Teaching Criminology: Part VII

Postmodern Criminology
Researching Non-Linear Dynamics in Crime

SOCGRAD MINI-LECTURES

by

T. R. Young
The Red Feather Institute

A. This is the final part of a seven part series on teaching criminology. The series was prepared for graduate students in sociology as part of the Transforming Sociology Series of the Red Feather Institute for Advanced Studies in Sociology.

In this tutorial, I will focus upon the epistemological assumptions in the knowledge process which forever change the ways in which social research is done.

There is a companion set of articles having to do more with the content of postmodern criminology than with the methodological questions taken up here...both are essential to a complete postmodern criminology...you can see that at:

POSTMODERN CRIMINOLOGY: A JOURNAL

B. PostModern Philosophy of Science. Postmodern science has very attributes from the modern science which, 300 years after the death of Newton, continues to inform sociology in general and criminology in particular. In this and other work, posted on-line at the address above, I use the new sciences of chaos and complexity with which to sort out the dynamics of crime, change, class and other topics of interest to sociology. Among the very different attributes are:

1. Non-linear Dynamics which reduce the epistemological efficacy of modernist/newtonian scientific tools: prediction, replicability, statistical inference of causality, generalizability, logically coherent theoretical models,

2. A Fractal Geometry of social forms which are product of those non-linear dynamics and...

3. A complex and changeable feedback between fractal forms--which take three forms: positive, negative and non-linear...these feedback patterns replace the standard notions of causality. Both positive and negative feedback patterns do, indeed, permit one to speak, poetically, of causality; however, most complex systems exhibit non-linear feedback between systems.

4. These, together, constitute a postmodern philosophy of science which can be set in opposition to the more nihilistic versions/assertions in postmodern scholar- ship which deny the possibility of objective know- ledge. In a word, there is enough order even in the most chaotic regimes to permit some degree of insight about what is happening.

C. Research in Postmodern Criminology.

The research design used in all modern science is set up in order to eliminate understanding of non-linear dynamics and fractal facticities. In a recent comment in the LA Times, James Q. Wilson is quoted as saying '...real science involves testing theories by repeated and independent experiments.' Wilson uses research in DNA, a simple system with linear dynamics as the model for battered women and children who live--and die--in very complex and nonlinear systems. He urges that courts use the truth standards appropriate for simple, linear systems in criminal cases.

Until we set in place quite a different research design, one which looks for changing truth values as key variables make small changes, both human understanding and social policy are hostage to this simplistic science.

a. Bifurcations. A postmodern criminology grounded chaos/complexity theory begins with the concept of the bifurcation.

1. Key variables bifurcate, change from displaying one track for a given kind of behavior to having two tracks. This is monumentally different from the kind of science Wilson presumes. A small change in a key varible can produce qualitatively different behavior for some of the systems involved.

Think of it; it is not the intervention of a new variable which produces new behavior but a small change in an ordinary variable which, at a different setting, did not entail that behavior.

2. In criminology, a small change in salary/income may produce a big change in crime. While most people in given circumstances did not steal at time one, some unpredictable portion of those well socialized well educated, white collar professionals begin to steal from employers, exploit patients, embezzle from clients and/or turn to entirely new and creative forms of crime.

3. With each bifurcation, causality fades and fails. With one, ` two, or four tracks a system might take, causality is tight enough to support modernistic models of science.

When there are four, eight, sixteen or thirty-two tracks produced by two, four, eight bifucations, criminality of given doctor, lawyer, broker, or banker becomes very uncertain indeed.

The same can be expected for corporations; small changes in profit/loss ratios may trigger new and innovate ways of cheating customers, endangering workers, subverting competitors and evading taxes.

Social life still occurs; order is found still; society still survives but non-linear research techniques are appropriate. Replication, falsification, statistical inference, theory-building and predication fail as knowledge tools.

And, as more and more uncertainty enters the lives of human beings, social control tactics fail as a solution to the problem of order. But social control is possible; this time, control of key variables; macro-structural processes are the proper target of affirmative postmodern criminology rather than increase of pain and costs to particular individuals.

4. Key variables: I have tried to suggest some of the key variables which may be involved in the cascade toward criminality in each part of this series. Key variables for street crime appear to be employment, income, desire, and social power. For white collar crime, the key variables may be income, life- style, life crisis and job satisfaction. Corporate crime is fueled by, I think, small changes in interest rates, taxes, demand, prices, and investment. Political crime is affected, I believe in small changes in macro-structural variables; population, kondratieff/kutznets cycles, infra-structure costs, taxe base, climate/agricultural productivity...prod- uctivity generally.

b. Attractors. Each bifurcations produces a new set of attactors for human beings who, perforce, must live out their lives in systems with changing variables. In criminality, the attractors at hand are one or more new ways to reducing uncertainty; new ways of behaving; new patterns of working, stealing, helping or hurting each other.

1. Fractal Facticity. As bifurcations increase, the geometry of social forms become ever more fuzzy and fragmented. In criminology, the social boundaries between 'criminals' vs 'law-abiding' citizens becomes less and less clear.

And for a given person, the routines of life become less and less predictable...while criminality may be a life-style in one outcome field, it may be very episodic in another...for the very same people with the very same socialization/character/ genes/menstrual cycle/religious beliefs.

2. Cascading Uncertainties. While a given person may be able to handle one, two or three uncertainties in family, at work, in school and/or in health, each new uncertainty brings evermore creative ways to handle social-life...some of which may be very helpful + to the human project; some less so.

c. Feedback. In the postmodern science with which I work, feedback replaces the concept of causality. Causal connection may well exist but, in social life, they are very different from the simple physical systems with which Newton worked and changed the world. There are three kinds of feedback one must think about in postmodern criminology.

1. Linear and Positive feedback. If a system is designed such that positive feedback results as between systems and sub-systems, great peril for the integrity of the system ensues.

Positive feedback tends to explode the outcome field and fill it with evermore attractors. Systems tend to fill the causal space available to them. Think of the screech of sound when there is positive feedback between a speaker and a microphone. Think of the chaos which linear feedback brings in economics; income gaps between rich and poor continue to increase until revolution breaks out. Think of the violence which occurs when racism continues to increase the status differences between majority and minority.

Linear feedback is a recipe for the deep chaos so hostile to the sensibility of those who argue for law and order. Yet linearity in policing, in trying, in judging, and in sentencing people is said to be a solution to crime.

2. Linear and Negative Feedback. Positive feedback results in deep chaos; negative feedback results in death. Both are hostile to the transcending stability of social life. In populations as in physics, negative feedback fulfills the prophecy of death in the second law of thermodynamics...every system tends to fall apart.

3. Non-linear feedback. If we want to maintain the stability of a social life world, then we must consider at what point we must change from linear feedback to non-linear in our social policies.

Market dynamics work on the basis of positive feedback to firms, investors, inventors and workers. The same price for the same item permits mass marketting; the same process for the same product permit mass production; the same rate for each hour worked makes mass employment possible; the same sentences for the same crime produces a certain rationality in the criminal justice system.
yet human beings live in qualitatively different life circumstances. Rationality becomes enemy to social stability for such people.

At some point, social policy must transcend the thin rationality of mechanistic logic and deploy the larger rationality of mercy, compassion, hope and faith in things not known with certainty.

d. Algorithms: an algorithms is a set of 'instructions' which shape the destiny of a system...non-linear algorithms have two parts; one or more variables which are constant and one or more which settings vary.

1. Racism is a constant in the lives of many people...job opportunity, health, police response, relationships are variable...

With such an algorithm, a given cohort of young minority persons, Afro-Americans, Native Indians, Migrants and others who constantly face racist, ethno-centric discrimination find themselves in non-linear social settings.

Given, say, 10,000 young minorities children in, say, Chicago, the sociologist would know that which each bifurcation in key variables...health, job, policing for example, new attractors would emerge. Some would be pro-social; some not.

The important methodological point is that while we could predict a fairly stable sub-set of kids would go to a given attractor, we could not predict which would...small changes at bifurcation points in key variables would send similar kids in quite different directions.

2. Income is a constant in the lives of young, middle class children as is high status for white kids...one would see much less uncertainty in the lives of these kids; fewer new attractors, good, bad or indifferent.

3. Ratios between desire and resources vary greatly; both are variable while racism is a constant. In such non-linear dynamics, we could be sure that efforts to reduce mismatch between desire and resouces would entail a great deal more surprize in the lives of those whose devices are limited but whose desire, fueled by adverizing is not limited.

e. Iterations. Daily, weekly, seasonal and yearly cycles are such iterations. In non-linear iterations, self-similarity replaces the sameness found in linear iterations. Ordinary epistemological tools do not work in non- linear criminology; High correlations are not helpful to the knowledge process; replication does not prove falsity/valdity; formal axiomatic theory is not possible/useful in non-linear dynamcis.

Given the same set of kids in the same conditions each cycle would produce slightly new behaviors in class, in play, in crime or in family life would be expected.

Given the same set of doctors in the same conditions, each new cycle would produce different rates of crime.

Given the same set of corporations with the same labor costs, the same tax table, the same level of demand, the same level of competition, crime rates would vary if even one key variable made a small change.

At critical settings; those close to bifurcation points, great increases in white collar, corporate and political crime would be triggered by small changes in key variables.

CONCLUSION:

A postmodern criminology is as much concerned with preventing crime as with charting and theorizing about it. Postmodern criminology looks for changing correlations rather than high correlations. Postmodern criminology looks for ways to keep a society with enough order to serve the human need for dependable scheduling of social interaction while maintaining enough disorder to permit change, flexibility, adaptation and creativity.

Postmodern crime policy is not oriented so much to control, pain and punishment as to careful, light and strategic adjustments of key variables which affect the kind and number of attractors. Postmodern crime policy is not concerned so much with individuals but with kind and degree of linearity of structural variables: racism, class inequality, gender oppressions as well as national/transnational exploitations.

In a word, postmodern criminology is more oriented to social justice than to criminal justice.

TR Young