Sociology-crime-control/punishment/victims Flashcards
How does Clarke describe situational crime prevention?
‘A pre-emptive approach that relies, not on improving society or its institutions, but simply on reducing opportunities for crime’
What does Clarke identify?
Three features of measures aimed at situational crime prevention: They are directed at specific crimes. They involve managing or altering the immediate environment of crime. They aim at increasing the effort and risks of committing crime and reducing the rewards
Why do situational crime prevention strategies work?
‘Target hardening’ measures such as locking doors/windows increase the effort a burglar needs to make, while increased surveillance in shops (CCTV/security guards) increase likelihood of shoplifters being caught. Also replacing coin-operated gas meters with pre-payment cards reduces the burglar’s rewards
What is the underlying approach of situational crime prevention?
An ‘opportunity’ or rational choice theory of crime. The view that criminals act rationally, weighing up the costs and benefits of a crime opportunity before deciding to commit it
What does a rational choice theory approach to crime contrast with?
Contrasts with theories of crime that stress ‘root causes’ such as criminals early socialisation or capitalist exploitation. In this view, to deal with crime, we would have to transform the socialisation of large numbers of children to carry out a revolution
What does Clarke argue about most theories of crime?
Most theories offer no realistic solutions to crime, and argues the most obvious thing to do is to focus on the immediate crime situation, as this is where scope for prevention is greatest. Most crime is opportunistic, so we need to reduce the opportunities
What example of situational crime prevention does Felson give?
The Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City was poorly designed and provided opportunities for deviant conduct. The bathrooms were a setting for luggage thefts, rough sleeping, drug dealing and homosexual liaisons. Re-shaping the physical environment to ‘design crime out’ greatly reduced such activity, eg large sinks, in which homeless people were bathing were replaced by small hand basins
What is one criticism of situational crime prevention measures?
They do not reduce crime; they simply displace it. If criminals are acting rationally, presumably they will respond to target hardening by moving to where targets are softer. Chaiken et al found a crackdown on subway robberies in New York displaced them to the streets above
What are some different forms of displacement?
Spatial-moving elsewhere to commit crime. Temporal-committing at a different time. Target-choosing a different victim. Tactical-using a different method. Functional-committing a different type of crime
What is the most obvious example of the success of situational measures?
It is not about crime, but about suicide. In the early 1960s, half of all suicides in Britain were the result of gassing. At that time, Britain’s fas supply came from highly toxic coal gas. From the 1960s, coal was gradually replaced by less toxic natural gas, and by 1977 suicides had fallen to near zero. However, overall suicide rate declined, not just deaths from gassing-there was no displacement
What are the evaluation points for situational crime prevention?
Works to some extent in reducing certain kinds of crime, however with most measures there is likely to be some displacement. Tends to focus on opportunistic petty street crime-ignores white collar, corporate and state crime, which are most costly and harmful. Assumes criminals make rational calculations-seems unlikely in many crimes of violence, and crimes committed under the influence of drugs/alcohol. Ignores the root causes of crime, such as poverty or poor socialisation-makes it difficult to develop long-term strategies for crime reduction
What is environmental crime prevention based on?
Wilson and Kelling’s ‘Broken Windows’, which has been described as ‘perhaps the most influential single article on crime prevention ever written’
What is the ‘Broken Windows’ article?
They use the phrase ‘broken windows’ to stand for all the various signs of disorder and lack of concern for others that are found in some neighbourhoods. Including undue noise, graffiti, begging, littering, vandalism etc. They argue leaving broken windows unrepaired, tolerating aggressive begging etc, sends out a signal that no one cares
Why is crime more likely in areas such as those spoken about in the ‘Broken Windows’ article?
In such neighbourhoods, there is absence of formal social control (police) and informal control (community). Police are only concerned with serious crime and turn a blind eye to petty nuisance behaviour, while respectable members of the community feel intimidated and powerless. Without remedial action, the situation deteriorates, tipping the neighbourhood into a spiral of decline. Respectable people move out (if they can) and the area becomes a magnet for deviants
What is Wilson and Kelling’s solution to crime?
Their key idea is that disorder and the absence of controls leads to crime. Their solution is to crack down on any disorder, using a twofold strategy
What is the first part of Wilson and Kelling’s solution to crime?
First, an environmental improvement strategy-any broken window must be repaired immediately, abandoned cars towed without delay etc, otherwise more will follow and the neighbourhood will be on the slide
What is the second part of Wilson and Kelling’s solution to crime?
Secondly, the police must adopt a zero tolerance policing strategy-instead of merely reacting to crime they must proactively tackle even the slightest sign of disorder, even if it is not criminal as this will halt neighbourhood decline and prevent serious crime taking root
What is an example of success for zero tolerance policing?
Large success especially in New York (where Kelling was an adviser to the police). Eg a ‘Clean Car Program’ was instituted on the subway, in which cars were taken out of service immediately if they had any graffiti on them, only returning once clean. As a result, graffiti was largely removed from the subway. Other successful programs to tackle fare dodging, drug dealing and begging followed
What happened after the first big success of zero tolerance policing?
Later, the same approach was extended to the city’s police precincts. Eg a crackdown on ‘squeegee merchants’ discovered that many had outstanding warrants for violent and property crimes. Between 1993 and 1996, there was a significant fall in crime in the city, including a 50% drop in the homicide rate-from 1,927 to 986
What is a problem with zero tolerance?
Not clear how far zero tolerance was the cause of the improvements: NYPD benefited from 7,000 extra officers. Was general decline in crime rate in major US cities at the time-including ones where police didn’t adopt zero tolerance. Early 1990s had seen major recession and high unemployment, but from 1994 many new jobs were created. Was decline in availability of crack cocaine. While deaths from homicides fell sharply, attempted homicides remained high-has been suggested the fall in murder rate owed more to improved emergency services than policing
What is a strength of zero tolerance?
Nonetheless, zero tolerance has been very influential globally, including the UK, where it has influenced anti-social behaviour policies
What do Wilson and Kelling also recognise about crime prevention?
Show some recognition of the role of the community and informal controls in preventing crime, but the main emphasis of policies based on their ideas has been in terms of policing
What contrasts with Wilson and Kelling’s view on crime prevention?
By contrast, social and community prevention strategies place the emphasis firmly on the potential offender and their social context. The aim of these strategies if to remove the conditions that predispose individuals to crime in the first place. These are longer-term strategies as they attempt to tackle the root causes of offending, rather than simply removing opportunities for crime
How can general social reform programmes also be successful in reducing crime?
Because the causes of crime are often rooted in social conditions such as poverty, unemployment and poor housing, more general social reform programmes addressing these issues may not have a crime prevention role, even if this is not their main focus. Eg policies to promote full employment are likely to reduce crime as a ‘side effect’
What is one of the best-known community programmes aimed at reducing criminality
The experimental Perry pre-school project for disadvantaged black children in Ypsilanti, Michigan. An experimental group of 3-4 year olds was offered a two year intellectual enrichment programme, during which time the children received weekly home visits. A longitudinal study followed the children’s subsequent progress, showing striking differences with the control group who had not undergone the programme. By age 40, they had significantly fewer lifetime arrests for violent crime, property crime and drugs, while more had graduated high school and were in employment
What is evidence of how successful the Perry pre-school project was?
It was calculated that for ever dollar spent on the programme, $17 were saved on welfare, prison and other costs
What is missing from the crime prevention approaches?
The approaches take for granted the nature and definition of crime. They generally focus on fairly low-level crimes and/or interpersonal crimes of violence. This disregards the crimes of the powerful and environmental crimes
This definition of the ‘crime problem’ reflects the priorities of politicians and agencies tasked with crime prevention. Eg Whyte conducted a survey of 26 crime and disorder area partnerships in the North West of England to discover what crimes their strategies were targeting-mainly property, violence or drug crimes
Why is the crime prevention approach’s definition of the ‘crime problem’ a major problem?
Environment Agency instituted 98 prosecutions in 2001-02 in the North West, including 62 for waste offences, 32 for water quality offences, and two for radioactive substance offences. The North West also has one of the most heavily concentrated sites of chemical production in Europe, where just two plants between them release into the air about 40% of all factory-produced cancer causing-chemicals into the UK every year
What does Whyte point out about what is missing from crime prevention strategies?
There is no logical reason why such activities should not be included in the crime and disorder partnership agendas-yet despite their potential and actual effect on the health of local communities, they are not
How can surveillance be defined?
As “the monitoring of public behaviour for the purposes of population or crime control. It therefore involves observing people’s behaviour to gather data about it, and typically, using the data to regulate, manage or ‘correct’ their behaviour”
What was surveillance like in the 14th century?
During the 14th century plague, communities had to nominate an individual to monitor and record spread of plague, and the information was being used to stop people moving to uninfected areas
What is surveillance like today?
In today’s late modern society, surveillance often involves use of sophisticated technology, including CCTV cameras, biometric scanning, automated number plate recognition, electronic tagging, and databases that collate information from different sources to produce profiles of groups and individuals. In turn, this data may be used for crime and disorder control, and to control the behaviour of workers and consumers
What does Foucault contribute to the concept of surveillance?
Foucault’s “Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison” opens with striking contrast between two different forms of punishment: sovereign power, and disciplinary power
What is sovereign power?
Typical of period before the 19th century when monarch had absolute power over people. Control asserted by inflicting disfiguring, visible punishment on the body such as amputations/branding. Punishment was brutal, emotional spectacle, such as public execution
What is disciplinary power?
Becomes dominant from the 19th century. In this form of control, a new system of discipline seeks to govern not just the body, but the mind or ‘soul’. It does so through surveillance
What is one view of why the type of punishment changed?
One view is that brutal bodily punishment disappeared from Western societies as they became more civilised or humane-however Foucault rejects this liberal view
Why does Foucault reject the liberal view of why the type of punishment changed?
Claims that disciplinary power replaced sovereign power simply because surveillance is a more efficient ‘technology of power’-a more effective way of controlling people
How does Foucault illustrate disciplinary power?
With the Panopticon
What is the Panopticon?
This was a design for a prison in which each prisoner in his own cell is visible to the guards from a central watchtower, but the guards are not visible to the prisoners. Prisoners don’t know if they are being watched, but do know they might be. As a result, they have to behave at all times as if they are being watched, so the surveillance turns into self-surveillance, and discipline becomes self-discipline. Instead of being a public spectacle that marks the outside of the body, control takes place ‘inside’ the prisoner
How does disciplinary power differ from sovereign power?
Unlike sovereign power, which seeks to crush or violently repress offenders, disciplinary power involves intensively monitoring the individual with a view to rehabilitating them. For this reason, Foucault sees experts as having an important role to play in applying specialised knowledge to correcting individual’s deviant behaviour. Foucault argues social sciences, and professions such as psychologists, were born at the same time as the modern prison
What does Foucault argue about prisons?
prison is just one of a range of institutions that, from the 19th century, increasingly began to subject individuals to disciplinary power to induce conformity through self-surveillance. These include mental asylums, barracks, factories, workhouses and schools
What is dispersal of discipline?
non-prison-based social control practices, such as community service orders, form part of a ‘carceral archipelago’. A series of ‘prison islands’ spreading into other institutions and wider society, where professionals such as teachers, social workers and psychiatrists exercise surveillance over the population. In Foucault’s view, disciplinary power has now dispersed throughout society, penetrating every social institution to reach every individual. The form of surveillance in the Panopticon is now a model of how power operates in society as a whole
What is a strength of Foucault’s work?
Foucault’s work has stimulated considerable research into surveillance and disciplinary power-especially into the idea of an ‘electronic Panopticon’. However, Foucault has been criticised on several grounds
What are the criticisms of Foucault?
The shift from sovereign power and corporal punishment to disciplinary power and imprisonment is less clear than he suggests. Also, he is accused of wrongly assuming that the expressive (emotional) aspects of punishment disappear in modern society. Foucault exaggerates the extent of control. Eg, Goffman shows how some inmates of prison and mental hospitals are able to resist controls. He also overestimates the power of surveillance to change behaviour
How are CCTV cameras a form of panopticism?
We are aware of their presence but unsure whether they are recording us, however they are not necessarily effective in preventing crime. Norris’s review of dozens of studies worldwide found that while CCTV reduced crimes in car parks, it had little/no effect on other crime, and can cause displacement . Gill and Loveday found few robbers/ burglars/shoplifters/fraudsters were put off by CCTV-it’s real function is ideological, falsely reassuring the public about security even though it makes no difference to risk of victimisation
How do feminists criticise Foucault/CCTV?
Feminists such as Koskela also criticise CCTV as an extension of the ‘male gaze’. While it renders women more visible to the male camera operator, it does not make them more secure
What are some surveillance theories since Foucault?
Synoptic surveillance, surveillant assemblages, and actuarial justice and risk management (+labelling and surveillance?)
What does Mathiesen talk about?
Argues that Foucault’s account of surveillance only tells half the story when applied to today’s society. In his view, while the Panopticon allows the few to monitor the many, today the media also enable the many to see the few. In late modernity, he argues, there is an increase in the top-down, centralised surveillance that Foucault discusses, but also in surveillance from below
What does Mathiesen call this surveillance from below?
Mathiesen calls this the ‘Synopticon’-where everybody watches everybody
What example does Thompson give of synoptic surveillance?
Thompson argues that powerful groups such as politicians fear the media’s surveillance of them may uncover damaging information about them, and this acts as a form of social control over their activities
What are other examples of synoptic surveillance?
Another example of synoptic surveillance is where the public monitor each other, as with video cameras mounted on cycle helmets or dashboards to collect evidence in the event of accidents. This may warn other road users that their behaviour is being monitored and result in them exercising self-discipline. Similarly, widespread camera ownership means ordinary citizens may now be able to ‘control the controllers’, eg by filming police wrongdoing
What does Mann et al call this widespread camera ownership?
Mann et al calls this ‘sousveillance’ (from the French sous meaning ‘under’). Foucault’s panopticism cannot account for this surveillance from below
However, what does McCahill argue?
Occasional bottom-up scrutiny may be unable to reverse established ‘hierarchies of surveillance’. Eg under anti-terrorism laws, police have powers to confiscate the cameras and mobile phones of ‘citizen journalists’
