Crime as Social Control

often alleged that during the late 1960s and early 1970s, many on the Left romanticized “street crime ” as proto-revolutionary rebellion. To some extent this position had currency among elements of the white ultra-Left. However, main-stream criminologists and historians of the 1960s have overemphasized this (Cummins, 1994). To the extent that there was romanticization of crime, it was based, in part, on a warped reading of Fanon’s ideas about the psychologically salubrious and politically heuristic effects of revolutionary violence and his casting of the lumpen classes in colonial towns as potential militants, rather than as the déclassé and dangerous dross white Marxists often took them to be. Yet, to be fair, left valorization of crime as proto-political was neither common nor even very important in shaping left politics around criminal justice; any back issue of this journal’s earliest incarnations will attest to that. So what is a radical reading of crime? By crime, I mostly mean the “index offenses ” or interpersonal violence, such as murder, rape, and assault, along wit