crim lecture 6 (8)-13 Flashcards
Classical criminology/Classical theory
school that contributed to the growth of individualistic explanations for criminality and deviance
Spiritual theory
people who committed crimes were possessed by demons/evil forces
- People were fundamentally good, evil acts were caused by external forces
- Punishments were used to determine guilt/innocence, torture/death/public humiliation, usually inflicted on the body
–> Public, deter people from committing crime, imprisonment was less common
–>Believed that harsher punishments = stop people from committing crimes
The enlightenment’s impact on criminology
Began 17th and 18th century Europe,
Use of scientific method to study humanity,
Spread of rationalism and social optimism in Europe
–> Justice system (torture) is reformed, punishments reflect the crime, found that brutal punishments do not fundamentally deter people from engaging in crime
–> more human rights, humans aren’t seen as inherently sinful
The classical school
Classical theorists say we enjoy rationality and free will
→ Hedonistic calculus - maximize pleasure, minimize pain
- Decisions to violate the law are made by weighing cost benefit against possible punishments
- Primary purpose of punishments should be deterrence other than vengeance
→ Deterrence and denunciation → what does the punishment acheive
→ Punishments must be individualized and proportionate
Objectives of punishments
- General deterrence
→Deter the general public - Specific deterrence
→Deter recidivism(?) - reoffenders - Denunciation
→Our society condemns the behavior - Incapacitation
→Control movements of potentially dangerous offenders → jail/prison/monitoring - Rehabilitation
- Reparations/restitutions
→ Pay back individual harmed or community - could be literal or by imprisonment of the offender - Retribution
Neo classical theories and deterrence
Concepts of just deserts (appropriate reward or punishment for one’s actions) at the core of neo classical approach
Deterrents
→ The certainty of punishment is the most effective element of deterrence
→ The criminal justice system often works slowly, making speed or celerity difficult
→ More severe punishments have no effect and can actually increasing the risk of reoffending
Rational choice theory - event and involvement decisions
- Criminology was overly focused on individual level factors
- Offenders and non-offenders engage in similar decision making processes
- Rational choice theory includes “involvement decisions” and “event decisions” everyone who commits crime has both
→ Involvement decisions based on background factors, prior experience, and solutions to our needs
→ Event decisions include immediate and situational factors, Ex. security, location, time, human behavior, victim
Routine activities theory - rational choice based theory
- Cohen and Felson, American society in 60s and 70s was more affluent.
People had more wealth, larger homes, possessions. Changes in lifestyle increased victimization - Crimes require a motivated offender, suitable target and absence of a capable guardian
→ Motivated offender and suitable target must be accompanied by lack of a capable guardian
→ Guardianship can be formal or informal (formal is police/security/cameras, informal is friend/neighbor/concerned citizen/ street lighting)
→ Informal is the most important form of guardianship
Felson claims the fourth variable is the absence of an ‘intimate handler’, a significant other; for example, a
parent or girlfriend – who can impose informal social control on the offender.”
Physical environment and offending
Focuses on the role of place in crime prevention
- Easier to predict high crime locations than people
Changes to physical, social, and organizational environment can reduce offending.
Techniques of situational crime prevention
- Increasing the perceived effort of crime.
- Increasing the risk of crime.
→ Extending guardianship - Increases certainty of being caught
- Reducing the rewards of crime.
→ Concealing high value targets - Reducing the provocations of crime.
→ Less cause for crime/incentives, reduce frustrations, conflict control
Reducing excuses for criminal behavior
→ Clear rules, increasing compliance ex. No parking signs
Critique of rational choice
- How do theories account for illogical and expressive crime?
- Rational choice theories do not sufficiently account for social, structural, and individual influences
→ Ex emotional state - People often underestimate the risks of crime and consequences
What is recidivists
Reoffenders
“victimization actor” model
Understanding what influences on the offender caused them to commit the offense
What happens when the law expresses values that are rejected by powerful people in society?
Legal backlash → Powerful people using the law to resist legal change
Michelle Alexander’s thesis on mass incarceration
Mass incarceration is a legal strategy of discriminatory treatment that has emerged to preserve racial hierarchy in American society
Law is layered
- In a federal system, laws are layered from the local up to the national level
- When these laws conflict, the federal layer always wins
- Courts tell us when laws conflict → called Judicial review
After slavery ended, amendments were added to the constitution to attempt to integrate black people into society
→ Thirteenth amendment
→ Loopholes within the law
How did law continue to discriminate against black people?
Mandatory contracts for adults
→ Disproportionately enforced on African Americans
- Apprenticeship for children
- Wage fixing
- Vagrancy laws
- Convict leasing
→Labour of prisoners
“Black codes”:
- Understanding clause
→ Illiterate black people were not allowed to register to vote while their white counterparts could
- Grandfather clause
→ If your parents did not fight in the civil war or if you didn’t have the right to vote in the past
- Good character test
→ Subjective and biased assessment
Fifteenth amendment
Black men were given the right to vote
Not to be discriminated against “on account of race, color and (past) servitude”
- There’s still loophole to this, in which doesn’t explictely discriminate on the basis of race, but disproportionately against black men
“Separate but equal”
Equal segregation - “equal opportunities but separated”
- Except opportunities were not given equally → reproduces inequality through legal channels
“Legislation is powerless to eradicate racist instincts”
War on drugs affect on black men
Different amounts of drugs got the same sentence - because of the populations that use them
Reinforces discrimination, but under the guise of only felons (disproportionately black men):
1. Previous felons were usually not allowed to vote
→ States that allowed it had mostly white populations
2. After being convicted, you cannot participate in a jury
→ After disproportionate incarceration of African Americans, juries become disproportionately white and biased
3. Employers asking if you have been convicted of a felony
Basis benefits like public housing and food stamps were then denied from felons
The truth of the war on drugs
Crime rates and incarceration rates move nearly independent of each other
“The drug war has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, despite the fact that studies consistently indicate that people of all races use and sell drugs at remarkably similar rates.”
- White youth are more likely to commit drug crimes than youth of colour
- In some states, African Americans constitute 80 to 90% of all drug offenders sent to prison
Blindness to mass incarceration
Statistics help reinforce blindness to this issue by excluding those who have been incarcerated, therefore not accurately depicting the disproportionate amount of black people who have felt the effects of discrimination in areas like housing and employment
→ Downplays the impact of racial discrimination
Legal consciousness definition
Orienting ourselves to Law –> the way individuals experience and react to the law
Law is in society
- Law has a place in texts, statutes, codes and in judicial rulings
- Most of us don’t consult these sources when deciding what to do
- Instead we rely on common sense (approximate, imperfect, contradictory)
- Terms and conditions → ironclad rules to prevent being sued for violating rights
Culture and Contradiction
Culture → the way in which we make sense of the world (often very contradictory)
→ We select which culture to use based on the situation
Proverbs → Contradict each other, relevant on a situational basis
→ Ex. Out of sight, out of mind, But absence makes the heart grow fonder
Legality as a social construction perspective
Social construction → A common sense understanding that produces the reality of the construction, become real in their consequences
Ex. witch trials
- Examples of the trial is that the law is divine and external → religious morality
Nietzsche - god is dead
→ We abandoned gods to dictate morality - we now look to law in contemporary societies
→ Visually, law imitates religion (supreme court - church)
→ How do we enforce legitimacy when law loses its divinity?
With the law perspective
With the law perspective - the game is the rules
- Ex. self regulating in sports or referees in competitions
James Harden - When you play the game, you play the rules
- Achieving goals within the realm of what is allowed
Against the law perspective (especially in low income neighborhoods)
Over Policing explodes the myth of “before the law
- Policing loses its legitimacy
- “Legal cynicism”
- “Code” replaces the law - a sense of community over the law - anti snitching code becomes the organizing principle
→ It doesn’t need to be real to organize our conduct → communities just need to understand and follow the moral of the story
Before the Law
“In this form of consciousness, the law is described as a formally ordered, rational, and hierarchical system of known rules and procedures. Respondents conceive of legality as something relatively fixed and impervious to individual action.”
“Often in these situations people express loyalty and acceptance of legal constructions; they believe in the appropriateness and justness provided through formal legal procedures, although not always in the fairness of the outcomes.”
- Can result in anger towards the law, due to the laws restrictions of individual autonomy
Schemas
“include cultural codes, vocabularies of motive, logics, hierarchies of value, and conventions, as well as the binary oppositions that make up what he calls a society’s ‘fundamental tools for thought.’”
“By applying schemas from one setting in another, people are able to make familiar what may be new and strange; moreover, they can appropriate the legitimacy attached to the familiar to authorize what is unconventional”
- The power of naming → assigns meaning and familiarity
- Explaining one concept with an adjacent more familiar concept
Social disorganization and strain
in disadvantaged neighborhoods
- How does social disorganization impact residents of disadvantaged communities?
- Experiences with concentrated poverty, frustration, anger and lack of opportunity can contribute to strain
Durkheim argued that strain is a normal part of society
- Anomie shapes our relationship to norms
- Reaffirming our norms when responding to crime
Durkheim on the function of crime
Crimes serves a positive function in society
- Social responses to crime can contribute to expanding social norms and to social change
- The structure of society and how groups interact are the primary causes of crime and deviance
- Society can be organized through either mechanical or organic solidarity
- Differentiated by the division of labor in our society → as society becomes more advanced, more division of labor and specialization
Mechanical solidarity
Mechanical solidarity is linked to the pre-modern era, where there was a greater degree of consensus surrounding social norms and values
People lived in smaller towns and villages
Populations were more homogenous with shared histories and traditions
Individual freedoms are sacrificed for the common good
- Group is prioritized over individuals
- Violation of norms was seen as an attack on the collective consciousness and was punished severely
→ Repressive sanctions
