PART IV: EMPIRICAL FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION
7. Introduction
7.3 Triangulating and displaying the data on which findings are based
7.3.1 Knowledge about crime in context
This section provides a descriptive analysis and displays, compares and relates (Bazeley, 2009:5-12) participants’ explicit and tacit knowledge which was accessed through open and probe questions based on the idea that individuals acquire ‘strong, or collective tacit
185 knowledge … by being embedded in society’ (Collins, 2010:11). Participants across sub- units mentioned individual and structural factors that lead to the commission of crime.
Some participants explicitly mentioned the interaction of individual and structural factors that produce crime.
Four distinct notions are identifiable from the data displayed in figures 7.3 and 7.4:
that individuals are responsible for the commission of crime, (which resonates with dispositional theories of crime). This includes the single account that stated
‘crime is an anomaly’.
that structural factors produce crime (which resonate with situational theories of crime);
that it is the interaction of individual and structural factors that produces crime, which resonates with integrative theories of crime.
that crime is a social construction (which resonates with social construction theory).
Participants mentioned individual and intra-personal factors that exemplify various psychological, developmental, rational choice, biological, substance abuse, spiritual and other factors. The social structural factors mentioned include relationship networks, economic, education, political, historical, social conflict, cultural and other social factors.
A comment by a Norwegian restorative justice organisation leader sums up the underlying ambivalence portrayed in figure 7.3. She stated:
[T]he tendency is to say the individual has the responsibility and must make the choice to change… but on the other hand when you ask, everyone would say of course it is also the surroundings, the society.
Figure 7.3 displays extracts and words drawn from participants’ responses. These extracts give insight into participants’ constructions of crime and ‘the criminal’ which draw heavily on contextual factors.
Sub-units Personal and Intra-personal factors
Social Structural factors
Victims •stress
•low self-esteem
•hunger
•alcohol abuse
•drug abuse
•‘…anti-social factors definitely.’
•economic factors
•driven by poverty
•lack of education
•inter-generational negative attitude towards education
•patriarchy/gender discrimination
186
•bad parenting
• vulnerable age when parents divorce
•peer pressure
•’… too many ‘taverns’
Offenders • ‘…there are certain limits you can take inside…’
•’…as time goes on people change.’
•’…born angels…’
•economic (‘no food, no money, no job…’)
•lack of education
•drug abuse
•friends Prosecutors •’…born innocent…’
•choice
•moral values
•’… people are hungry’.
•‘committing an offence is a strange happening, an anomaly’
•admiration of criminals
•media inspired consumerism
•definition of ‘success’ is material
•unemployment
•inequality
•breakdown in society
•violent society
•type of neighbourhood
• abundance of negative role models/lack of positive role models
•poor parenting
•split families Mediators ••’… not from the beginning,
All people have bad sides and some good sides but some people have more bad sides ’.
••’…bad feelings and anger.’
• consumerism
•impressed by gangsters’
possessions
•learnt behaviour
•peer pressure ••family
••neighbourhood
•• friends restorative
justice organisation/
programme leaders
•moral development not nurtured
•choice
•deficient needs satisfaction
••all born good.
••anger
•• individual responsibility
••very aggressive market liberalism
•poverty
••’Some are lucky to have good family networks and others did not win the lottery’.
•domestic abuse
••’… the surroundings, the society.’
Key experts •’psychological reasons’
•’…needs were not met’
•’… feel disempowered’
•• biological (eg. ADHD)
•rabid capitalism
••’society is constructed to hypnotise/tempt people to buy and if they cannot buy, to steal.’
•conspicuous consumerism
•socio-economic factors
187
•lack of care as baby
•lack of trust in adults
•abuse
•prior victimisation and lack of coping skills
•• ‘criminality is something created by society, it is not a natural fact - only a social fact’
Figure 7.3 Participants perspectives of the factors that contribute to crime
On the one hand, while participants in all sub-units mentioned individual and structural factors, in some instances the same participant would mention individual propensity and structural factors in the same sentence. However, the participant would not proceed to explicitly mention that there is, or could be an interaction between individual propensity and structural factors that produce crime.On the other hand, several participants, despite their seeming ambivalence, implied that there is an interaction between individual and structural factors in the commission of crime, while others said so explicitly. The comment by an offender, who had
experienced victim offender mediation twice for similar offences, and the insight of a key expert, exemplify the tacit and explicit knowledge about the interaction of individual and structural factors that participants hold:
Economic reasons, no job, no money, no food what can you do? Let me break the window of this car and take that thing and go and sell it.
I used to think it was all nurture, now I know, after some 26 years of professional work, that there is some influence on where we come from, what we experience in utero and what we receive genetically.
With regard to unequal societal contexts, Unvin (1998:136) who writes about the genocide in Rwanda, suggests that:
[F]or most of us, it is hard to imagine how tense and frustration-ridden a society must be when every day the large majority of the population is shown the lifestyle of the “developed” and exhorted to achieve it but is at the same time structurally excluded from this “good life,” with very little chance of achieving it. (Unvin, 1998:136)
188 These words were repeated, almost verbatim, in 1985 by South African lawyers and sociologists based at the University of Cape Town, in a collection of critical essays titled Crime and Power in South Africa. They argued in essence, that there is a need for a new paradigm within South African criminology as ‘social structures in South Africa create conditions that encourage criminality among those exposed to the demands of the capitalist economy but [are] simultaneously denied access to its benefits’ (Davis &
Slabbert, 1985:9, 14). This resonates with the accounts of many participants in this study who made reference to inequality through economic exclusion, poverty, media driven conspicuous consumption and the messages it sends about what society regards as
‘success’ (amongst other reasons). Excerpts of the accounts of participants (that reflect tacit and explicit knowledge of individual and structural factors and the interaction of these factors in the commission of crime) are displayed in figures 7.3 and 7.4.
Prosecutors Mediators Restorative
justice
organisation &
programme leaders
Key experts
•‘… inequalities, people go to bed without food, it plays a role… appear in court for shoplifting kimbies for a child…
they don’t want to sell [it], but there is a need, people are hungry.
•‘…there are no gangsters in Constantia but in Manenberg and Khayelitsha.’
•‘…some follow but you also find a child who says “I will never hit my wife”, they copy what they see. The environment and individual, there
•‘… they see other people you know
‘successful’, being rich because of committing crime.
So they want to be like those people.
They are getting so impressed …’
•‘Poverty for some people…’
•‘I personally believe that it is the situation that leads people to see themselves committing a crime…’
•’They then decide to copy that way of living and now get involved with these criminal things…
• ‘It is the perennial question of nature vs nurture. It is hard to say, I think many people would say it is an interaction …. ’
•‘… it could be the particular influences that they were exposed to growing up in terms of the role models that they had.’
• ‘Psychological factors are the point where biology might meet with external factors, because a person's
psychological makeup might make them more inclined to commit crimes but their psychological make-up might be influenced by either biology or
environment or both.’
•‘… I think it falls somewhere in the middle …’
•‘I used to think it was all nurture, now I know, after some 26 years of professional work, that there is
189 is an interaction….’
•‘… goes back to being oppressed, [people] feel [they are] “not good enough”
•‘… domestic violence is seen as acceptable behaviour, it shapes how the child grows up, shapes choices.’
•’…‘moral values start in home and schools.’
•‘Yes, socio-
economic whatever they may be….
determines who I am.’
•‘…environment can shape they say the individual, but not all are strong, certain people are strong and powerful, not
everyone.’
• ‘Under that system [apartheid], violence was the norm in society.’
also the background from home.’
•‘…no explanation good healthy homes, stigma attached to…’
I’m not the dude in this community’
because I don’t do what they do’ … so they just fall in line…
peer pressure.’
some influence on where we come from and what we
experience in utero and what we receive genetically’.
•• ‘e.g. debate in Norway that the school system is creating male losers because it is getting more and more theoretical. It suits girls but some boys it does not suit at all. … There is an increasing dropout rate by young men. It’s an example of exclusion processes that might
“produce”
criminality.’
•• ‘… negative integration of foreigners … many refugees integrate well also, but there is unfortunately a bit of overload of
“foreigners” in Norwegian prisons, which I believe has to do with problematics concerning
integration.
South African participants
•• Norwegian participants
Figure 7.4 Excerpts that explicitly and implicitly suggest an interaction between individual propensity and structural factors in the commission of crime.
The excerpts and codes in figures 7.3 and 7.4, drawn from participants’ accounts, establish that restorative justice stakeholders, in general, are at least tacitly aware that structural factors play a role in the commission of crime. Specifically, some of the key restorative justice stakeholders (prosecutors, mediators and restorative justice
190 organisation and programme leaders) have explicit knowledge of the interaction of individual and structural factors as exemplified by their statements in figure 7.4.