Crime Law Soc Change (2010) 54:111124

DOI 10.1007/s10611-010-9248-3

Plain left realism: an appreciation,

and some thoughts for the future
Elliott Currie

Published online: 24 July 2010

# Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

Let me begin with a small anecdote.

Im speaking as part of a panel that includes academics and practitionersall of
whom are progressive, some of them long-time activists for a better criminal justice
policy in the United States. Were discussing the prison crisis generally in America
and more specifically California, where the swollen prison system has contributed to
a fiscal crisis of historic, and currently unmanageable, proportions.
Were agreed that the restoration of anything approaching a functioning society in
California will require spending less on prisons. I argue that if we want to
permanently reduce spending on prisons while also ensuring that we treat those
people in confinement in ways that are humane, restorative, and productive, well
need to think holistically. Well need to change the way we now do business on
several levels at once: reforming out-of-control sentencing practices: providing real
(not bogus) help for offenders already in trouble to address the issues that helped to
put them on track to prison in the first place.
But also that there can be no enduring solution to the prison problem unless we
simultaneously address the crime problemin particular, by creating strategies that
can reliably shut down the pipeline that shunts people with distressing
predictability from our most devastated communities into the criminal justice
system. I argue that as long as we continue to tolerate (or foster) the social
conditions that continue to produce stunningly high levels of violence and
victimization in the United States, we will remain stuck in a crime/prison cycle
from which no amount of tinkering with sentencing for nonviolent offenders, or with
the conditions of parole, will really free us.
But I then say, on a more positive note, that against the thinking of entrenched
conservatives, timid technocrats, or pessimistic liberals, challenging those conditions
isnt nearly as hard to do as most people have been led to believe. Thats especially
true given the growing evidence of the extraordinary concentration of serious violent

E. Currie (*)
University of California, Irvine, CA, USA
e-mail: ecurrie@uci.edu

112

E. Currie

crime in a relative handful of extremely distressed communities, both in California

and in the United States as a whole (a pattern that shows up in other countries as
well). I argue that the lesson of this evidence is ultimately a hopeful one. The bad
news is that these are places that have been horrendously abused and neglected by
forces well outside their control, and have suffered enormous damage as a result: but
the good news is that, realistically, it wouldnt take all that much to turn them
around. It isnt hard to envision the kinds of social investmentsparticularly in
creating legitimate work for the youngthat would radically transform those
communities, reduce serious crime significantly and enduringly, and accordingly
reduce the flow of offenders that sucks so much of our public resources into the
prisons.
All of this seems pretty uncontroversial, but as I say it I sense some discomfort
among my fellow panelists. They are not, of course, opposed to providing more
opportunities in economically devastated communities for young people whose
levels of legitimate employment have recently fallen toward the single digits. But
they are not comfortable with the idea that the social conditions in these
communities have much to do with why our prisons are overflowing. They are, in
short, uncomfortable with the idea that these adverse conditions are actually linked
to crime. And, accordingly, they are somewhat resistant to the idea that addressing
those conditions could have much if anything to do with reducing the footprint of
the prisons. As the panel continues, a couple of my fellow panelists gently chide me
for failing to point out (or perhaps failing to understand) that the reason people from
these communities are disproportionately behind bars is not because they commit
more serious crime but solely because of the higher levels of surveillance theyre
subjected to. Theyre not in prison because of crime, one says: theyre in prison
because of the surveillance.
These exchanges are friendly, but Im left with the troubling feeling that my
fellow speakers and I are living in different worlds. I dont have the time to say it
then, but I want to say something like this: sure, differing levels of surveillance are
part of the reason why people from inner-city communities go to prison more often
than those from better-off places. But thats not the whole story. It surely holds, to a
degree, for drug offenses. It doesnt work for serious violent crime. Many of the
communities were talking about are, and remain even after our celebrated crime
drop, places of routine violence and pervasive fear. In a time when a young black
man in the state of Louisiana is more likely to die by violence than his counterpart in
El Salvador, the argument that its only heightened scrutiny by the agencies of social
control that creates the (false) appearance of a particularly severe crime problem
among the minority poor is startling.
I leave the proceedings thinking glumly that these earnest progressives, whose
hearts are surely in the right place, are living in a peculiar state of denial. And that if
they are going to be the standard-bearers who we hope will lead a challenge to our
present social priorities, the prospects for real change are pretty dim.
This exchange reminded me why, if questioned about what to call myself, I tend
to respond that Im a left realist. And it serves to introduce my main argument in this
paper: that Left Realism (or what I will call here left realism, without capitals) is
not only an essential perspective on the problems of crime and justice in the early
21st century, but that it is the perspective that offers the best hope of providing the

Plain left realism

113

intellectual underpinnings for a genuinely progressive approach to crime around the

world.
Let me explain what I mean by left realism without capitals. Left Realism with
capital letters emerged at a particular place and timeamong British criminologists
in the 1970s and 1980s who were troubled both by the increasing dominance of
right-wing policies toward crime and by the stance of parts of the left, in and out of
academia [10, 13, 14, 23]. That very important and productive movement in
criminology has its own roots and its own trajectory, its own internal debates and
changes of heart. And not least, it provided the name left realism. But I would
argue that most of its central themes and crucial insights could apply to a much
broader swath of criminologists working today, in the U.K., the United States and
elsewhereindeed, that much of the best work in criminology around the world is
now being done by people who fit what we might call a big tent definition of left
realism, whether or not they would use that term to describe themselves.
I believe that this kind of plain left realism (to borrow from C. Wright Mills
[18] famous concept of plain Marxism) is by now a much more influentialand
compellingposition than we may superficially assume. Its not yet true that we
are all left realists now. But Id argue that, intellectually, there is no longer, if there
ever was, a really serious challenge to the central vision and key tenets of plain left
realism.
Thats not to say that left realism is a finished work. Above all, its not to say that
left realisms intellectual achievements have had a corresponding impact on social
action and policy. And Ill come back in a moment to suggest ways in which left
realism might both grow intellectually in the coming years and become more
effective as a force for social justice and rational criminal justice priorities. Building
on left realisms successes, Ill argue, is critically important now, at a time when
there is a kind of vacuum in public discourse and policy around crime and justice
that an assertive and energetic left realism may be able to fill, if we seize the
moment. If we dont, it is likely that others will, and we will all be the worse off if
that happens. But the bottom line is that it is difficult to see, on the criminological
landscape, any competing perspective that offers a credible challenge to the central
insights of plain left realism. Such a perspective, after all, would by definition
have to be either not left, or not realist. And neither of those nots, I suggest,
can withstand much scrutiny.
To explain this fairly large claim, its important to set out what it is about left
realism, in this broad or plain sense, that makes it left, and what it is that makes
it realist.

Some principles of plain left realism

The bedrock principle of plain left realismand the thing that most renders it
realistis the idea that crime (emphatically including ordinary crimes in the
streets and homes) should be taken seriously, not just as an intellectual category but,
above all, as a part of the lived experience of real people in real communities. Thats
by no means to deny that it is also socially constructedthat some kinds of action
that demonstrably harm others get called crime while others do not, or that some

114

E. Currie

peoples crime is much more likely to result in surveillance and prosecution than
others. But the key point is that crime isnt just a matter of social constructionnor
just a phantom issue stirred up by governments, right wing politicians, or the mass
media, playing on the exaggerated fears of a deluded (or racist) public.
The latter idea, to a large extent, was the view expressed in the forum I just
mentioned. Im always a little startled at how widespread this view remains, in some
corners of academia and of the world of activism. But its easy to understand the
continuing pull of this view for many progressives. In most of the countries of the
post-industrial world, the threat of street crime has indeed been often deployed, with
greater or lesser effectiveness, to advance pernicious and repressive agendas and to
stir up public fearin the service of shifting social and economic priorities to the
Right or, at least, of getting elected. It can be tempting, in those circumstances, to
counter the political distortions and exaggerations about crime by single-mindedly
minimizing it. But whether you call that approach left idealism, as the pioneering
Left Realists in Britain did, or (as I have sometimes done in responding to a
distinctively American version) liberal minimalism [3], its both empirically
misleading andsome of us would arguepolitically disastrous, because by poohpoohing the very real concerns of large parts of the public, it has consistently helped
to deliver the crime issue to the Right.
For plain left realists in the United States, in particular, that outcome is
especially frustrating given that it is precisely the long dominance of essentially
right-wing social and economic policies that is largely responsible for the
exceptional American crime problem in the first place. By denying that street
crime is much of a problem, minimalists have given up what ought to have been
an important political advantage: the ability to point to high levels of crime as a
problem that has happened on the Rights watch: to firmly define crime as a cost of
neoliberal policies, and one more reason to reject them. The same bias has also led to
a concentration on the origins and irrationalities of criminal justice policies at the
expense of serious efforts to tackle the question of what a progressive justice system
would look likethus effectively taking much of the left out of the public debate on
what to do about crime.
But another central theme in plain left realism is that crimeat least in its most
serious formsaffects some people, in some kinds of places, far more than others.
Serious violent crime, whether it takes place in the street, in the home, or for that
matter in the larger environment, is disproportionately concentrated in places that
suffer other kinds of victimization and disadvantage as well. High levels of violence
go hand in hand with social exclusion, economic inequality, deprivation, political
marginality, poor health and inadequate social supports. In that sense, violence tends
disproportionately to be an affliction of the already afflicted. It is a fundamental
aspect of the larger pattern of inequality in societies at every level of development.
And that concentration of the risks of harm among the already disadvantaged may be
increasing in many parts of the world [7, 19].
That isnt to deny that differential enforcement and surveillance are also very real
problems that urgently need addressing. It is, again, to say that they are not the
whole story. Both the intense surveillance that helps funnel African-American youth
in Detroit into the prisons and the failure to protect them from violent death or injury
are part and parcel of the same over-arching set of social circumstances. Both the

Plain left realism

115

decimation of the young male population of these communities by stratospheric

levels of incarceration and the continuing threat of routine violence faced by young
women in their streets and homes [17] are inseparable aspects of the reality of life in
the most socially excluded communities.
It is important to remind ourselves of the scale of this affliction in the places
where violent crime is most pervasivethe extent of the human disaster that
violence represents. Observers around the world were shocked and appalled when
Hurricane Katrina took the lives of a little more than a thousand people in New
Orleans, Louisiana, in 2006. But over the past 25 years, violent crime in the United
States has left a death toll equal to several hundred Katrinassimilarly concentrated
among the poorest and most vulnerable parts of the population. For the plain left
realist, this quieter, ongoing disaster represents both a massive social policy failure
and a moral challenge.
Thus the idealist or minimalist tendency to downplay the reality of ordinary
violence flies in the face of all credible evidence on the social distribution of serious
criminal harm. Whether its the risk of being gunned down in a drive-by shooting,
sexually assaulted on the street or in your home, beaten by a parent or by your
mothers boyfriend, forced to breathe high concentrations of toxic chemicals or
suffer the long-term damage from automobile exhaust fumes, it is sharply higher in
places suffering high levels of social deprivation and economic marginality.
Governments and the better-off (and the occasional criminologist) may choose to
turn their heads away from that reality, but that doesnt make it go away.
Confronting it head-on is an important part of what makes left realism realist
and what makes it right.
For plain left realism, that unequal distribution of the risks of harm isnt
surprising, because left realists have always argued that serious violent crime is bred
by inequality, community fragmentation, deprivation and lack of supportive
institutions (and some would add an accompanying culture of predation, harsh
competition, and neglect). For many plain left realists, that recognition leads
directly to a critique of the criminogenic effect of some forms of capitalism or, in
some variants, of market society [4, 21]. This, again, is part of what makes left
realism left. Plain left realism is distinct from more tentative liberal perspectives in
its insistence on seeing these adverse forces not as isolated misfortunes or failures of
social integration within a generally unproblematic social order, but as integral
aspects of a socioeconomic system that, left to its own devices, predictably generates
inequality, injustice, social fragmentation and a hard and unsupportive culture. But
plain left realism is also distinctive in its central recognition that there are many
varieties of capitalism, and that some of them are far more criminogenic than others
thus distinguishing itself from more maximalist perspectives on the left.
Thus left realism tends to be, as the late Ian Taylor often put it, social
democratic in its core analysis and implications. Again, thats social democratic
with a small s and a small d. Its not to say that any actually existing left realist
would necessarily identify with any particular Social Democratic political organization or regime (though some would, and do). But Id argue that a core
characteristic of small-l left realism is the belief that macro level social policies
from the left undertaken within the context of a capitalist economy can make a very
large difference in reducing crime and, hence, the victimization of communities by

116

E. Currie

violence and fear. Again, that assertionlike much of the core of left realismis
broadly and deeply supported by both empirical research and historical experience.
Societies that have set out to reduce inequalities of class and gender, to provide more
generous social supports for vulnerable families and individuals, to counter the
dominance of market relationships and imperatives generally, are less wracked by
serious violence than those that havent [4, 9, 12].
To the left realist that central social fact seems unassailable, even obviousa nobrainer. But its important to realize how fiercely it has been resisted, across the
political and intellectual spectrum. The argument that social democratic strategies
matter directly challenges both the central tenets of conservative criminology and of
the kind of left maximalism that insists that not much can be done about crime short
of a thorough overthrow of the capitalist state. But the great differences among
various forms of capitalism have created something like a natural social experiment
in the effects of progressive policy on serious crime, and the results of that
experiment are in: in this realm, as in others, the unfettered free market loses, and
social democratic strategies win.
Id argue that this social democratic sense of both the necessity and the
possibility of making large social and economic changes that could matter a great
deal for crime is a fundamental and distinctive quality of left realism with small
letters. It implies, also, a compelling moral imperative to do our best to tackle the
macro conditions that are ultimately most important in shaping the level of violence
a society suffers. But that doesnt rule out the potential virtue of less sweeping
interventions. Another central quality of plain left realism has been its insistence
that some kinds of interventions, both on the level of the criminal justice system and
that of working with vulnerable children and families, can make a difference. Here
too the empirical evidence is robustboth on the uses of such micro-level
interventions and on their limits. That is particularly true for early childhood
intervention programs, from the Perry Preschool Project to the Prenatal-Early
Infancy Program [5]. But it is also true for efforts to work with people already
caught up in the justice system. In the United States, plain left realists have long
been engaged in what is, by now, a moderately successful battle to overturn the stock
conservative claim that nothing works to rehabilitate offenders (with a landmark
salvo by Cullen and Gilbert [2] leading the charge). Again, its important to
comprehend the significance of that intellectual victory, both for public policy and
for the discipline of criminology. There are still, to be sure, plenty of people who
continue to put stock in theories that insist that nothing we do later can undo the
failure of parents to instill proper self-control by the age of eight. But no serious
empirical evidence backs up that claim, which appears increasingly as ideology
rather than social science.
But the flip side of this affirmation of the useful possibilities for early intervention
and rehabilitation is an equally staunch refusal to expect too much from such efforts
in the absence of broader social change. Plain left realists would agree, for example,
that even well-designed programs aimed at helping offenders to reintegrate into
what we rather vaguely call the community are certain to be limited if that
community remains massively deprived of economic opportunity and functioning
institutions of social support, and is indeed a community in only the most abstract
sense. Left realism has limited patience for what I call as if criminology: that is,

Plain left realism

117

the kind of criminological scholarship and practice that narrows its focus to minor
alterations in the justice system or social programs, as if there were not massive
social forces relentlessly producing social insecurity and violence and predictably
undercutting even the most technically proficient interventions.
As Ill argue in more detail in a moment, I think that developing a richer and more
progressive vision of what it means to rehabilitate offenders ought to be a high
priority for left realists in the future. But what I take to be the basic left realist stance
skepticism about how much can be accomplished by micro-level intervention
alone coupled with optimism about the potential of well-designed programs when
linked to a larger strategy of social change and community reconstructionoffers a
good starting point.
Another key theme in what Im calling plain left realism is, of course, its
fundamental critique of repressive criminal justice strategies in controlling crime.
Here too, the critique is not merely instrumental but also moral and political. Plain
left realists argue, based on what is by now very robust evidence, that mass
incarceration in particularthe core crime-control strategy of conservative realism
is both an ineffective and a socially destructive way to approach crime. Most
would agree that in its most extremethat is, Americanform, it has wrought an
unprecedented social disaster, again dramatically concentrated in the most vulnerable
communities. Indeed, in the United States the prisons have become an integral part
of the deepening crisis of what I call Americas Third Worlddraining already
scarce funding from more productive purposes, saddling entire generations of young
people with a surplus load of obstacles to opportunity, and radically undercutting
the capacity of families and communities for informal social control [1, 22]. And all
of this while demonstrably failing to protect the hardest-hit communities from tragic
levels of victimization by violence.
Increasingly, the failure of mass incarceration as a crime control strategy is
acknowledged even by many scholars who hardly fit the left realist profile [20]. But
the left realist understanding of these realities is very different from that of
technocratic criminology, in part because it begins from the understanding that what
appears to be a need for massive investments in incarceration in the first place is a
product of remediable social conditions. The tendency of technocratic criminology
to assess the prisons effectiveness in narrow cost-benefit terms divorced from any
acknowledgement of that larger context appears, to the plain left realist, as a
frustratingly limited and blinkered vision.
At the same time, left realism doesnt shrink from the responsibility to explore
how the criminal justice system could be made both more effective and more just.
Here too it is sharply distinct from left idealism/liberal minimalism, which is too
often satisfied with charting the growth and spread of repressive and inhumane
policies, registering opposition to themand stopping there. Left realists take for
granted that we will, in every country, have a criminal justice system for the
forseeable future, and that accordingly one of our central tasks is to figure out how to
shape those systems in ways that maximize human rights, social inclusion and
solidarity. So its incumbent on left realists to describe, for example, what a police
force would look like that is effective in keeping people from victimization, but also
responsive to community needs and governed by a commitment to human rights. Its
incumbent on left realists to ask what a genuinely progressive approach to truly

118

E. Currie

dangerous people would look like. As Ill discuss more fully in a moment, I think
this is one of the areas where we will need to do the most work in the future. But,
again, the bottom line is that here too left realism stands out favorably against the
alternatives. Conservative realism institutionalizes a brutal and counterproductive
investment in mass repression as the centerpiece of its criminal justice strategy. The
left idealist position tends to avoid thinking about a criminal justice strategy at all
beyond simple non-intervention. Technocratic, as if criminology operates with a
bloodless commitment to technical efficiency unmoored from any clearly definable
social valuesmuch less the left values of social justice, human rights, and
autonomy. Against these competitors, left realism once again stands out as uniquely
positioned to help in the creation of a just and effective response to crime.

Some steps for the future

Taking crime seriously; recognizing that it disproportionately afflicts the most
vulnerable; understanding its roots in the economic disadvantages, social deficits and
cultural distortions characteristic of (but not limited to) predatory capitalism;
insisting that those conditions are modifiable by concerted social action, and
acknowledging the usefulness of some smaller-scale interventions that stand the test
of evidencewhile rejecting as counterproductive and unjust the massive expansion
of repression as a response to crime: those are, Id say, the fundamental principles of
plain left realism. And whats important to understand is that they are not just
political preferencesthough for most left realists, they surely are political
preferences. They are also propositions that are well supportedindeed, uniquely
supportedby the evidence, both of research and of history. This is a record that
should give us considerable confidenceand maybe even a little prideparticularly,
again, when we compare ourselves to the alternatives.
But thats not to say that the work of left realism is done. I see two broad areas
that are especially important for left realists in the future: first, deepening and
broadening our own analysis, both of the roots of crime and of the ways in which it
can be combated while simultaneously enhancing democratic principles and the
prospects for social justice: and, second, creating the organizations and institutions
that can more effectively disseminate that enhanced knowledge and translate it into
social action.
1. Left realism has done a highly creditable job of explaining the social and
economic sources of crime in the global post-industrial world. A chief task for
the futureespecially if we want to have a greater impact on social policy both
within and beyond the criminal justice systemsis to more clearly articulate a
vision of what we might do about it: a vision of how to achieve stable and safe
communities and deal with the genuinely troubled and damaged, while
simultaneously promoting social justice and human rights. This, in turn, has
several components:
a. Outlining a progressive justice system
The logic of left realism points clearly to the need to grapple with the
very complex question of what a genuinely progressive criminal justice

Plain left realism

119

system would look like. Thats not really an issue for technocratic
criminologists, for whom the very idea of searching for a progressive
justice system would be befuddling. But left realism acknowledges that the
persistence of deeply destructive social conditions has created truly volatile
communitiesand truly volatile people. That in turn creates both a practical
and a moral obligation to outline what we propose to do about them in ways
that flow from our core values.
Clearly, plain left realists agree that we want the smallest possible
footprint for the formal criminal justice system thats consistent with the
job of public safety. Left realists have been consistent critics of the heedless
growth of incarceration and of the more subtle spread of coercive forms of
social control into the community. They surely want an end to the punitive
treatment of minor drug offenders and, more generally, to get nonviolent
people out of secure custody. But then what? What does that smaller,
humane, and genuinely rehabilitative system look like? What do we really
do with truly violent offenders? Simply saying that we propose to treat
them rather than imprison them is hardly an adequate position, and by
ducking the question of what that treatment should look like, could help to
usher in practices that are even more troubling than what we already have.
What do we propose instead, and why do we think it will work? What
models can we build on? Again, there is a role for left realists in this work
that I dont think anyone else can fill: the conservative model is both
reprehensible and ineffective, the idealist model has largely abdicated this
job, and the technocratic model cannot move beyond mere data to the level
of fully articulated social values. I hasten to add that Im not suggesting that
we havent already done useful work in this vein. We have: but we need to
do more.
One important piece of this vision, as Ive suggested elsewhere [8, 15], is
a revitalized conception of rehabilitation. Once we acknowledge, as we
must, that a predatory (and deeply sexist) society creates people whose
behavior and values we cant tolerate, its incumbent on us to figure out
ways of helping them, when we can, to change in ways that both mesh with
our values and allow them to live their lives in productive and non-violent
ways. Here too, simple nonintervention isnt enough. People who offend in
destructive ways have real issues that need to be addressedat the very
least, in order to keep them from coming right back into the penal system.
In the current deep fiscal crisis in the advanced societies, there is
considerable pressure to cut back (or abandon altogether) even the limited
investment in rehabilitative programs that now exists. Left realists need to
oppose the decimation of already inadequate programs in education, job
training, and drug treatment. But that doesnt imply a blanket acceptance of
any program or tactic that promises to reduce recidivism or claims the
mantle of being rehabilitative. As critics since the 1960s have pointed out,
there is much that goes on under the name of rehabilitation that is at least
troubling and at worst downright scary. This is an issue that promises to
become even more important as technological and pharmacological
advances increase the capacity of authorities to control behavior in the

120

E. Currie

name of treatment. Sorting out what we wish to mean by rehabilitation

and figuring out what kinds of intervention are both effective and compatible
with our valuesis a complicated task that weve barely begun to tackle.
What would these more socially conscious rehabilitative programs look
like? Who would run them? Here, as elsewhere, left realists need to develop
a greater capacity to create new kinds of programsbased on our analysis
and our principlesand to evaluate them, accumulating our own base of
knowledge about what works in this deeper sense.
b. Creating blueprints for social reconstruction
But we need to simultaneously develop better proposals for how to create
the stable communities of dignity and opportunity without which even the
best efforts at personal transformation will often fail. We need to focus much
more intensively on how to achieve what I like to call deep prevention,
well beyond the pallid concept of crime prevention that dominates as if
criminology. We need to develop the capacity to be able to say with
confidence how we would transform, say, the South Side of Chicago, or
Glasgows Gorbals, in ways that would enduringly increase opportunity and
support and reduce victimization and fear. This requires both developing
both the capacity to intimately comprehend the contours of local social and
economic problems, and the capacity to apply lessons learned from around
the world in grappling with them.
It might be objected that this would take us far beyond the boundaries of
criminology as we know it. But thats the point. For plain left realists, crime
does not exist in isolation from the broader social forces that generate it, and
cannot be enduringly addressed without confronting them. We cant
simultaneously believe that and shirk the responsibility of developing a
detailed analysis of how to change those criminogenic conditionswhat
mix of anti-poverty and employment strategies, family supports, health and
mental health interventions, education strategies, and more, will bring into
being the kinds of communities, streets, homes in which people can live
securely and with dignity. This too requires that we learn from others
successes (and failures): and that we join forces more effectively with people
in other disciplines. And we need to be able to seek out examples of
this kind of best practice in community reconstruction wherever theyre
foundin the developing world as well as the developed...
c. Becoming truly global
Thats especially important because of the vast disparity between the
distribution of the problem of violence and what most criminologists now
focus on. As Ive argued elsewhere [9], there are two worlds of violence,
and with some exceptions (notably my own country) the world that suffers
most is found overwhelmingly in poor to middle-income countries. That is
true whether we are talking about violence among young men against one
another or violence against women on the streets and in the home. Yet the
energy of criminology as a discipline does not map well onto that global
reality. We know less about the pervasive and life-shattering violence in, say,
the Congo, or Nigeria, or even Brazil, than about the minor delinquencies of

Plain left realism

121

American middle schoolers. Indeed, because our issues have become

increasingly global ones, we need to become more international in our
focus even to really comprehend the reality of violence in a single place. We
wont understand, say, gang violence in Long Beach, California, without
understanding the flow of people from places as distinct as El Salvador and
Cambodia (and often back again), and the social and economic conditions
that have driven it.
Mexico offers a startling example of the mismatch between the
distribution of criminal harm and the emphasis of criminology. The level
and ferocity of violence in Mexico today has made normal life all but
impossible in some parts of the country and threatens the integrity of most of
its institutions. The media tend to reduce this social catastrophe to a simple
struggle among rival drug cartels. In reality it represents the accumulated
impact of a toxic mix of neoliberal economic policies that have ravaged
communities and livelihoods throughout the country, massively failed drug
policies in the United States as well as Mexico, the absence of even rudimentary
gun control policy in the United Stateswhich has fostered a massive flow of
firearms south across the borderand more. The Mexican government has
recently acknowledged the failure of its effort to control this crisis through
military force. But what next? The international criminological community has
been remarkably silent about this. A perspective that takes seriously the fearful
toll of violence while rigorously linking it to larger social and economic
forcesi.e., left realismoffers the best hope for clarifying the roots of this
crisis (and others in the developing world) and putting forward credible
strategies for addressing it.
d. Taking crimes against humanity seriously
Similarly, I believe that an important part of the task for plain left
realism in the future is to devote more attention to mass crimes against
humanity. I wont labor this point, since it has been made eloquently by
Daniel Maier-Katkin and his colleagues (2009), John Hagan and Wenona
Rymond-Richmond [11], and a handful of others. Suffice it to say here that
the principles of left realism fit well with the imperatives of the study of
crimes against humanitya study that is still in its infancy. Left realisms
commitment to taking crime seriously: its insistence that crime comes from
somewhere, and is driven by some kinds of social organization more than
others; its willingness to take on the difficult job of looking for workable
solutions to crime that flow from its causal analysis, and its insistence that
doing so is part of the duty of the criminologistall of these will necessarily
be part of the tool-kit of scholars who want to seriously explore these most
destructive of crimes, and who see their reduction as a social and moral
imperative. Might we have important things to say, for example, about the
roots of the catastrophic unleashing of violence against women in Congo? I
think we probably do: and I think we should.
2. The second big task for the future is to work to close the gap between the
intellectual accomplishments of left realism and its less than overwhelming
impact on social policy and the practice of justice in the real world.

122

E. Currie

Conservative criminology may be brain-dead intellectually and may even have

lost some of its voice in public debate. But crime policy in some countries
remains largely dominated by right-wing principles, to the extent that it is
guided by principles or clear ideas at all. And in most countries, even those
where neoliberal social policies are less dominant, crime policy is at best in a
state of drift and technocratic tinkering, and at worst increasingly susceptible to
the very ideologies that have failed every test of evidence and effectiveness. The
issue, then, is how we can translate the good ideas of left realism into
meaningful social action. Not that there havent been successes along these lines
(and as Ill argue, part of the job is to develop the capacity to share those more
effectively), but we need to do bettermuch better.
One of the most curious things about the recent thrust of crime policy in the
United States and the United Kingdom is the political triumph of ideas about
crime and its remedies that diverge so dramatically from the accumulated body
of knowledge about them. The reasons for that split are doubtless complex, but
one of them is surely the success of conservative organizations in building the
kinds of institutionsthink tanks, publications, regular conferencesthrough
which their ideas, however wrongheaded, could be widely disseminated. A more
politically effective left realism needs to learn from that experience. We will
need to build new and more publicly visible organizations through which we can
do a better job both of catalyzing left realist work and sharing it within the left
realist community, and disseminating it widely to broader constituencies. As it
stands, too much of our workeven the bestdoesnt get much past the
universities and the professional organizations that are closely tied to them (I
suspect that this is more true in the United States than it is in the U.K.).
As Ive argued before [6], an important part of this job will be to work
assertively to reshape the processes and incentives of the academic world itself
in ways that make the universities a more hospitable place for the more engaged,
holistic, and progressive work that left realists do. But another part should
involve the creation of more organizations beyond academia. Given what Ive
said above, I think its clear that those organizations and institutions will need to
be both seriously international and genuinely trans-disciplinary. Again, the core
logic of left realist analysis points to the need to consider crime holistically, not
in isolation from such problems as unemployment, concentrated poverty or
disruptive economic development. A criminology that wants to take the social
and economic context of crime seriously will need to work more closely with
others working on anti-poverty strategies, job creation, educational transformation and public health. And it will need to broaden the conversation, and the
working relationships, past the relatively few, and mostly developed, countries
where criminologists now usually speak with one another.
Those institutions should also bring together not only academics and
researchers but also people involved in NGOs and community organizations.
As it stands, there is a wide gap separating the work they dosome of which is
in fact left realist in its assumptions and aimsand the work that academics
do, even if they share similar views. In the absence of mechanisms to encourage
a systematic sharing of research and experience, both sides lose: community
organizations miss out on scholarship that could help guide their work, and

Plain left realism

123

scholars miss the wealth of knowledge generated by real-world experience in

putting ideas and programs on the ground. I think of the many years of
important work done by NACRO in the U.K., for example: much of this work
has important lessons for us in the United States, but most of it is unknown to
American academics or American activists.
Along the same lines, it will be important to shift the focus of engagement
with the world outside the academyfrom the attempt to gain insider access
to policy-makers, toward developing enduring relationships with a much
broader public. In the United States in particular, criminologists have been
recurrently seduced by the idea that bringing sound analysis of crime to
legislators will lead to real change in policy. But while there is certainly room
for developing and firming channels for that kind of political access, weve seen
the results of relying too much on itwhich is to say, no results at allin the
absence of a more direct engagement with the public: one that opens the
possibility of changing hearts and minds and catalyzing a shift in the broader
political culture around crime and punishment. Public opinion studies have
given us, for a long time, tantalizing suggestions that even without much
educating, the public is more open to progressive strategies of crime control than
we may have thought. But so far, at least in the United States, we havent been
able to work effectively to deepen the publics understanding, much less to
mobilize them into political action. We need to develop the capacity to speak
with broader publics in ways that are both compelling and understandable: that
straightforwardly acknowledge public fears while educating them about the real
reasons why theyre afraid, and about what will and what will not work to make
them saferand that provides them ways of turning that enhanced knowledge
into social action.
The increasingly obvious failure of the conservative model offers us a real
opening to move our ideas center stage and to put a genuinely progressive vision
of crime policy on the table [16]. And the potential is increased by the current
fiscal crisis that wracks most countries around the world. Especially in the
United States, and to a lesser extent the U.K., where huge increases in prison
spending are now increasingly seen as simply unsustainable, there appearsat
least for nowto be a new receptivity to more progressive ideas about how to
reduce the footprint of the prisons and develop alternative approaches to both
crime prevention and the rehabilitation of offenders. (Weve been fooled by this
before, of course: In the U.S., we started thinking that fiscal realities would soon
put a limit on prison expansion as far back as the early 1980s. That economic
imperatives were routinely trumped by political ones has been an important, and
sobering, lesson). But the danger is that either this opening will disappear when,
or if, governments return to a more stable fiscal footing: or, worse, that the
response to continuing high levels of violent crime and social disorder in the
context of ever-deepening fiscal crisis will become very scary indeed. In the
absence of a compelling set of alternatives that can be put before the public, its
easy to imagine a scenario in which governments seek out cheaper ways of
dealing with crime that are even more inhumane and/or intrusive than they are
now: ranging from simply abandoning vulnerable communities altogether and
leaving them to cope with persistent violence and disorder on their own (we do

124

E. Currie

this already, after all, to a large extent in the U.S.), to investing in yet more
sophisticated means of technological and pharmaceutical control of populations
considered volatile and dangerous.
We cant afford, in other words, to simply let the pathologies of neoliberal
social policy take their course and grumble impotently from the sidelines. We
need to be confident that we indeed have something to say and can offer a way
forward where other ways have patently failed. And we need to both get better
at defining that way forward and convincing others that its the right one.

References
1. Clear, T. (2007). Imprisoning communities. New York: Oxford University Press.
2. Cullen, F. T., & Gilbert, K. (1982). Reaffirming rehabilitation. Cincinnati: Anderson Publishing.
3. Currie, E. (1992). Retreatism, minimalism, realism: Three styles of reasoning on crime and drugs in
the United States. In J. Lowman & B. D. MacLean (Eds.), Realist criminology: Crime control and
policing in the 1990s. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
4. Currie, E. (1997). Market, crime, and community: toward a mid-range theory of post-industrial
violence. Theoretical Criminology, 1(2).
5. Currie, E. (1998). Crime and punishment in America. New York: Metropolitan Books.
6. Currie, E. (2007a). Against marginality: arguments for a public criminology. Theoretical Criminology, 11(2).
7. Currie, E. (2007b). Pulling apart: notes on the widening gap in the risks of violence. Criminal Justice
Matters, (70, Winter 20078).
8. Currie, E. (2008). Social consciousness as prevention and rehabilitation. Paper presented at the annual
conference of the American Society of Criminology, St. Louis, MO., November.
9. Currie, E. (2009). The roots of danger: Violent crime in global perspective. NJ: Upper Saddle River.
10. DeKeseredy, W. S., & Schwartz, M. D. (2006). Left realist theory. In S. Henry & M. M. Lanier (Eds.),
The essential criminology reader. Boulder: Westview Press.
11. Hagan, J., & Rymond-Richmond, W. (2009). Darfur and the crime of genocide. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
12. Hall, S., & McClean, C. (2009). A tale of two capitalisms: preliminary spatial and historical comparisons of
homicide rates in Western Europe and the USA. Theoretical Criminology, 13(3, August).
13. Hayward, K. (2010). Jock Young. In S. Maruna & J. Mooney (Eds.), Fifty key thinkers in criminology.
London and New York: Routledge.
14. Lea, J., & Young, J. (1984). What is to be done about law and order? Harmondsworth: Penguin.
15. Matthews, R. (1992). Developing a realist approach to penal reform. In J. Lowman & B. D. MacLean (Eds.),
Realist criminology: Crime control and policing in the 1990s. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
16. Matthews, R. (2009) Beyond so what? criminology: rediscovering realism. Theoretical Criminology,
13(3, August).
17. Miller, J. (2008). Getting played. New York: New York University Press.
18. Mills, C. W. (1962). The Marxists. New York: Dell.
19. Nilsson, Anders, & Estrada, F. (2006). The inequality of victimization: trends in exposure to crime
among rich and poor. European Journal of Criminology, 3(4).
20. Raphael, S., & Stoll, M. (2009). Do prisons make us safer? New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
21. Taylor, I. (1999). Crime in context: A critical criminology of market societies. Cambridge: Polity Press.
22. Western, B. (2008). Punishment and inequality. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
23. Young, J. (1992). The ten principles of realism. In R. Matthews & J. Young (Eds.), Issues in realist
criminology. London: Sage.

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

Author: Currie, Elliott

Title: Plain left realism: an appreciation, and some thoughts for the future
Source: Crime Law Soc Change 54 no2 S 2010 p. 111-24
ISSN: 0925-4994
DOI:10.1007/s10611-010-9248-3
Publisher: Springer SBM B.V.
Gustav Mahlerlaan 10, P.O. Box 283, 1000 EA Amsterdam, The Netherlands

The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and it is reproduced
with permission. Further reproduction of this article in violation of the copyright is
prohibited. To contact the publisher:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/1573-0751/

This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sublicensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make
any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently
verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever
caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.