4 Explaining crimes
4.1 Exploring the claims about crime
The claims of the common-sense story of crime that we unearthed in Section 3 were, broadly speaking, about the start of the story (how things were then) and the end of the story (how things are now). But most stories have a middle. A middle that gets you from the beginning to the end, that explains how one state of affairs is transformed into another. The former claims are primarily descriptive. The claim in the middle would be explanatory. It would need to address questions like: What has caused the rise in recorded crime? What has changed in UK society to bring this state of affairs about? Why do people commit crimes? And why they do so now and in such apparently increased numbers?
SAQ1
Look back at your notes on Section 2. What, if any, explanatory claims are buried in the common-sense story of the crime problem?
Answer
We noted this:
Claim 3: The story seems to imply that a decline in the sense of community and a shared set of moral values is to blame for the rise in crime. This, in turn, has been caused by a variety of wider social changes in the post-war UK; for example, the fragmentation of traditional families and communities, a rise in poverty and inequality, increasing moral fecklessness, and unresolvable moral diversity, etc.
We could, like we did in Section 3, immediately begin to test this set of claims against the evidence. But claim 3 is too complex to test in this way, because while nearly everyone seems to agree that a decline in communal values and moral standards is the problem, no one can agree as to precisely how this has happened. To sharpen the claim so it is fit for investigation, we need to take a step back and think about explanatory claims in more detail.
Strange as it may seem, part of the reason there are so many conflicting accounts of the decline of community and moral standards is that there are so many different accounts of this in the social sciences; accounts that have filtered into the language and thinking of political elites, the police, the media and the general public. Indeed, there is an entire branch of the social sciences devoted to exploring crime, criminals and criminality – criminology. So, let's go straight to the horse's mouth. In the rest of this section we will be looking at four different explanatory frameworks of criminal behaviour in the social sciences, explanations which divide around the issue of structure and agency. We will then return to our common-sense story of the crime problem and its explanatory claims, and ask whether these criminological explanations take us any further.