Crime & Deviance: Control, punishment & victims

Question 1

Situational crime prevention (Clarke 2002)

Answer 1

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.

Question 2

Situational crime prevention: Target hardening

Answer 2

-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.

Question 3

Situational crime prevention: Rational choice theory

Answer 3

-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.

Question 4

Situational crime prevention: Criticism - Displacement

Answer 4

-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.

Question 5

Criticisms of Situational crime prevention

Answer 5

-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.

Question 6

Environmental crime prevention: Broken window theory (Wilson & Kelling 1982)

Answer 6

-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.

Question 7

Environmental crime prevention: Zero tolerance policing

Answer 7

-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.

Question 8

Environmental crime prevention: The evidence

Answer 8

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.

Question 9

Social & community crime prevention

Answer 9

-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).

Question 10

Social & community crime prevention: the Perry pre-school project

Answer 10

-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.

Question 11

Criticisms

Answer 11

-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.

Question 12

Surveillance

Answer 12

-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.

Question 13

Surveillance: Foucault - birth of the prison (1979)

Answer 13

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.

Question 14

Foucault: The Panopticon

Answer 14

-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.

Question 15

Foucault: The ‘dispersal of discipline’

Answer 15

-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.

Question 16

Criticisms of Foucault

Answer 16

-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.

Question 17

Foucault: Surveillant assemblages

Answer 17

-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.

Question 18

Surveillance theories since Foucault

Answer 18

-Synoptic surveillance
-Surveillant assemblages
-Actuarial justice & risk management
-Labelling & surveillance

Question 19

Synoptic surveillance (Mathiesen 1997)

Answer 19

-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’.

Question 20

Actuarial justice & risk management (Feeley & Simon 1994)

Answer 20

-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.

Question 21

Actuarial justice: Social sorting & categorical suspicion

Answer 21

-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.

Question 22

Criticism of actuarial justice: Self-fulfilling prophecy

Answer 22

-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.

Question 23

Labelling & surveillance

Answer 23

-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.

Question 24

Punishment: Reduction

Answer 24

-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.

Question 25

Punishment: Retribution

Answer 25

-Paying back.
-Justification for punishing crimes that have already been committed rather than preventing future crimes.
-Based on idea that offenders deserve to be punished & that society is entitled to take its revenge on the offender for having breched its moral code.
-Expressive view of punishment & expresses society’s outrage.

Question 26

Punishment: Durkheim- a functionalist perspective

Answer 26

-Argues that the function of punishment is to uphold social solidarity & enforce shared values.
-Punishment is expressive - expresses society’s emotions of moral outrage and offence.
-Though trials and punishment, society’s shared values are reaffirmed.

Question 27

Durkheim: 2 types of justice

Answer 27

Retributive: in traditional society, there is little specialisation & solidarity between individuals, is based on their similarities. This produces a strong collective consciousness which when offended responds with a vengeful passion to repress the wrongdoer. Punishment is expressive.
Restitutive: in modern society, solidarity is based on interdependence between individuals. Crime damages interdependence, so society must repair it through compensation. This aims to make restitution to restore things to how they were before the offence. Its motivation is instrumental, but still expresses collective emotions.

However, traditional societies do have a restitutive element

Question 28

Marxism: Capitalism & punishment

Answer 28

-The function of punishment is to maintain the existing social order (part of RSA).
-Means to defend filling class property.
-Punishments such as hanging for theft was part of a ‘rule of terror’ by aristocracy over the poor.
-The form of punishment reflects the economic base of society.
-Rusche & Kitchheimer argue each type of economy has its own corresponding penal system.
-E.g. money fines are impossible without a money economy.
-Argue that under capitalism, imprisonment becomes the dominant form of punishment.
-Melossi & Pavarini see imprisonment as reflecting capitalist relations of production:
-> Capitalsm puts a price on the workers time (prisoners ‘do time’ to repay for their crime).
-> Prison & capitalist factory have a similar strict disciplinary style, involving subordination & loss of liberty.

Question 29

Marxism: The changing role of prisons

Answer 29

-Pre-industrial Europe had a wide range of punishments (warnings/executions).
-Prison was mainly used for holding prisoners prior to tie punishment.
-Only after the Enlightenment, imprisonment was seen as a punishment itself, where prisoners would be ‘reformed’ through labour, surveillance, etc.

Question 30

Marxism: Imprisonment today

Answer 30

-In liberal democracies without the death penalty, imprisonment is the most severe form of punishment.
-Hasn’t proved to be an effective method of rehab - 2/3rds of prisoners commit further crime upon release.
-Some argue they make bad people worse.
-However, since the 80s, there’s been a move towards populist punitiveness where politicians seek electoral popularity by calling for tougher sentences.
-E.g. New Labour govt took view that prison should be used for serious AND persistent petty offenders.
-1993-2001, prison population doubled to 80,000, & theres overcrowding, less opportunities, barely edible food etc.
-In England and Wales, 130 out of 100,000 people are in prison.
-France (93) USA (639)
-95% male.

Question 31

Marxism: The era of mass incarceration?

Answer 31

-Garland 2001 days the USA is entering an era of mass incarceration.
-In 1972, tere were about 200,000 inmates in state & federal prisons.
-However, now there’s about 1.4 million state & federal prisioners.
-Over 3% of adult population is under supervision of the CJS (over 3X European rate of imprisonment).
-Black males make up 33% of prison population, but only 12% of US population.
-Downes argues this has an ideological function. Soaks up 30-40% of unemployed, making capitalism successful.
-Garland argues that we’ve shifted from penal welfarism, to exclusionary ‘tough on crime’ policies.
-Another reason is that since drug use is so widespread, there’s an almost limitless supply of arrestable & imprisonable offenders (Simon).

Question 32

Marxism: Transcarceration

Answer 32

-Idea that individual become locked into a cycle of control, shifting between different carceral agencies during their lives.
-E.g. someone might be brought up in care & sent to a young offenders’ institution etc.
-Some see transcarceration as a product of blurring boundaries between CJS and welfare system.
-E.g. health and social services increasingly given a crime control role and often engage in multi-agency working with police, sharing data.

Question 33

Marxism: Alternatives to prison

Answer 33

-Major goal in dealing with young offenders was diversion, to avoid contact with CJS to avoid self-fulfilling prophecy.
-The focus was on welfare and treatment, using community-based controls such as probation.
-Growth in community-based controls such as curfews, community service orders etc.
-Cohen argued that growth of community controls has cast the net of control over more people.
-Argues increased range of sanctions enables control to penetrate deeper into society.
-Instead of diverting people away from CJS, community controls might divert them into it.
-E.g. some argue that police have used ASBOs as a way of fast-tracking young offenders into custodial sentences.

Question 34

The victims of crime

Answer 34

-The UN defines victims as those who have suffered harm through acts or omissions that violate the laws of the state.
-Christie highlights the notion that the ‘victim’ is socially constructed. The stereotype of the ‘ideal victim’ favoured by the media, public & CJS is a weak, innocent & blameless individual (ie. small child or old woman).
-Victims are important to study because they provide much of the evidence used in the detection of offenders and may act as witnesses.

Question 35

Positivist victimology

Answer 35

Miers defines this as:
-Aims to identify the factors that produce patterns in victimisation.
-Focusses on interpersonal crimes of violence.
-Aims to identify victims who have contributed to their own victimisation.

-Early studies focussed on victim proneness & sought to identify social/psychological characteristics of victims that make them more vulnerable.
-These characteristics ‘invite’ victimisation.
-An example of positivist victimology was Wolfgang’s study of 588 homicides in Philly, where he found 26% involved victim precipitation (victim triggered event leading to homicide).

Question 36

Evaluation of Positivist victimology

Answer 36

-Brookman says that Wolfgang shows the importance of the victim-offender relationship & that it’s a matter of chance, who becomes the victim.
-Ignores wider structural factors influencing victimisation (ie. poverty).
-Can tip into victim blaming (ie. Amir’s claim that 1 in 5 rapes are victim precipitated……..)
-Ignores situations where victims are unaware of their victimisation, as with some crimes against the environment & where harm is done but no laws broken.

Question 37

Critical victimology

Answer 37

Based on conflict theories & shares approach of critical criminology:
-Structural factors: patriarchy/poverty where powerless groups such as women & poor are at greater risk.
-Mawby & Walklate argue, victimisation is a form of structural powerlessness.
-State’s power to apply/deny label of victim: ‘victim’ is a social construct in the same way as ‘crime’. The state applies the label of victim to some but withholds from others.

Question 38

Critical victimology - Tombs & Whyte (2007)

Answer 38

-Show that ‘safety crimes’ where employers’ violation of the law lead to death or injury to workers, are often explained as the fault of ‘accident prone’ workers.
-Note the ideological function of this ‘failure to label’ or ‘de-labelling.’
-By concealing true extent of victimisation, it hides the crimes of the powerful & denies powerless victims any redress
-In the hierarchy of victimisation, the powerless are most likely to be victimised.

Question 39

Evaluation of Critical victimology

Answer 39

-Disregards role victim plays in bringing victimisation on themselves through their own choices (ie. not making their home secure) or their own offending.
-Valuable in drawing attention to the way that ‘victim’ status is constructed by power & how this benefits the powerful at the expense of the powerful.

Question 40

Patterns of victimisation

Answer 40

-Class: poorest groups more likely to be victimised. Homeless were 12X likelier to have experienced violence.
-Age: most at risk of being murdered are infants, teenagers more vulnerable to offences of assault, theft, abuse & OKD at risk of abuse in care. Overall, risk of victimisation decline with age.
-Ethnicity: minorities are at a greater risk of being victims. Young and homeless report feeling under-protected & over-controlled.
-Gender: males at greater risk. About 70% of homicide victims are male. But women are likelier to be victims of DV, harassment, stalking.
-Repeat victimisation: if you have been a victim once, you’re likely to become one again. Supported by British Crime Survery.

Question 41

The impact of victimisation

Answer 41

-Crime has physical & emotional impact on victims (ie. disrupted sleep, helplessness, paranoia etc).
-Dreams of traumatic events may reappear (ie. child witnesses of snipe attack).
-Secondary victimisation means individuals may suffer further victimisation at the hands of the CJS. Feminists argue rape victims are treated poorly by courts & police.
-Fear of victimisation where crime may create fear of becoming a victim. Women may fear going out in case of attack, yet its men who are main victims of violence. Feminists argue, that women’s passivity is focussed on rather than their safety from structural threat of patriarchal violence.