival : the experience of long-term imprisonment , کتابخانه مرکزی دانشگاه علوم پزشکی ایران