A man inherits a position in the second-largest criminal organization in the country, maneuvers his way to the top of it, and mobilizes everything it has — money, soldiers, territory, a war with a rival syndicate — toward an objective that no accountant could enter in a ledger. He wants a fight. Specifically, he wants a fight with one particular man, and the entire apparatus he has assembled exists to produce the conditions in which that fight can happen between equals. Criminology has a framework for offending that is not about acquiring anything, and it has spent sixty years arguing about whether it is a theory or a description.
// The theoryThe values are ours. Only the timetable is different
David Matza and Gresham Sykes's “Juvenile Delinquency and Subterranean Values” (1961) was aimed at the dominant American theory of the day, which held that delinquent gangs had inverted the values of respectable society and constructed a counterculture. Matza and Sykes pointed out that the alleged delinquent values were nothing of the kind. A taste for excitement and the disdain of routine; the pursuit of the big score rather than steady earnings; the display of physical courage and toughness; the demand for immediate gratification — these are not opposed to conventional values, they are conventional values, celebrated openly in sport, in business mythology, in the war film and in every advertisement for a holiday. What society does is not prohibit them but schedule them: they are approved during leisure, in designated places, by people whose position entitles them to the indulgence. The values run underneath the respectable surface — hence subterranean — and the delinquent's error is one of timing, place and permission rather than of belief. The tradition this opened was extended most forcefully by Jack Katz, whose Seductions of Crime (1988) insisted that criminology had ignored the most obvious thing about offending, which is what it feels like from inside: the “sneaky thrill” of the shoplifter, the righteous fury of the man who kills in a quarrel, the constructed persona of the “badass”. Stephen Lyng's edgework (1990) named the same appetite in its legal form — the voluntary approach to the boundary between control and chaos that skydivers, climbers and test pilots describe in language almost identical to that of career offenders.
The offense that has no payload
What makes this subject analytically valuable is that the usual confound is stripped out. In almost every real case, the thrill and the profit arrive together — the robbery is exciting and pays, so no one can say which was doing the work, and this ambiguity is why the subterranean-values tradition has been so hard to test. Here the profit motive is absent. Ryuji already has money and inherits more; the war he starts costs his organization vastly more than it can win; and he says clearly and consistently that what he wants is the contest itself. Strip out acquisition and what is left is exactly what Matza and Sykes described: courage, physical dominance, the decisive confrontation, contempt for the accumulation of a safe position. Put him in a stadium and those same attributes make him a national figure. The values have not changed between the two settings; the authorization has. That is the theory's central claim demonstrated in a single subject, and it is also the theory's embarrassment, because a framework that cannot distinguish a champion from a gang boss by their values alone is saying something true and something unhelpful at the same time.
// The subjectWhy the opponent has to be an equal
The detail worth pausing on is that he does not want to win easily, and the structure of the whole scheme follows from that. An opponent who cannot resist supplies nothing; the experience he is after requires uncertainty, which is Lyng's point precisely — edgework is not risk-seeking in the sense of indifference to outcome but the deliberate placement of oneself where the outcome is genuinely undetermined and depends on one's own capacity. So Ryuji spends years manufacturing a rival's importance rather than removing it, elevating the man he intends to face until the contest means something. That is why the organization is instrumental and not the goal: it is the apparatus required to arrange one encounter on the right terms.
It also places him precisely against the file that opens this hub. Nishikiyama wants a standing he cannot earn and destroys the man who has it. Ryuji wants a contest and therefore has to keep his opponent intact, which makes him, by a considerable distance, the least murderous subject in the hub and one of the most destructive, because the war he starts to arrange it kills people who have no part in it at all.
Ryuji Goda
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// The crackA brilliant description of the rare case
The subterranean-values tradition and its successors are the most vivid writing in criminology and the least useful for prediction, and the objections are worth being blunt about. First, most crime is boring. The bulk of recorded offending is petty acquisitive property crime committed by poor people for small sums, plus offenses of intoxication and domestic violence, and none of that is well described as the pursuit of an intense experience. A theory built from the thrill fits the exceptional case and misses the distribution. Second, it has almost no structural content: Katz was criticized at length for producing a phenomenology of offenders who are overwhelmingly young, male and poor without explaining why the appetite for these experiences is distributed that way, and the answer — that these are the people for whom the legal routes to the same sensations are closed — is a structural explanation his framework does not supply. Third, edgework is theorized from the wrong population, largely from voluntary risk-takers with resources and exits, whose position resembles a career offender's far less than the analogy suggests. Fourth, it is hard to falsify, since any offense can be redescribed after the fact as the pursuit of some seduction. What survives is genuinely important and was genuinely missing: offending has a phenomenology, some of it is not instrumental at all, the values involved are continuous with values the same society applauds elsewhere, and any account that treats offenders as defective calculators will fail to explain the substantial minority who were not calculating anything.
A ring is not a city
Saying that a man's values are the same as a boxer's is not a defense of what he did with them. Ryuji ran a war for a personal appetite, and the people killed in it were not participants in his contest — that is the entire distance between a ring and a city, and it is the distance the theory is least equipped to talk about, because its focus on the actor's experience leaves the other party out of the frame. The finding worth taking out is the uncomfortable half of Matza and Sykes' argument: the impulse is not alien, and a society that celebrates these qualities in one register and punishes them in another is not drawing a line between two kinds of person but between two sets of circumstances.
Three key ideas
- Matza and Sykes (1961) argued that delinquent values are not oppositional but subterranean — excitement, toughness, the big score, contempt for routine — the leisure values of the whole society, misplaced in time, place and permission.
- This subject removes the usual confound: there is no profit motive at all, so what remains is the contest itself. Edgework explains why the opponent must be kept intact — the experience requires a genuinely undetermined outcome.
- Most crime is petty, boring and acquisitive, the framework has little structural content, and it is hard to falsify. What holds: offending has a phenomenology, a minority of it is not instrumental, and those values are continuous with ones the same society applauds.
Sources · to keep reading
- Matza, D. y Sykes, G. M. (1961). “Juvenile Delinquency and Subterranean Values”, American Sociological Review, 26(5).
- Matza, D. (1964). Delinquency and Drift. Wiley.
- Katz, J. (1988). Seductions of Crime. Basic Books.
- Lyng, S. (1990). “Edgework: A Social Psychological Analysis of Voluntary Risk Taking”, American Journal of Sociology, 95(4).
- Ferrell, J., Hayward, K. y Young, J. (2008). Cultural Criminology: An Invitation. Sage.
- Hall, S. y Winlow, S. (2015). Revitalizing Criminological Theory. Routledge.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
Who is Ryuji Goda?
Ryuji Goda (“El Dragón de Kansai”) is a villain from Yakuza, analysed on KRIMINIS through the lens of criminology. He does not want the territory.
Why does Ryuji Goda (The Dragon of Kansai) become a villain?
Ryuji Goda and subterranean values: Matza and Sykes showed that the offender does not hold different values but the same ones we celebrate in sport and war, placed at the wrong time. The file on crime with no economic motive.
Which criminological theory explains Ryuji Goda?
Ryuji Goda's case is analysed through Subterranean values. In 1961 Matza and Sykes dismantled the idea that juvenile delinquents held a counterculture of their own. Their values — the search for excitement, contempt for routine work, the big score, toughness — are not oppositional values: they are the leisure values of the whole society, the ones we celebrate in sport, adventure and the soldier, expressed outside the authorized time and place. Jack Katz took this into the phenomenology of the act in 1988 and Lyng turned it into edgework, voluntary risk at the boundary of control. Ryuji is the pure version: a boss whose business has no economic purpose and whose only objective is an experience.
