417604 CMCXXX10.

1177/1741659011417604YoungCrime Media Culture

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Crime Media Culture

7(3) 245­–258
Moral panics and the © The Author(s) 2011
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DOI: 10.1177/1741659011417604
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Jock Young1

Abstract
The concept of moral panic arose out of a particular conjuncture of political, social and theoretical
circumstances; specifically the events of 1968, the social transformations of the late 1960s and the
synthesis and energizing of New Deviancy and subcultural theory in British criminology centering
on the NDC (National Deviancy Conference) and the CCCS (Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Studies). This work evoked Mills’s Sociological Imagination: the placing of individual problems as
public issues, the relation of the individual to his or her particular time and social structure, and the
effect of social dynamics on the psychological and psychodynamics on the social. The sociological
imagination is not a constant but is greatly enhanced at times of change: it is this imagination
which engenders transformative politics. Such an analysis clearly demands placing both human
actors and reactors, in this instance, ‘deviants’ and moral panickers, in structure and historical
time and to examine both the immediate and deep roots of their behaviour. There is a tendency in
these neo-liberal times to view moral panics as simple mistakes in rationality generated perhaps by
the mass media or rumour. In this process any link between the individual and the social structure,
between historical period and social conflict, is lost. In particular the peculiar ‘rational irrationality’
of moral panics is obfuscated, the link between social structure and individual belief diminished,
and attempts to utilize moral panics to stymie social change and transformative politics obscured.

Keywords
drugs, high-profile cases, moral indignation, moral panic, ressentiment, 1960s

Introduction
There is something inside me that just wants to excite that thing in other people because I
know it’s there in everybody. There’s a demon in me and there’s a demon in everybody else. I
get a uniquely ridiculous response – the skulls flow in by the truckload, sent by well-wishers.
People love that image. They imagined me, they made me, the folks out there created this folk
hero. Bless their hearts. And I’ll do the best I can to fulfill their needs. They’re wishing me to do

1City University of New York, USA.

Email: jyoung@jjay.cuny.edu

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246 CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 7(3)

things that they can’t. They’ve got this job, they’ve got this life, they’re an insurance sales-
man…but at the same time, inside of them is a raging Keith Richards. When you talk of a folk
hero, they’ve written the script for you and you better fulfill it. And I did my best. It’s no exag-
geration that I was basically living like an outlaw. And I got into it! I knew I was on everybody’s
list. All I had to do was recant. But that was something I just couldn’t do. (Keith Richards, Life,
2010: 365)

It was 1967, I was living deeply ensconced in the bohemian enclave of Notting Hill in West London,
my flat mates drug dealers, junkies and a burglar on the run, the underground and the underworld
firmly entwined, searching for a PhD topic which was, of course, looking at me right in the face.
The world was in tumult, 1968 was just round the corner, they, our parents, politicians, journalists,
opinion leaders, magistrates, the whole straight world had got it wrong about Vietnam, got it
wrong about sex, got it wrong about work and self-discipline and now, palpably, had got it wrong
about drugs. I was fascinated by the nascent hippie culture, the interface of bohemian, West Indian
and ne’er-do-well life, the strange pantomime of police and drug users, the extraordinary venom,
the repulsion and attraction that such an innocuous drug like cannabis and such a quiescent sub-
culture evoked. So I set off for the next two years on an ethnographic study of the area, unaided
by Ethics Committees or Institutional Review Boards which were yet to be invented.
In February of that year, Redlands, the Sussex home of Keith Richards, was raided by 20 police
officers, after a concerted campaign against the Rolling Stones by the tabloid News of the World,
setting off a frenzy of reported decadence, including drug use, nudity, the suspicion that Mick
Jagger and one of the guests were wearing lipstick and an extraordinary narrative about Marianne
Faithful which was in reality a total, if thoroughly salacious, fantasy. The trial of Mick Jagger and
Keith Richards was in June and they were both sentenced to imprisonment, pending appeal, on the
charge of, in Jagger’s case, the possession of four tablets of amphetamine and, in Richards’, allow-
ing cannabis to be smoked on his property. Brian Jones’s London apartment was busted somewhat
later on the same day, a host of journalists and photographers turning up to witness the incident
minutes before the raid and in a piece of magnificent misorganization temporarily blocking the
police’s ability to enter the apartment. The conflict between the Establishment and the new youth
culture seemed to be gathering pace, the reactions quite disproportional to the offences and the
number of police and of newspaper columns exhibiting something of a panic about the morality of
‘today’s youth’. Somewhat surprisingly the conservative editor of The Times, William Rees-Mogg,
warned, in an editorial famously entitled ‘Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?’, that:

if we are going to make any case of the conflict between the sound traditional values of Britain
and the new hedonism … we must be sure that the sound traditional values include those of
tolerance and equity. It should be the particular quality of British justice to ensure that Mr.
Jagger is treated exactly the same as everyone else, no better no worse. There must remain a
suspicion in this case that Mr. Jagger received a more severe sentence than would be thought
proper for any purely anonymous young man. (The Times, 1 June 1968)

Such high-profile cases, as Lynn Chancer (2005) has so convincingly demonstrated, have a
symbolic nature, reflecting particular problems of race, class and gender (and to this we can add,
as in this instance, youth), and allowing debates about unresolved issues.

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For me the saga of the trial and the everyday experience of the prejudice engendered by long
hair and exotic clothes, by the paranoia of the impending raid and the knowledge of police
planting of drugs, fabrication of evidence and other malpractices set off a train of thought that
gave vitality to the idea of the moral panic as a moral conflict between authority and subculture
which was of a cultural nature and could not be reduced to humanitarian interventions on the
level of protecting the weak and vulnerable or simple punitive moves to deter the wicked. And
all of this occurred, of course, at a time of intense politicization. The London School of Economics
where I was a student was a focus of protest and unrest: anarchist, Marxist and Situationist ideas
were rapidly gaining currency. Students were feeling the impact of the policing both of their
lifestyles and political demonstrations (see Lilly et al., 2011); it was a time when, as Bill Chambliss
put it, students of criminology began to look into police cars rather than look out of them, ‘trou-
ble’ traditionally located by the sociologist as at the bottom of the social order became relocated
among those in authority whether journalists or police, magistrates or university administrators,
and thence on, for a substantial minority, up the class structure to captains of industry and the
system itself.

The Academic Context

It was in this context that the National Deviancy Conference was formed in 1968, a collection of
British criminologists and sociologists of deviance disenchanted by orthodox positivism, radical in
its politics and inspired by the American New Deviancy Theory, both in its labeling and subcultural
branches. The two strands of theory gave meaning to deviancy, in contrast to positivism which
took meaning away. They saw the reaction against crime and deviance as a cultural product, not
simply a technical problem of social control and the deviant act itself as a cultural product, an
attempt by groups of actors to solve the social problems which confronted them. The two key
innovations of the American deviancy theory were the insistence that crime or deviance was a
dyad – in order to understand a deviant act you had to understand why someone committed an
act and why someone defined it as deviance; and secondly, that the interaction between actors
and reactors created deviance – social control generated deviance rather than the other way
round and, furthermore, that this was often self-fulfilling. British theory, in the Atlantic crossing,
transposed such theorization. It brought labeling theory and subcultural theory together; both
theories after all, despite being somewhat at loggerheads, fitted together like pieces of a jigsaw
puzzle, one explaining social reaction and the other social action, the two parts of the dyad. They
insisted on symmetry of explanation, both actors and reactors, deviants and controllers, must be
explained in the same way as cultural producers both attempting to solve the problems confront-
ing them and inhabit the same ontological and epistemological universe. Lastly the British theo-
rists placed the analysis in a more macro-context and sometimes overtly, often unwittingly,
politicized the final product. In the extraordinarily innovative period of American theory between
1960 and 1970 the works for example of Becker (1963, 1964, 1967), Lemert (1967), Goffman
(1968), Scheff (1968) and Kitsuse (1962) were limited to the micro level and were largely apoliti-
cal. Indeed Albert Cohen, a decade later (1978), was to lament the fact that American criminology
was so ‘underdeveloped’ in its level of analysis. There were notable and brilliant exceptions, for
example the pioneering work of Richard Quinney’s Critique of the Legal Order (1974) and Bill
Chambliss’s Towards a Political Economy of Crime (1975) and the remarkable scholarship of the

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Berkeley School of Criminology. But radical theory and radical practice were much more likely to
be shot down (sometimes literally) in the United States given its McCarthyist past, its pragmatist
present and the continued experience of FBI surveillance (see Keen, 2004; Young, 2011). Nor were
university administrations or, for that matter, job opportunities or tenure possibilities as conducive
to left wing positions. Suffice it to say that whereas critical criminology subsequently developed to
inhabit the mainstream in Britain, in the United States it remained much more marginal and ghet-
toized (Mooney, 2011).
The contrast between the United States and British versions of the new deviancy theory are
illuminating, although there were American sociologists such as Albert Cohen who significantly
forged the bridge that led from one to the other (see particularly Cohen, 1955, 1965). Whereas
the American focus was on the offender and social control separately, the British focus was on a
symmetrical explanation of both; whereas the offender was seen as antisocial the British equiva-
lent committed acts of resistance sometimes foolhardy, sometimes pyrrhic, but sometimes exem-
plary; and whereas one was mechanistic and rather listless the other was creative and much more
energetic. In Britain the deviant slipped easily into the cast of transformative politics so that just as
his or her subcultural agency was seen to involve resistance to the status quo, the social reactions
against the deviant, whether taking the form of long-drawn-out encounters or episodic moral
panics, were seen as acts of resistance on behalf of the establishment, attempts to shore up a
hegemony that was threatened.

The Mass Media, Moral Panics and the Segregated

Poverty of Social Knowledge

I was run over by the truth one day

Ever since the accident I’ve walked this way
So stick my legs in plaster
Tell me lies about Vietnam…

You put your bombers in; you put your conscience out,
You take the human being, and you twist it all about
So scrub my skin with women
Chain my tongue with whisky

Stuff my nose with garlic

Coat my eyes with butter
Fill my ears with silver
Stick my legs in plaster
Tell me lies about Vietnam

(Extract from Adrian Mitchell’s poem ‘Tell Me Lies about Vietnam’ published by Bloodaxe Books. He subsequently
over the years changed the place name to Iraq and then Afghanistan.)

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The continuing war in Vietnam, the transition to what we would later call late modernity where
the older values of discipline and deferred gratification gave way to those of expressivity and indi-
vidualism, the collision between the generations in the university and on the street, gave way to
a profound skepticism about the mass media. The world was simply not how it was presented; the
world of appearances seemed something of a sham. And where could this be more apparent than
in criminology? For crime and deviance are a major focus of the media yet time and time again
the journalists persist in getting the wrong end of the stick. Portrayals of serial killers are not at all
like how serial killers actually are, television murders are not like real murders, detective work is
not at all like how it is portrayed, most offenders are not caught, to gauge the risks of crime from
television drama would be like guessing the future from the horoscope column.
The mass media were seen to play a key role in moral panics, firstly in rapidly propagating
stereotypical images of deviance; secondly in creating rising spirals of alarm; thirdly in propelling
the process of deviancy amplification whereby the deviance of the group or individual was steadily
ratcheted upwards giving rise, in some cases, to a self-fulfilling prophecy. Having conjured up
demons, something resembling folk devils resulted. The ability to focus quickly on a ‘problem’
area to sway public attention massively towards a social phenomenon was influenced by Marshall
McLuhan’s stress on the implosive nature of the modern media in his hugely influential
Understanding Media which was published in 1967 during the time of my research. He portrays
the city as expanding out, with its transport systems creating social distance and segregation with
a subsequent drop in direct knowledge from one community to another. Yet this explosive growth
of inner-city neighborhoods and distant suburbs cut off from each other is followed by a media
implosion. We can no longer get away from the ghetto and the delinquent, from the murderer
and the hoodlum; they are there in our living rooms on the 6 o’clock news; they parade them-
selves in the latest law and order series. But this rise in information about crime is accompanied
by a marked decline in its veracity. It is not the glut of information that is the problem but the glut
of severely distorted information in a situation of very poor direct knowledge: it is the stuff of
panic – the violation of reason.
My attempt to formulate this process involved three very ideal typical stages. In a rural or small-
town setting there is a high proportion of face-to-face contact, of three-dimensional knowledge,
of the individual placed in a setting of kinfolk, employment, leisure interests and individual char-
acter. We know the kid who stole the sweets from the neighborhood store, we know him in the
round and we know his social situation. The conditions for verstehen and a successful guess at
causality are considerable. The vast expansion in the 19th century of cities such as Manchester or
Chicago generates a situation of extreme class segregation, restricted knowledge and limited
media sources: Booth, Mayhew and Dickens saw themselves as explorers traversing the ‘unknown
continent’ of the proletarian city. The rise of the mass media transforms this: we have a plethora
of knowledge in the news but merely of an atomized individual, selected in terms of one particular
trait, caught at one moment: petrified into the delinquent or the offender or portrayed in televi-
sion drama as an essentialized deviant stuck in the middle of an improbable context determined
by the exigencies of the show and the stereotypes of the writer. Either way we have poor knowl-
edge. Moral panics occur against such a background, the media carry a great deal of distorted
knowledge – feral youth, crack mothers, binge drinkers, gang wars; direct knowledge would
inevitably take the steam out of them. They are implosive and sudden. It is like a searchlight beam
which focusses on the deviant and obscures all else, but with this has the strange ability to collect

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instances of the assigned deviance wherever it occurs within a country – and sometimes globally
– and subsume them in its beam. It is faster than rumour and much more pernicious.
In retrospect I am mindful that I was too romantic about the rural community and too unspe-
cific about the distribution of social knowledge. For certainly there are rural deserts where no one
knows much about anyone and everyone minds his or her own business, and if we are talking
specifically about crime there are urban areas where there is a rich, if devastating, knowledge of
poverty, crime, drugs, police behaviour and what it is like to be in a prison. Try lecturing about
criminology to students who have been raised in the projects. In contrast the upper middle classes
have comparatively very little substantive contact with either the criminal justice system or the
poor. They are rarely stopped in the street, rarely spread-eagled against the wall and searched,
would be quite surprised to find strange substances in their pockets or the tampering of evidence.
Outside of those in social work or criminal law practices contact is almost nil; you might meet a
judge at a dinner party; you might have an ambitious police officer sitting in your class. That is
why, as I have discussed, there was such a shock and revelation when middle-class youth of the
countercultural generation encountered the police, as it was with the first wave of suffragettes
before them. The poor, on the other hand, are in John Lee’s phrase ‘police property’ (1981); they,
as it were, belong to the police. And as for middle-class interaction with the poor, substantive
contact down the class structure suffers from invisibility and distortion. The poor have been recon-
structed into a service class, they wash up in the basements of restaurants, do all the menial jobs
in hospitals and shops, act as nannies, drivers, cleaners, helps for elderly parents – they support
and subsidize the dual-career, middle-class family. Yet they are somehow invisible. Barbara
Ehrenreich talks of ‘the solipsis of the middle class’: a feeling of detachment, self-absorption and
of existing separately and independently from the rest of society (2002: 103). Ironically, by virtue
of this attitude of detaching themselves from the rest of society, by this myth of classlessness, they
divorce themselves from class relationships and consign the poor to a workless class beyond the
bounds of the regular society. Yet if the poor are invisible at work, they are only too visible on the
screen. Instead they are viewed as a shiftless underclass, detached from the class structure, seen
only as a source of crime and malcontent.
To this middle-class solipsis, a comparative lack of social knowledge about the poor and ‘dis-
possessed’ must be added a particular susceptibility to moral indignation (Ranulf, 1938; Young,
2007a). The discipline necessary to maintain their class position has with it a consequent fear of
falling. The presence of the undisciplined and the hedonistic stoke the fires of righteous indigna-
tion. In Al Cohen’s memorable phrase: ‘What effect does the propinquity of the wicked have on
the peace of mind of the virtuous?’ (1965: 7). Together these twin characteristics make up a prime
site for moral panics.

The Intimacy of Self and Other

It is useful to view moral panics as a dramatic form of othering, an acute manifestation of the
moral indignation which is chronic in our society. But moral indignation, as Merton pointed out in
Social Theory and Social Structure (1957), can be sour grapes and a front for secret desires. It can,
as the postcard on my desk by the designer Sean Tejaratchi proclaims, be ‘jealousy with a halo’.
Yet often the moral panic is thought of as distant from what is happening on the ground. Contrary
to this l want to argue that in three crucial aspects there is an intimate relationship between the

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Other and Otherer. This takes the form of three ‘intimacies’: that of Reproduction, that of
Resistance, and that of Repression. In each instance I will start with a common conception of a
moral panic and seek to demonstrate how such an attribute presumes much too great a hiatus
between stereotype and reality.

The Intimacy of Reproduction: The Real Fantasy and

The Problem of Disproportionality

One of the key questions which we address to a moral disturbance to establish whether it is a
moral panic or not is whether the social reaction to the problem is disproportionate.

I was due to give a talk at a conference on drug use at Queen’s University, Belfast, in 1992 and
was sitting listening to the speaker before me. He was a police officer from the drugs squad, well-
armed with PowerPoint and scary picture. He showed a slide of a woman unbearably disfigured,
a drug mule killed by a condom of cocaine that had split inside her. ‘This’, he informed us, ‘is what
we are up against, this is the sort of tragedy that drugs create and which policing works to pre-
vent.’ When my turn came I had to point out the irony of the situation. No one swallows condoms
of cocaine for the fun of it; the condoms were employed because of the situation of illegality,
indeed the high price of cocaine in the marketplace was a direct result of policing. It was in socio-
logese an instance of secondary deviance, not primary deviance: the problem was socially con-
structed creating secondary harm much greater than the primary harm of the drug itself. It was
the moral panic that created something to panic about, not the thing itself.
Similarly, it is not a fantasy that there are cartels across the border in Mexico which are violent
and predatory and that these are fueled by the illegal drugs trade and that such a market has
generated immense corruption both in government and civil society. But the fantastic beliefs
about drugs, the violence, the dangers, the deaths and the corruption are in reality, to a large
measure, self-fulfilling. The bitter irony, of course, is that both the moral panic about drugs and
the desire for them – the root causes of the problem – lie on the other side of the border in the
United States, a country which is easy on guns and hard on drugs. And it is there, from San Diego
to Seattle, that there is a demand for drugs which creates the illegal market which so dominates
the policing and politics of Mexico, and it is from their lax market in guns that the firearms come
which so wantonly kill both the corrupt and the innocent of this southern neighbor. It is as if all
the problems associated with illegal drug use have been outsourced across the border, like some
bizarre spinoff of the North American Free Trade Agreement, to allow Americans with their declin-
ing crime rate to export crime across the border and then to look aghast at their violent neighbor,
to project all their angst onto this land of illegal immigrants and drugs, and to discuss in blog and
in travel magazine whether it is safe to vacation there.
Thus once a group is deemed a dangerous other it often becomes, because of social interven-
tion, a dangerous other: the conditions for a moral panic are created by the moral panic, fantasy
is translated into reality. So if one of the core questions in determining if we have a moral panic
or not is whether the social reaction is significantly disproportionate to the problem, as it presents
itself at the present moment, we have to make allowances for the fact that the past reaction
may have contributed greatly to the size and severity of the problem. Thus the question of

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252 CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 7(3)

disproportionality must always be phrased as: is the reaction disproportionate to the problem if
there had been no such social reaction in the first place? If we do not do this, the answer will
always be corrupted by the question; the world of appearances will dominate reality.

The Intimacy of Resistance: The Rational Irrational

A second criterion of a moral panic is that the reaction is irrational, given the actual social
threat of the problem concerned.

The mods and rockers, studied by Stan Cohen in his classic Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972),
involved a series of skirmishes between kids on beaches on the south coast of England; the televi-
sion footage of the time shows little reason for the intensive police presence, the frisson of anger
in the media, the galvanization of church, expert and political commentary that fueled the escala-
tion of concern among the population. Similarly the reaction against cannabis was widely out of
touch with the actual dangers of such an innocuous drug; it was propelled by stereotype and
unreason. So on the face of things we have a simple irrationality. But let us examine it a bit more
closely.

The same day we were released, the strangest TV discussion ever took place between Mick –
flown in by helicopter to some English lawn – and representatives of the ruling establishment.
They were like figures from Alice, chessmen: a bishop, a Jesuit, an attorney-general and
­Rees-Mogg. They’d been sent out as a scouting party waving a white flag, to discover whether
the new youth culture was a threat to the established order. Trying to bridge the unbridgeable
gap between the generations. They were earnest and awkward, and it was ludicrous. The
questions amounted to: what do you want? We’re laughing up our sleeves. They were trying
to make peace with us, like Chamberlain. Little bit of paper ‘peace in our time, peace in our
time’. All they’re trying to do is retain their positions. But such a beautiful English earnestness,
this concern. It was outstanding. Yet you know they’re carrying weight, they can bring down
some heavy-duty shit, so there was this underlying aggressiveness in the guise of all this amused
curiosity. In a way they were begging Mick for answers. (Keith Richards, Life, 2010: 229)

(See the television interview on YouTube, The World in Action, 1967, part of which was shown in
Shine a Light, directed by Martin Scorsese, 2008.)

Jagger himself is hesitant and rambling in the interview and the distinguished representatives
of the Church, Law and Press scarcely better. He upmarkets his accent, fumbles around with
highfaluting phrases, jumbled and incoherent rather like a bad undergraduate seminar at LSE. He
does not really understand what is going on; what force it is that their music and attitudes have
come to represent and set free. Yet it was what John Birt, the former director of the BBC, described
in the 2005 McTaggart Lecture as an ‘iconic moment of the sixties’ (Guardian, 26 August 2005).
There are singular events which generate such a public interest and a media clamour that their
social significance is obvious whether or not their representation in the media or in the courts has
any bearing on reality or not. Let me put it this way: their depiction may well have greater

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purchase on the wider social reality than a survey of 1,000 atomized individuals whose opinions
may be half-hearted, without any emotion or merely presenting the conventional wisdom, the
‘correct’ answer of the month. And the relevance of such singular, iconic events will derive both
from the fact of the great interest that they generate and the fashion by which they are misrep-
resented (see Young, 2011).
One has to ask oneself why it is that the Rolling Stones, who were aficionados of obscure
American music which was virtually unknown in white America and had little following in the
Black population, suddenly become so extraordinarily successful. How were they catapulted from
obscurity on the British blues circuit to global fame in a very short space of time, how were they
at the forefront of making this rich American heritage popular in America and how, indeed, did
Chicago Blues become transplanted to the suburban tranquility of the Thames Valley? What is of
great interest was how surprised they were by their success and by the visceral reaction against
them. I believe that both their dramatic success and dramatized demonization sprang from the
same source. They touched the same nerve. Moral panics are often thought of as mistakes, as
public irrationality often spurred on by media misinformation. For what could be more silly than
getting worked up by a few kids fighting on the beaches or an innocuous drug like cannabis? As
I have argued elsewhere (Young, 2005, 2009), this ignores the sources of energy, the actual con-
flicts of culture which occur and the tectonic plates of structural and normative change which
underlie them. The shift to late modernity in the period of the late 1960s and early 1970s involved
a move from a value system that stressed discipline and deferred gratification to one which both
normatively and economically put an accent on immediacy, short-term hedonism and instant
gratification. The old postwar attitudes were on the way out. Thus if it was irrational on the sur-
face to get so het up about some kids fighting on the beach it was perfectly rational to sense that
the new teenage culture was a harbinger of a world where self-discipline and deferred gratifica-
tion would no longer be thought of as economically sensible. If it was irrational to get so wound
up about youth smoking a few joints of weed, it was very understandable to get pissed off about
people whose very culture and style of life mocked the 9 to 5 discipline of work from 18 to 65,
monogamy and the suburbs which formed your timescale and your life pattern.
As it was the music became mainstream, it reflected the emergence of new values and life-
styles; as a result rock groups did not last three years like a teenage fad: the music followed people
through their lives, resulting in stadium rock and exorbitant prices. The music of dispossessed
Blacks carrying with it a charge of hedonism and energy fitted the changing times: the values of
the periphery had moved to the center. In this reading, then, the targets of moral panics are not
arbitrary and the passions they stir up understandable once seen in the wider context. There
would be no panic if there wasn’t something to panic about.
Interestingly enough some in the business began to sense that the world was changing. So it was
the Stones’ manager Andrew Loog Oldham who pursued the path of riding the moral panic, of
using the energy of the folk-devil image to garner publicity, to mobilize support and for a moment
split the generations. Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager, a few years before had taken the usual,
more conventional path. In preparation for the US market he swapped the group’s leather jackets
of their Hamburg days playing in the Reeperbahn, for matching little suits and bouffant haircuts in
order to minimize any disturbance to American sensibilities. Later on the route of rebellion and
­dissipation became more obvious, witness Malcolm McClaren’s launch of the Sex Pistols, in effect
trying to create a moral panic rather than avoid it (see McRobbie and Thornton, 1995).

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The Intimacy of Repression. Folk Devils as Folk Heroes:

The Lure of Forbidden People and Forbidden Substances

A third criterion of a moral panic is that supposedly it involves a negative stereotype of the
deviant, a reaffirmation of Normality and the denigration of the transgressive Other, a person
or a place where one definitely doesn’t want to be.

I am sitting in the Pavilion cinema in Park Slope in the heartland of gentrified Brooklyn watching
Public Enemies (dir. Michael Mann, 2009), the audience are all white and very middle class and
Johnny Depp, Keith Richards’ close friend, who plays Dillinger is, of course, everyone’s hero. But I
am taken by the spontaneous applause that breaks out every time an FBI man is gunned down. I
have only seen something similar to this with the cheers accompanying the exploits of Mexican
bandits from an audience watching an American Western in a Spanish cinema.
In 1961 David Matza and Gresham Sykes published an article entitled ‘Juvenile Delinquency
and Subterranean Values’; it was written as a corrective to their much more famous ‘Techniques
of Neutralization’ written four years earlier. The notion of neutralization by itself gives the impres-
sion that acts of violence, delinquency or hedonism are lapses from a general value system, almost
like excuses or exceptions. It has allowed the concept, much to Matza’s dismay, to be co-opted by
control theorists such as Travis Hirschi (Brotherton and Young, 2010). The 1961 article attempts
to answer the question why it is that such deviant acts are so attractive. It posits a system of sub-
terranean values parallel to the conventional values of respectable life. Here is the realm of excite-
ment and spontaneity, of short-term hedonism and abandonment, of violent masculinity and
daring. It is the world of action movies, videogames, thrillers and crime novels; it is difficult to
imagine entertainment without it. Here the folk devils of one sphere are very often the heroes of
the next. Here the techniques of neutralization are the route from one value system to the other,
not simple excuses to explain or facilitate lapses in ‘proper’ behavior (see Mooney, 2007). Such a
notion of subterranean values exists, parallel to the world of conventional values; it is the underlife
of cities so prized by Bakhtin, de Certeau and Presdee (2000). It is expressed, however wanly, in
the contrast between work and leisure; it is the contradiction between the sphere of emotions
and the ‘rational’ and the planned (Ferrell et al., 2008). For there is a clash between the ‘sensible’
corporate world of work and consumption, and the human world of passion and authenticity. To
survive in the present day necessitates a repression, the building of a character armour which
shields from the tedium, the humdrum, the structured boredom of everyday life and blocks out
the distraction which the full acknowledgment of social injustice would engender.
Drugs from alcohol through Prozac to the panoply of illegal substances have a key role in all
this both to dim down such existential anxieties and conversely, as Aldous Huxley pointed out, to
provide a door to changes in perception and a means of facilitating the transition from one sphere
to another (see Young, 1971b). Richard Blum captured well this fascination-repulsion relationship
with drug use when he wrote:

Pharmaceutical materials do not dispense themselves and illicit drugs are rarely given away, let
alone forced upon people. Consequently, the menace lies within the person, for there would
be no drug threat without a drug attraction. The amount of public interest in stories about
druggies suggests the same drug attraction and repulsion in ordinary citizens. ‘Fascination’ is

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Young 255

the better term since it implies witchcraft and enchantment. People are fascinated by drugs
because they are attracted by the states and conditions drugs are said to produce. There is
another side to the fear of being disrupted; it is the desire for release, for escape, for magic and
ecstatic joys. That is the derivation of the menace in drugs – their representation as keys to
forbidden kingdoms inside ourselves. The dreadful in the drug is the dreadful in ourselves.
(Blum, 1969: 335)

Thus the sources of the repression of drug use are close to this fascination and one curiously
reinforces the other. For there can be little doubt that their stigmatization elevates the attraction
from the laughter edging on the censorious about alcohol, to the sneaky thrills of the cannabis
spliff, to the elevation of heroin to its pinnacle position in the pyramid of decadence. Erving
Goffman in a nice passage in Asylums points to this overdetermination: ‘Some illicit activities are
pursued with a measure of spite, malice, glee, and triumph, and at a personal cost which cannot
be accounted for by the intrinsic pleasure of consuming the product’ (1968: 274).
Thus there is a blurred and transgressive line between folk devils and folk heroes, between the
desired and the forbidden. And it is for this reason that the formation of a moral panic is a thing
of energy and emotion rather than a simple mistake in rationality and information.

Coda
The ethnographic work in Notting Hill presented me with the obvious research question of why
the forcefulness of the reaction to an innocuous drug and a docile subculture; the case history of the
Jagger-Richards trial pointed to an iconic moment in the 1960s which represented much more
than an isolated burst of prejudice or a solitary mistake in policing. It edged me into the necessity
of placing the micro within a macro context. The suddenness of public concern propelled me into
a rudimentary measurement of the amount of coverage of the panic in the newspapers and the
narratives of causality and nemesis occurring in the media. The work on the ground pointed to the
possibility of self-fulfilling prophesies and deviancy amplification while the academic work emerg-
ing among my colleagues at the time underscored the need for a dyadic explanation of deviancy:
of both deviant behaviour and the reaction against it. Not the least influence was the pioneering
work of Stan Cohen leading up to Folk Devils and Moral Panics.
As it was in 1968 I set out for York to the first National Deviancy Conference (NDC) to give my
first academic paper written largely on the train: a task which I wish I could repeat today, though
mind you the trains were so much slower. This was published in 1971 as ‘The Role of the Police
as Amplifiers of Deviance, Negotiators of Reality and Translators of Fantasy’, followed shortly that
year by The Drugtakers. It was this book that prefigured the theoretical agenda of ‘a fully social
theory of deviance’ which was at the core of The New Criminology (Taylor et al., 1973). The NDC
was a pivotal institution for me. It was a time of exceptional creativity in British sociology of devi-
ance. We learnt from the times and we learnt from each other. The tectonic plates of society
shuddered a notch or two and the sociological imagination flourished.

And So to the Future

The first two studies of moral panics, that of Stan Cohen and my own, were written at a time
when the postwar disciplines of restraint and deferred gratification were breaking down; they

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256 CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 7(3)

were times of seeming progress yet of increased social instability: the movement into late moder-
nity (see Young, 1999). The moral panics coalesced around the feelings of ressentiment with
regard to an older generation against youth cultures which carried with them harbingers of the
future. The present period this side of 9/11, the recession and the restructuring of the economy is
accompanied by the breakdown of community and the rise of an unparalleled hyperdiversity of
ethnic and subcultural formations. There is ontological disturbance and widespread economic
insecurity (Young, 2007a). It presents a much more unsettling scenario and one which is con-
cerned with issues of class and diversity rather than intergenerational conflict. The searchlight of
panic and ressentiment scours the social structure for cases of faux injustice and springboards of
moral outrage. The focus is almost inevitably on immigrants as purveyors of alien diversity and
welfare scroungers, on the indigenous poor, usually racialized, depicted as members of an ‘under-
class’ who are frequently portrayed as the focus of illicit drug use, and on so-called sexual devi-
ants. A world of diversity is responded to by fundamentalism and natavism, a society of
exceptionally low social mobility, great inequality and social injustice is regaled with tales of
Welfare Queens, crackheads and ‘perverts’. One glimpse at the tabloid press or television pro-
grammes pivoted around law and order will substantiate this. An upper class which faces a legiti-
macy crisis as a result of its gross mismanagement of the economy and the pursuit of corporate
kleptocracy (see Galbraith, 2008) links up seemingly easily with a lower middle class who are
financially stricken so that moral panics both populist based and elite engineered abound (see
Goode and Ben-Yehuda, 1994).
Svend Ranulf in his pioneering study Moral Indignation and Middle Class Psychology (1938/1964)
focused, in part, on the rise of National Socialism in Germany and the ressentiment conjured up
by a threatened lower middle class. It would be absurd to suggest that anything like such an
extreme situation occurs today, but parallel problems have arisen since the recession which play
the same tune albeit in a minor key. There is widespread ‘fear of falling’ among upper working-
class and middle-class families, particularly in the United States. Let me briefly list some of the
contributory factors:

1. There has been a substantial fall in house prices.

2. 11.1 million of US households have negative equity, some 23% of mortgaged homes. In
Arizona this is near one half as it is in Florida, California and Michigan. A further 2.4 million
houses have only 5% equity, putting them on the edge of tipping.
3. Retirement savings have been severely hit by the fall of stock prices, as has the money saved
to get kids through college.
4. There is widespread redundancy and the growth of part-time and short contract jobs.
5. There is a decline in real wages.

Such a moral indignation readily bubbles over into politics, whether enhancing the growing power
of the extreme right-wing parties of Europe or the teabaggers of American Republicanism. Charles
Blow in a recent article in the New York Times (30 April 2011) points to the most reprehensible
statements about Blacks, Hispanics and Gays publicly made by Republican politicians in the last
few months. One suggested that the threat of illegal immigrants was comparable to that of Hitler
in the Second World War and that border guards should be allowed to ‘shoot to kill’, one com-
pared pregnant illegal immigrants to ‘multiplying rats’, another that funds to HIV/AIDS victims

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Young 257

should be cut off because ‘they lived a perverted life style’ while another – and I forbear to com-
municate the details – compared the Black unemployed to dogs.
The vortex of prejudice set in such a vertiginous current of economic distress engenders a
plethora of moral panics. The financial crisis engenders the lives of the poor and of the culturally
diverse as regular and convenient targets (Young, forthcoming).

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