In the new millennium many of my colleagues around the world  perceive a growing disorder of affairs.  This perception may be or may not be real, i.e., it may be a media-induced phenomenon, but be as it is, the old adage of W. I. Thomas and Florian Zaniecki (1918) seems apt here.  That is, “what we believe is real has real consequences.”  That there is growing complexity is true, whether it is disordered or not calls for close scrutiny.  How well we manage this growing complexity depends on how well we understand its causes, and this is vital in the creation of adequate justice policy.  Unless we get to their roots, problems continue to grow and fester.  The history of thought suggests that there are ways to understand what is going on.  One traditional view of society  is a model of balance or equilibrium.  Secondly, Hegelian dialectic was the ancestor of the modern conflict model of society.  The third and most recent approach to understanding our social world has evolved mostly from mathematics and is called chaos theory.  There seems to be some precedent for chaos theory in physics, i.e., the Second Law of Thermodynamics – the Law of Entropy. This paper tries to develop the implications of these theoretical viewpoints into reasonable policy assumptions for criminal justice.

 

Introduction

 

In the academic world of  Criminal Justice we seek knowledge based on fact and develop theory to guide us in rational policy analysis and decision making.    The foundation of our analyses depends on our concepts of the nature of the world and of such aggregates as nations, societies, cultures, neighborhoods and regions as well as individuals.  And it is obvious that much of our success (or failure) depends on just how realistic are our notions of good and evil, crime and punishment, and order or disorder.  Brown (“people”) comments that a current revised approach to the theory of social systems has been inspired by ground-up models and away from aggregate large-scale models.  This revision gives us better-defined assumptions about small-scale behavior.  Traditionally, we have employed two models of society: the equilibrium model and the conflict model.  Chaos theory suggests a third model.  This model may be exceptionally useful in policy development through understanding some of the phenomenon of disorder today and in policy development for criminal justice, especially with reference to civil disorder, terrorism, and crime prevention. 

 

Models of Society

 

Our success as theorists can be judged by observing if our models of society are consistent with what we are actually seeing today.

 

There are two overarching principles that apply in this discussion.  First, as Heraclites of Ephesus wrote nearly 500 years BC after allegedly immersing his finger in the water of a flowing river and observing the ripples, “All is flux.”  That is, everything in the world flows, evolves, mutates, or changes over time.  And, as an ad hominem example, we all know this because of our personal experience of waking to a “new” day, day after day—each is not the same as the one before.  So our theory of the reality of society and criminal justice must account for constant evolution or change in society.  Second, the rate of change is accelerating.  It is moving faster and faster, bringing to mind the notions developed by University of Chicago sociologist WF Ogburn in the concept of “Cultural Lag” (1953).  Ogburn observed that all cultures include and are characterized by three general components: technology, type of social organization, and values.  He further noted that technology tends to evolve most rapidly, social organization somewhat slower, and values the slowest.  The expanding gap between technology and values is “cultural lag.”  I don’t think this is even arguable; just imagine how many centuries it may take for our values to adjust to some of what is already possible in our technology.  What is interesting for us is that our law is based on our values, and our values are the slowest part of our culture to change and thus there will always be a tension between the state of technology, the state of social organization and the state of our law (values). 

 

Given these two cautions, let’s look first at the equilibrium model of society.   This model can be imagined as a teeter-totter or see-saw progressing across the continuum of time.  As the see-saw moves along over time and space, it is balanced and the board is relatively horizontal.  Society almost automatically makes minor adjustments to keep it that way.  But sometimes one side rises and at other times falls way too far to suit society.  At that point, society tries in a very conscious, directed and forceful way to raise or lower the side that is considered to be too far out of adjustment.  We apply pressure to the deviant side, usually with new or modified law, to bring the whole see-saw back to horizontal as it moves along.    Such major adjustments have been in issues like school desegregation, the entire gamut of rights movements and their consequences, oil shortages, global warming, and our numerous “wars” against poverty, drugs, alcohol, terrorism, etc.  As we are aware, some of the issues are unresolved for years or perhaps are not foreseeably resolved as we look at them now.  But the equilibrium model assumes that the see-saw will return to horizontal, all will be well, and there you have it. 

 

Much of our criminological research assumes the equilibrium model of society.  Such research assumes that all will return to an even, level state (that the “system” can be stabilized) if we find the right combination of explanation and policy.  Almost universally, the reports of evaluators, committees, consultants, and other boards and groups seek to adjust policy and procedures to bring back “stability” and allow progress to continue. 

 

The second informative model of society is the conflict model.  If we look around ourselves, conflict is rampant, e.g., gender conflict, age group conflict, race conflict, international conflict, and culture conflict.  Karl Marx, for example focused on the pervasive problem economic tensions that persist between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.  Now conflict itself is not necessarily a negative, and in many instances of research and sociological/criminological observation it may be more realistic that the equilibrium assumption.  Rather, it points to the ever-present tensionbetween competing groups at all levels of existence.   

 

The idea of conflict in society had been present in the philosophy of Western-European-Judeo-Christian culture for millennia.  Its most astute spokesman, in my opinion, was idealist philosopher George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 to 1831) who proposed the dialectic model of change. Hegel referred to philosophers like himself as the “Owls of Minerva.”  The owl of Minerva is the owl that accompanies Minerva in Roman myths, seen as a symbol of wisdom. Hegel noted that "the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk" -- meaning that philosophy comes to understand a way of life just as it passes away. Philosophy cannot be prescriptive because it understands only in hindsight. He had in mind the transition from eighteenth-century feudalism to nineteenth-century commercialism and democracy. 

In Hegel’s dialectic model, at any moment for a given process there exists a “status quo”, or thesis.  For example the status quo of this group is physical presence in a meeting room.  Every thesis has inherent in itself and anti-thesis or antithesis which threatens the status quo.  Again, because this group exists in this room, it is inevitable that it will  disband. The group members will each find a new place in the social reality and enter into a new “status quo, a synthesis.  The synthesis, though, is itself a thesis and the process can repeat ad infinitum.  Hegel realized that all existing statuses contain the seeds if their own destruction and that stability is a relative construct.  In his Phenomenology of Mind, Hegel wrote:

       “To consider any specific fact as it is in the Absolute, consists here in nothing else than  saying about it that, while it is now doubtless spoken of as something specific, yet in the Absolute, in the abstract identity A = A, there is no such thing at all, for everything is there all one. To pit this single assertion, that "in the Absolute all is one," against  the organized whole of determinate and complete knowledge, or of knowledge which at least aims at and demands complete development -- to give out its Absolute as the night in which, as we say, all cows are black -- that is the very naïveté of emptiness of       knowledge." (1807, "Preface") 

This model certainly points to real conflicts in society, e.g., the “glass Ceiling,” cloning, abortion, distribution of wealth, political manipulation and continuing phenomena in daily life.  It would be foolish in our criminology to assume that  there is no tension in society and that pressure to achieve a nw sysnthesis (change) is not rampant.  Much of our research and policy is unable to deal with a fluctuating social reality and continues to try to reestablish equilibrium where there was no equilibrium in the first place.  The obvious upshot of such considerations, to be discussed below, is that to develop effective  criminal justice policy we must work toward resolving the roots or causes of the fluctuating society or social condition under consideration. 

One could argue that chaos, to be discussed next, is a special case of conflict, but I think not because the roots of chaos are not identical with the roots of conflict.

 

The third model of society which has emerged over about the last three decades is the chaos model of reality (society).  It is fascinating that some similar inklings of a chaos model have existed for many years, e.g. Entropy, as in the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and in Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.  I think that there has always been among scientific observers of the world a notion that it is natural for some instability (chaos) to emerge in linear systems.  What is new is recognition that, with the increasing diffusion of order in systems, regularity arises within the diffused and apparently unstable subsystems.  Now, we know that much of our knowledge depends on the level or scale of systems, including social systems such as groups, neighborhoods, cities, and states.  And most importantly, we now know that certainty is improbable and perhaps even sometimes impossible in systems which are influenced by significantly high numbers of extraneous variables as are social systems (in our social sciences analyses and the results of our statistical manipulations we refer to this phenomenon as “noise” yet we often refuse to acknowledge the underlying instability, preferring instead to take an equilibrium model as reality).

The modern notion of chaos as used in math and physics (not in our everyday jargon) is that small variations in the input values of calculations early in any calculation  process produce over time and repetition of the calculation an almost infinite amount of diffusion of outcomes.  The breakthrough in the popularity of chaos study was made by meteorologist Edward Lorenz of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the early 1960s, he was working on a computer simulation of global weather systems. He created a reasonable facsimile of atmospheric conditions with a few simple equations and variables, such as temperature and wind direction, entered as numbers. Lorenz found that entering the same input variables into the computer produced identical output variables each time he ran the program.  It is reported (Gleick, 1987) that Lorenz one day ran the program by entering values that he thought had been output at the halfway point of an earlier run. Entering the same variables, even at a point in the middle of the program, should still have produced the results that Lorenz had seen so often before.  But in fact, Lorenz entered rounded approximations of the actual values. For one series, he entered 0.506 rather than 0.506127. He never imagined that his approximation would make any difference in the program's outcome.

But it did.  In the early part of the run, the weather pattern resembled the pattern with which he was familiar. Before long, though, he noticed that the program was following a new pattern, one that had begun to diverge drastically from the original one. Over time, this new pattern lost all semblance of its predicted form.  The difference between the original numbers and Lorenz's approximations, although very small, had produced huge changes in the end result.

"A small numerical difference like a small puff of wind --surely the small puffs faded or canceled each other out before they could change important, large-scale features of the weather. Yet in Lorenz's particular system of equations, small errors proved catastrophic." (Gleick, 1987)

(Note)  I use “infinite” (above) cautiously because we have not yet been able to measure the ultimate outcomes – our computers are neither powerful enough nor fast enough to produce a conclusive result.  Yet we have found that in the dispersion of results a series of orders can be observed. 

 

Several criminologists have been diligently attempting to formulate theoretical and policy statements employing the Chaos model.  To date these efforts have proven valuable in limited perspectives while simultaneously much skepticism is expressed about these attempts.  I’ll comment about the reasons I think the skepticism exists later in the summary.

 

Problems of Chaos Theory

 

While chaos is relatively new, and even though there are problems—extensively discussed in existing literature—with equilibrium and conflict model, chaos also has problems.  Most significantly, Cowling (2006) questions the transferability of Chaos theory to our world view.  Our world view is based greatly on Euclidian geometry.  Chaos theory is based on fractal geometry, not Euclidian geometry.  Because our societies and cultures are inter-subjective constructs, social space is essentially Euclidian.

 

A second problem is that human groupings are complex/compound systems for which one is not able to write down any sensible equations (although economists do well in select sub-categories of human activity).  “To speak of chaos for the systems does not take us much further than the intuition already contained in the popular wisdom.” (Sokal and Bricmont, 1999:135-6)

 

Grosz and Vanderlinden (Synthesis) caution that “just because certain phenomena in various fields superficially appear to be ‘chaotic’ (in a state of utter confusion), that does not necessarily identify a single property which transcends the natural-social science border.”  To me this indicates that criminologists are free to pursue their own directions of interest, but they should be cautious in “hastily drawing general conclusions regarding potentially incomparable modes of thought.”

 

Applications to Criminology

 

Chaos theory indicates that over time social order tends to become fragmented and increasingly diffuse.  We could rightly observe even in “street talk” that a situation has become chaotic.  We would mean in street talk “disordered,” while the chaos theorist would be discussing the origins or causes of the disorder as a chaos effect.  (good science gets at causes)  As was described in the Lorenz discussion earlier, the emergence of instability from a modification early in a process has been called the “Butterfly Effect.”  It was illustrated by Gliech (1987) in this way: "the flapping of the wings of a butterfly in Beijing today could result in a hurricane in Washington, D.C. a month from now.”

 

It seems to me that this is very close to some of the assumptions of Freudian analysis as well as in the discussion in Neoclassical Criminology about the “life course” (Felson)  In both of these developmental perspectives, small events early in one’s life course can blossom into significant traits or problems in later stages of life.  What chaos adds to both of these views is the notion that the issues discussed are in the context of a disordered, rather than ordered, world.

 

Chaos can destroy cultural homogeneity -- and this is just the theme of some of the earlier strain theories stemming from Durkheim (1893) in his work on modernization and anomie.  This is the case with many types of crime where we have created policies that fail to address the roots of the problems (cultural and social chaos) and which founder in the diversity of these problems.

 

Discussion of chaos theory reveals that the social science on which the Criminal Justice  system is based has downplayed the quest for real causation because of a fear that if we identify root causes we will have to address social and cultural issues rather than be simply reactive.  We fear of acknowledging instability inherent in systems because such acknowledgement will force us to approach crime problems from new perspectives.  (e.g. instead of maintaining Law and Order, working to create Law and Order.)  Chaos theory calls for a different outlook.  For example, consider the problems in Iraq.  Clear failure to understand the need to create an order based on the existing Islamic culture rather than to impose a Conservative Western European Judeo Christian order has had devastating consequences.

 

In my opinion, chaos theory is very applicable in the concepts of David Matza’s drift theory. (1964)   Matza correctly observed that delinquents are not out doing delinquency  on a 24/7 basis.  Rather, much of the time delinquents are in a state akin to suspended animation, just drifting along on the currents of neighborhood and peers.  Occasionally an opportunity to do something, perhaps something delinquent, comes along and interrupts the drift condition.  And naturally, depending on situational variables, some opportunities are more frequently delinquent than others (opportunity is not equally distributed).  If the juvenile or young adult takes the opportunity, e.g., steal a car, joyride, grab a bag from an old lady, assault a likely victim, then delinquency has occurred.  Chaos theory’s contribution in this framework is to point out that as social conditions and situations are repeated time-after-time, the complexity and anomie of the drift situation multiplies itself and decreases the possibility of coherent policies for social order and control.  E.g., if there is no intervention to minimize continued lack of childhood support and increase provision of positive role models, more and more individuals in the society will continue to be lost, alienated (anomie) and become inhabitants of the drift population.

 

Thus, chaos-oriented thinking leads to the understanding that society my indeed be non-linear in nature and that it may take only one small adjustment to the system (not an after-the-fact reaction to a deviant) to have a low-cost yet long-term impact on socials welfare and especially on crime.

 

First and foremost, chaos forces us to recognize diversity and multiplicity.  It forces us to realize that that to be effective with criminal justice policy we must work toward resolving the roots or causes of the fluctuating society or social condition under consideration. 

Second, it follows that criminal justice policy must be sensitive to reality of society.  If  society is chaotic in nature, then the causes are in the structure of the repetitive activities.  This means that rather than assuming unidirectional causality of crime, we need to look for repetitive loops which amplify or contain crime.  For example, we must ask if our policies reinforce the conditions that have produced classes of “have-nots” in society and which reinforce the have not syndrome, do we put the “have-nots” into have not schools and provide them with only have-not opportunities while at the same time providing the “haves” with expanded opportunities of generations to maintain and preserve their good fortune. 

For example, does current policy reinforce the antisocial behavior of corporations and actually reward deviance at that level of society?  This possibility and several other like it are well-illustrated in discussion of types of crime by T.R. Young (1991)  He claims that in the phenomenon of street crime we see amplification of crime through our policies.  The victims of street crime tend to be those already living in great uncertainty with regard to healt, housing, gender relations and social relations.  In another example, organized crime offers to solve the uncertainty with short term solutions; gambling, drugs and commodity sex.  White collar crime and corporate crime have as their only virtues that distribute uncertainty at random.  One cannot predict who will be the victim of doctors, lawyers or stockbrokers with the same certainty that one can identify the possible victim of a street thug.  Political crime tends to reinforce existing patterns of inequality where the state is involved.  “In brief, crime increases as our policies cause bifurcations or discrepancies in wealth, status and power while control tactics fade in efficacy with each bifurcation.”  (T.R. Young, 1991)

 

Third, policy should not be reduced to linear models as is done in equilibrium thinking because with such over-simplification the richness of the social structure is missing.  We need to examine the phenomenon of crime at varying levels of the social structure, e.g. individual, gang, peer group, etc. Such an approach is illustrated in the work of James Lindner (1999), who provides an excellent analysis of serial killing from a chaos perspective and really does add new light to the typical explanations of this type of crime at the individual level. Lindner illustrates a “Shadow” personality that arises in the complexity of the mind from a chaos perspective and achieves very positive results.

 

Fourth, remembering (as in the Butterfly effect) that small size inputs may result in large size impacts, it is logical to seek the most cost-effective ways of making society safer and less criminal.  Over time, development of anti-crime (wars are so much hype) policies can work toward gradual positive change and avoid the danger that many people may perhaps be overwhelmed by rapid change.

 

Last, we don’t want to be caught in the trap of postmodernism which inappropriately applies the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle to social reality.  True, there is uncertainty, but emerging chaos theory helps us recognize that the uncertainty is not merely one of deterioration of equilibrium states, but rather that it is in the nature of existence and compounded by our limited measurement ability and the non-ideal conditions in which we do our criminological research.

 

Brown, Allison, “Has Chaos Theory Found any Useful Applications in the Social Sciences?”   http://people.brandeis.edu/  blebaron/ge/chaos.html.

 

Cowling, Mark, University of Teeside, UK, (2006) Postmodern Policies? The Erratic Interventions of Constitutive Criminology, Internet Journal of Criminology, www.internetjournalofcriminology.com.  .

 

Durkheim, Emile (1893) The Division of Labor in Society, The Free Press, reprint, 1997.

 

Gleick, James, (1987) Chaos: Making a New Science,  New York, Penguin Books.

 

Grosz, Jerry and Jeff Vanderlinden, “Synthesis<”  www.wesleyan.edu/synthesis/Synthesis/Chaos.html.

 

Hegel, George, Wilhelm Friedrich, Phenomenology of Mind (also known as Phenomenology of Spirit) (1807), Nuremberg, Germany.

 

Hegel, George, Wilhelm Friedrich ,Philosophy of Right (1820), "Preface" University of Berlin.

 

Lindner, James, (1999) Chaos Shadow Theory, http://goertzel.org/dynapsych/1999/SHADOW/html.

Ogburn, William F.  ‘Technology and the Changing Family’ (with Nimkoff) 1953.

Sokal, A. and Bricmont, J. (1999) Intellectual Impostures, London, Profile Books.

 

Thomas, William I, and Florian Zsaniecki, (1998-1920) The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, 5 tomes, Champaign, IL. University of Illinois Press. (1966 reprint)

 

Young, T.R. (1991) Chaos and Crime: Explorations in Post Modern Criminology 1, http://uwacadweb.uwyo.edu/RED_FEATHER/chaos/015crime.html.

 

Young, T.R. (1998) Chaos Theory and Postmodern Theories of Crime,

http://uwacadweb.uwyo.edu/RED_FEATHER/chaos/001crime.html.