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Fighting crime
The slogan “Fight Crime” refers primarily to it being an integral and
objective social phenomenon. Dr. Yuri Bluvshtein points out the prevalence of
this notion [38; p. 115]. Meanwhile, crime as an
integral object only exists within the framework of a formal juridical approach,
which regards any deed stipulated in criminal legislation as a crime. Such deeds
may not exist at all or may be regarded by the majority of the population as
normal, socially approved or even heroic — they could be regarded either
as criminal or as law-abiding behavior (for example, when a law is changed or
when someone moves to another country).
Thus, crime, as some integral phenomenon, only exists in lawyers’ heads, on
the pages of criminal codes, in militia department reports or in collections of
criminal statistics. As soon as we go beyond these abstractions, what was
considered an integral phenomenon scatters like mercury on parquet.
Juridical formulas describing the types of crimes relate to quantitatively
different notions. For example, murder, i.e. deprivation of life of one
individual by another (others), in some circumstances is regarded as an evil
deed, while in another circumstances as valor. Among saints of the Russian
Orthodox Church professional “killers” (warriors and princes) take second
place in number after monks and clergymen...
Criminologists are more likely to consider crime as a combination of extreme
forms of deviant behavior (from social norms). However, integrity and certainty
inherent in other forms of deviant behavior (drug addiction, alcoholism, suicide
etc.) are also lacking. The slogan “Fight Crime” is, strictly speaking,
nonsense due to the vagueness and abstract nature of the object itself which
must be fought. Criminal statistics presented to us as objective information
about crime are, in fact, a fragmentary reflection (since only a small portion
of these criminal acts is registered) of heterogeneous social, cultural etc.
phenomena.
What does it actually mean that 100 murders per year were registered in towns
N, M, X and Y? In one case, it could be a result of a high level of drunkenness
in the local population, in an other — the clash of culturally
incompatible ethnic groups on the same territory, in the third case — the
outrage of the young and in the fourth — all of them combined...
Let us examine several more crime-related paradoxes, using in the main more
concrete criminological interpretation.
A “natural” crime level always exists like a normal pulse of an
individual. A decrease in the natural crime rate may be a sign of ethnic
tensions or a symptom of social pathology (for example, totalitarianism). The
natural crime level varies for various peoples during various periods of their
history. In Russia, the natural crime level is higher than in the majority of
European countries (this does not in the least mean that we are worse or better
than others). This can be proven by the extremely high number of murders in
Russia at the end of the XIX century, when most of the population lived under
patriarchy. Peasants took the penultimate place among registered offenders,
clergymen occupied the last place and noblemen and the proletariat were leading
groups. The low level of registered crime in the 1950s—1980s was more likely a
symptom of extreme social problems (pathology); the dynamics of murders can
serve as proof for this.
Some proportion of registered crime is a result of cultural confrontation or
of the partial incompatibility of codified (formal) and everyday law, i.e. a
disagreement between norms stated in the law and norms formed by traditional
culture and accepted by the majority of the population. The latter is a chronic
phenomenon in Russia. During the Communist rule, this old “disease” became
acute and is still felt now.
During times of social and political changes, an increase in crime rate may
occur due to the necessity to adapt to new conditions and due to other objective
reasons, common in a period of reforms. This is like a quickened pulse when one
moves energetically. Record figures of registered crime in Russia at the
beginning of NEP (New Economic Policy) period were, to some extent, connected
with the growth of this type of crime. But we are unlikely to acknowledge that
the years when the crime rate was low, during the period of collectivization,
mass deaths from hunger and dispossessing the kulaks, were happier than the
years of NEP. This type of crime contributed greatly to a wave in crime in the
late 1980s and early 1990s. The level of “perestroika” crime then began to
decrease as the population managed to adapt a little to a new social and
economic reality.
Crime can also be a result of more alarming processes: a spiritual crisis in
society, social and economic policy and the state’s criminal policy. The first
two reasons have recently been discussed at great length, so let us dwell on the
criminal policy of the Russian state. As we pointed out above, it is random,
excessive and extremely repressive. It produced an enormous prison population
which, in turn, is grounds for a future crime wave.
“Among all the components of the criminal justice system, penitentiary
institutions, which criminologists consider as “factories of crime”,
probably contribute most to the crime rate.” Furthermore, as criminal
statistics show, people who served their sentences in custody are very likely to
re-offend. Consequently, the more people were imprisoned the greater the
reserves became for future criminal acts” [11, p.
46].
The extent to which the prison population influences the crime rate is
recorded throughout the world. But in Russia this factor is even more important.
The Soviet system of prison camps is one of the main sources for reproducing
organized criminal groups and professional crime. Research we conducted suggests
that it was the Soviet criminal and penitentiary policy which, in the early
1960s, enabled the appearance of a specific and completely unfamiliar
subculture, now experiencing its next transformation. A considerable part of
criminal communities, for example, those connected with “thieves-in-law” use
methods based on mechanisms, procedures and norms of prison subculture. The more
people go through our prisons and camps, the more people will acquire this
culture and the greater the reserves will be for criminal communities.
Regional factors also plays a very important role in the phenomena we
consider. Probably, not only single political and economic space ceased to
exist, which was convincingly proved by parliamentary elections in 1993 and
1995; criminal and law enforcement domains, which were rather motley, grew more
and more different. For example, opinion polls in six regions of Russia [11]
demonstrated that even the ratio between registered crime and victimization rate
revealed by surveys varies considerably for various regions (the victimization
rate shows what part of the population became victims of crimes during the
examined period).
"If to differentiate the regions on the victimization rate (according to
official statistics and the opinion poll), only for the Irkutsk do regions the
figures coincide. In Premorsky Krai results of the opinion poll are more
satisfactory than those of official statistics. In Moscow, Tula and Nyzhny
Novgorod regions opinion polls create a more gloomy picture of the crime
situation than official statistics..."
Criminologists G.I.Zabryansky, N.F.Kuznetsova, V.I.Shulga and others [13,
p.81] explain regional differences by "an uneven social, economic,
historical, geographical and demographic development of regions... State,
dynamics and structure of crime have their own tendencies, qualities and nuances
defined by the specific development of each region". The fact that the
minimal and maximal rates of less latent crimes (murders and grievous bodily
harm) differ more than 10 times in various Russian regions can serve as a good
example of this diversity.
Let us stop this long but incomplete list of social and cultural phenomena
and regional factors hiding behind the screen of “crime”. What has been said
is enough to understand that it is not only senseless but also dangerous to
fight most of these phenomena. In some cases, it is immoral. At present,
representatives of those social groups who themselves are victims of objective
conditions of the reform period and of governmental social and economic policy
(the homeless, unemployed, refugees, deserted children etc.) are subject to
criminal penalties. Such a policy results in the suffering of people whose
criminal behavior is determined by the state itself.
“Historical experience, including our national experience, gained over many
centuries shows that it is absolutely useless trying “to establish order”,
to reduce crime and other offenses without making any changes in social,
economic and political conditions and neutralizing the main criminal factors” [22].
It is probably useless to try to develop any federal programs to fight
non-existent, entirely Russian crime with a "single crime data bank" [5,
p.47] etc. Certainly, there are some regional, federal and international
problems in the crime sphere. But they require the coordination of efforts. For
example, if INTERPOL tried to create a single data bank including information
about all crimes and criminals in the world, its activity would not be effective
even if it were provided with many more resources.
With very limited resources, the attempt to carry out
federal projects and solve all the crime-related, central problems makes the
task of establishing control over criminal procedures on Russian territory
practically impossible. Russian regions need their own programs, resources for
their development and fulfillment rather than instructions from Moscow on how to
act, how many and which offenses to reveal for accounting analysis.
The myth about the possibility and necessity of fighting crime, in fact,
leads us away from important social goals such as normalizing social life,
restoring law and order, providing public safety etc. If one takes a broad
understanding of the word ‘safety’, then the majority of crimes (street,
alcohol, social and household crimes) will not take any of the leading places
among the most typical crimes and those having the most serious consequences.
Overcrowded penitentiary institutions, bureaucrats’ corruption and
arbitrariness, the crisis of power, human rights violations and a dozen other
acute problems partially caused by the campaign to “fight crime” will come
higher on the scale.
According to opinion polls, government corruption appears in the list of the
most serious problems. It should be noted that government machinery was growing
at a rate 10 times faster than crime during the last four years, in spite of
very low salaries for the majority of people working there; the number of people
in government service is now 18 million (there were 17 million in the USSR).
Russian citizens (entrepreneurs, in particular) are driven hard to feed this
“army”. Besides taxes and bribes, money from criminal groups constitute the
main part of bureaucrats’ income. The number of known organized criminal
groups connected with corrupt officials increased from 38 in 1990 to 1,037 in
1994 [2; 15].
According to the Federal Security Service, about 50% of criminal income [9]
is spent on bribing state bodies and justice officials.
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