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This book is comprised of three sections: technical and analytical considerations, legal considerations, and reality and sociology. The idea of addressing the topic by means of sections itself is an admission of the complexity of the matters at hand when dealing with social aspects of crime. Technical and analytical considerations are markedly absent in the contemporary criminological literature. It is not uncommon for criminologists to take street gangs, for example, as a given and then to go on and conflate gang membership with criminal activity as though the two are synonymous (Pyrooz et al. 2016, 365–397). This has led to some very bad work, both in the academic and policy arenas, especially in relation to black and working class youth (Smithson et al. 2013). In Chap. 1 we examined the complex determination of collective action and in Chap. 2 we examined collective goal setting and arriving at a common goal, something of vital importance when determining legal responsibility. These are technical considerations but they are crucial to the determination of culpability in group offending cases, especially in the light of the abuses of joint enterprise prosecutions in the UK (Squires 2016). It is important for justice that it is established whether or not individuals are involved in a genuine collective action and the same holds for establishing the goals individuals have in mind. There is a great deal of published work on gangs and other jointly authored crimes, along with organised crime, but this is pretty much cut off from technical discussions about social ontology, and contemporary criminological research overlooks pertinent work in law, philosophy and political theory. What we require is a far more nuanced, and philosophically more rigorous, account of persons and the groups they belong to in the context of intentional action, goal setting and responsibility. The street gang itself is over-determined in a great deal of the criminological literature, often without much evidence for this over-determination. Moreover, this over-determination is often accompanied by what can only be termed “sensationalist” writing, one might even say it amounts to a reactionary moral panic (Harding 2014). It is important when we assess the nature of groups that we meticulously work through the relationships to establish the nature of individual and collective actions and the nature of any collective goals. Criminology must relate, and fairly immediately, to the criminal law. Criminologists are centrally concerned with criminals, not with youths or gangs, per se. Criminality must be established: it cannot be assumed. Hitherto, criminologists have taken groups as straightforward associations and neglected the technical, and problematic, issues of how intention and action structures membership and action. They also tend to overlook the fleeting nature of many groups, notably street gangs, and overstate the continuity of group membership over time. It is a legacy of the history of sociological writing that interactionism remains hugely influential, especially in relation to the understanding of street gangs. This is not altogether a bad thing, but interactionism tends to argue that it is primarily through interaction that persons, and groups of people, define their context and go on to assign meanings. This approach allows for a great deal of social change and it obviously prioritises the role of culture, but it also tends to work with a sense that there is an underlying stability to the person. In other words, though the meanings and the contexts fluctuate, the person doing the changing is largely unexamined. We also note how interactionists conceive of groups as essentially defined by the nature of their interactions, and not the nature of their intentions. This is a very unsophisticated approach existentially. It completely ignores work by philosophers, such as Bratman (1999) and Gilbert (2000), and, in terms of contemporary political theory, List and Petit (2011) with their emphasis upon the role of social ontology, collective action and goal setting. In general, the treatment of the street gang, for example, tends to overplay its homogeneity, understanding it as a super-individual. This also understates how individuals are themselves understandable, in many ways, as mini-associations. In neglecting intentionality, there is a tendency to somewhat conflate, or put on the same ontological footing, armed robbers with their loose bonds and heightened sense of intention with street gangs who may well have tight social bonds but who also exhibit a diminished sense of intention. Interactionism ascribes intentionality all too easily and they over-determine the ontological status of groups. Personal identity is based on the psychological connectedness between intentional episodes or person-stages (Parfit 1984). A continuous person is an association between intentions, desires and beliefs at different points in time. Criminology needs to think more in terms of coming up with a form of explanation better able to differentiate action and intentional states: thereby, saying something meaningful about the criminal responsibility of individuals and groups. |
