'In Slime and Darkness': The Metaphor of Filth in Criminal Justice

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 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? Theoretical no less than practical considerations imbue these questions with 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 experience of the body. Contradictory and paradoxical, filth in its ultimate form of excrement unites radically opposed meanings. On the one hand, it signifies meaningless: the nullifying reduction of all things to one homogeneous mass. On the other, 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. 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 throughout time and space, 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 show 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: the Botany Bay Venture, Britain's 1786 decision to found a penal colony in New South Wales and its eighty-one -year-long practice of banishing criminals to Australia. In interpreting the Botany Bay venture, I will draw on two disciplines that have developed theories of filth: psychoanalysis, with its theory of anality and obsessional neurosis, and anthropology, with its examination of taboos and pollution-avoidance. 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 re-enactment of an age-old story: the Fall.