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18 Aust. & N.Z. J. Criminology 1 (1985)

handle is hein.journals/anzjc18 and id is 1 raw text is: AUST & NZ JOURNAL OF CRIMINOLOGY (March 1985) 18 (1-2) EDITORIAL Putting the Organized Crime and Corruption Debate in Perspective Three New South Wales criminologists, David Brown, Russell Hogg and Richard Phillipps have very recently put together under the title Not the National Times a series of essays and letters, some already published, around the theme of organized crime and corruption, with special emphasis on the Costigan Royal Commission, the state of the legal system in New South Wales and the treatment of these issues by the media, in particular a series of articles in the National Times. Their contribution is a modest but extremely timely and useful one. The general point they make is that the level of criminological debate on these issues in Australia is poor and skewed in the wrong directions. Their specific message is that the responses to the issues of organized crime and corruption in Australia have failed to consider problems from first principles and from the broadest possible economic, political and social perspectives. Brown, Hogg and Phillipps focus on the National Times because of the major impact which that newspaper has made in calling much of the tune of the current debate in the wake of the Costigan Commission and allegations of corruption in New South Wales and elsewhere. They query on rather traditional, but nevertheless valid, grounds whether the press reporting of such issues is ever neutral and whether it is purely a treatment of facts in order to reveal the truth. They also argue that any press treatment, however good, of such a complicated set of issues as organized crime and corruption, must of necessity only scrape the surface, and that any overall assessment of the situation must take this carefully into account. In putting forward some preliminary ideas about the conduct of an informed debate on the dual problem of organized crime and corruption on the one hand and their treatment by the media on the other, the three authors state a number of common assumptions and positions which underlie their thinking. These are as follows: (1) that news is a commercial product, socially constructed and produced through the institutions, instruments, practices and relations of its production. (2) that progressives should therefore adopt a critical stance to claims that journalistic accounts merely report the facts, reveal the truth etc. (3) indeed that a critical attitude should be maintained toward religious notions of the the truth and to generalised claims of free speech. (4) that a critical approach should similarly be maintained to arguments that crime and criminality can be explained in terms of individual morality or pathology. (5) that a progressive approach to crime (organised or disorganised) involves a stress on its structural preconditions, especially economic. (6) accordingly that the focus of change around crime should be on law reform and on attacking practices, relations, structures and markets rather than immoral individuals. (7) that a sceptical approach should be maintained toward the creation and proliferation of law-enforcement agencies, what one of our articles calls new centres of unaccountable power. (8) that expose work does not necessarily generate progressive political effects and that these effects depend on the terms in which the exposes are conducted and the political context into which they emerge. (9) that it is dangerous to conceive these variously conceived debates as constituting a unity and that analyses which do so conceive them run the risk of overriding complex and diverse rich histories of local struggle. Brown, Hogg and Phillipps are concerned that the impact of the present debate has been to create the impression of organized crime in Australia as a monolithic concept dominated by close-knit, carefully organized criminal conspiracies. They also point out that no satisfactory definition of organized crime has yet been produced, which leaves it open for 1

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