The Social Control of Cities?: A Comparative Perspective

By Sophie Body-Gendrot

In this ground-breaking study, Sophie Body-Gendrot provides a comparative analysis of the growing problem of new forms of poverty and social marginalisation in contemporary advanced societies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Jul 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9781444399202

Book preview

Contents

List of Figures

List of Tables

Foreword

Series Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction

From the Global to the National Scale

Conceptualizing Urban Violence

In Search of Missing Linkages

From the National to the Local Scale

The Community in Question

Case Studies

Three Scenarios

The Difficulties of Cross-national Comparisons

Methodology

Outline of the Book

Notes

Part I The Politics of Depacification

1 Economic Globalization and Urban Unrest

Inequalities and Crime: Ecological or Behavioral Effects?

Lessons from the Past

Society, Globalization, and Crime

Notes

2 Law-Enforcement in the USA

The Social Context: A Segmented Society

The Politicization of Street Crime

The American Public in Question

A Trickle-Down Phenomenon

Surveillance in No Man’s Land

Notes

3 Solidarity and Social Prevention in France

The National Context

Urban Violence in French Problematic Neighborhoods

National Urban Appeasement Policies

Police and Justice within Urban Policies

Public Discontent

The Punitive Trend

Notes

Part II The Politics of Reconciliation

4 Managing Polarization: New York and Chicago

New York, a Global City

The Impact of National Repressive Politics on Welfare

Crime Patterns in the City

Repressive Policing: National Influence and Local Innovation

The Role of Intermediate Organizations

Chicago

Conclusion

Notes

5 Managing Polarization: Paris, Marseilles, and Lyons

St-Denis in the Paris Region

Marseilles: A Deceptive Calm

Turf Battles in Lyons

Notes

Conclusion The Social Control of Cities?

What Are the Police Doing?

The Demand for a Better Judicial System

The Community as a Panacea for the Co-Production of Safety

The Professionalization of Community Organizations in the USA

Financing Community Work

French Community Participation: the Cité des Poètes at Pierrefitte

The Virtue of Civil Society or Democratic Resistance

Conclusion

Notes

References

Index

Studies in Urban and Social Change

Published by Blackwell in association with the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. Series editors: Chris Pickvance, Margit Meyer and John Walton.

Published

Fragmented Societies

Enzo Mingione

Free Markets and Food Riots

John Walton and David Seddon

The Resources of Poverty

Mercedes González de la Rocha

Post-Fordism

Ash Amin (ed.)

The People’s Home?

Social Rented Housing in Europe and America

Michael Harloe

Cities After Socialism

Urban and Regional Change and Conflict in Post-Socialist Societies

Gregory Andrusz, Michael Harloe and Ivan Szelenyi (eds)

Urban Poverty and the Underclass: A Reader

Enzo Mingione

Capital Culture

Gender at Work in the City

Linda McDowell

Contemporary Urban Japan

A Sociology of Consumption

John Clammer

Globalizing Cities

A New Spatial Order?

Peter Marcuse and Ronald van Kempen (eds)

The Social Control of Cities?

A Comparative Perspective

Sophie Body-Gendrot

Forthcoming

European Cities in a Global Age

A Comparative Perspective

Alan Harding (ed.)

Urban South Africa

Alan Mabin and Susan Parnell

Urban Social Movements and the State

Margit Mayer

Copyright © Sophie Body-Gendrot 2000

The right of Sophie Body-Gendrot to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published 2000

2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

Blackwell Publishers Ltd

108 Cowley Road

Oxford OX4 1JF

UK

Blackwell Publishers Inc.

350 Main Street

Malden, Massachusetts 02148

USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Body-Gendrot, Sophie.

The social control of cities? : a comparative perspective / Sophie Body-Gendrot.

p. cm. – (Studies in urban and social change)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-631-20520-9 (alk. paper) – ISBN 0-631-20521-7 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Urban economics. 2. Urban poor. 3. Poverty. 4. Marginality, Social.

5. Social control. 6. Urban policy. I. Title. II. Series.

HT321.B65 1999

307.76 21 – dc21 99–043568

Typeset in 10½ on 12 pt Baskerville MT

by Best-set Typesetter Ltd, Hong Kong

List of Figures

List of Tables

Foreword

The central effort in this book is to examine the possible correlation between the impact of globalization on the city, the growth of inequalities and of power conflicts, and the violence and crime evident in what are often spatially segregated areas. A crucial intermediate variable is whether, and if so how, the new types of welfare and order-maintenance policies of states at the national and local level reflect at least in part the pressures of globalization.

One of the key empirical sites the author uses to explore these issues is cities that have experienced in accentuated forms the impact of economic globalization. These cities have rising numbers of high-income professional households which, through their significant numbers and lifestyles, mark the urban landscape and create strong contrasts with the growing spaces of poverty and segregation. Because they are strategic for the global economy, these cities also develop policies – from development of airports to social order maintenance – that are seen as crucial for the role these cities play as strategic sites for the global economy. An important hypothesis explored by the author is that in this combination of conditions such cities emerge as sites for the production of new norms. Among these norms is the renewed importance of order maintenance as a fundamental responsibility of the state and the novel contents associated with it, given new forms of urban violence.

Against this background, the author examines whether the types of violence and criminality evident today in spatially segregated poor areas in major cities are related to economic globalization and its specific materialization in these cities. And secondly, whether the new welfare and other policies of states at the national level and at the local level that have the effect of raising control over socially marginal populations and areas actually reflect the need for social order maintenance if a city is to fulfill strategic functions for the global economy. Body-Gendrot also examines to what extent these policies may in fact be an enactment of represssion which generates its own forms of violence and criminality as a response to that repression by those who have little if any access to the formal political system.

This is, clearly, a complex argument and one which demands new types of theorization, new types of evidence, and multiple secondary analyses of a range of data sets which have typically been collected with other aims in mind. This book is an enormously important contribution to this new way of studying and interpreting urban violence and state policy. There are today major studies and major findings about this subject, and the author makes a point of discussing these and showing how they contribute to her overall inquiry. This book is, then, centered in the existing scholarship. But she also argues that there is more work to be done. Introducing globalization as part of the explanation adds to this scholarship and provides yet another set of variables to an as yet incomplete explanation of urban violence and the best ways to address it. While using some of the newer types of variable, such as the type of capital present in different social groups and symbolic domination, the author is very focused on developing a set of variables linked to globalization and the intervening role of the state.

The author emphasizes the fact of unequal resources and unequal access in democracies where, in principle, differences of access should not be as strong as they in fact are. She notes how even in large French cities, where poverty and segregation are far less extreme than in US cities, there is nonetheless violence and criminality and the threat of more of it to come. She shows us how global cities are indeed a strategic site for the enactment of new forms of politics by disadvantaged groups with little power, yet with the capacity to exert an intimidating presence. Some of the forms of urban violence we are seeing today in large cities are, in the last analysis, one of the ways in which those who lack access to other institutional channels can engage the formal political system and the powerful. Urban violence can, in some situations, be a means to getting a share of the city’s resources or respect as subjects, as was illustrated in the Diallo case in NYC in 1999 and in many of the other demonstrations against police brutality in the USA and in several European countries.

Through their actions, these groups introduce alternative normativities in the socio-political and symbolic order of the city. In an earlier book, Ville et violence, Body-Gendrot has developed the concept of urban violence as a specific form of violence, one that has elements of a politics and of claims that cannot be easily encompassed by or worked out through the formal political system. In this book, she continues this work through an examination of the specific forms of this new politics by those who are or feel powerless to affect their condition, and she shows us the considerable variance these new politics assume across different cultures.

One of the contributions of this book to our understanding of these issues is the comparison between large French cities, particularly Paris, and large US cities. Such an analysis brings to the fore the specificity of sociocultural forms through which the general dynamics of urban violence and the state’s management of social disorder operate in each of these different contexts. Further, it also shows us that what we associate largely with inner cities in the USA takes place typically in urban peripheral zones in France – often what we would think of as suburban areas in the USA. The author shows us how in France, for instance, it is also the middle class and the farmers who will engage in often violent or violence-prone demonstrations against the state to pressure it into fulfilling its role as regulator and buffer against the negative impacts of unregulated markets, downsizing, and uncertain futures for their children. These are conditions certain sectors of the middle class in France see as connected to economic globalization.

One of the challenges of globalization for social science is that its locational and institutional embeddedness does not correspond to what are standard categories in established social science research. Whether explicitly or implicitly, the boundaries and the scales at which categories are constructed and deployed – the nation-state, the city, the group, the household – do not easily accommodate the cross-border and cross-boundary dynamics of globalization. There is a type of research that confines globalization to the study of macro-level cross-border processes, most especially, crossborder flows of trade and capital; and, one could argue, this type of research can be executed without much concern about these analytic and theoretical issues. But for scholars like myself, who see globalization as a far more complex social phenomenon and one with considerable social thickness, the challenge is centered on how to study its concrete instantiations. That is to say, the challenge is how to study globalization in the specific institutional settings and processes through which it becomes embedded in what we could think of as the non-global. Globalization inhabits specific structurations of the national, the local, the cultural, the subjective. One of the tasks this calls for is the decoding of what has historically been constructed as the national, or the local – in brief, the nonglobal. The assumption here is that the imbrication of the global and the non-global is complex and variable. The embedding of the global in a specific institutional setting may amplify the features of that setting or it may alter these features, partly or wholly, even as the institutional setting might still be coded/represented as if nothing had changed. In this regard, longstanding dualities such as local–global or national–global are not helpful and indeed do not capture the actual modalities of the locational and institutional embeddedness of globalization.

In this regard, Body-Gendrot’s book represents a major contribution to the elaboration of this new type of research agenda. It introduces another sphere for research and theorization: urban violence and the state’s ordermaintenance function as these materialize in a very specific type of site: large cities that have become strategic places for the global economy. The particular focus on zones of urban violence in major French and US cities further helps us understand the variance in the modes through which certain aspects of globalization get filtered through the specificities of different localities. The subject of urban violence has remained somewhat intractable. There has been a multiplication of explanations which together have contributed enormously to our understanding of the issues involved. Adding the variable of globalization and its impact on conditions of poverty and spatial segregation as well as on the functions of the state introduces an important new dimension to this scholarship.

Saskia Sassen, Professor of Sociology, University of Chicago, and author of Globalization and Its Discontents

Series Preface

In the past three decades there have been dramatic changes in the fortunes of cities and regions, in beliefs about the role of markets and states in society, and in the theories used by social scientists to account for these changes. Many of the cities experiencing crisis in the 1970s have undergone revitalization, while others have continued to decline. In Europe and North America new policies have introduced privatization on a broad scale at the expense of collective consumption, and the viability of the welfare state has been challenged. Eastern Europe has witnessed the collapse of state socialism and the uneven implementation of a globally driven market economy. Meanwhile, the less developed nations have suffered punishing austerity programs that divide a few newly industrializing countries from a great many cases of arrested and negative growth.

Social science theories have struggled to encompass these changes. The earlier social organizational and ecological paradigms were criticized by Marxian and Weberian theories, and these in turn have been disputed as all-embracing narratives. The certainties of the past, such as class theory, are gone and the future of urban and regional studies appears relatively open.

The aim of the series Studies in Urban and Social Change is to take forward this agenda of issues and theoretical debates. The series is committed to a number of aims but will not prejudge the development of the field. It encourages theoretical works and research monographs on cities and regions. It explores the spatial dimension of society, including the role of agency and of institutional contexts in shaping urban form. It addresses economic and political change from the household to the state. Cities and regions are understood within an international system, the features of which are revealed in comparative and historical analyses.

The series also serves the interests of university classroom and professional readers. It publishes topical accounts of important policy issues (e.g. global adjustment), reviews of debates (e.g. post-Fordism), and collections that explore various facets of major changes (e.g. cities after socialism or the new urban underclass). The series urges a synthesis of research and theory, teaching and practice. Engaging research monographs (e.g. on women and poverty in Mexico or urban culture in Japan) provide vivid teaching materials just as policy-oriented studies (e.g. of social housing or urban planning) test and redirect theory. The city is analysed from the top down (e.g. through the gendered culture of investment banks) and the bottom up (e.g. in challenging social movements). Taken together, the volumes in the series reflect the latest developments in urban and regional studies.

Subjects which fall within the scope of the series include: explanations for the rise and fall of cities and regions; economic restructuring and its spatial, class, and gender impact; race and identity; convergence and divergence of the east and west in social and institutional paterns; new divisions of labour and forms of social exclusion; urban and environmental movements; international migration and capital flows; politics of the urban poor in developing countries; cross-national comparisons on housing, planning, and development; debates on post-Fordism, the consumption sector, and the new urban poverty.

Studies in Urban and Social Change addresses an international and interdisciplinary audience of researchers, practitioners, students, and urban enthusiasts. Above all, it endeavors to reach the public with compelling accounts of contemporary society.

Editorial Committee

John Walton, Chair

Margit Mayer

Chris Pickvance

Acknowledgements

This book results from investigations carried out in five urban regions: New York, Chicago, and localities around Paris, Lyons, and Marseilles. For each site, whenever sources of data were available, the socio-economic context, the segregative mechanisms, the demographic profile and the presence of stable or unstable immigrants and minorities, the political profile of the leadership, the culture and identity of the cities and their neighborhoods, and the interactions of the public, private, and third sector were taken into account to study local governance on the issue of safety.

From January to May 1997, a grant from the French Délégation Interministérielle à la Ville (DIV) and an invitation from the Center of European Studies headed by Martin Schain and from Thomas Bender and Richard Sennett at the head of the Program on Urban Knowledges at the International Center for Advanced Studies of New York University allowed me to conduct interviews with numerous actors involved in social control: policemen, judges, correction officers, mayors, teachers, community organizers, young inmates, ex-convicts, residents of public housing, etc., and to participate in several forums, conferences, beat meetings, and street activities. My field work followed a number of investigations in US depressed neighborhoods, carried out during research trips (concerning the USA) sponsored by various organizations, including the French-American Foundation and the US State Department, or financed by various grants (Fulbright, Hewlett-Packard, Rockefeller Foundation). I would like to acknowledge the very valuable help I received from Ron Schiffmann and his staff at the Pratt Institute and from Lynn Curtis and the Milton Eisenhower Foundation on several of those trips.

The French part of this research was facilitated by an official investigation on urban violence ordered by the French Minister of the Interior, Jean-Pierre Chevènement, which I led with Nicole Le Guennec and Michel Herrou, looking into French and European problematic neighborhoods during the spring of 1998. In addition, my research was aided by numerous exchanges of view which took place over the years at conferences, meetings, research trips, and seminars, including the many insights that came from my CNRS team Urmis (Unité de recherche, migrations et société) at the University of Paris-Sorbonne (Paris VII), the think-tank Profession Banlieue in Seine St-Denis (a suburb close to Paris), the Institut des Hautes Etudes sur la sécurité intérieure, the Ecole Nationale de la Magistrature, the French Union of Public Housing, the French American Foundation, GERN (Groupement européen de recherche sur les normativités) led by Philippe Robert, and from work with community organizations, especially Droit de Cité and Unis-Cité.

I also wish to thank Nicolas Frize who, in the course of my investigations into citizenship, took me on some very unusual visits into prisons and hospitals; Patrick Le Galès, Thierry Paquot, and Patrick Weil for so many stimulating conversations; Edmond Préteceille, Catherine Rhein, and, among others, my graduate students, past and present at SorbonneParis IV (Department of English-American Studies) and the Institut d’Etudes Politiques (Programme d’études avancés – les métiers de la ville). I cannot possibly give all the names, but each in their own way contributed to deepen analysis for which I alone am responsible. Besides these colleagues and friends, others should be thanked for their help: Wayne Barrett, Robert Beauregard, James Bell, Jean-Paul Brodeur, Lynn Curtis, John Devine, Bernardine Dohrn, Joy Dryfoos, Jeff Fagan, Susan and Norman Fainstein, Eric Flamm, Esther Fuchs, Marilyn Gittell, Martin Goldsmith, Diana Gordon, Constance Jewett-Ellis, Nancy Johnstone, John Logan, Peter Lucas, John Mollenkopf, Susan Saegert, Robert Sampson, Saskia Sassen, Stuart Scheingold, Lisbeth Shepherd, Jonathan Simon, Kate Stimpson, Todd Swanstrum, Gretchen Suzy, and Aristide Zolberg.

Special thanks go to my French publisher, Bayard Editions, which gave me permission to reproduce excerpts from a previous book, Les Villes face à l’insécurité.

I am especially grateful to Kevin Delaney and Sarah Dancy for their editorial assistance and to Isabelle Bartkowiak for checking the bibliography.

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.

Introduction

Tolerance and Suppression

How do societies form their perceptions of urban danger and become alarmed by it? Today it is easy to point to the city-based media which construct the theme and fill their coverage with stories of minor riots, non-violent crimes, and even rumors, to be disseminated throughout the globe. But, even in the past, when the knowledge of a crime would go no further than a horseback ride, people in cities were constantly involved in a dialogue with fear. Fear everywhere, fear always, L. Fèbvre, a French historian, once remarked.

In recent years, urban violence has been debated in the context of anxieties raised by the slowing of growth in Europe, the marketization of economies all over the Western world, and the prioritization of international economic competition. The discussion in the public debate of violence is euphemistic, displacing more urgent questionings on new forms of inequality and social marginalization that are appearing in cities, as well as a general feeling of precariousness among the middle and working classes. Urban danger is therefore constructed as the discursive displacement of issues already related to family disruptions and institutions’ dysfunctions.

My major focus is on the link between the eroding buffer role of the welfare state, the function of the local arena – namely large cities – as the site impacted by the negative consequences of economic restructuring and of rapid social mutations, and that of the civil society as cities address the public’s insecurity. At stake is a redrawing of what constitutes the legitimate responsibilities of individuals, collectivities, and the state. Partnerships are the sites in which the rearticulation of new socio-political relationships is played out and contested and out of which innovation and change in terms of crime control may emerge (Crawford, 1997). Confronted with new challenges, national elites seem indeed to be confused, particularly in the Old World where the established insiders are advocating a better control of crime and violence frequently associated with others – that is, unemployed, unskilled, or redundant workers with different racial or ethnic identities and, more specifically, youth from the inner cities. Excessive flows of information reinforce the idea that societies are becoming more complex, more heterogeneous, and too difficult to manage from traditional centers of power alone.

I look in this book at a period of transition, at a time of crisis, in its etymological meaning of search for a solution. I wonder, with Jürgen Habermas, if, at least in Europe, we are not observing the exhaustion of a model for state-provided protections against hardship and for the continuity of the social link. I assume that, at least in France, the more the central state devolves its social commitments to the local arena, the more cities become the major spheres in which to understand the treatment of polarization and marginalization associated with the world flux of capital and people. Politics and culture shape civil society and its efficacy. Policies of control are nationally generated, but the decentralization and the deconcentration of the French state, added to European Community bulldozing of national idiosyncrasies, give local authorities and communities space to maneuver and innovate, a space sometimes reluctantly seized at a time of fiscal austerity.

The bases of solidarity that have cemented industrial societies’ roles as democratic welfare states and rights providers since World War II have indeed been eroded under the twin pressures of global economic and social transformations. In an era of globalization, the processes of disintegration, disempowerment, social invalidation, marginalization – whatever term one wishes to use – fracture post-industrial cities. That rupture may not occur in a dualistic logic, as it is often suggested, but certainly in a myriad of patterns, some of them leading to collective violence and disorder, as shown in Los Angeles in 1992. National societies seem to disarticulate in a strange movement of de-modernization, notes Alain Touraine (1991).

The social control of violence and crime and the defense of some order are important stakes for national societies, and for cities in particular, where so many strategic resources, wealth, power, and people are now concentrated and where peaceful collective life is to be maintained in democratic ways.¹ The question-mark in this book’s title comes from the fluctuating and diverse interpretations relative to social control. For example, are cities exerting a form of social control when they pursue symbolic politics? Is social control better embodied by a preventative or by a repressive approach, or by a mixture of both? Is social control exercised at city level, at other levels, or by partnerships, however conflictual they might be? As the title of this chapter, Tolerance and Suppression, implies, the social control that local societies exert on people and places varies according to national stakes, ideologies, resources, and actors. Although the goals and the trade-offs are basically the same, some societies put more emphasis on a search for equality, social prevention, welfare, and state intervention for the treatment of marginality and a check of uprisings. Others rely more on individualism and self-help, as well as on deterrence and punishment. In all cases, safety is considered as a fundamental collective goal. Why and how are these choices made? Why and how is the change marked from a more or less recent past?

From the Global to the National Scale

When French society, in accordance with its historical traditions, forcefully and symbolically rejects violence and chooses to fight its root causes through policies of primary prevention, there is an institutional consensus arising from both conservative and liberal elites to support state-sponsored social policies. With the primary prevention approach,² welfare, education, city policies and various forms of place-oriented treatment attempt to repair the damage done by economic globalization and reincorporate the marginalized into the mainstream. Pressures on middle and upper classes via both increasing taxes and discursive appeals to citizenship are launched by successive governmental teams and do find some response. (A taxpayer in France is described as "imposable and a policy such as Proposition 13 – which refers to a revolt by taxpayers in California in 1978, leading to approval by referendum and a climbdown by the state, and which was followed by similar action in a dozen other states – has no equivalent, except in the tumultuous, ephemeral social movements in the recent history of the country which the far right tends to revitalize.) The French philosophy that supports such policies is indeed that since society is responsible for its citizens, the state has to emancipate the individual whose nature is fundamentally good and educatable (think, for example, of Rousseau), the troublemaker being not so much to blame as society is. If we wonder whether teachers, prison wardens, and parents are all actually doing the same thing, the answer depends on the kind of responses we are looking for. In this book, I look at organized formal and informal responses to threats of urban violence, crime, and delinquency as they are constructed in the current debate. Some are reactive, others proactive. Some may be directly orchestrated by institutions,³ others by community mediation; they may also come directly from individual initiatives. Why is the choice of inclusion in the French public discourse preferred to the easier answer of stigmatization and suppression? Is it in the Catholic tradition? Is there also more reliance in France on the efficiency of institutions and of policies, a thesis supported by Elias’s (1933) civilizing process" than on self-help?

The norm of solidarity has been patiently formed throughout centuries of hesitation and confrontation. France has socialized its citizens into this principle dating back to the Revolution, and whether conservative or lefttending regimes are in power does not make much of a difference. At the very start an insurance regime supported by the state gradually expanded to incorporate one vulnerable category after the other. The ordinance of 1945, according to which a youth at risk (as author or victim of a crime) needs education and protection from the state, still prevails. More recently, solidarity has been based on public partnerships; that is, on formal agreements between various sectors of the state and either distressed areas or individuals, under specific conditions.

The primary social prevention policy elaborated at the local level by Bonnemaison in the 1980s was place-oriented: local committees for the prevention of crime and delinquency acted on school programs, financial support to families, cultural development within a national policy of help to cities (politique de la ville – see Chapter 3). Yet, in the 1990s, inserted in the processes of globalization and Europeanization, the French central state acting as a regulator met with complex rival priorities, and devoluted the concerns of solidarity to the local sphere, yet without abandoning its regalian control. Local committees on prevention of crime and delinquency have frequently become empty shells. In 1999, it was admitted that only one-third of them actually function efficiently. The general unemployment rate is 11.4 percent in France (at the end of the first semester of 1999), and 22 percent amongst under 25-year-olds. Three-quarters of 18–20-year-olds and 42 percent of 21–23-year-olds have no other choice but to live with their parents (Le Monde, 7 July 1999). This situation is very different from the one in America. As a consequence, a dismantling of the welfare state, as in the USA and the UK, would not be tolerated, but what is occurring instead is a devolution from the central state to subnational authorities on social issues, as if a decoupling of economic and social political issues places them on different trajectories. It is not surprising, then, that domestic politics become more and more local and associated with bread-and-butter issues.

In that process, despite an official rhetoric based on citizenship and inclusion, solidarity today receives less support from the overtaxed middle classes than during the thirty years following World War II: the poor and the useless normal – that is, those who are unfit for or redundant in the labor markets of the post-industrial society, including unskilled immigrants’ children – are suspected of taking advantage of dependency. With lower rates of crime in 1997 (1.2 murders per 100,000 people) than in the USA (9 per 100,000), the punitive trend in France is not as dominant as the inclusive one, but it is nevertheless growing in public opinion, due to social disturbances in at least one thousand urban areas, amplified by the media, exploited by the national populism of the National Front (which was winning around 15 percent of the national vote in general elections in the 1990s, although 67 percent empathize with its opinions).⁴ The construction of demands for more surveillance and repression also comes from mayors and professionals in charge of law and order – namely, some bodies of rank-and-file policemen, judges, and prosecutors – exerting corporatist pressures on national decision-makers for more repression. For instance, in twenty years convictions leading to more than five years of detention have grown by 1,020 percent, to more than ten years by 233 percent, and to life by 100 percent (Vital-Durand, 1999: 17). We may therefore suspect that the generous discourse of solicitude and solidarity at the top is modified when confronted with the principle of reality on the ground.

Repression, like solidarity, is the continuation within the multilevel state apparatus of relations and struggles that had their origins and ends elsewhere. That suppression or punishment is a tool of social policy is implicit (Simon, 1993: 12). It is a method of surveillance and control of communities where those defined as offenders live in great numbers. In a federal country, such as the USA, marked at its foundation by a puritanical philosophy, a widely shared idea is that only the work of a community upon itself and by itself can rescue the individual through efforts, deterrence, and constraint. The state’s action must remain marginal and residual. It is not supposed to intervene in natural social processes. This implies that, according to an ideology which emphasizes the communities’ efforts and their capacity to make moral choices in the foundation of the society they want, the moral insiders, linked by an implicit covenant, do not feel responsible for the fate of delinquent outsiders, except through charity and other private outreach (Elias, 1965). A behavioralist philosophy also supports the idea that setting aside the bodies of dangerous classes (in prisons) will solve the community’s problems and that, miraculously, after being released, inmates will be able to rejoin the mainstream. This approach struck Alexis de Tocqueville when visiting American prisons with Beaumont in 1830:

There are, in America as in Europe, men worthy of esteem whose mind breeds on philosophical dreams and whose extreme sensitivity needs illusions. These men, for whom philanthropy has become a need, find in the penitentiary system, a nutrient for this generous passion: starting from their abstractions which depart more or less from reality, they consider man, however deep he is into crime, as capable of ever being brought back into virtue . . . And pursuing the consequences of this opinion, they foresee a time when all criminals being radically reformed, prisons will be entirely emptied and justice will have no more crimes to punish. (quoted in Garland, 1990: 139)

He also added that while society in the U.S. gives the example of the most extended liberty, the prisons of the same country offer the spectacle of the most complete despotism (quoted in Garland, 1990: 11). At the time, in the USA as in Europe, rehabilitation through work in prison was thought to take care of marginalization.

Under the conservative regimes and fiscal austerity of the late twentieth century, the lock-them-up-and-throw-away-the-key attitude gained popular support and the hope of rehabilitating hard-core delinquents generally vanished, as the representation of the marginalized (most of all, the drug dealer, stereotyped as the child of an urban mother on state benefits) became increasingly demonized. There was a time in the 1960s when therapeutic rehabilitation was in vogue. But a general sense of public frustration (nothing works) due to rising rates of crime led to a cost-benefit managerialism which reduced welfare and led to higher levels of incarceration (which is a lucrative business). A subtle dialectic of laissez-faire (less state) – deregulation, detaxation, and accumulation – and retaliation (more state) is at work. The counter-discourse of resistance is weak, yet I will show that it exists, especially at the lower levels of the state where policies are implemented. A diversity of voices percolating up from various community-based interests, cities, and states can be heard.

Crime is what society decides it to