ac3.3: examine limitation of agencies in achieving social control Flashcards
finance
funding is limited and budget cuts have impacted the effectiveness of agencies in achieving social control. this then leads to a shortage of police officers on the streets and lack of prison staff/ specialist teams. this impacts the experience of prisoners by having less free time, more time in cells and higher rates of suicide/ mental illness.
civil liberties and legal barriers
basic rights and freedoms granted to citizens of a country. these include freedom of speech, movement, religious worship ect. these can limit social control as they restrict [police from achieving social control ie foreign nationals with criminal convictions who cannot be removed from the uk due to prisons being in danger in their home country.
access to resources and support
limit prisoners from being able to rehaviiate and therefore luimuts success of social control. prisoners fae problems with finance, accommodation and employment once released from prison. lack of support/ resources may mean prisoners are tempted to return to crime in order to survive.
environment
when prisoners are released their home environment can have a large impact on whether or not they stay out of prison. if an offender returns to the same environment with limited opportunities to social mobility and with criminal friends then it is likely an offender could return to prison. if an offender moves to a new environment, they may have more opportunities for social mobility and with criminal friends then it is likely an offender could return to prison. if an offender moves to a new environment, they may have more opportunities.
repeat offenders/ recidivism
if offenders fail to rehabilitate and continue to commit crime than social control will never be achieved. recidivism is one of the main reasons why the prison population has increased over the past 20 years with nearly 50% of those convicted returning to prison within a year.
local and national policies
local police forces prioritise certain crimes over others depending on the scale of the problem in that area. this can mean some crimes are not investigated. national government polices focus on certain crimes at time i.e knife crime, gang related crimes which can lead police to focus on certain crimes over others, leading to unreliable crime data.
crime committed by those with moral imperatives
a moral imperative is a strongly felt principle that compels a person to act. offenders can commit crime as they believe they are doing the right thing from a moral point of view. assisted suicide is an example of a crime that could be argued has been committed with a compassionate motive. when this happens, social control is limited as a person’s moral compass surpasses rules of social control.
Due process
Many of civil liberties are aspects of the due process model of justice that examined in 1.3. for example, freedom from arbitary arrest and freedom from detention without trial = are both important protections for the individual against the states abuse of its power.
Moral imperative- Kay gilderdale
Broke the law by assisting suicide for her daughter who had been seriously ill for 17 years.
The suffragettes
Womens right activists. As part of their campaign of direct action and civil disobedience they deliberately broke the law. For example, suffragettes set fire to post boxes and vandalised properties. Emily davison died when she protested by throwing herself under the kings horse during the derby race 1913.
The cat and mouse act
As a result of the hunger strikes, the cat and mouse act was informed by the government to maintain social control. They would release women from prison when they became weak from their hunger protest and then would rearrest the, after they recovered to finish the remainder of their sentence and would repeat this process many times, a bit like a cat playing with a mouse.
Theory
Funcitonalists such as durkheim argue that without deviance, new social values could not emerge, no change would be possible and society would stagnante. For examples, the suffragettes law breaking drew attention to the injustice of denying women the vote and promoted equality between sexes as a basic value of UK society.
Moral panics
On both a local and national level, the priorities of police and other agencies such as the CPS may be affected by media coverage and moral panics about a particular type of crime. As we saw in unit 1, the moral panic in the press about dangerous dogs led to the hasty introduction of a new law that has turned out to be largely ineffective in protecting the public. However one response of police forces is sometimes to de-prioritise a particular offence where they feel it is too trivial , a waste of police resoruces or too difficult to enforce the law.
