CRIM Midterm Review 1 Flashcards
According to Edwin Sutherland, what is his definition of Criminology?
Criminology is the study of the making of laws, the breaking of laws, and of society’s reaction to the breaking of laws
What are the 3 areas of focus for Criminology according to Sutherland?
the process of making laws, of breaking laws and of reacting towards the breaking of laws”
According to Garland, what are the two initial streams of work that criminology is the product of?
The governmental project and Lombrosian project
What is “the Governmental project”
empirical studies of the administration of justice; the working of prisons, police and the measurement of crime
What is the Lombrosian project?
studies which sought to examine the characteristics of criminals and ‘non-criminals’ with a view to being able to distinguish the groups, thereby developing an understanding of the causes of crime
Lacey suggest that criminology concerns itself with?
social and individual antecedents of crime and with the nature of crime as a social phenomenon
Lacey suggest that criminal justice deals with?
speficically instituitional aspects of the social construction of crime. (Such as, policing, prosecution, punishment
What is the legal definiton of crime, according to Tappan (1947)
Crime is an Intentional act in violation of the criminal law
What are the three great tributaries that make up the subject of crime?
The study of crime, the study of whose who commit crime, the study of the criminal justice and penal systems
According to Sutherland, what is the objective of Criminology
development of a body of general and verified principles and of other types of knowledge regarding the process of law, crime, and treatment or prevention
What is critical criminology?
Critique associated with criminology
What are the 4 major lines of criticism in critical criminology
- Crime has no ontological reality: the belief that crime has no reality beyond the application of the term to particular acts.
- Criminology perpetuates the myth of crime
- Crime consists of many petty events
- Crime excludes many serious harms
What is white- collar crime?
is a nonviolent crime often characterized by deceit or concealment to obtain or avoid losing money or property, or to gain a personal or business advantage
Harm based definition
Enables criminologist to better captured harms that are not dealt with. Very well via, the criminal law, such as many forms of corporate and white collar crime.
How does the labeling perspective view crime
The labelling perspective views crime as relative to time, place and audience.
What is the essential characteristic of Crime?
behaviour which is probhibted by the state as an injury to the state and against white the state may react, as a last resort, by punishment
Crime as a social construct means
illustrates that the use of power by the state of groups of people to define people in particulars
Social constructionism
the idea that crime like other social phenomena is the outcome or product of interaction and negotiation between people living in complex social groups
Criminislisation refers to?
the process of labelling acts and people as criminal
Crime as a social construct views morality as what?
as notions of right and wrong as socially constructed and subject to crime.
What are the 3 sources of crime Data?
Official Statistics, victimization surveys and self-reporting surveys
What are the limitations of Official Statistics?
- Only captured a fraction of the so called “dark figure of crime” crime that remains unreported, unrecorded and largely unknown
- Are generally offense- rather than offender or victim- focused
- Only cover a limited range of crimes
- Not all LEAs participate; it voluntary
- Variation between police departments in recording and enforcement practices (ex. Seriousness rule. They may focus at certain times at the expense of others- impaired driving)
- Police apartments manipulating and falsifying data
What must happen for a crime to be counted as an official statistic?
1) A criminal event occurs
2) Decision to call the police
3)Police decides to respond
4) Even if police decided to respond, they decided to report
What is the definition of the crime funnel?
a model indicating that the actual total quantity of crime is much higher than the decreasing proportion that is detached , reported, prosecuted and punished
What are the most common reasons, one might not report to the police?
Violent
Not important enough
Personal matter
Fear of revenge
Did not want to bring shame to their family
Non-violent crime
Police won’t consider it important
Lack of evidence
Police won’t identify perpetrator or find the portoper
Lack of meaningful evidence for police action
No one was harmed
Crime was minor
What is the most underreported crime?
Sexual assault, 8 percent of victims of sexual assault in Canada report the crime to the police meaning that 87 per were woman
What are the common reason that sexual assault is an underreported crime?
- Re-victimization in court
- Out in the open for friends and family
- Lack of evidence
- He said/she said case
- Pay legal fees if lose
- Feeling of life being on hole until trial
- Perpetrator is powerful in stats, low likelihood of succeeding
- People doubting the testimony
- Women are often confronted with skeptism, doubtl outright blame for provoking or at least not resisting. Seen as responsible for attack. Concern about the claims being taken seriously
- One consequence of changing social attitudes towards violence against woman has been increases in reporting rates.
why might police not report a crime (5 reasons)
- May consider their discretion and simply issue a warning, confiscate illicit goods, or interrupt some escalating activity
- May find insufficient evidence to confirm that an offense has take place
- May judge that the matter has been resolved
- Victim May refuse to press charges
How does the Criminal Justice System operate
as a funnel (crime funnel)
Crime Mapping
is technology trying to predict when and where a crime may occur.
Uses official stat to generate maps that usually rep the spatial distribution of crime
- BASED on premise that crime has an inherent geographical quality
- hotspot ; geographic locations of high crime concentration
- Popular among LEAS to determine how best to target and deploy resources
What are the problems with crime mapping?
- Only street crime are reported to police are represented
- Impact on privacy of victims
- Can lead to increases in home insurance premiums falling residential and commercial property prices and business abandonment
What is Spatial labeling
refers to the idea as an area is associated to high crime there is a stigma attached
What are victimization surveys
Interviews a sample of a population and ask them questions about their experiences of criminal victimization
- Typical survey will ask whether participants have been a victim of a crime and if so, to:
Describe the nature and consequences if the experience
Indicates whether they or others brought the incidents to official attention
Describe the criminal justice response
Describes how they were affected by the experience
How many times has statistics Canada conducted a victimization survey?
About every 5 years. For the 2014 survey, telephone interviews were conducted with a random sample around 3300 people aged 15 and older.
What are the strengths of the victimization surveys
- Largely overcomes the non-reporting and non-recording problems associated with official statistics
- Helps estimate the size of the gap between reported and unreported crime
- Generally captures 3-5 times more crimes than captured by official means
- According to the 2014 statistics Canada survey, 31per of criminal incidents were reported to the police that year.
- Directs attention to the experiences of victims
- Less subject to political and police biases
What are the limitations of Victimization surveys?
- Not all types of crimes are captured
- Murder victims cannot participate
- Victimless crimes cannot be included
- Does not cover business and therefore commercial industrial victimazation are excluded
What corporate and environment crimes are excluded from victimization surveys?
- Sexual assault
- Robbery
- Assault
- Break and enter
- Motor vehicle theft
- Theft of household property
- Theft of personal property
- Vandalism
- Does not includes under 15s
- Excludes people not living in a household
- Fallibility memory
- Memory decay, telescoping (not accurately remembering the time scale)
- if there is any reluctance to answer honestly
- Incidents seems too trivial to report as a victimization experience
Self-reporting surveys
Typical finding that is often replicated in self reporting surveys is that participating in delinquent behavior is much more widespread than indicated in official statistic
Most adolescents from all socio backgrounds, classes have committed some behaviour for which they could have been arrested for
What are self-reporting surveys
- Interview a sample of a population and ask them a series of questions about their involvement in committing criminal or delinquent acts
- Common with high school students to examine trends over time in delinquent behaviours
What are the strengths of Self- reporting surveys
- Avoids problems of non- reporting and non-recording associated with official stats.
- Provides insight into offenders’ motivation for committing crimes and techniques they use.
- Reveals levels of involvement in Crime according to sex, age and race
- Useful exploring changes in patterns of offending over the life course
What are the limitations of self-reporting surveys?
- Sampling problems
- Difficult to get hardcore criminals in sample
- Types of crimes included;
- Focus on low level crimes and legal but delinquent behaviours
- Cannot be assumed participants are entirely truthful
- Memory decay, telescoping
- Unwilling to disclose due to fear, embarrassment, shame
What is Classical Criminology in historical context?
- The execution of jean calas(1762)
- Executed for the murder of his son
- Allegedly killed him because he had converted to catholicism
- Later discovered that the son had in fact committed suicide due to gambling debts
- Critics and reformers called for an end to such cruel and barbaric ways of delivering justice
Pre- Enlightenment systems of punishment
carries a demonic perspective that;
Crime is the product of evil
Crime is equated with sin: Transgressions against the will of God
Criminals are either tempted or possessed by the devil
Classicism (4 components)
- Emerged in response to arbitrary and cruel systems of punishment
- Sought to move away from the dark age of superstitious and inhumane social control
- Strived for predictability and proportionality in the infliction of pain on offenders
- Was the product of the enlightenment
In the pre- enlightenment era, justice systems had
- No such thing as individual rights
- Torture used as punishments and as means of securing confession
- Corporal punishment very common
- Punishment was arbitrary, bloody and cruel
Enlightenment Political Philosophy
- Age of enlightenment (1650-1800)
- Clear light of reason used to rid the world of superstition and ignore
- Referred to as the age of life. Poor thought ideas coming to the light
- Divine rights of the kings were brought into question. Enlightenment authorities started to question the monarch and their power “why are their monarchs?”
- Introduced new ways of thinking about rights, freedom, liberty, justice and government
- Laid the foundation for contemporary liberal democratic institutions
Who were the 4 political philosophers?
Thomas Hobbs, John Locke, Montesquieu and Voltaire
Thomas Hobbes
- Sought to legitimize power of government
- State of nature: solitary, poor, brutish and short
- Social contract: citizens consent to surrender some of their rights to their sovereign
in exchange for protection of their remaining rights
John Locke
Believed everyone is born with 3 natural rights;
Life
Liberty, including liberty of conscience
Estate/property
Job of the government is to make laws that protect these naturals rights
Montesquieu
Distribution of political power in three branches of governments
Legislative: passes laws
Executive: enforces laws
Judicial: deals with violations of the laws
Who two classical theorist
Cesare Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham
What did Michel Foucault make famous?
Panopticon
Panopticon
Meaning all around sight.
Model prison, circular building with central guard tower
Should be built near the cities as visible reminder of the consequences of crime
Prison regime to include serration of inmates, teaching of trades, and regular religious instruction
Never built, but inspired over 300 prisons worldwide including the infamous stateville prison in Illinois
What is the idea of the Panopticon?
the idea is the prisoners will behave as if they are under surveillance all the time; the prisons will govern themselves.
Critiques of classicism
- Incapacity
- Mitigating circumstances
- Judicial discretion in sentencing
- Structural Inequalities
Impact of the criminal justice practices
- Legal principles like due process, equality before the law and the right of the accused
- Decline of torture, corporal punishment and death penalty
- Growth of the prison as a form of punishment
- Idea that the aim of punishment is deterrence
Cesare Beccaria: Essay on crimes and punishments (1764)
- Published two years after the death of jean calas
- Experience with academy of fist group led him to witness firsthand a penal system ridden with corruption and injustice
- Fearful of commendation, published his work anonymously
- Initially banned in some countries; quickly became a landmark text for law reformers internationally
What are the three ideas of Beccaira’s approach
Certainty: how likely a punishment is to occur
Celerity: how quickly punishment is inflicted
Severity: how much pain is inflicted
Jeremy Bentham: The principles of morals and legislation
- Pleasure-pain principle: human behaviour is directed at maximizing pleasure and avoiding pain
- People break the law in order to gain excitement, money, sex or something else that is valued
- The trick for criminal justice is to ensure that any pleasure derived by crime is outweighed by the pain that would be inflicted by the way of punishment.
Impacts on Criminal logical thoughts
Impacts on criminal logical thoughts
-contemporary neo- classical theories that view offenders as rational actors:
- rational choice theory
Routine activities theories
Situational crime prevention
What is the premise of criminological thoughts
Crime can best be reduced by managing, designing, or manipulating the immediate environment so as to reduce the opportunities of crime and increase its perceived risks
Montesuieu prevents excessive centralization, provides checks and balances
- Removal of church authority from matters of politics and personal thought
- Church shouldn’t make laws
- Priests are not above state laws
- Priests are not judges
- Priests are not prosecutors
What is the historical context of Positivism
-Scientific revolution (16-18th century)
- Revolutionized people’s. Thinking about the natural world. People turned away from religious ideas around the origin of the world and society turned to scientific evidence
- Copernican revolution- the sun is the Centre of the world
- Gailieo telescope- the moon is not perfectly smooth
- Newtons laws of motion
What is the outcome of the historical context of positivism?
Development of the scientific method
Importance placed on inductive reasoning
What is Darwin’s On the Origin of Specifics (1859)
- Theory of evolution by natural selection
- Certain heritable traits make it easier for some to survive and reproduce
- The fittest thrive and multiply while the f=unfit die out
- Over time, this process modifies the genetic makeup of the population
What is the main ideas of social Darwinism?
The wealthy and powerful are so because of personal characteristics that evolved through natural selection
The unsuccessful are so because they are less evolved
Who is a well known social Darwinist?
Herbert Spencer
What did Herbert Spencer believe?
- Government intervention only interferes with the nature; process of survival of the fittest
Helping the poor and working classes only delays the extinction of the unfit
What are 2 problems with Herbert Spencer’s Theory?
- Misinterpretation of Darwin: evolution is not linear and one-dimensional
- Confuses culture with biology: traits that are culturally undesirable treats as biologically inferior
What is an example of naturalistic fallacy?
social inequality is good because it is a result of evolution and the natural process.
What is the Positivist perspective?
- Rose to prominence in the 19th century
- Pictures crime as sickness, not sin
- Considers crime as caused rather than chosen
- Posits that crime is the product of a disease infecting the body or mind
What does the positivist perspective sought?
to eliminate or at least reduce crime
What is Lombroso’s ephiphany
the criminal was an evolutionary throwback, an atavist, a born criminal.
What happened during Lombroso’s autopsy?
While performing an autopsy on the body of a thief, Lombroso was struck by what he perceived as ape-like structure of the criminal’s skull.
He hypothesized that the criminal was an evolutionary throwback, an atavist, a born criminal.
“the nature of the criminal- an atavistic bring who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primary humanity and the inferior animals”
What was Lombroso’s study of the criminal man?
Sought to test his thesis by comparing the bodies of 400 Italian prisoners with the bodies of a group of soldiers.
Each ws measured for evidence of physical anomalies
Found that 43% of prisoner had five or more “atavistic” anomalies , and that none of the soldiers had five . Only 11% had more than 3.
What are notable anomalies of criminals according to Lombroso?
- Ears of unusaul size
-occasionally very small or standing out from his head as do those of the chimpanzee
-Pouches in the cheeks like those of some animals
How many ways is the body of Lombroso’s object of analysis?
3
What are the three ways of Lombroso’s object of analysis?
The Criminal Body, The punishable body, The social body?
The Criminal body is interested in
- Interested in corporal signs of atavism. Criminality could be read off the body
- Used autopsies of criminal bodies to scientifically prove criminality and dangerous
- Nearly all criminals have jug ear, thick hair, thin beards, pronounced sinus, protruding chins and broad cheek bones”
The Punishable Body
- Punishments should be equal to the dangerousness of the offender
- Permanent incapacitation or death for born criminals
- Manual labor for criminals of less danger
The Social Body
- Worried criminals bodies would infiltrate and infect the social body
- Represents anarchists and other political agitators as pathogens or a for, or illness plaguing the social body
- Concerned to protect the social body by managing and eradicating criminal bodies
What did Dugdale Infer?
Inferred that poverty and criminally can be inherited
Dugdale (1877): the jukes: a study in crime, paupersim, disease and heredity
- 150 years of information on a degenerate family
- Traced descendants starting with Mas, a hard drinker, who was averse to steady toil”
- Of 709 family members studied:
- 180 had received welfare
- 140 were convicted criminals
- 30 had been charged with bastardy
What did Goddard infer
Inferred that feeable mindedness was strongly heritable
Goddard (1912)
Dug through family, town, and court records to compare the descendants of martin Kallikak and a nameless feebleminded barmaid
Marton Kallikak and his legitimate wife
Feeble-minded: general category referring to a variety of mental disabilities
Coined the terms moron, imbecile, and idiot to refer to different levels of intelligence
Found that the children on the feebale minded s ended up poor, mentally ill, ciriminal bastards living off the generoisity of the state
Eugenics
Eugenics- meaning “well born” is a term coined by francis Galton, half cousin to darwn, in 1883
- The scientific findings of studies if degenerate families were used to justify eugenics programs in the united states and Canada
What did Eugenicist believe
believed that feeblemindedness, poverty, promiscuity and criminal were inheritable
They believed they could eliminate such socials ills by encouraging the fit to reproduce, and discouraging the unfit from reproducing
Positive Eugenics
Attempts to improve the gene pool by e.g encouraging the genetically well-endowed to reproduce more frequently,
Negative Eugenics
Permeant segregation
Sterilization
Restrictive marriage policies
Restricting immigration policies
What are the critiques of Positivism (methods)?
imprecise definitions, poor scampling procedures, inadequate control-group comparisons
Determinism
the assumption that there are factors beyond the individual that impel or constraint them in way that lead them to crime. This fails to take account of human decision making, rationality and choice
Individualism
focuses in individuals factors to exclusions of everything else. Culture, socialization enforcement activities, and inequality are completely ignored
What are the three critiques of positivism
Methods, determinism and Indiviudualism
the idenfication of facts associate with criminality thought the application of scientific methods
has a huge impact on criminology
What is an example the criminality thought and scientific method imapct criminology
The central nervous system
Neurotransmitters
Nutrition
Horomones
What is the intetion of newer biological positivst work
Shift claims of direct causation to the realm if potentialities and risks
Shift form crude body measurements to visualizations and simulations
REORIENT its focus from. The outer observable body to its infinitesimal insides
Advocate clinical treatments, gene therapy and lifestyle change over any final solution
What is the first conclusion of positivism
biologic factors almost certainly have some role in the determination of criminal conduct however,
The extent if this role is very small and
This role is heavily mediated by broader social and environmental factors
What is the second conclusion of positivism
The common utopia, of all past and current bio criminalities is this; to know criminals bodes in such a way that pathological ones never reach their full potential, so that social defense is made a thing of the past
Where was sterilization passed in Canada
BC and Alberta
What does sterilization mean?
Sterilization means limiting a person’s ability to reproduce
How many people were authorized for sterilization under Alberta’s sexual sterilisation Act in an attempt to control the reproduction of people deemed incompetent and genetically defective?
Over 4800
What did Clarence Hinks believe?
Sub normality and mental unfitness seem to be on the increase in Canada. It is his conviction that highly selective eugenically sterilization should be part of our daily
What are the 4 reason individuals were sterilized
Behavioral difficulties
Deprivation of family environment
Impoverished family environment
Precondition to institutional release
Case file analysis also shows that the act was disproportionately applied to
Females
Unemployed
The unmarried
People living in rural areas
Ethnic minorities
Sexual sterilization Act was repealed in 1972
2018: Class action Lawsuit
Reports from 100 plus indigenous women, some as recent as 2018
“State-sponsored sexuaal assault”
2022: Senate Committee on HUman Rights report
Practice persists, disproportionately affects the vulnerable and marginalized groups
What is the object of study for Classicism?
The offence
What is the response to crime According to Classicism
Punishment and proportionate to the offence
What is the nature of the offender according to Classicm?
free-willed, rational, calculating and normal
What is the object of study for Positivsim
The offender
What is the nature of the offender according to positivisim
Determined, driven by biological, psychological or other influences pathological
What is the response to crime according to positivism
Treatment, indeterminate, depending on individual circumstances
