Left Realism: “Taking Crime Seriously”

Abstract

Left realism emerged in the mid-1980s as a criminological theory of the Left. In 1979 Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government had been voted into power in the United Kingdom on a largely law-and-order ticket. Thatcher led an administration of the radical Right, close in politics to Ronald Reagan’s Republicanism in the United States, bound to laissez-faire economics, to incentives for work, cutting back on the welfare state, and a heavily punitive response to street crime. Yet, despite Thatcher’s law-and-order agenda, the crime rate continued to rise, and there was widespread public unease about crime and disorder, especially in inner-city areas. Riots, largely the result of political marginalization and aggressive policing, which had occurred against a background of high unemployment and deprivation, impacted several major British cities and, in particular, communities of color. Although central government was Conservative, many of the metropolitan councils (local government) were Labour Party controlled and were committed to addressing the high levels of unemployment, caused by Thatcher’s monetarist policies, together with the growing problem of crime, while, at the same time, curbing the excessive use of police powers. The latter was viewed as the major cause of the riots and as having resulted in a plethora of police malpractices. This provided the impetus and support for left realism: a perspective intent on identifying problems of crime and policing in urban areas, committed to keeping law-and-order issues high on the political agenda, and seeking to find crime-control policies that were progressive and non-authoritarian, with the understanding that ultimately change had to occur at the level of the social structure. The substantive inequalities that tarnish the social fabric had to be confronted. While left realism is concerned with state and corporate crime, it became particularly associated with tackling the problems of street crime—that is, crime which directly affected poor and working-class communities. The aim of left realism is to take the problem of crime seriously, to listen to the concerns of ordinary people, especially those living on inner-city housing estates [projects], and to reclaim the politics of crime and disorder from the Right. The founding text of left realism was John Lea and Jock Young’s What Is To Be Done About Law and Order? (a book greatly influenced by Ian Taylor’s Law and Order: Arguments for Socialism). Initially, conceived as a Left social democratic project that would work to intervene both theoretically in criminological debates and politically in the Party politics of the day, in recent years there has been a revival of interest in left realism and its development. Its aim being that of advancing what John Lea described as “a radical program for social justice” to confront the challenges of the contemporary period.