Crime & Deviance: Control, punishment & victims Flashcards
Situational crime prevention (Clarke 2002)
Pre-emptive approach that relies, not on improving society or its institutions, but simply on reducing opportunities for crime.
3 features of it are:
-they are directed at specific crimes.
-they involve managing or altering the immediate environment of the crime.
-aim at increasing the effort & risks of committing crime and reducing the rewards.
Situational crime prevention: Target hardening
-Measure such as locking doors & windows increase the effort he burglar needs to make.
-Increased surveillance in shops via CCTV or security increase the likelihood of shoplifters being caught.
Situational crime prevention: Rational choice theory
-View that criminals act rationally, weighing up the costs and benefits of a crime opportunity, before deciding to commit it.
-Contrats with theories of crime that stress ‘root causes’ such as the criminal’s early socialisation or capitalist exploitation.
-Clarke argues that to focus on the immediate crime situation, where the scope for prevention is the greatest.
-Most crime is opportunistic, so we need to reduce the opportunities.
-Felson has an example of the Port Authority Bus terminal in NYC was poorly designed, creating opportunities for deviancy.
-E.g. toilets were a setting for luggage thefts, drug dealing, sexual activity etc.
-Reshaping the environment to design crime out reduced this.
-E.g. Large sinks, in which homeless people bathed, were replaced by small basins.
Situational crime prevention: Criticism - Displacement
-Does not reduce crime, simply displaced it.
-If criminals are acting rationally, presumably they’ll move to where target are softer.
-Chaiken et al found that a crackdown on subway robberies displaced them to the streets above.
Displacement can take place in several forms:
-Spatial
-Temporal
-Target
-Tactical
-Functional
However, this wasn’t apparent through suicide methods.
In 50s, over half of suicides occurred through gassing and when coal gas was replaced by less toxic natural gas, overall suicide rates dropped and were not replaced by another method.
Criticisms of Situational crime prevention
-Displacement.
-Tends to focus on opportunistic petty crime. Ignored white collar, corporate and state crime.
-Assumes criminals make rational calculations, but in many cases of violence and crime, it’s committed under the influence of drugs or alcohol.
-Ignores the root causes of crime, such as poverty or poor socialisation, so no long-term strategies developed.
Environmental crime prevention: Broken window theory (Wilson & Kelling 1982)
-Stands for all the various signs of disorder found in some neighbourhoods.
-Included noise, graffiti, begging, vandalism etc.
-Argue this leaves broken windows in repaired, sending out a signal that no one cares.
-In such neighbourhoods, there’s an absence of formal control (police) & informal (community).
-Police only concerned with serious crime and ignore petty crime while community members feel intimidated and powerless.
-Then the neighbourhood falls into a spiral of decline and becomes a magnet for deviants.
Environmental crime prevention: Zero tolerance policing
-Their solution is so crack down one any disorder, using a two fold strategy.
-> Environmental improvement strategy where broken things are repaired immediately.
-> Zero tolerance policing where heg must proactively tackle even the slightest sign of disorder even if it’s not criminal to halt neighbourhood decline.
Environmental crime prevention: The evidence
Successes claimed in New York:
-“Clean Car Program”: Graffiti-covered subway cars were removed from service until cleaned, leading to less graffiti.
-Tackled fare-dodging, drug dealing, and begging.
City-wide extension:
-Crackdown on “squeegee merchants” identified individuals with outstanding warrants.
-Between 1993-1996, violent and property crimes declined, and homicides reduced by 50%.
Doubts about its role in crime reduction:
-Crime rates declined in areas without zero-tolerance policing.
-Economic improvement from 1994 and job creation may have contributed.
-Decrease in crack cocaine availability.
Improved emergency medical services might explain reduced homicide rates.
Global influence:
-Zero tolerance inspired anti-social behavior policies, including in the UK.
Social & community crime prevention
-Aims to remove the coditioosn that predispose individuals to crime in the first place.
-There are longer-term strategies, since they attempt to tackle the root causes.
-More general social reform programmes address social issues so while policies may not aim to solve crime, they may reduce it as a side effect (ie. full employment).
Social & community crime prevention: the Perry pre-school project
-Experimental program:
_Aimed at disadvantaged Black children (3-4 years old) in Michigan.
-Two-year intellectual enrichment program with weekly home visits.
Longitudinal results:
-By age 40, participants had fewer arrests, higher employment rates, and more high school graduates compared to a control group.
-For every $1 spent, $17 saved on welfare, prison, and other costs.
Criticisms
-Focussed on low-level crimes, disregarding crimes of the powerful & environmental crimes.
-Whyte conducted a survey of 26 crime & disorder area partnerships in the North West of England to discover what crimes their strategies were targeting.
-North West England’s crime strategies targeted vehicle crimes, burglary, and youth nuisance over corporate environmental violations.
Surveillance
-Monitoring of public behaviour for the purposes of population or crime control. It therefore involves observing people’s behaviour to gather data about it & use the data to regulate, manage or ‘correct their behaviour.
-Surveillance now involves CCTV, electroning tagging etc. This is used for crime and disorder control.
Surveillance: Foucault - birth of the prison (1979)
Sovereign power: before 19th century, when the monarch had absolute power over people & their bodies. Control asserted by visible punishment (branding/limb amputations). It was a brutal, emotional spectacle, such as public execution.
Disciplinary power: becomes dominant from the 19th century. A new system of discipline sees to govern not just the body, but the mind or ‘soul’. It does so through surveillance.
Argues that disciplinary power replaced sovereign power because surveillance is a more efficient ‘technology of power’ - way of controlling people.
Foucault: The Panopticon
-Design for a prison where each prisoner is visible to the guards from a central watchtower, but the guards aren’t.
-Prisioners don’t know if they’re being watched so they behave at all times, as if they are.
-This turns into self-surveillance/discipline where control takes place inside the prisoner.
-Unlike sovereign power, which seeks to repress offenders, disciplinary involves monitoring them in order for rehab.
Foucault: The ‘dispersal of discipline’
-Argues that prison is just 1 of a range on institutions that from the 19th century, increasingly began to subject individuals to disciplinary power to induce conformity through self-surveillance.
-Include mental asylums, schools, factories etc.
-Non-prison based control practices, such as community service orders, form part of a carceral archipelago. A series of prison islands spreading into other institutions and wider society, where teachers, social workers exercise surveillance over the population.
-This has dispersed throughout society.
Criticisms of Foucault
-Shift from sovereign power & corporal punishment to disciplinary power & imprisonment is less clear than he suggests.
-Also accused of wrongly assuming that the emotional aspects of punishment disappear in modern society.
-Exaggerates the extent of control. Goffman shows how some inmates of prisons & mental hospitals are able to resist controls, overestimating the power of surveillance.
-Norris’ review of stories worldwide found that while CCTV reduced crimes in car parks, it had little to no effect on other crime & even caused displacement.
-Feminists such as Koselka, criticise CCTV as an extension of the ‘male gaze’. Doesn’t make women more secure.
Foucault: Surveillant assemblages
-Based on the idea that surveillance involves th manipulation of physical bodies in confined spaces like prison.
-Haggerty & Ericsson argue surveillance tech now involves the manipulation of virtual objects in cyberspace rather than physical bodies in physical space.
-Important trend toward combining diff technologies.
-E.g. CCTV footage can be analysed using facial recognition software. These are called surveillant assemblages suggesting we’re moving towards a world in which data from diff tech can be combined to create a ‘date double’ of the individual.
Surveillance theories since Foucault
-Synoptic surveillance
-Surveillant assemblages
-Actuarial justice & risk management
-Labelling & surveillance
Synoptic surveillance (Mathiesen 1997)
-Argues while the Panopticon allows the few to monitor many, the media allows the many to see the few.
-In late modernity, there an increase in the top-down, centralised surveillance but also from below Synopticon where everyone watches everyone.
-Thompson argued powerful groups fear the media’s surveillance of them, acting as a social control over their activities.
-Another example, is where the public monitor each other such as video cameras on helmets, resulting in self-
discipline.
-Widespread mobile phone ownership means ordinary people may be able to control the controllers, like by filming police wrongdoing.
-Mann et al calls this sousveillance.
-However, McCahill argues occasional bottom up scrutiny may be unable to reverse established ‘hierarchies of surveillance’.
Actuarial justice & risk management (Feeley & Simon 1994)
-Argue that a new ‘technology of power’ is emerging throughout the justice system & it differs from Foucault’s disciplinary power in 3 main ways:
-Focusses on groups rather than individuals.
-Not interested in rehabilitating offenders, but simply preventing offences.
-Uses calculations of risk or ‘actuarial analysis’ & this concept derived from the insurance industry, calculating risk of particular events happening to particular groups (ie. young drivers’ risk of having an accident).
This is applied to crime control.
-E.g. airport security screening checks are based on known offender ‘risk factors’. Using info gathered about passengers, they can be profiled & given a risk score.
-Anyone scoring above a given level is stopped, questioned etc.
-This aims to predict and prevent future offending, by applying surveillance techniques to identify, classify & manage groups by levels of dangerousnness.
-Damage limitation strategy.
Actuarial justice: Social sorting & categorical suspicion
-According to Lyon, the purpose of ‘social sorting’ to be able to categorise peope so they can be treated differently according to the level of risk they pose.
-An effect of this is to place entire social groups under categorical suspicion (Marx, 1998)
-In 2010, West Midlands police sought to introduce a counter-terrorism scheme to surround mainly Muslim suburbs of Birmingham with about 150 ANPR cameras, placing whole communities under suspicion.
Criticism of actuarial justice: Self-fulfilling prophecy
-Profiles of typical offenders are often complied using OS.
-If these show that going Black inner-city males carry weapons, police are more likely to stop & search them than members of other groups.
-This seems to confirm the validity of the profiling, since they’re caught more.
Labelling & surveillance
-Ditton et al says that in a major city centre CCTV system, cameras were capable of zooming in in vehicle discs from metres away, but managers didn’t think this was a suitable use of the tech, so the motorists offences were left unchecked.
-By contrast, research shows that CCTV operators make discriminatory judgements of ‘potential suspects’ appearing on their screens, that they should focus on (black people disproportionately focussed on).
-These judgements are based on the typifications. This can lead to a self fulfilling prophecy, in which their criminalisation is increased, since they’re targeted & their offences are revealed & criminalisation of others is lessened, since their offences are ignored.
Punishment: Reduction
-Deterrence: punishing individuals discouraged them from future offending. Making an example of them can serve as a deterrent to wider public. Thatcher’s ’short, sharp, shock’ regime.
-Rehabilitation: idea that punishment can be used to reform or change offenders so they no longer offend. Policies provide education & training so prisoners can ‘earn an honest living’.
-Incapacitation: use of punishment to remove the offender’s capacity to offend again. Imprisonment, cutting of hands etc. America introduced a ‘3 strikes and you’re out’ where even a minor 3rd offence, leads to lengthy prison time.
This justification is an instrumental one - punishment is a means to an end, namely crime reduction.
