INTRODUCTION In any postmodern criminology, both the kind of theory and the kind of methodology used to map the terrain of wrongful behavior has to be reworked. In this chapter, I will review each of the major theories of crime and evaluate the degree to which they are useful and the degree to which they deflect attention from the larger social dynamics which produce crime. In passing, I will comment on the implications of Chaos theory for a postmodern theory of crime.

Postmodern theory of crime in the sense used here is that, while both premodern and modern knowledge processes privileged order and defined disorder as aberration, postmodern science offers no special license to any given form of order or disorder. Rather, if a given form of order is to be used to ground law, policing practices and punishment, postmodern sensibility requires that the human interest and politics by which such defining and enforcing processes occurs, is recognized and acknowledged. I want to add my own view that it is most certainly appropriate to enforce some forms of ordered behavior as well as to work to promote other forms of order. The human process requires some mix of order and disorder but the ratio has to be biased heavily toward order even in the most unsettled times. Anarchy is fine among equals with equal resources but for most of us, power and privilege still contaminates the social process.

The concept of Chaos, when understood as great disorder, is also conservative in that it seems to be calling for more order, more control and more conformity to existing normative structures. Nothing could be more incorrect. Chaos is the study of the mix of order and disorder. Some disorder is essential to life in all its forms. Order can be deadly; order of the sort implicit in modern science is the dream of a tyrant. So the concept of chaos, far from calling for order, is a call to consider the mix of order which is most congenial to the human condition and to the great bio-sphere upon which all life depends.

As it turns out in this reading of it, Chaos theory is a very radical theory of crime in that it focuses upon small changes in key parameters of society-as-is to account for the forms and incident of crime. It is radical in that it offers a very different paradigm for understanding all social dynamics and it is radical in that it teaches us that the possibility of control slips out of human hands when key parameters increase beyond the fourth Feigenbaum point. That case has been made in the previous three chapters and will be made here again.

The most radical feature lying quietly in chaos theory may well be the lessons it has to offer on the minutes and moments of human agency. Unlike premodern knowledge with its tribute to supernatural agency; unlike modern science with its tribute to natural law, Chaos theory opens up space for human agency while warning the careful reader that human agency can amplify instability with its concern for more and more of the same.

The foremost interesting question for this most radical of theories identification of those key parameters which drive the various forms of crime. While, in this formulation, each crime and each form of crime has its own set of factors which make it an attractive outcome basin, for most crime and most kinds of crime, I will nominate the usual suspects: class, gender, racial and ethnic inequality. However, this nomination takes a very different form from that of Marx, Mao, and Marcuse.

Non-Linear Effects of Race, Class and Gender Inequality.  In the version of Chaos theory, some levels of inequality may have no particular effect on crime rates. A blind opposition to low levels of inequality may well be hostile to the human project and to a peaceable society.  And, apart from how inequality developed, low level of class inequality may even be beneficent to a society.

The operative question in non-linear criminology studieds is what ratios exist between those at the bottom and those at the top of the pyramids of power, wealth and social honor. If the Feigenbaum numbers are useful here, they have much to tell us about how much inequality is useful and how much destabilizes.

Beside inequality and the maintenance of inequality as key factors in postmodern criminology, there is another, more subtle interaction which may well underlay the dynamics of crime. While inequality in power, wealth and social honor may drive many kinds of crime; behind this and intricately woven in the uses and pursuit of power and wealth is are psychological parameters, desire, insecurity, status and the false demands for new goods driven by advertizing which well may spin individuals from one attractor to another.  And religious values push far too much crime; crime against women, crime against tribes and crimes against children.

I will make the case that, in the case of white collar crime at least, the magnitude of the difference between desire for wealth, status and power on the one side and changing access to income, esteem, and compliance on the other side fuels most cases of this kind of crime.

Out with the Old; In with the New There are several theoretical perspectives, each with variable validity which are used in American criminology to explain to the student and the citizen how to understand the dynamics of crime. Many of these theories are conservative in that they locate the dynamics of crime in personal or interpersonal characteristics and, thus, exclude dominant social institutions from critical investigation and policy considerations. Most of the major theories in American criminology are not at all theories of crime at all; they are theories of socialization and of social interaction--and rather good theories of human behavior at large. They give insight into both prosocial and antisocial behavior; they are valid under most social conditions found in everyday life but, even so are not theories of crime.

In order to open up space for Chaos theory and the postmodern criminology it informs, it is helpful to revisit these conventional theories of crime and look at them with a fresh eye. While there is much merit in these theories; little of it speaks to the sources and solutions to a crime ridden society. Before we look again at the theories which ground American criminology again, there is a technical note worth consideration. Our understanding of causality preshapes our attribution of criminal culpability. In Chaos theory, causality opens and closes depending upon scale of analysis and upon stage on a bifurcation map...culpability can be fractional. Not so in modern science.

Critique of Interactional Theories of Crime   Two of the most popular and, I might add, powerful theories of human behavior are: 1) Differential Association Theory and 2) Labelling theory.  As powerful as they are and as well deserving of time and attention in other venues, neither can be used as a theory of crime.  Both ignore the operative question: where does the first act of crime come from and why does it persist in some and not in others who are labeled and/or who differentially associate with those who do crime.

Nor does either take into account all the pro-social behavior of all those who commit crime.  Crime is one small part of the life of even the most hardened criminal...ordinary peaceable and trust-worthy interaction is far more common in face-to-face interaction...even in the worse prisons.  We need a much more nuanced and delicate theory of crime than either provides.

Differential Association Theory Of the major theories of crime Differential Association Theory is, perhaps, the most commonly used perspective. It has many features but the short version is that crime is a result of interaction with criminals. It uses a sort of social calculus to say that if we associate more frequently and intensively with those who urge us to commit crime than we do with those who urge us to obey the law, we will commit crime. The simplicity and the folk wisdom of the theory is its chief failing. The dynamics of crime are far more complex and far less easy to explain than by looking with whom and how much one associates.

Differential Association Theory cannot be a theory of crime since, at its best, it is a theory of all kinds of socialization, learning and mutual influence in role relationships. It explains why people speak English instead of Japanese; they differentially associate with those who are habitual speakers of English. It explains religious preference; those who associate more with Baptists are much more likely to become Baptists than they are to become Catholics or Buddhists. Physicians differentially associate with medical school professors, residents, interns, nurses and ill people. Physicians are constructed by and organize their behavior as if they were physicians through and only through such interaction. One cannot be a "physician" nor a "criminal" outside such a social life world with such differential association. Differential Association Theory is thus a theory of socialization generally and social life in particular.

Among it chief theoretical failings, Differential Association Theory seldom speaks to the differential efficacy built into stratified societies. High status persons have considerably more social power with which to engineer crime than do low status persons. And they can use status advantage to exculpate themselves from the effects of the crimes they commit. There are other forms of power as well. Those with money can deploy economic power to enlist criminal behavior. Then too, one can intimidate others with physical duress and enlist complicity in a crime. On schoolyard, in prison, on board ship or any where those without social or economic power gather, physical power is a resource of last resort as a way to model the behavior of those with whom one has no group affiliation.

In addition to social power, physical power and economic power, moral power can mediate crime. Moral power brings with it the capacity to use shame and guilt to mediate behavior; a legacy of premodern knowledge processes. One can appeal to shared values with unknown others in order to enlist or prevent harmful behavior. Differential Association theory passes by these other forms of power to privilege the social power of those who have some enduring social connection to each other.

Finally, if there is no interaction, in Differential Association theory, there is assumed to be no capacity of others to influence a person one way or another. Yet those without direct and valued social relationships to others do engineer criminal behavior. A corporate officer can offer a bribe to a new Congressperson; a pharmacy can offer a physician a percentage of the price of every prescription he writes to that pharmacy...the corporate officers of the pharmacy come and go but the contract to defraud patients remains apart from association or even knowledge each of the other culpable parties.

Differential association remains a useful way to understand the behavior of most persons since the social process requires that we comply with requests made by significant others. It is these larger validities which make it appealing as a theory of crime. If mind, self and society are indeed twinborn as interactionist claim [and rightly so for the most part], then it is nowise strange that a young man can enlist the aid of another young man in theft or violence. If one's ways of feeling, thinking and acting are a product of symbolic interaction then it is not mysterious that the symbols used by a husband can enlist the aid of a wife in a wrongful act. If the symbols a boss uses is joined by command of both social and economic rewards, it is not curious that an employee will do what s/he is told to do even when it robs the customer or cheats other employees with whom the same employee also differentially associates.

However, D.A.T. avoids the question of why other young men and women with whom the criminal is associating are engaging in crime in the first place. Still less does it tell us why the total population of criminals increases and decreases in a given society or vary greatly in size across societies. So while it is true that Differential Association Theory is important to the organization of criminal behavior it may not be used in a special theory of crime. That which is a constant across human behavior generally may not be adduced as a theory special to one form of human behavior.

Given differential association as irregularly common to both prosocial and antisocial activity, the prior question arises as to why it is that some of one's associates offer an excess of definitions favorable to crime rather than an excess of definitions favorable to mutual aid, to compassion, to nonviolent redress of grievance among persons. Having answered that question and positing membership in two groups, one of which stresses harmful behavior and one of which demands socially constructive labor, we then can accept that Differential Association Theory offers empirically testable hypotheses about crime and interaction.

Where, in the first instance, does that antisocial crowd with whom our putative criminal associates, come from. That question should be the subject of theoretical concern for the criminologist. It is not enough to say that if one associates As a matter of fact, Chaos theory does offer some ideas about why it is that a person, having a choice between two groups, moves toward one of the other. Those ideas are set forth in two different forms in other essays, once in the essay on the ABCs of Crime and the other in the essay on Chaos and Human Agency.

The short version is that, given changes in key parameters affecting either life styles [a cultural parameter] or survival needs [a psychological parameter], in a ratio which exceeds the Feigenbaum numbers mentioned in the last chapter, people begin to cast about for alternative ways to unite desire and demand. Doctors whose expenditures exceed income by factors of two or three become more interested in prescribing marginal medical regimes or in billing for unnecessary tests and measures. Young people whose desires for goods and services exceed their earning power by such ratios begin to look and listen to acquaintances otherwise distant from them. In Chaos theory it is the ratio between desire and capacity in a changing milieu which constitute the theoretic grounds for a postmodern criminology anchored on the uncertain dynamics of a massified and marginalized population.

Labeling and Societal Reaction Theories Labeling theory is a special form of Differential Association Theory and a much more highly focussed version of it. Both are valid theories of social interaction. There is a labeling process which has changing effect on the persons concerned in a wide variety of social realms. In passing, labeling theory describes a form of social magic in which entirely new forms of social behavior appear and are stabilized by a number of nonlinear feedback loops. The very act of labeling and acting as if the label were true is a nonlinear event. To the extent labeling theory enters into and describes adequately the generation of criminal behavior, to that extent criminology adopts the nonlinear dynamics of this new science of complexity, change and irregularity.

In the ordinary run of events, those small squalling, sucking, wriggling blobs of protoplasm which emerge from the womb of woman are labeled sons and daughters and in the consequence, become sons and daughters. If they are not so labeled, they have no status in the sociology at hand and come to an uncertain end...absent a drama of the Holy in which they are accorded moral status, any harm which comes to them is not subsumed by the concept of crime. There is always a point at which there is an existential decision on the part of some set of adults to accept or to reject the physiological creature as a social creature. That point may be as simple, as among the Lakota, as a male holding out his arms and receiving the child into his kin grouping. It may be as complex as neophyte studying a holy tract for years, submitting to a test as a young adult, and/or enduring an ordeal of courage and stamina as among the Blackfeet. Whatever the case, a postmodern sociology of law and crime looks first to the question of status as a place to begin to consider criminal behavior.

For those who are so accepted--or rejected--as part of the 'We,' that labeling is a bifurcation point in a much longer process which brings them under the umbrella of personhood. Having the status of a full person entails many rights, access to all needful resources as well as entrance into any social occasion constructed by the society at hand. There are a number of other bifurcation points which affect the legal and moral status of a person. Some of those children are labeled boys and some are labeled girls; such labeling is highly efficacious in generating gendered behavior. Of the daughters, many come to be labeled wives and in the labeling, act within the logic of wifery. Of the sons, many are labeled husbands and in the labeling act as husbands. Among the men in a patriarchal society, still more rites of passage entail still more status; more protection from the law and more control over the policing and judging process.

People labeled as thieves, prostitutes and criminals usually are, in reaction to such labels, a bit more likely to behave in ways compatible with those labels. But labeling is much more efficacious for doctors, for police, as well as criminologists than it is for criminals since there is a larger context in which the association is given meaning, approbation and opportunity. A secondary 'deviance' arises when persons are labeled and located within a network of others which have significant control over resources needed by the person so labeled to act upon that opportunity. In all this both differential association and specific forms of labeling are found. In all this, labeling theory is much more a theory of prosocial behavior than of criminal behavior.

But what is not registered in labeling theory and which is most important to the constancy to the label itself is a drama of the Holy. In most socially venerated roles, persons are put through a religious ceremony in which the social identity associated with a given status role is officially, legitimately and thus, existentially fitted into the self system of the person concerned. Wives go through such a ceremony and are sanctified to the marriage process; doctors are fitted out with such an identity through a rite of passage involving oaths and high public ceremony; presidents and popes are endowed with identities through a religious celebration which greatly increase the probability that the person so named will behave through every iteration of an appropriate social occasion as if one were really a wife, doctor, president or a pope.

There is also the drama of profanation which labels people and, with variable efficacy, affects their behavior within negative laden social role-sets. Howard Becker and others have picked up on this negation of the drama of the Holy and have used it to good effect in explaining some of the secondary deviance not welcomed in a society. Erving Goffman viewed the criminal trial as a special kind of rite of passage in which a person was subject to labeling by two sets of partisans and labeled criminal or noncriminal at the end of the framing process. Yet the prior question why people behave in such a way as to earn the label is left unanswered in labeling theory. It can be no theory of crime to leave unasked and answered such questions.

The political and economic factors which contaminate the framing/labeling process are well known to lay and professional persons alike. These contaminating factors, largely ignored by the theory itself, arise from larger social structures. The point at which a given label is allocated or not by a given jury is uncertain indeed unless one is young, male, poor and a minority person--in which case the labeling process is much more certain. The run of others who will apply the label with alacrity is much larger than if one is older, female, affluent and Anglo. Many factors enter in the calculus by which labels are affixed; given more than three such factors inconsistent each with the other, Chaos theory suggests that the labeling process is most uncertain indeed and offers a model by which turning points in such labeling can be mapped and uncertainties located.

There are additional disqualifiers of labeling theory as a special theory of crime. Many people who routinely commit crime have never been so labeled, never associate differentially with such criminals and still do crime. Political criminals, corporate criminals and white collar criminals are not so labeled and still systematically engage in crime over their careers. The ability of positive labels to structure behavior is called into question by many forms of white collar crime. A doctor or a professor is enjoined by a set of ethics and a set of significant others from exploiting her/his patients or students. Yet many do so repeatedly and over a great many years. Without benefit of differential association; even against the causal efficacy of a label; in secret and without remorse, doctors cheat and teachers betray the trust with which they are endowed. Without encouragement, labeling or instruction, corporate managers violate a wide variety of laws; citizens cheat on tax returns; presidents do things in secret.

Yet again many people do not accept labels nor do they organize their behavior in ways consonant with labels which are aggressively imposed under the most difficult circumstances. I have in mind ethnic groups most members of which resist labeling; "jews, niggers, wops, polacks, micks, huns, krauts, bohunks, chinks, slopes and japs." Such people try to maintain their dignity in spite of such labeling practices. The range of pejorative labels assigned to women as a congery has but uncertain efficacy in generating behavior compatible with the labels. The use of such body-part labels by young men might have a bit more capacity to preshape the behavior of young men but such labels are very, very marginal to the behavior of a man and a maid in face to face interaction.

In spite of the great power imbalances; in spite of the role of the media in broadcasting such labels; in spite of the church in sanctifying such labeling, still people resist the labeling process. But the changing pattern in which some members of minorities do succumb to the labeling process is of interest to the Chaotician. That changing pattern should fit into a bifurcation map, the geography of which is similar for physics, chemistry, biology and psychology. It is found in Figure 5 of the next chapter.

As a theory of crime, both differential association theory and labeling theory are marginal. The varying efficacy of both theories as causal factor is crime sets well within the larger framework of Chaos theory. As both a general theory of behavior with varying efficacy and a special theory of crime with very uncertain efficacy, one can see that Differential Association Theory and Labeling Theory are nonlinear in their dynamics and fractal in their reach.

CONTROL THEORY It is Control theory which suffers most from the adoption of Chaos theory as an epistemological tool with which to sort out the dynamics of crime. I will make the case in the passages below that, in the first instance, many forms of crime arise within the context of well entrenched and efficacious controls. In the second instance, Chaos theory teaches us that, with each bifurcation in the outcome field, uncertainty increases. With each qualitative increase in uncertainty, there is a parallel decrease in the efficacy of controls. Those who would argue for more and more laws, more and more prisons, more and harsher punishment and more and more policing as crime increases are urging a progressively incompetent policy if my reading of Chaos theory is correct.

Control theory relies on the absence of controls to explain the presence of crime. Apart from the mysticism involved when that which does not exist is said to have causal agency, there are other logical and empirical failures with which to deal when considering control theory. One might say, in parallel fashion, that the presence of disease is caused by the absence of doctors; that the presence of English is caused by the absence of French; that the absence of birds causes the presence of insects.

Control theory cannot be a theory of crime since, in terms of the research design theory, it does not predict, uniquely, upon criminal behavior. Considering the five kinds of crime of interest to criminology, control theory appears to have some limited utility with regard to street crime and white collar crime but, as far as corporate crime, organized crime and political crime are concerned, it is not the absence of controls which are telling but the very strength of the controls instituted in the state, in the organization and in the corporation which ensures the commission of the crimes in question.

In the political crime of F.B.I. agents, C.I.A. agents, the military as well as corporate officers and organized crime employees, there are goals, rules, sanctions, hearings, adjudications, rewards, promotions: in a word, all the elements of social control exist to engineer the crimes in question. When Oliver North broke the laws of several countries including those of the USA, he was not 'out of control.' He was under the control of William Casey, the Director of the C.I.A. Casey himself was in constant contact with Mr. Reagan. Both North and Casey worked out of a set of shared values both knew clearly and both enacted in order to advance the policy of Mr. Reagan. That policy required the violation of several kinds of laws. Mr. North and most other persons who violate both U.S. law and international law while on active duty with the various agencies of the U.S government, the German government, the British government, the government of the U.S.S.R. or any other government does not yield to control theory but stands as testimony to the need to use controls to different purpose if we are to reduce the amount of political crime in the world.

People in political crime, organized crime, white collar crime or in most street crime, thus, are not left loose on their own and nor do they 'drift' into crime because social controls have broken down. Certainly corporate criminals are firmly under the control of the top executive officers. If one does not commit corporate crime, one replaced as soon as possible by another who will. Control theory is doubly a mystification since the theory is used as an apology for a police state in which the crimes of the poor are policed differentially. This policing is at the expense of the collective interest in a society safe from the predations of the powerful and oriented to democratic processes and the civil rights necessary to democracy.

In Yugoslavia in 1992, Christian Serbian soldiers were encouraged to rape and murder steal large numbers of Bosnians simply because they were Muslim and such a policy fit within the logic of ciscenje, 'ethnic cleansing.' Borislav Herak, a Serbian soldier recounted the conditions under which he and other soldiers were instructed in the murder and encouraged in the rape of Muslim women. Appeal to control theory, i.e., the absence of control with which to explain this behavior is difficult indeed. As a matter of fact, within direct controls approving such behavior, Christians and Muslims had lived as neighbors in peace for years. We will return to this case in the discussion below of the soliton and its use in the understanding of prosocial and antisocial dynamics.

It is doubtless true that many crimes would occur absent the police officer; the witness or the hidden camera. What is of interest to a theory of crime, however, is why the clerk might want to embezzle the funds; why the wife might want to kill the husband; why the vandal might want to despoil the school. It is to these prior questions that a postmodern sociology of crime must speak. One need not spend a great deal of time investigating that which does not happen [the noncrime in the presence of a control system] or to inventory all the nonevents that were absent when a crime was committed. It is a far better thing to do that we look at the dynamics of a relationship; of a status-role; of social occasion; or of a political economy to identify the key parameters which do give light on these prior questions.

In any through-going postmodern criminology, one looks for fractally existent structures which are bifurcating such that entirely new causal basins are opened up for human choice and human agency. Those fractal structures might be ecological, they might be economic, they might be geographical, they might be technical and most certainly, they might be sociological. Of those which are sociological, I suspect that one rounds up the usual suspects and questions them closely: class, status, racism, religion, power and gender differentiations. In other essays in the series, I suggest that bifurcations in class, status and power as well as in racism, religion, and gender are part of the uncertain dynamics of crime.

It well may be the case that bifurcations in status generate crime under some conditions while they promote creativity and energize ambition under other conditions. It may be the case that two or three bifurcations in wealth are helpful to the human project while eight or sixteen might be harmful. It may be the case that two gendering patterns are helpful in one context and hurtful in another. Whatever the case, as Kundera might say, the incredible complexity of being cannot be sorted out with the binary logic of modern science nor with the analytic reductionism of its methodology.

Anomie Control theory is a variant of anomie theory. That theory, specified by Robert Merton, holds that crime increases as norms become unclear, are missing or compete with other norms. The word means, literally, without order; a = without, nomy = order. There is much of value in such formulations. One cannot be a human being without society and society could not exist without normative regulation of behavior. The absence of norms, i.e., social proscriptions for behavior is a negative, a nullity, a void. In scientific endeavor, of which Merton is a familiar, that which does not exist cannot be adduced to explain that which does exist. It is a scientific sin akin to the invocation of gods and gremlins with which to explain the regularity of gravity or the unreliability of aluminum.

At the very basic level of scientific reasoning, anomie is thus a nonwinner. But there is something to be said about a condition in which there are no special and well known directives for action. Human agency is augmented in the regions of uncertainty which Merton called anomie. What is of prime interest to a criminology informed by the science of complexity is why causal fields expand to include regions of uncertainty. Absent norms, people might be more helpful and sharing; absent norms, people might be tempted to do mischief. In the first Black out of New York in the 1970s, uncertainty about norms gave raise to much supportive and friendly behavior; in the second blackout some years later, robbery, looting and personal violence ensued. In such cases, any number of factors might enter in to shape or preshape behavior.

Of the millions of persons in New York or in any such situation, given the inability to act as usual, there are any number of backup regimes for solving the problem of order. For fundamentalist Christians, Jews, and Muslims, such background norms are clear and present at all times; there is never a time of normlessness for such persons. For those who live in mass society, the norm of anonymity obtains; one should go about one's business without bothering others. For those who are family members, one should seek and support one's family. For those who are friends, friends should be sought and supported. For every occasion and for every surprise there are background rules which come out of the long history of premodern sensibility which support prosocial behavior. By the time one is three years old, one has the generic sense that prosocial behavior is to obtain in times of crisis. Yet anti-social behavior did obtain in the second blackout and in many other such urban scenes.

Conflict Theory Conflict theory appears to be helpful in such cases; given racism, given gender antagonisms, given class privilege, given ethnic rivalry, more exploitative and one-sided norms may well be attractive structures of behavior for those who have been subjected to the great indignities of racism, povery and declassed gender status.

In looting, the rare glee with which young and old people reclaim the profits squeezed out of the ghetto by years of pricing policy of a clothing store, a drug store or a furniture store. For those who have to pay exorbitant interest rates to stores to get a refrigerator, the theft of a television set seems to be distributive justice. It is not that they see others stealing televisions set and are caught up in a mob frenzy; are subject to a group mind or are reduced to animal instinct. It is that reasoning and reasonable people understand the class and racial animosities which exist in normal times and which bend to the advantage of majority groups in banking, in job hunting, in house hunting, in shopping and in schooling.

These advantages are set aside and other norms, more oriented to equality and to equity are possible in a time of uncertainty. The fact of the matter is that such behavior involves the replacement of old norms observed by most with new norms observed by others. The Blackout expanded the outcome field and offered a chance to embody norms in which the conflict which took a thousand forms favorable to a majority were, temporarily, replaced by a new normative structure which reversed such benefits. Two outcome basins exist where, but a short time before, only one normative basin attracted behavior. Of those present, some embodied one set of norms; others a new set. And some were uncertain to which basin of attraction to move. It is their uncertainty that theorists who use the concept of 'anomie' refer; not the simple, clear rules which are understandable to the five year old children who joined in on the reclamation of wealth. Merchants, mayors and criminology professors may not approve of such street justice but, in terms of theories of anomie, such behavior offers data which cannot be embraced by its presumptions.

Looting, burning and shooting Anglos and Anglo stores is, on the face of it, pretheoretic resistance and rebellion in that it does little to change the dominant structure of racist/elitist norms. Yet to appeal to 'anomie' with which to understand the origins of behavior is to turn a blind eye to the conflicts which riddle a society. Anomie-as-theory turns into a poetics in which the looting of exploitative merchants is depoliticized and the people who reclaim the wealth taken by an exploitative normative structure are reduced to barbarism...and thus subject to barbaric policing tactics.

The sexual harassment of women in both the Tailhook and the Clarence Thomas case also speak against the validity of anomie as a theory of crime. In the Tailhook episode, some 20 or more women were put through a gauntlet in which their clothes were torn off, their bodies violated and their human spirit degraded. This event was part of a culture complete with values, norms, resources, plans, positive sanctions, symbolic interaction, and other such supplies with which social realities emerge out of a socio-cultural complex. Differential Association might be helpful to understand the transmission of the culture to Naval Officers; Labeling theory might be helpful to understand the capacity of otherwise good and decent men to behave badly toward women but the idea that anomie could be useful to explain such behavior requires much in the way of imagination and more in the way of inattention.

In the Clarence Thomas case, Mr. Thomas may have used the power of his office to extort sexual favors from women. If he did, again, differential association may have some contingent explanatory value; labeling of women with pejorative labels referring to a whole human being as merely a body part most certainly is part of the larger culture from which Mr. Clarence received his socio-sexual orientation. If the testimony of millions of women is to be believed, such harassment, such extortion, such abuse of the social trust assigned to such offices is normative. It is a common ordinary feature of a sexist and sexually repressive society.

Nor was the behavior of Ms. Hill anomic. In her complaint and testimony before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee, Anita Hill was involved the political act--conspiracy if you will--of replacing one set of norms with a different set of norms. She was and is part of the feminist movement, shared by the journalists and Congresspeople who opposed the confirmation of Mr. Thomas. This movement is not interested in anomie; it is interested in clear and specific norms orienting gender behavior. It is not 'anomie' which is operative in the case but a conflict between two sets of norms in overt conflict with each other.

In trying to discredit Ms. Hill, the Republican members were supporting a well instituted set of sexual norms and, at the same time, trying to reconstitute the Supreme Court such that a new set of legal norms about religion in school, about teenage sexuality, about government regulation of business, about racial relations could remain institutional and thus forestall another set of legal norms.

In both cases above, it is not anomie which is at issue but rather a political question about which of two incompatible set of norms to privilege which is the operative question; as such to speak of anomie with regard to either party in either contest is to substitute one's own confusion about what to do for the clarity of vision that sexists have on the one side and feminists have on the other. For either party, there is no confusion over the norms; they is only conflation in which one party tries to replace one set of norms with another. The vague, missing or confused elements are in the analyst not in the analysand.

An alternative way to conceive of such episodes is to use the concepts from Chaos theory with which sort out the behavior as a totality. Chaos theoreticians would suggest that a key parameter has changed in which a new attractor has developed toward which some set of persons move in preference to an older, better instituted form of behavior. Two concepts are particularly salient to such analysis: the concept of the Soliton and the emergence of new forms of organization out deep chaos.

New Structures Out of Old Ilya Prigogine took a Nobel prize in 1977 for his work on irreversible thermodynamics. In brief, he showed how the energy dissipated from turbulent systems generated new order in chemical systems. One could work through such effects on various forms of crime, but for purposes of illumination of the effects of nonlinear dynamics, we shall take patriarchy and crimes against women as a case in point. Patriarchy has managed to survive most of the more profound socio-economic changes that have swept through human societies; it is found in agrarian societies, in slave systems, in feudal societies, in colonial societies and in socialist societies.

In these societies, patriarchy takes the form of a soliton; a special form of social behavior which maintains its structure even while passing through other social structures. Of all existent societies, it is in liberal capitalist societies where the status of women has changed most fundamentally. Among the events which have empowered women in western liberal democracies, one can look to the rise of capitalism and its concern with cost and profit. Women are better workers on a number of scores than are men; they are more dependable, more tractable about working conditions, may be a bit brighter and in all this, accept lower wages. To the extent women are hired and, having independent wages, women are better equipped to walk away from men upon whom they would otherwise be dependent. Economic power translates into a variety of social powers at home, in politics, in market and in school.

Then too, the flow of wealth from the third world to Europe and the USA in the past 200 years has greatly empowered those women who inherit wealth, whose families can afford to send them to university, who are able to find a niche in some corner of the state sector or the private sector and which frees them from economic thralldom. A great many social movements have emerged among those women who have the resources to sustain such movements. And there are many such women in the USA and in Europe; indeed more and more such movements are emerging among women around the world.

Given the empowerment of women, the usual norms may be challenged. Just which women will challenge which norms in which episode is a matter of great uncertainty. We can be sure that some women, sometime will object to the attentions of traditional sexists such as Mr. Hill and as those Naval Officers who used them with indignity and with little of the reciprocity which marks egalitarian social relations. Yet once the precedent is established that women can, should and will be supported by some sector of the population or some institution in society, the behavior of Naval Officers and of the Clarence Hills in Washington, D.C. is sure to be transformed into a political incident. Where before there was but one normative basin within which women might act, now there are two. The one basin is a basin of conventional sexual norms in which the sexuality of women is used to solve the solidarity needs of otherwise competing males (as Durkheimian analysis would suggest) and another basin of sexual norms in which a woman has considerably more control over her own sexuality and may invest it with more discretion than may she in the former basin.

Capitalism has considerably less to offer to women of the third world whose labor produces over 60% of the surplus value in those countries. Factories set down in the middle of a sexist society offers some limited empowerment of third world women but while European and American women have families of orientation to which to turn for aid, in patriarchal societies in which over 90% of the women move into families which are patrilocal, migration to the city and to the jobs is also migration away from a key support group. European and American women also have welfare systems to which to turn when standing in defiance of abusive or exploitative males. Third world women have far fewer external supports available. So, in order to generate income in a declining economy, a third world woman takes a job in a factory, is subject to long hours, strict discipline and meager wages. At home and at work, she is subject to masculine prerogative and has far fewer choices in front of her should she confront her oppressor.

Then too, along with economic changes wrought by liberal capitalism there are fundamental changes in culture and religion which are not unconnected to each other in mutual amplification of feminist thought, power and organization to replace sexist norms with more democratic norms. Liberation theology has a feminist voice to which millions of women listen. Postmodern psychology best embodied in work of Carol Gilligan, offers women a sense of pride and confidence in the nonlinear reasoning which trumps the narrow and blind rationality of linearity. The voice of women is heard in the media, in the university and in a thousand billion encounters with young men, themselves subject to entirely new social and economic conditions.

To dismiss this analysis in preference to anomie, to control theory or to differential association seems to me to be an exercise in simplification which may fit within the logic of modern analytic science but does great harm to the facts of the case and more harm to the knowledge process. There are better, more complex, and more nonlinear ways to conceptualize, to research and to explain the forms of crime and the forms of resistance sometimes labeled crime.

Culture of Poverty Poverty cannot be adduced as a cause of crime in as much as there are many very poor societies with very little crime. People in poor countries such as China, in many Muslim societies, as well as most poor people in the U.S. do not commit crime at the same rates as do rich people in the 'developed' countries. On the other hand rich people routinely commit crime in both rich and poor societies. Studies of corporate crime and white collar crime find such behavior endemic. Where there is poverty and where community or social solidarity is strongly supported, as in religious or some socialist societies, the relationship between poverty and crime disappears.

In the USA and in other massified societies with little solidarity and with a lot of desire for goods and services exceeding, the biggest crimes are committed. And they are committed by the rich. Doctors overcut and overbill in order to increase their portfolio. Corporations pollution, bribe, violate labor laws, safety laws and money exchange laws in order to increase profits. Some 30 to 50% of we middle class professionals will cheat on our income tax reports as we file them this year. Poverty cannot be adduced as a cause of crime in such cases.

High crime rates among the rich, powerful and among those with high status well integrated into a society, surrounded by well known norms, clearly expressed and reinforced by other high status functionaries do not resolve to theories of poverty, of differential interaction nor do they yield to control theory. The pursuit of wealth beyond one's needs fuel private crime; institution and reproduction of the forms of inequality, fuel state crime as well as privatized control systems. A look at the institutions deployed to assure inequality and to control the kinds of crime which threaten the social peace in a stratified society help make the case that it is not poverty or anomie which promotes crime but rather the ordinary workings of that society.

Bifurcating Control Systems There is much conflict sociology behind who is to be policed by which control system. In order to preserve the dramaturgical impression that the USA offers equality before the law, new and qualitatively different control systems are employed to deal with differing forms of crime. The Criminal Justice System offers a rough and ruthless equality before the law for street criminals. There are other control systems for white collar crime, corporate crime and political crime. They are gentle and bestow dignity on the accused in that they are comprised of peers and/or sympathetic State functionaries. There are, therefore, several systems of social control in the United States. Each one polices a different stratum of society; each one is informed by a different theory of justice and each one serves up a differing labeling process to the persons it polices.

The partition of justice into differing outcome basins to which differing crimes are 'attracted,' i.e., to which differing crimes are assigned bespeaks a greater inequality as between them and a complex bifurcation system engineered by those who benefit from such differential tracings of crime and justice. We can look at, briefly, the focus and performance of each system in order to get a sense of the social means by which inequality is reproduced by the Justice System itself.

1) the criminal justice system. It deals mostly with street crime. It polices poor persons. It is informed by retributive justice and it labels the persons processed through its routines as 'criminals,' 'hoods,' 'crooks,' and 'habitual sexual offenders.'

2) the Military Justice system. It deals mostly with street crime committed by those in the armed forces. It polices enlisted personnel more so than the Officer strata; it is informed by retributive justice and its labeling processes last only during the life of the sentence. If a person is habitual, he /she is given a 'general,' 'bad conduct,' or 'dishonorable' discharge. Officers are allowed to resign without affixing a label on the Discharge Record.

3) the Administrative Justice System. It is composed of the many regulatory Agencies of the Federal, State, and Local governments. It is the system which polices corporate crime. It confines its action to fictional entities called corporations rather than to either the engineers of the crime or its beneficiaries. It is informed mostly by distributive justice and seldom uses a labeling process with which to designate habitual corporate criminals.

4) the Peer Review system polices professionals such as doctors, lawyers, and professors. It is informed by distributive or rehabilitative justice imperatives and seldom labels the offenders who are subject to its procedures.

5) the Private Security systems monitors employees, customers, and competitors on behalf of owners and managers. Its routines are informed by distributive justice and it seldom makes any effort to label either employees or customers who are caught stealing, embezzling, converting or otherwise pursuing white collar crime.

6) the Religious justice system monitors and sanctions members of a religious group. Over most of human history, it has been more or less concerned with social justice since it deals with 'sin,' 'corruption,' 'evil,' and inequity. Its actions are quite varied from highly punitive retribution to mild and constructive rehabilitation. Its use of labeling is also highly variable. Sometimes it employs labels which profane and thus exclude persons from the ordinary norms of respect and support. Sometimes it uses terms which resanctify the thief, the adulterer and the sinner in the process of 'saving' them to the Drama of the Holy.

7) the Medical control system judges and controls the behavior of those who are said to be ill or 'mad' rather than criminal. It includes the mental health system as well as chemotherapy prescribed by general practitioners, both of which control 'deviant' behavior rather than punish it. Usually its polices forms of vice and/or 'crimes without victims;' alcoholism, homosexuality, drug use, and sexual abuse by middle class men and women. Lower class persons who engage in the same behavior tend to be processed through the criminal justice system.

The medical control system also prescribes pacifying medications for children and for middle class women who engage in pretheoretical resistance and rebellion against the conditions of school, family and work.

8) the Social Welfare system monitors and controls the behavior of those to whom welfare payments are made...usually poor women but sometimes others. There are a set of social life rules with which recipients must order their lives upon pain of forfeiture of benefits. It the USA, the social welfare system is particularly mean-spirited and cheap. In other nations, the system is oriented more to social justice and sanctification of its citizens.

Other Control Systems Besides those formal, publicly instituted justice systems there are such informal social control systems such as the K.K.K., the White Citizens' Army, the Jewish Defense League and various political underground groups which monitor, judge and punish those whose behavior does not fit the instituted moral order. These tend to act openly and often in concert with state agencies in totalitarian societies; they tend to go underground in democratic societies (Young, 1983).

There is also a large and growing arbitration system in which private parties ask third parties to make binding judgments about what is right and what is fair. The mediation system helps those in conflict relations negotiate settlements.

There are 22 secret agencies of the Federal government which also make judgments about people and engage in punitive action. They are supplemented by hundreds of underground state agencies or teams which engage in paralegal activity, often catching, judging and sanctioning those who could not be brought before the more public control systems. The various military services are used to control nations and whole regions of the world.

The complexity of the Justice System in the USA is further developed by the quiet different policing according women in a patriarchal society. Feminists have pointed out that women are exempted from both policing and protection by the criminal justice system since husbands, bosses and other males are presumed to police their anti-patriarchal behavior (N. Davis and K. Faith, 1985). Since such behavior is not proscribed by the law, it cannot be the subject of the officially established policing system but it is nevertheless policed and punished.

A postmodern criminologist, declining to accept the conventional definitions of crime must explain the proliferation of control institutions. I will discuss the growing use of high tech control systems in the next section but one should keep in mind that all these varied systems work together to make it possible to have class, gender, and racial stratification in a society putatively oriented to democratic social relations.

Technofascism One solution to the high cost of labor intensive policing and corrections is to use capital intensive policing strategies. Rather than hire enough private security police, even at the depressed wages they are paid, it is more efficient to install detectors at doors. Rather than hire more supervisors, it is more economical to install television monitors in shops with which one person can scan entire ranks of clerks and using the video tapes, constitute self and judge and jury. For those employees who use phones or computers, software exists with which to police time and content of work.

Crime and the Market Many forms of crime can be understood as nonlinear feedback loops in which wealth is redistributed outside the rationality of the marketplace. When a burglar steals a television set, that theft is nonlinear in terms of market dynamics even if the theft serves to stimulate demand on the part of the family from which it was stolen. When a clerk embezzles funds from a bank, the transfer of resources is nonlinear in terms of linear wage policy (the more hours worked, the higher the income) yet the funds may allow that clerk to enter the housing market, the health care market, the leisure market or send her children to college. All equally nonlinear, all such acts together may be destabilizing of a firm or a society, but nonetheless stabilizing of her life style; at least in the short term.

Many forms of corporate crime entail a discontinuous abrogation of a contract either through fraud or privileged access to legal services. Many forms of white collar crime entail the unilateral construction of a nonlinear feedback loop between, say, doctor, patient, and insurance carrier in which the flow of resources between doctor, patient and carrier are not rational in terms of the language of a medical insurance policy. The advantages in resources accruing to corporations or white collar thieves can be used to construct another feedback loop in which those with more wealth can detach themselves from the consequences of their behavior by recourse to bribes, legal tactics or flight to another country.

When a firm moves from sole dependence on profits to dependence upon government subsidies then on to forms of corporate crime, or to loans in order to generate income, it too has created a 2n+ income attractor field. The parallel attractors are, in terms of a free market, nonlinear, but they satisfy the need for additional income to meet survival needs of the firms or life style desires of the owners and employees of firms. These practices may draw order from the environment in such a way as to degrade that environment beyond reversibility.

If nonlinearity at one scale of human endeavor preserves pattern and predictability at another scale of endeavor, it well might be the case that nonlinear economics is an asset to a society. However, the effects of such nonlinear behavior should be a matter of public policy rather than private action since private actions may simply transfer uncertainty from one part of the system to another rather than promote order in the totality. It is not disorder which is the topic of interest to the postmodern criminologist but rather the kind, ratio, location and timing of nonlinearity.

Criminology Concepts as Fractals In terms of criminology, the concept of theft covers so many varied acts that poetic imagination is necessary for police, prosecutor, judge and jury to function. Failing such open and varied interpretations, a law making body would have to pass billions of laws to cover even the simplest kind of theft if it were to presume a precision close to that of newtonian mechanics, i.e., a precision to one part in 10¹⁴ parts. Such a view of concept usage means that there are, inevitably, regions of uncertainty between theft and gift; theft and honest value; theft and warranty.

The major implication of this uncertainty of vocabulary is that justice can never be precise; nor can a judge ever be rational in any modernist usage of the concept of rationality. Reliance on law as a way to get order is compounded by other uncertainties to match those in language.

The basic unit of social life is the norm. For a norm to be useful, it must have both pattern and variation. Imposition of a linearity in which precise conformity to a legal norm is required means that everyone is, perforce, a criminal. No one unit act is ever ontologically a crime or a prosocial act; most have multiple effects and some have varying efficacy. The uncertainty in language is compounded by the uncertainty in actual behavior to which the legal language refers.

The basic unit of social organization is the status-role. The essence of a status role is that it is always plural in composition. A status role is comprised of two or more actors. In any given form of corporate crime or political crime and in most forms of white collar crime and certainly in organized crime, the behavior in question is role directed. The single acting autonomous individual is a fictive concept for most kinds of crime. This means that the boundaries between those who are responsible for the crime and those who are innocent of the crime are fractal indeed. Most of the responsibility for political crime might reside with a president or a general but, given the role relationships found in a presidential staff or an army unit, the actual deed might be two, three, four or more steps away from the person most culpable. Chaos theory, with its nonlinear interconnections, can handle such culpability far more readily than can the euclidean geometries of solitary crime and solitary culpability implicit in modern criminology. Such reductionism of crime to the individual only adds to the cycles of pain without reducing the cycles of crime.

Chaos and the Concept of Deviancy Chaos theory teaches us that one should take care to honor the need for variation, surprise, or creativity in human affairs. One should not be too ready to call every variation in gender relations, in economic behavior, in religion by the name of deviancy. Chaos theory gives criminology entirely new perspectives on such pejoratives. Postmodern criminology honors polycentered politics, economics, religions and forms of gender relations. The question arises, how then may one speak of crime and virtue? How then may one set the standards by which the limits of variation might be known? How then may one speak of good and evil?

These are difficult questions and reside in the domain of social philosophy. Ethics and morality themselves are oriented to premodern and modern understandings of that which is normal and that which is necessary. While there is a much more nuanced argument made elsewhere, I think the beginning of the answer to such questions are found in the indicators of social distress; infant mortality rates indite the economic system. Drop out rates indite the educational system. Divorce rates indite the system of gender relations and forms of intimacy. Crime rates bespeak the adequacy of religion, economics and, variously, politics (Young, 1981).

For those who want more guidance in the definition of crime and justice, one can turn to such documents at the United Nations Declaration of Universal Human Rights (Kamenka and Erh-Soon Tay, 1978). For those who want more careful grounding of a theory of crime and justice, one might well look at the work of Ronald Kramer and Ray Michalowski (1987); Michalowski (1985), Louk Hulsman, and Elliott Currie. All these have tried to think through the structural features of low crime societies.

Crime and Its Attractors I will emphasize again and again, the 'strange attractors' of criminal behavior are not explicable in terms of the individuals who engage in crime but rather a product of the many social, economic, political and cultural factors that work together to produce storms of crime and interludes of cooperative social harmony. For many in both traditional and modern criminology, such a statement is outrageous. Yet it is a decidedly sociological theory of crime which focussed attention upon social relations in social context rather than personality or upon genetics. What I will say about the patterns of given forms of crime does not preclude the view that, within the skin and brain of particular individuals, there are also nonlinear dynamics which affect overt behavior.

I do not want to be heard as saying that personality factors do not mediate crime rates. What I want the reader to hear is that interactions between social and cultural variables shape personality configurations in the first instance and offer a context in which they are embodied in the second. If one is to explain crime, one must explain that which produces differing personality configurations as between high crime and low crime societies. I will offer some ideas later on. Yet the point remains. Chaos theory teaches us that the very same individuals with the very same personalities at time one will commit crime under given parameter values while remaining at peace with neighbors and self at other settings of the same parameter.

I do not want to be read as writing that physiology is unrelated to some forms of crime; what I want the reader to grasp is that, given a population of persons with given physiological attributes, some will be entrained in some forms of crime and others will not. I want the reader to consider that, perhaps, such physiological attributes may be central to a given form of crime in one of the five dynamical states but not in another dynamical state.

Such a position appears to be a contradiction. How can personality or physiology mediate crime sometimes and not other times? How can they be relevant to the explanation of crime and the control of crime in one attractor state and be irrelevant in another? There are no data, no studies, no reasoned basis for such statements answerable to ordinary standards of verification. Yet, even without data, one can see the implications of Chaos theory for a field which has yet to use the organizing concepts with which to direct research. These implications are vast and the research inspired by them likely to be most helpful to an understanding of human behavior.

Amplifications of Order and Disorder In order to appreciate these implications in respect to criminology, it is helpful to think about causality in terms of feedback loops rather than unidirectional arrows. Negative feedback loops regulate and thus preserve order; positive feedback loops amplify and thus move a system from a near-to-equilibrium state to a more chaotic equilibrium. The kind of feedback loops is important. When either kind of feedback loop is linear, one gets death (with negative feedback) or full blown chaos (with positive and linear feedback.

Nonlinear feedback loops tend to preserve existing patterns of order in a near to stable configuration while linear and positive feedback loops tend to 'blow them apart. In social terms, if the children of the middle classes are given a head start over children in the underclass, a linear positive feedback loop would send the middle class children into better schools, better jobs, better housing and better health care which, in turn, would enable their children to have still better schooling, jobs, housing and health care. If, at the same time, children in the underclass are in a linear positive feedback loop which sends their children into ever worse schools, jobs, housing and health care systems then both loops together amplify inequality between the two sets of children. Perhaps to a point where such differences destabilize the system.

After several iterations of such loops, even small differences become great differences. Given the workings of positive feedback loops inequality between the two cohorts become so great that each has its own causal basin even in the same society in which everyone is subject to the principle (that of positive, linear feedback) of the system. Each cohort gets its proper reward for effort; middle class children, with their head starts, make ever more effort. Children of the underclass, with their failing resources make ever less effort to get jobs, housing, education or health care. Some of these children may move outside the logic of linear feedback and attempt to get a head start for themselves or their children.

Nonlinearity of Social Justice If we want to maintain the integrity of a market economy with its many advantages, then there must be such forms of nonlinear response with which to defeat the transformation of the torus which describes, say, frequency of entry into the market for essential goods and services. If not, the market itself may split into 2 or more attractors: one oriented to those with discretionary income and those without. As income inequalities between ethnic groups, economic classes or nations grow, more and more capital is attracted to the basin of production allocated to luxury goods and less and less to the production basin which essential goods are produced. When those with discretionary income determines the price and supply of essential goods and services, more and more low wage earners are driven out of the market. At some point, low wage earners will begin to seek alternative ways to increase income or to reduce costs in order to stay in the marketplace. Some of these alternative ways may be outside the logics of the marketplace; i.e., they may be nonlinear in terms of a cash economy.

Those in economics will know that there are many feedback loops, nonlinear in terms of free market dynamics, used in our economy to maintain order and stability of the economy. Of the 255+ million people in the USA, only about 115 million work for wage or salary. Most persons who do not work for wage or salary depend upon nonlinear modes of redistribution; for some, their family offers a feedback loop with which to redistribute resources based not on effort or merit but upon need. For others, private charity constitutes a nonlinear feedback loop in which those with discretionary income give resources to those without it. Again this feedback loop is nonlinear in terms of market criteria. State welfare systems are huge and nonlinear feedback loops which take resources from one group and redistribute it outside the deterministic logic of the market to those it deems worthy. Indeed stability of the whole system depends upon such parallel and nonmarket-driven systems of redistribution.

It is the central thesis of this essay that, in terms of market dynamics, most forms of property crime constitute a nonlinear system of redistribution. Although offering nonlinear feedback in terms of the logic of market and profit, crime tends to amplify disorder by adding to the uncertainties of their victims and perpetrators alike. Street crime is a particularly vicious expression of nonlinear redistribution since its victims tend to be those already living in great uncertainty with regard to health, housing, gender relations and racial relations. When one adds crime to the uncertainties of those who live with all too many uncertainties, all too often one sees despair and degradation. Organized crime offers to solve such uncertainties with short-term solutions; gambling, drugs and commodity sex as well as employment in providing them.

White collar crime and corporate crime have as their only virtue that they redistribute uncertainty anonymously. One cannot identify the victim of doctors, lawyers, or stockbrokers with the same certainty that one can identify the victim of the street thug. Yet each iteration of white collar crime adds to the totality of inequality in a society even if some white collar crime catches still other white collar criminals as it victim...it is the overall pattern which destabilizes when such inequality reaches a critical point.

Political crime tends to reinforce existing patterns of inequality. When the state uses its monopoly of force to uphold existing processes in market, school, church and state which exacerbate class inequality in each new contract, in each new program, in each new meeting or each new election, interaction within and between each process pushes key parameters beyond equilibrium. State crime promotes disorder by amplifying status inequality as well. More of the same turns into much more than more the same. Small inequalities turn into destabilizing inequalities. Absolute powerlessness produces apathy and withdrawal but when people are deprived of social power and/or economic power, they still have physical power and can use it in ways that may not be theoretically useful to themselves or to the rest of society. Failing good theory and good politics, pretheoretical resistance and response is easy. One strikes out at whomever the media or the church say is class enemy; or at whomever is closest and most vulnerable.

Conclusion We can use this knowledge about nonlinear dynamics and the science of complexity for any number of purposes which may or may not help produce a good and decent society. Rather than empower women, we may use this knowledge to empower the state; rather than empower workers, we may see this new science used to empower any number of managerial elites; rather than use this knowledge for social justice, we can stand aside and see it used to generate still more inequality.

There will always be some percentage of persons who will rob, rape, steal, and intoxicate the good earth. The interesting question is how to build a criminology which will lead toward a low crime society. There will always be groups which try to transfer their problems to other, more vulnerable groups. The task that the postmodern criminology has involved a pursuit of that knowledge which will reduce their vulnerability. There will always be societies which try to solve their survival on the backs of other, poorer and weaker societies. The role of the Chaotician. is to show that exploitation of the environment and degradation of other peoples has repercussions not found in earlier ages. In the crassest terms possible, given a connected world, we hurt our children when we hurt our cousins.

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