Девиантность, преступность, социальный контроль в обществе постмодерна

Police as well as police training and education system are part and parcel of the society, and they have common problems – economic, social, political, morale (including insufficient of finances, corruption, traditional Russian police «secrecy», the militarization of police, and police training, etc.).

Punishment

The social control over deviance (including criminality) is one of the major problems in the modern world. Street crime, organized crime, violent crime, terrorism, and so on, affect people and give rise to «moral panic» and «fear to crime» (Cohen, 1973). Legislators, politicians, police and criminal justice officials try, often habitually, repressive methods to gain control over criminality, drug abuse and drug trafficking, prostitution, corruption, terrorism, etc. However, traditional measures have not obtained the desired results.

Social control is the mechanism of self-organizing and self-preservation of society by the establishment and maintenance of normative order, by elimination, neutralization, or minimization of deviant behavior (including crimes). Two basic methods of social control are encouragement and punishment («bait and switch»).

The social control over criminality includes general methods of social control – punishment, «war on crime» by means of reprisals, and crime prevention. Mankind has tried all means of reprisal, including qualified kinds of death penalty and refined torture. However, criminality for some reason, has not disappeared…

There are some points of view that exists about what inhibis control of crime – «crisis of punishment» (Mathiesen, 1974), crisis of the criminal justice systems, crisis of the criminal-law control over criminality, including the control of police (Christie, 1981; Davis and Anderson, 1983; Pep-inski and Quinney, 1991; Hendrics and Byer, 1996; Rotwax, 1996; Christie, 2000, and others). Movement of abolitionism develops and grows towards cancellation not only of the death penalty, but also towards replacement of imprisonment by alternative measures of punishment, for transition from the retributive justice to the restorative justice (Morris, 1989; Zehr, 1990; Consedine, 1995; and others).

R. Lenoir (1974) and S. Paugam (1996), N. Luhmann (1998) and J. Young (1999) wrote about the new social global situation – the tendency to divide people and societies into inclusive and exclusive. «Inclusive» is the personality inclusive in the functional system. «Exclusive» can be only individual not inclusive in the functional system, who are known only by existence (Luh-mann). The distinction of inclusion/exclusion exist between countries (global inclusion/exclusion) and between people within some countries (national inclusion / exclusion).

From our point of view, the social and economic inequality is one of the biggest criminogenic factors. People have real opportunities to satisfy their needs, depending on their belonging to one or the other social class, stratum, and group or depending on their social and economic status. Inequality of opportunity generates social conflict, dissatisfaction, envy, and at last, various forms of deviation. The process of inclusion/exclusion is acquiring more and more criminogenic and deviantogenic significance, both for the contemporary world and for the future. It is clear that «excluded people» are becoming a mass reserve, a social basis of social deviation, including criminality.

Repressive social control is the best means of exclusion, especially through the issue of selection in the police and the judiciary. There appears to be a cir-culus vitiosus (vicious circle). The repressive mode of social control enhances the amount of the excluded people. The more people are excluded, the higher the deviance (including crime) rate seems to be. The higher the rate of deviance, the more repressive the social control is considered to be.

The basic tendencies of the theory (and in the practice of some countries) of the modern Western policy of the social control over criminality are as follows:

• Recognition of irrationality and inefficiency of the reprisals («crisis of punishment»),

• Change of the strategy of social control from «war» to «peace» and «peacemaking» (Pepinski and Quinney).

• Search for alternative (non-repressive) measures of social reaction.

• Priority of crime prevention (for our opinion about crime prevention see: Gilinskiy, 1998).

• Realization of the conceptof «restorative justice».

• Realization of the concept of «community policing».