A.C. 4.1- CRIMINOLOGICAL THEROIES IN INFORMING POLICY DEVELOPMENT

Question 1

What is policy development?

Answer 1

Designed to prevent crime and can include things like the police making an arrest as part of a scheme to deal with gang problems, a court sanction to a secure prison or in extreme cases the death penalty sentence. Policies are plans or ways of dealing with crime and they can be developed from research and theories

Question 2

What is informal policy making?

Answer 2

Community meetings to set out how to control crime, establishment or neighbourhood groups such as youth groups. Family rules come under informal policy making as grounding and removal of items like mobile phones aim to reduce unwanted behaviour. Informal policy making is linked to non-official methods of preventing crime

Question 3

What is formal policy making?

Answer 3

Includes society using crime control policies to reduce or prevent crime or punishment policies to punish offenders agreed upon by institutions such as prisons and or government. Formal policy making is official methods of preventing crime such as community orders and custodial sentences.

Question 4

Psychoanalysis- link to psychodynamic theories

Answer 4

Aim- To understand why someone behaves like they do. Tries to understand the unconscious and the rooted problems in the unconscious mind. Typical issues can be repressed trauma and issues during development. This is formal policy making and Eysenck found only 44% of patients treated for neuroticism showed improvement.

Effectiveness-
- Can be very time consuming and is unlikely to provide answers quickly. People also must be prepared to invest time and money into the therapy. It doesn’t work for everyone and for all disorders. It can also bring back painful and unpleasant memories but it can be used on people like domestic abusers (who could have an overactive id) to see why they abuse. It can help to explain the importance of early childhood experiences and can improve childcare systems. However, it is unfalsifiable (meaning the theory cannot be tested), this is because the unconscious cannot be studied and there is a lack of empirical and scientific research for it preventing crime. This could also be seen as outdated because it was based on Victorian ideas that the father would usually be the cause of trauma. Lastly, it is expensive and time consuming.

Question 5

Behaviour modification- link to learning theories

Answer 5

Aim- Focuses on techniques to extinguish undesirable behaviours and promote desirable ones. The underpinning principle is that behaviours that are reinforced are strengthened, behaviours that are punished in order to weaken the thought-process leading to the illegal behaviour. Token economies used in prisons all over the UK. This links to operant conditioning and Aversion Therapy is a type of behaviour modification and uses electronic shocks or nausea (anti-emetics) to deter behaviour.

Effectiveness-
Strengths-
- Evidence that token economies can work in institutions (controlled environments, schools etc)
- Encourages offenders to re-learn norms and values which aids reintegration into society

Weaknesses-
- Little evidence that TEs apply outside of the institution
- Goffman suggests that institutional regimes exist to reduce individuality and to restrict rather than develop behaviour
- No real evidence that aversion therapy works in the long-term
- It is also seen as unethical

Question 6

Neurochemicals- links to biochemical explanations

Answer 6

Aim- Chemical castration is used to reduce a male sex offenders libido or sex drive in the UK, Korea and states in USA like Alabama. It works by the offender being given a pill with stilbestrol in (a female hormone) which reduces the production of testosterone.

Effectiveness-
- It does work but there is no equivalent for female sex offenders and in the UK the offender must volunteer to be provided the drug
- It could also be seen as unethical or against peoples human rights to have a child

Question 7

Eugenics and the death penalty- biological policy

Answer 7

Aim- Eugenics is selective breeding in humans to increase the occurrence of heritable characteristics seen as desirable (an example would be the Nazi twin experiments). This could prevent people from producing or inheriting the ‘criminal genes’. The death penalty also means that criminals who have committed some of the worst crimes are killed so their genes may be ‘wiped out’

Effectiveness-
- Can be seen as very unethical and can have links to racism