crime and deviance - crime control, preventation and punishment Flashcards
Explain situational crime prevention (SCP)
Clarke (1992) describes SCP as ‘pre-emptive’ approach that relies, not on improving society or its institutions but simply reducing the opportunities for crime. He identifies three features of SCP measures.
(a) they are directed at specific crimes
(b) they involve managing or altering the immediate environment of the crime
(c) they aim at increasing the effort and risks of committing crime and reducing the rewards
What theory are SCP influenced by
‘target hardening’ measures increase the effort of a burglar has to make or increases the likelihood of shoplifters being caught. Underlying SCP approaches is a rational choice theory of crime where criminals are viewed as acting rationally, weighing up the costs and benefits of an opportunity before deciding whether to commit crime.
This contrasts with theories of crime that stress ‘root causes’ such as the poverty or capitalism. CLARKE argues that most theories offer no realistic solutions to crime, therefore the most obvious thing to do so, he argues is to focus on the immediate crime situation, since this is where scope for prevention is greatest. Most crime is opportunistic, so we need to reduce the opportunities
Explain Felson’s example of SCP strategy
Felson gives an example of SCP strategy. The Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York was poorly designed and provided many opportunities for crime and deviance; the toilets provided an environment for luggage thefts, rough sleeping, drug dealing and gay sex etc. Re-shaping the physical environment to ‘design crime out’ greatly reduced such activity
Explain the major criticism of SCP
A major criticism of SCP measures is that they do not actually reduce crime, they only displace it. If criminals act rationally, they will respond to target hardening simply moving to where targets are softer. For example, CHAIKEN et al found that a crackdown on subway robberies in New York displaced them to the streets above. Displacement can take many forms such as spatial (moving elsewhere to commit the crime), temporal (committing it at different time), target (choosing a different victim) etc.
However, the most successful example of SCP which did not lead to displacement was the replacement of Britain’s gas supply from highly toxic coal gas to a less toxic natural gas leading to a massive decrease in the number of suicides resulting from gassing. The overall suicide rate fell too, as people did not switch to another method
Evaluate situation crime prevention
- SCP only displaces crime rather than reduce it as crime can easily be displaced from higher social class neighbourhoods to wc neighbourhoods
- only works for specific crimes e.g street crime which perpetuates the myth that crime is a wc phenomenon
- not a realistic solution to crime as it does not account for structural/causes for crime
- it does not solve why crime occurs in the first place
- assumes all crime is opportunistic - not all crime is based on opportunity/getting a reward/not all crime is rational
- not easy to anticipate - where crime takes place
- short-term fix for crime - not long-term solution
- Norris and Armstrong (1999) - SCP strategies such as CCTv disproportionately focus on young males particularly young black males
Explain Environmental crime prevention
ECP is based on Wilson and Kelling’s article, Broken Windows. They use the phrase broken windows to stand for all the various signs of disorder and lack of concern for others that are found in some neighbourhoods including undue noise, graffiti, begging, littering, dog fouling, vandalism etc. They argue that leaving broken windows unrepaired etc sends out a signal that no one cares.
In such neighbourhoods, Wilson and Kelling argue that there is an absence of both formal and informal social control. The police are only concerned with serious crime and turn a blind eye to petty nuisance behaviour, while respectable members of the community feel intimidated and powerless. Without remedial action, the situation deteriorates, tipping to neighbourhood into a spiral of decline. Respectable people move out and the area becomes a magnet for deviants.
Their idea is that disorder and the absence of control leads to crime
Explain ECP’s two fold strategy to tackle crime
Their solution is to crack down of any disorder using a twofold strategy:
1 - an environment improvement strategy: any broken window must be repaired immediately, abandoned cars towed without delay etc. otherwise the neighbourhood will be on the slide
2 - the police must adopt a zero-tolerance policing strategy: instead of merely reacting to crime, they must proactively tackle even the slightest sign of disorder, even if it is not criminal. This will halt neighbour decline and prevent serious crime taking root
Great success has been claimed for zero-tolerance policing, particularly in New York. For example, a clear car programme was introduced on the subway, in which carriages were taken out of service immediately if they had graffiti on them and graffiti was largely removed from the subway. Similar programmes to tackle fare dodging, drug dealing and begging followed
Evaluate ECP
- ECP approach largely focuses on street crime - ignores corporate crime
- leads to an abuse of power from the police
- only amplifies crime further as police arrest more for the smallest offences
- critics argue that new york benefitted from 7,000 extra police officers of the same time they introduced zero-tolerance policy difficult to conclude how successful strategy was
Explain social and community crime prevention
Social and community crime prevention is based on the the potential offender and their social context. The aim of the strategies is to remove the conditions that predispose individuals to crime in the first place. These are longer-term strategies, since they attempt to tackle the root causes of offending, rather than simply removing opportunities to commit crime. Because the causes of crime are often rooted in social conditions such as unemployment, poverty, poor housing etc, more general social reform programmes addressing these issues may have a crime prevention role even if it is not their main focus
Evaluate social and community crime prevention
- long-term solution addresses why people commit crime in the first place
- viewed as too ambitious
- focuses only on working class crime - ignores how the upper classes commit crime neglecting the crimes of the powerful
Explain Surveillance
Another very important way of attempting to control people’s behaviour and prevent crime is surveillance. This can be defined as: the monitoring of public behaviour for the purposes of crime control. It involves observing people’s behaviour to gather data and using this to regulate manage or ‘correct’ their behaviour. It has a long history and takes many forms.
In today’s late modern society, surveillance often involves the use of sophisticated technology, including CCTV cameras, biometric scanning, automated number plate recognition (ANPR), electronic tagging and databases that collate information from different sources to produce profiles of groups and individuals. This data is used for crime and disorder control (and to control the workers and consumers)
What two types of punishment does Foucault identify?
Michel Foucault’s ‘Discipline and Punch: The Birth of the Prison’ (1979) identifies two different types of punishment:
Sovereign power & disciplinary power
Explain Sovereign power
1 - Sovereign power: this was typical of the period before the (19th when the monarch had power over people and their bodies). Inflicting punishment on the body was the means of asserting control. Punishment was a brutal and emotional spectacle - a degradational ceremony e.g. public executions
Explain disciplinary power
2 - Disciplinary power: because dominant in a range of institutions from the (19th and sought to control and discipline not just the body but the mind and soul through surveillance)>
Foucault illustrates this disciplinary power with the panopticon prison design. This was an early design for prisoners where each prisoner had their own cell and all prisoners cells were visible to the guards from a central watchtower but the guards were not visible to the prisoners.
Therefore, prisoners do not know when they are being watched and as a result have to behave at all times - so the surveillance becomes a form of self-surveillance and discipline becomes self discipline. Disciplinary control takes place ‘inside’ the prisoner rather than public spectacle. Unlike sovereign power which seeks to crush or repress offenders, disciplinary power involves intensively monitoring the individual with a view to rehabilitating them.
What does Foucault argue about punishment in relation to the birth of the prison
Many argue that brutal bodily punishment disappeared from Western society because it became civilized. However, he rejects this liberal view - arguing that disciplinary power replaced sovereign power simply because surveillance is simply a more effective way of controlling people.
As a result of this shift in control, Foucault sees experts as having important roles to play in applying their knowledge to correcting deviant behaviour. He argues that social sciences and professions like psychologists were born at the same time as the modern prison.
Explain the dispersal of discipline
Foucault argues that the prison is just one of a range of institutions from the (19th to the present day that began to use disciplinary power to create conformity through self-surveillance. These included mental asylums, barracks, factories, workhouses and schools.
Non prison based social control practices such as Community Service Orders form part of a ‘carceral archipelago’. In other words, a series of ‘prison islands’ spreading into other institutions and wider society where professionals like social workers, psychiatrists and teachers exercise surveillance over the population.
To Foucault, society has now dispersed disciplinary power everywhere penetrating all social institutions, The Panopticon model therefore operates throughout society as a whole
Evaluate Foucault’s work on the types of punishment and discipline
Foucault’s work has inspired much research into surveillance and disciplinary power especially through the idea of the ‘electronic panopticon’ that uses modern technology to monitor us,
However, his work has also been criticised:
- the jump from sovereign power and corporal punishment to disciplinary power is not clear cut/oversimplified
- he wrongly assumes that the expressive, emotional aspects of punishment have disappeared in modern society
- he exaggerates that extent of control. Goffman showed that prisoners and mental health patients could resist controls
- He overestimates that power of surveillance to change behaviour because in the panopticon people become self-disciplining because they cannot be sure that they are not being monitored
- CCTV cameras are a form of Panopticons - we know they exist and are present but are unsure if they are recording us. Norris reviewed dozens of studies worldwide and although he recognised that they could be effective in preventing crime in some situations like car parks, they had little or no effect on other crime and may cause displacement.
CCTV assumes that all criminals know that they are being watched burglars, fraudsters etc were put off by CCTV and that its main function may be ideological by falsely reassuring the public about their security, even though it does not reduce their risk of victimisation. Feminists such as Koskela (2012) also criticise CCTV as an extension of the ‘male gaze’ as women are more visible to voyeurism of the male camera operators and yet it does not help them to be more secure
Explain Synoptic surveillance
Foucault has inspired many sociologists to develop theories on surveillance in today’s late modern society. Some build on his work and others criticise it. Mathiesen (1997) argues that Foucault’s account of surveillance only tells part of the story in today’s society, In his view, while the panopticon allows the few. In his late modernity, he argues that there is an increase in the top-down, centralised surveillance that Foucault discusses but also in surveillance from below. Mathiesan calls this the ‘Synopticon’ - where everybody watches everybody
What does Thompson argue in relation to synoptic surveillance
Thompson argues that powerful groups like politicians fear the media’s surveillance of them, as they may uncover damaging information about them and this acts as a form of social control of their activities. An example of synoptic surveillance is where the public monitor each other, e.g. through camera on cycle helmets or car dashboards, in order to collect evidence in case of accidents.
This may warn other drivers that their behaviour is being monitored and therefore they exercise self-discipline. Widespread camera ownership means that ordinary citizens may now be able to ‘control the controllers’. For example by filming police wrongdoing Mann et al calls this ‘sousveillance’, from the french word for under. Foucault’s panopticon does not account for this surveillance from below.
McChaill argues that occasional bottom up scrutiny may be unable to reverse established ‘hierarchies of surveillance’ e.g under anti-terrorism laws the police can confiscate camera and mobiles of ‘citizen journalists’
Explain Surveillant assemblages
Foucault’s panopticon is based on the idea that surveillance involves the manipulation of physical bodies in confined prisons. Haggerty and Ericson (2000) argue through the surveillance technologies now involve the manipulation of virtual objects like digital data in cyberspace rather than physical bodies in physical space. Until recently, surveillance technologies tended to be stand alone and unable to talk to one another.
Now there is an important trend towards combining different technologies e.g. CCTV can be analysed using facial recognition software. Haggerty and Ericson call these combinations ‘surveillant assemblages’. They suggest that we are moving towards a world in which data from different technologies can be combined to create a sort of ‘double data’ of the individual
Explain Acturial justice and risk management
Feeley and Simon argue that a new ‘technology of power’ is emerging throughout the justice system. It differs from Foucault’s disciplinary power in three main ways:
- It focuses on groups rather individuals
- It is not interested in rehabilitating offenders but preventing them from offending
- It uses calculations of risk, or ‘actuarial analysis’. The concept derives from the insurance industries which calculate the statistical risks of particular events happening to particular groups e.g. young drivers greater risk of having an accident
They apply this to surveillance and crime control. An example would be airport security checks based on offender ‘risk factors’. Using information based on passenger’s age, sex, religion, ethnicity etc, they can be profiled and given a risk score, for example young males would score higher than older females and anyone scoring above a certain level is then stopped, questioned searched etc.
Unlike disciplinary power, the aim of this surveillance is not to correct, treat or rehabilitate. According to Feeley and Simon it does so by applying surveillance techniques to ‘identify, classify and manage groups sorted by levels of dangerousness’
Explain Actuarial justice and risk management in relation to Young
Young notes actuarial justice is basically a damage limitation strategy to reduce crime by using statistical information to pick out likely offenders. For Lyon, the purpose of this ‘social sorting’ is to be able to categorise people so that they can be treated differently according to the level of risk they pose.
One effect of this is to place entire social groupings under what Marx (1998) calls ‘categorical suspicion’, or where people are placed under suspicion of wrongdoing because they belong to a particular category or group.
An example would be West Midlands Police in 2010, who used a counter terrorism scheme to surround two mainly Muslim Suburbs of Birmingham with 150 ANPR (cameras that read registration plates of drivers), some of them covert thereby placing whole communities under suspicion.
Explain one problem with actuarial justice
However, one people with actuarial justice is the likelihood of a SPF, e.g. profiles of typical offenders are often comprised using official crime statistics. If these show for example that young black inner city males are the group most likely to carry a weapon, then the police data will indicate that they should be stopped more than any other group. If in reality all groups are just as likely to carry a weapon, then black young males will still be the most likely to be caught, convicted and become a statistic, thereby confirming the supposed validity of the profiling
Explain Labelling and Surveillance
Ditton et al show in one major city CCTV system, the camera were capable of zooming in on vehicle discs from hundreds of meters away to see if the date had expired. But the system managers did not think this was a suitable use of technology and so the motoring offences went unchecked.
In contrast, research shows that CCTV operators make discriminatory judgements about who out of thousands of potential suspects appearing on their screens they should focus on. Norris and Armstrong (1999) found that there is a massively disproportionate targeting of young black males for no other reason than they belong to the membership of that particular social group. Such judgements are based on typifications or stereotypical beliefs about who offenders are likely to be.
As stated above, this can lead to a SPF in which the criminalisation of some groups (young black males) is increased as they are targeted and their offences revealed while the criminalisation of others (such as motorist) is lessened because their offences are ignored
What is punishment
Punishment is a measure that many see as a central to crime prevention. Given that punishment involves deliberately inflicting harm, two main justifications have been offered for it and both are liked to penal policies: reduction and retribution
Explain Reduction in relation to punishment
Reduction - One justification for punishing offenders is that it prevents future crime. Therefore the justification is an instrumental one - it is a means to an end - crime reduction. This can be achieved through:
(a) Deterrence: punishing the offender discouraged them from future offending and making an example of them may also serve as a deterrent to the public e.g. degradational ceremonies
(b) Rehabilitation: punishment is used to reform or change offenders so they no longer offend. This often involves providing education and training by preventing them from going back to crime.
(c) Incapacitation: removes the offenders capacity to offend again e.g. chemical castration of sex offenders, sex offenders list or capital punishment
Explain retribution in relation to punishment
Retribution means paying back and is designed to punish offenders for the crimes that they have already committed rather than preventing crimes. It is justified on the basis that offenders deserve to be punished and that society is entitled to take its revenge on the offender for having breached its moral code. This is an expressive rather than instrumental view of punishment - it expresses society’s outrage e.g. through community services/sentences, public apologies, physical/manual labour
Explain the functionalist perspective on punishment
Functionalists such as Durkheim argues that the function of punishment is to uphold social solidarity and reinforce shared values. Punishment is primarily expressive - it expresses society’s moral outrage at the offence. Through rituals of order, such as public trial and punishment society’s shared values are reaffirmed and its members come to feel a sense of moral unity. While punishment functions to uphold social solidarity, it does so differently in different types of society.
Durkheim identifies two types of justice corresponding to the types of society: retributive justice and restitutive justice
