Article by Martha Grace Duncan
Philosophers have long proclaimed the essential role of metaphors in generating meaning. Words that say one thing and suggest another are necessary for the growth of our thought and may be an inevitable aspect of language itself. Nevertheless, metaphors can hamper understanding when we lose sight of their status as tropes and take them for reality.
One of the most common metaphors in our culture is that of the criminal as filth. References to criminals as “dirt,” “slime,” and “scum” pervade the media and everyday conversation. Yet, despite the familiarity of these figures of speech, scholars have devoted little attention to such questions as the following: What is the origin of the metaphor likening criminals to filth? Is this metaphor accidental, or is it essential to our thinking about lawbreakers? And, to the degree that this metaphor governs our understanding of criminals, what are the consequences for our criminal justice system?
These questions beckon with special urgency at a time when the United States keeps more than one million people behind bars; when penologists urge other ways of combatting crime, yet legislators resist their call; when sentencing guidelines mandate severe punishments for venial offenses—all highlighting the irrational sources of our attitudes toward criminals.
Theoretical no less than practical considerations imbue these questions with a special allure, for filth is a concept of exceptional richness and power, an archetypal symbol with roots lying deep in childhood, in early parental warnings and primordial experiences of the body. Contradictory and paradoxical, filth in its ultimate form of excrement unites radically opposed meanings. On the one hand, it signifies meaninglessness: the nullifying reduction of all things to one homogeneous mass. On the other hand, as psychoanalysts inform us, excrement represents many good things: an artistic creation, a gift, wealth.
Strongly repelling and strongly attracting, filth serves as an apt metaphor for criminals, who likewise evoke our simultaneous hate and love, repudiation and admiration. By virtue of this similarity, filth appears to be, in C. S. Lewis's terms, a pupil's rather than a master's metaphor. The evidence suggests that we may be incapable of reflecting about criminals without concepts such as slime, scum, and excrement.
If this is so, then our liberation from the metaphor may depend not on rejecting this figure of speech, nor in finding substitutes for it, but rather in seeing clearly the vicissitudes of the metaphor in criminal justice. This Article suggests that the metaphor leads to a view of criminals as diseased and contagious and to a policy requiring segregation of criminals from uncontaminated noncriminals. In addition, on a measure-for-measure theory of punishment, the metaphor may cause authorities to imprison criminals in places that are conceived as suitably filthy and malodorous.
Along the way to these conclusions, this Article explores several byways of our topic, among them the reasons that we connect evil with darkness, the relationship between crime and foul odors, and the fantasy that criminals are made specifically of soft, wet dirt, or slime.
An article such as this one, which seeks to examine the labyrinthine chains of meanings that we associate with illegal behavior, cries out for an interdisciplinary approach. Specifically, it demands a source that can reveal our unconscious as well as our conscious associations. Such a source is classical literature-works of fiction that, by virtue of being read and loved through centuries and across continents, have proven their capacity to strike a responsive chord in their readers. Therefore, in Part II of this Article, I employ the classics, supplemented by occasional examples from contemporary fiction, history, and theology, to demonstrate the pervasiveness of the anal metaphor for criminals.
After this examination of the larger picture, in Part III the Article offers an extended illustration, a case study in legal history: namely, the Botany Bay venture, Britain's 1786 decision to found a penal colony in Australia and its eighty-one-year-long practice of banishing criminals to that remote continent. The history of Australia is replete with descriptions of convicts as “sewage” and of their island-prison as a “dunghill,” a “cesspool,” and a “sink of wickedness.” In even more graphic terms, Jeremy Bentham described the policy of transporting criminals to Australia as projecting an “excrementitious mass.” Notwithstanding the richness of these expressions, it was not for its language that I elected to analyze the Botany Bay experiment, but because this episode represents a remarkable effort by noncriminals-an effort to eliminate the very relationship with criminals, to repudiate convicts utterly and treat them as if they were on another planet, or a distant star.
In interpreting the Australian undertaking, I will draw on two scholarly disciplines that have developed theories of filth: psychoanalysis, with its exploration of anality and obsessional neurosis; and anthropology, with its examination of taboos and pollution-avoidance behavior. Based on this literature, I will show that the Botany Bay venture was more than a practical response to a growing problem; it was also an enterprise fraught with, and partially determined by, unconscious meanings. Physically, it reproduced the act of expelling waste from the body; psychologically, it resembled the defense mechanisms of externalization and projection. And symbolically, this banishment of people who had violated the laws, and become impure thereby, represented a reenactment of an age-old story: the Fall.
In Part IV, this Article shows how the theory of anality sheds light on other areas of criminal justice: vagrancy law, with its emphasis on “cleaning up” neighborhoods and towns; eighteenth-century prison reform with its goal of “perfect order and perfect silence”; and juvenile justice, with its effort to remove children from messy cities of contagious criminality to rural homes of supposed order and purity. In the final pages, I discuss American cases in which judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys reveal their vision of criminals as filth.
About the Author
Martha Grace Duncan. Professor of Law, Emory University. Ph.D., Columbia University, 1976; J.D., Yale Law School, 1983.
Citation
68 Tul. L. Rev. 725 (1994)