Control, Punishment and Victims

Question 1

Miers - victimology

Answer 1

positive victimology - there are certain factors that lead to some individuals or groups being a more likely victim of crime (e.g: the homeless are statistically the most vulnerable victims of crime due to their lack of resources and power)
Miers determines some victims provoke behaviour that would lead to their own victimisation. this can be applied to both ends of the spectrum: middle-class victims of crime have contributed to their own victimisation, by ostentatiously displaying their wealth, therefore encouraging crimes such as theft, and the working class are more likely to provoke threats, leading to violent crimes against them

Question 2

Maybe and Walklate - victimology

Answer 2

critical victimology - suggest victimisation is a form of structural powerlessness, thereby structural factors, such as patriarchy and poverty place powerless groups, such as women and the poor at greater risk of victimisation

Question 3

Tombs and Whyte - victimology

Answer 3

critical victimology - believe a ‘victim’ is a social construct. through the criminal justice system, the state applies the label of the victim to some but withholds it from others, and therefore have an ideological function of ‘failure to label’ or ‘de-labelling’. by concealing the true extent of victimisation and its real causes, it hides the crimes of the powerful

Question 4

Clarke - control and prevention

Answer 4

situational crime prevention is a pre-emptive approach, focussed on reducing opportunities to commit crime, rather than improving society and institutions

Question 5

displacement - control and prevention

Answer 5

situational crime prevention does not get rid of crime, but moves it elsewhere
- spatial: moving elsewhere (e.g: if a house’s doors are locked, criminals will move to a different house to see if that is unlocked)
- temporal: different time (e.g: doors are more likely to be unlocked in the daytime, not the night time)
- target: choosing different target (e.g: if criminals are looking to kidnap, they may choose another child if one is with their parents)
- tactical: different method (e.g: suicide is prevented by the fact you can only buy 2 packs of paracetamol at one time)
- functional: different type of crime

Question 6

Wilson and Kelling - environmental crime prevention

Answer 6

the broken windows theory - refers to disorderly neighbourhoods with an absence of formal social (police) and informal control (community). police are merely concerned with serious crime and turn a blind eye to nuisance behaviour

Question 7

Wilson and Kelling - zero tolerance policing

Answer 7

when the police crack down and tackle any form of disorder and repair any disorderly signs in neighbourhoods (e.g: grafitti)

Question 8

social and community crime prevention

Answer 8

shifts emphasis from policing, to potential offenders and their social context. the Perry preschool project attempted to do this with a group of young disadvantaged black children who were offered a 2 year intellectual enrichment programme that aimed to reduce criminality in the future. the longitudinal study shoed significant differences with a control group who had not undergone an enrichment programme. by 40, they had fewer lifetime arrests for crimes and most were in a form of paid employment

Question 9

surveillance

Answer 9

surveillance is the monitoring of public behaviour for the purposee of crime control. in today’s society, surveillance is carried out by the use of CCTV cameras, biometric scanning and information databases etc.

Question 10

Focault - types of power

Answer 10

• sovereign power: the monarch had absolute power over people and their bodies, control was asserted by inflicting visible punishment on the body. this was a brutal and emotional spectacle, such as a political execution
• disciplinary power: become more dominant from the 19th century and involves a new system of discipline that seeks to govern the mind body and soul. it does this through surveillance