Chapter 14- Textbook Flashcards
What is criminology?
The study of crime causation, crime prevention, and the punishment and rehabilitation of offenders.
What is “the body of knowledge regarding crime as a social phenomenon. It includes within its scope the process of making laws, breaking laws, and reacting towards the breaking of laws”?
Criminology
What is crime?
Behaviours or actions that require social control and social intervention, codified in law.
- Includes acts of negligence
- Require formal response
What is deviance?
Actions of behaviours that violate social norms, and that may or may not be against the law.
What are social norms?
Shared and accepted standards and social expectations.
Most, but not all, crimes are understood as deviant, but are all deviant acts considered criminal?
No
What happens to some deviant acts and some criminal acts over time?
over time, some deviant acts come to be deemed criminal and some criminalized acts become legalized.
How do perceptions deviance change?
Acts that were once considered deviant can become an accepted element of society, while acts that were once considered “normal” can actually shift tone understood as “deviant” over time.
Is the distinction between what is considered deviant (or ought to be) and what is considered criminal (or ought to be) clear?
No
What do sociologists use the term deviance to refer to?
Any acts that involve the violation of accepted social norms. The act itself is not inherently deviant but rather people’s reactions to the specific act make it deviant. What is socially acceptable in one culture may actually be seen as deviant in another.
Who gets to define deviance?
In Canada, some of the most powerful groups involved in this process of defining what is deviant are politicians and governments, scientists, religious leaders, and the media. Each of these individuals may act as a moral entrepreneur.
What is a moral entrepreneur?
A person who influences or changes the creation or enforcement of a society’s moral codes.
What is the difference between informal and formal social controls?
- Informal social controls occur through our social interactions and includes the ways we attempt to both communicate and enforce standards of appropriate behaviour.
- when informal social controls are not effective, the state can exert formal social controls through mechanisms such as the criminal justice system, social workers, and psychiatrists.
What is “hard” deviance?
Crime, as an instance of deviance that has been made formal via criminal law.
What is Rational Choice Theory?
Before a person commits an offence, he or she engages in a rational evaluation of the pros and cons, costs and benefits of the situation. The person first evaluates the risk of apprehension, the evaluates the seriousness of the potential punishment, and finally judges the value to herself or himself of the criminal activity.A person’s decision to commit a crime is thus based on the aggregate outcome of this rational weighing of gains and risks.
What do Beccaria and Bentham argue?
That if crime produces some form of pleasure for a criminal, then pain is necessary to prevent a crime. They argued that sentences must be proportionate to the seriousness of the crime.
What are the four basic beliefs of classical criminology?
- Crime is a rational choice as people enjoy free will–they are able to choose to engage in criminal acts or in lawful acts.
- Criminal solutions requiring less work yet yielding greater payoffs are understood as being more attractive than lawful solutions.
- A fear of punishment can control a person’s choices.
- when criminality is met with measured severity, certainly of punishment, and swiftness of justice, a society enhances its ability to control crime and criminal behaviour.
What is biological determinism?
The hypothesis that biological factors completely determine a person’s behaviour
What did positivists assume about crime and criminality?
That once we were able to identify specific physical features distinguishing criminals from noncriminals, it would be be possible to figure out how to prevent and control criminal behaviour.
What did Cesare Lombroso attempt to do?
Attempted to apply the scientific method to his investigation of criminals He argued that some individuals were born criminals–that they were lower on the revolutionary ladder as a result of a particular anatomy.
What is Lombroso’s “criminal man”?
The criminal man could be distinguished by his anatomy: an asymmetrical face, large ears, particular eye defects, and so forth.
What do biological theories fail to consider?
The wider influence of environment
What is the sociological approach to crime?
Sociologists have been working to shift the focus of criminology toward a consideration of the social environments in which people are located. Explanations of crime at th level of the individual fail to explain persistent crime patters. Sociologists emphasize the evologiscal distribution of crime–access to and use of environmental refuses and services. Emphasize the fact of social change and the interactive nature of crime itself.
How does functionalism approach crime?
Functionalist argue that a balancing of tensions produces society. When a particular group or individual threatens this balance, efforts are made to ensure that everything returns to a stat elf homeostasis.
What are the roots to the functionalist approach to criminality?
- Emile Durkheim’s notion of anomie
- State of normlessness in which norms are confused, unclear, or absent
- Such normlessness leads to deviant behaviour.
What is Robert Merton’s strain theory?
The assertion that people experience strain when culturally defined goals cannot be met through socially approved means. Those of low socioeconomic status may feel strain since legitimate avenues are less open to them than they may be to more affluent persons. This perspective is not suggesting that people are simply incapable of controlling individual desires, but rather that unattainable goals and desires are being produced at the level of society.
What do strain theorists argue?
That most people within the same society share similar goals and values, and that when legitimate avenues to achieving those goals are not readily accessible, some will resort to deviant methods to achieve them. Alternatively, some people will reject socially accepted goals altogether and will instead substitute them with more deviant or criminal goals.
What does strain theory provide an explanation for?
The continued existence of high-crime areas as well as the prevalence of criminal behaviour among th lower class.
What are the five social goals and means to achieving those goals that merlons’ typology of social adaptions includes?
1) Conformity happens when individual both accept social goals and have the means to achieve those goals
2) Innovation takes place when an individual accepts society’s goals but she or he is incapable of achieving those goals through socially approved means. Innovation is most strongly linked with criminal behaviour
3) Ritualism as an adaption happens when social goals are reduced in importance.
4) Retreatists reject societal goals and the legitimate means of achieving such goals. Found on the margins of society as their lack of success leads to social withdrawal.
5) Rebellion involves the creation of an alternative set of goals and means, thus supplanting conventional ones. Happens when people call for and engage in radical change and alternative lifestyles.
What is Cloward and Ohlin’s illegitimate opportunity theory?
The assertion that individuals commit crime as a result of deviant learning environments. Individuals must be located in deviant “learning environment” that provide them with the opportunities to both learn and develop the expertise needed to engage in criminal behaviour
How does conflict theory approach criminality?
- Conflict theorists view crime as the product of class struggle
- Focus on the role the government plays in producing criminogenic environments
- Focus on the relationship between social power an criminal law
- challenge the commonly held belief that law is neutral and reflects the interests of society as whole
What are crimogenic environments?
An environment that, as a result of laws that privilege certain groups, produces crime or criminality.
What bias are conflict theorists interested in?
The bias in the criminal justice system. They argue that crimes committed by the wealthy are punished far more leniently than those committed by the lower classes.
What did marx argue structure social relations–including the legal system?
Economic relations (forces of production and one’s positive relative to the means of production).
