controlling crime 30 marker Flashcards
Feminist solutions
Their strategies to control crime against women would be:
Make victimisation more visible, such as domestic violence, so the public can be exposed to the extent of crime, to highlight that sexual violence is an issue of male power, to show how the male-dominated CJS make stereotypical judgements about women and how they fail to respond to crimes against women, reduce crimes by reporting them more (Liberal feminism), improve street lighting (reduce fear), self- defence classes (reduce fear), rape alarms (reduce fear).
Their strategies to reduce crime committed by women would be:
tackle poverty, debt and drug use – more supportive welfare policies, higher wages for women (these are similar to LR).
Marxist Feminism would look into how inequality in capitalist society greatest impact on WC women has which led them to prostitution and shoplifting due to economic necessity.
Radical Feminism – men need to undergo a re-socialisation programme so they no longer treat women as sexual objects where they can exert power over them through violence. They want policies that focus on more crisis centres for rape.
control through left realistic crime prevention strategies
LR: Reduce inequality, improve policing and community controls, government policy.
Social and Community Crime Prevention Strategy:
Tough on causes of crime.
Focus on offender and their social context.
Aim – remove conditions that predispose individuals to crime.
Long term strategies.
Tackle root cause not just removing opportunity.
Root causes = poverty, unemployment, poor housing.
Example – Perry Pre-School Project: Longitudinal experimental project of 2-4yr olds (black disadvantaged) on 2yr Enrichment Programme. Results – by age 40 – fewer arrests for violent, property, drugs crime.
More graduated from High School, high employment. For every 1$ spent on programme it saved 17$ in welfare and prison costs.
Farrington (1995): Compared backgrounds of young me with and without police records.
Risk Factors: Low income and poor housing, living in run-down areas, high levels of hyperactivity, low school attainment, family contact.
control through left realistic crime prevention strategies evaluation
Feminism Support Left Realist Approach
Tackling the root causes of crime is correct. This is the same approach feminism takes to understand why women commit crime.
Types of Crime
Only focus on low level/interpersonal crimes. They tend to ignore crimes of the powerful and environmental crime (this can be used against RR also)
Ignores Crimes of Powerful
Whyte (2005) Whyte notes that in the North West of England, the Police were targeting vehicle crime, burglary, drug-related crime and violent crime.
At the same time, the Environmental Agency notes that in the North West, there was a glut of environmental crimes by companies, which included 2 companies being responsible for 40% of all the factory-produced cancer-causing chemicals in the UK every year. This demonstrates that the Police’s attention is on working class, street, visible crime and ignores any investigation into corporate crimes/environmental crimes.
Right Realism
LR are ‘soft’ on crime. They pay too much attention to the social clauses of offending and downplay the role of the offender in ‘choosing’ to commit. RR believe that tackling the root causes of crime is fruitless. Aim should be on making crime harder to commit and punishment stronger. LR are deflecting attention away from practical crime prevention strategies.
Marxism agrees, but have a different solution
Marxism agrees with LR on the structural inequalities as the problem of crime, but their solution is social revolution.
LR explanation is Inadequate
Many people who have the risk factors (deprived communities tec.) don’t commit crime.
Control through the use of ‘RR Crime Prevention Strategies’
RR: ‘Contain, control and punishment of an offender’. Social order must be maintained. Environmental solutions (broken windows), zero tolerance policing, reduce benefit, increase the cost.
Situational Crime Prevention Strategy:
Ron Clarke (1992) “pre-emptive approach that relies, not on improving society or its institutions, but simply on reducing opportunities for crime”.
SCP based on rational choice. Features
1. Targets specific crimes.
2. Tackles immediate environment of crime.
3. Aim to increase risk and reduce reward.
Target hardening. CCTV. Replacing coin-operated gas meters with pre-payment cards reduces the burglar’s rewards. Felson (1998) Bus Terminal (NYC) – ‘designing crime out’ to reduce luggage theft, drug dealing and sleeping rough at terminal.
Environmental Crime Prevention Strategy:
Wilson & Kelling (1986) Broken Windows - Represents the various signs of disorder and lack of concern for others found in some neighbourhoods, such as graffiti, begging, dog fouling, vandalism, littering etc.
Not repairing the ‘broken windows’ gives the impression that no-one cares.
In these areas they don’t contain formal social control (police) and informal social control (community/neighbours).
The police are concerned only with serious crime and ignore petty crime and the community feel intimidated and powerless.
Without remedial action the area will tip into a spiral of decay.
Respectable people move out and more deviants move in (Theory of Tipping – Baldwin and Bottoms (1976) “disorder + absence of controls = crime”. Solution =
1. Environmental Improvement Strategy (repair all broken windows),
2. Zero Tolerance Policing (e.g Clean Car Program on NYC Subway trains).
Between 1993-1996 there was a significant reduction in crime, including a 50% drop in homicide.
However, was zero tolerance actually the reason for the fall in crime? The following factors may have been an influential factor in improvements – 1. NYPD had 7,000 more officers. 2.There was a general decline in crime of other cities, even with ones which didn’t adopt the zero tolerance policies
Control through the use of ‘RR Crime Prevention Strategies’ evaluation
Causes Displacement
1. SPATIAL: moving the crime to other places
2. TEMPORAL: committing crime at a different time
3. TARGET: choosing a different victim
4. TACTICAL: using a different method
5. FUNCTIONAL: committing a different type of crime
If criminals are acting ‘rationally’, then strategies, such as ‘target hardening’ or re- designing physical environments will only result in criminals moving to ‘softer’ areas.
Chaiken et al (1974) Illustrates this by noting that a crackdown on subway robberies in NYC just displaced these to the streets and increased mugging on the streets of NYC
Counter Evaluation: Doesn’t always cause displacement
SCP has had a massive impact on reducing suicide.
Early 1960’s, half of all suicides were as a result of gassing in Britain. At that time Britain’s gas supply came from highly toxic coal gas. This was replaced by less toxic gas by the end of the 1960’s. 1997 suicides from gassing had fallen to almost 0. The overall suicide rate had decreased, not just by gassing. This implies that people who may have committed suicide by gassing were not moving onto other forms/methods of suicide. In this situation, there was no displacement.
Evaluations of Situational Crime Prevention strategy
1. Does situational crime prevention work on reducing all types of crime? In most cases, it doesn’t reduce crime, just merely displaces it.
2. Only really focuses on opportunist street crime, such as robbery. Ignores white collar crime or corporate crime which are seen as more harmful to society (Laureen Snider - Marxist)
- It assumes that criminals make rational calculations about committing crime. What about violence, drug-related crime, alcohol-related crime?
- Ignores the root causes of crime, such as poverty or poor socialisation. Theories that look at the root causes are tackled by Left Realists, Marxists, Feminists, subcultural theorists.
- CCTV on records crime, it doesn’t prevent it. Norris & Armstrong (1999) found that camera operators disproportionately focused on young males. Feminists argue that CCTV is an extension of the ‘male gaze’ and is part of the problem, not the solution.
Control through the use of ‘Surveillance’ - Foucault
Sovereign Power
Typical before the 19th century. Monarchy had absolute power over people and their bodies. Control was exerted by inflicting disfiguring, visible impairment on the body. Punishment was a brutal, emotional spectacle, such as public execution.
Disciplinary power
Dominant from 19th century. This form of control was based on a system of discipline and to govern not just the body but also the mind or soul. It does this through surveillance.
Foucault disagrees and argued that disciplinary power took over from sovereign power simply because surveillance is more effective at controlling people.
Panopticon:
Foucault argued that punishment has become increasingly focused on the mind. This is illustrated through the increase in surveillance as a mechanism of social control.
The panopticon is a good example of this, where Bentham a prison reformer, designed a prison with no doors, just the knowledge that you are being watched at all times. Foucault argues that this is far more effective as a form of punishment as it allows the state much more control over the individual – it rehabilitates them.
Foucault notes that disciplinary power of surveillance has increasingly been adopted by other institutions in contemporary society in addition to prisons (factories, barracks, schools). These aim to induce conformity through self-surveillance.
Foucault argues that disciplinary power has dispersed throughout society, penetrating every social institution to reach every individual. Therefore, the panopticon form of surveillance is now a model of how power operates in society as a whole.
Control through the use of ‘Surveillance’ - Foucault evaluation
Norris (2012) found that whilst CCTV did reduce crime in car parks, it had little or no effect on other crime, and it may even cause displacement.
Gill and Loveday (2003) note that few robbers, burglars, shoplifters or fraudsters are put off by CCTV. It’s real function may simply ideological – falsely reassuring the public about their security even through it makes no real difference to their victimisation.
Koskela (RF) criticises the use of CCTV by seeing it as an extension of the ‘male gaze’, rendering women more visible to the voyeurism of the male camera operator. It does not make them more secure.
Labelling and Surveillance
Norris and Armstrong (1999) researched CCTV operators and found that there is ‘a massively disproportionate targeting’ of young black males for no other reasons than their membership of that particular social group. These judgements are based on ‘typifications’ or stereotypical beliefs held about likely offenders. One result of these beliefs id a self-fulfilling prophecy which criminalises certain social groups (such as young black males) as they are targeted for their offences, while the criminalisation of others is lessened because their offences are ignored.
Control through the use of ‘Post-Foucault Surveillance and Risk Management’
Unlike disciplinary power, the aim of surveillance is not to correct, treat or rehabilitate but aims to predict and prevent future offending.
Feeley and Simon note that it does this by applying surveillance techniques ‘to identify, classify and manage groups sorted by levels of dangerousness’.
Synoptic Surveillance:
Mathiesen (1997) Foucault’s account only tells half the story in today’s society.
In late modernity, whilst there has been an increase in top-down, centralised surveillance (as argued by Foucault), there has also been the rise in surveillance ‘from below’ where everybody watches everybody.
This is known as the ‘synopticon’.
Actuarial Justice and Risk Management:
CJS no longer operates to catch offenders and then punishes them, but ow aims to ‘identify and manage potentially deviant groups’.
Feeley and Simon (1994) argue that a new ‘technology of power’ is emerging throughout the justice system.
It differs from Foucault’s disciplinary power in 3 ways:
1. It focuses on groups rather than individuals
2. It is not interested in rehabilitating offenders, but simply preventing them from offending.
3. It uses calculations of risk, or ‘actuarial analysis’.
This calculates the statistical risk of particular events happening to particular groups.
An example is in airport security screening checks which are based on offender ‘risk factors’. They use information about passengers, create a profile and then give a risk score to individuals.
The higher the risk score, these will be stopped.
Social Sorting:
Lyon (2012) Purpose of ‘social sorting’ is to be able to categorise people so they can be treated differently according to the level of risk they pose.
These put entire social groups under ‘categorical suspicion’ (Gary T Marx 1988) whereby these groups are under suspicion of wrongdoing simply because they belong to a particular social group/category. This has been adopted by the Police and an example is with the counter-terrorism scheme introduced in the West Midlands in 2010 which aimed to surround 2 mainly Muslim suburbs of Birmingham with 150 ANPR cameras – thereby placing those two communities under suspicion (Lewis 2010).
Control through the use of ‘Post-Foucault Surveillance and Risk Management’ eval
One problem with actuarial justice is the danger of a self-fulfilling prophecy. This can affect Police targeting which can lead to more stop and search of this particular group than others and then this could lead to unrepresentative crime statistics as they only represent the Police targeting specific groups which then validates their profiling of a particular social group.
Social Sorting can lead to discrimination.
