12. Cultural Criminology
12.4 Boredom and Crime
Dr. Steven Kohm
In the middle class suburb where I grew up, there wasn’t much to do, so we made our own fun— often by breaking things. Everybody knows it’s fun to break stuff. Heck, I can remember one year when the carnival came to town they sold tickets for a chance to swing a sledgehammer three times against a new car. So I didn’t give it much thought when I saw some empty wine bottles laying in the alley behind the old boarded up gas station near my house. I had probably smashed three of them against the cinderblock wall of the abandoned service station before I heard an angry voice ring out behind me: “Hey, what are you doing?” I hesitated and then shot back with a lie – “nothing!” – but it was no use. She scolded me and ordered me to pick up the broken glass and put it in a nearby dumpster. I did so and the red hot sting of humiliation completely washed over me like a swarm of fire ants. The woman demanded to know my name and where I lived, so I lied again – this time with complete confidence and without hesitation. I jumped on my bike and pedaled quickly away from the scene. That overwhelming feeling of humiliation was now giving way to anger and just a little bit of excitement and exhilaration. The further I pedalled, the more energised I felt. I also felt satisfied that my parents would probably never find out, and I got away with it. Also, I realised that I was anything but bored in that moment.
The above anecdote is a slightly fictionalised amalgam of my experiences growing up in a dull, middle-class suburb in a Canadian city and is meant to illustrate the immediate sensations of minor acts of vandalism and transgression a key focus of cultural criminology. This account probably strikes many of you as very different from most detached analyses in typical criminology textbooks. Reading many mainstream accounts, you would think crime is like a bad rash, or a sprained ankle—most criminology treats crime as if it were an unfortunate affliction caused by bad luck, poor decision-making, or even social, psychological, biological or environmental conditions that drive human behaviour. For many criminologists, the search for the elusive all-purpose explanation of crime amounts to a Quixotic quest for determinate background factors that exist behind the day-to-day immediacy of human life that are thought to condition human behaviour. Crime has been blamed on factors including under-socialisation, over-socialisation, the influence of delinquent peers, poor environment, a lack of social control, flawed biology, and abnormal psychology. As Ferrell et al. (2008) lament, mainstream criminology with its Likert scale surveys, government datasets, high-powered statistical analyses and detached scientific objectivity drains the life out of its subject matter—often to the disappointment of students—and reduces “the vivid experiential agony of crime victimization… into abstract empiricism, the sensuality of