Crime in Contemporary society Flashcards
1
Q
Media representations of crime
A
- Media distorts the image of crime: they exaggerate/simplify and sectionalise it
Reiner - Exaggeration of certain types of crime
- Of all crimes reported, 75% personal crime, 25% was property crime
↳ 30% of all crime reported is homicide despite this making up less than 1% of all crimes - Tabloids devoted a higher proportions of content to crime: over 30% of The Sun and only 5% of The Guardian
- Violent crime is more likely to be covered than property crime & street crime are given more prominence than white collar, corporate or state crimes
- Sex crime take up a high proportion of crime reporting
Exaggeration of types of criminals
- 1 in 3 youth related articles was about crime, and young people were only quoted in 8% of stories
- The word most commonly used to describe them was ‘yobs’, ‘thugs’, ‘sick’ and ‘feral’
- 2009 research showed the best chance a teenager had of receiving sympathy coverage was if they died, out of nearly 1000 teenage boys, 85% said newspapers portray them in a bad light
- Stuart Hall Policing the Crisis
- The media represent the working class in a stereotypical way and place the the ‘ police and authorities in a positive light
↳ while working class street crime has become a mainstay of UK media, we very rarely hear about middle class and corporate level crime - Marxists: the media often ignore the crimes of the powerful, unless it is particularly newsworthy
Analysis of crime in the media is simplistic and one sided
- Documentaries typically take the side of the police and the authorities
- The underlying causes of crime are rarely looked at in the news or crime documentaries yet criminals may themselves be victims of an unequal society and a harsh upbringing but this is rarely considered
- Rarely hear from the criminals eg the ‘war on terror’: it is very rare to hear the Islamist’s point of view in the mainstream media
- When political protest happens, the media tend to focus on the violence done by a fringe minority rather than the issues being protested about
- Jewkes: most crime based entertainment in the media and news of crime provide homogenised versions of reality which can cause ignorance among audiences and perpetuate stereotypes, labelling and the criminalisation of certain groups
Crime is sensationalised
- The media tends to sensationalise crime and sometimes even glorify it
↳ eg consider the way Deviant celebrities are treated or the hyper real, idealistic, representations of war in games such as CoD -
Jewkes: there are specific news values applied to crime stories - they are more newsworthy if they involve sex, celebrity or high profile people and children as offenders or victims
↳ news stories need to be simple, local, be unexpected crimes and often fit a conservative ideology which may illustrate that news doesn’t portray facts but is a social constructed picture of reality of a false reality
Evaluations/Analysis
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Pluralists: the content of the media reflects the interest of the public
↳ the media simply generates content about crime that audiences want to watch/read
↳ there are a variety of media outliers that cater for minority views and audiences can choose to access these
↳ Sections of the media (BBC) are bound by law to give a balanced coverage of news events and so it could be argued there is not political bias
↳ alternative viewpoints give the balanced and diverse content that the public demand
2
Q
Consequences of media coverage on crime
A
- Moral Panic = an exaggerated outburst of public concern over the morality or behaviour of a group in society
↳ moral panics create ‘Folk Devils’ - Mass media creates moral panic through exaggerating the extent to which certain groups in society are deviant and threatening to social order
↳ this sets of a range of processes that impact upon levels of deviance, public perception of deviance, and often results in changing of practices around crime control - For a moral panic to break out, the public need to believe what they see in the media and respond disproportionality such could be expressed in heightened levels of concern in opinion polls or pressure groups springing up that campaign for action against the deviants
- The authorities relished to the public’s fear which will normally involve tougher laws, initiatives and sentencing designed to prevent and punish the deviant group
3
Q
Application of a case study: John Muncie on the murder of James Bulger
A
- Young people are frequently the target of negative media reporting and this started with the murder Jamie Bulger in 1993
↳ Bulger was killed by two 10 year old boys through abduction and battery - This had three related consequences: initiated a reconsideration of 10 year old as demons, helps to mobilised a moral panic about youth in general, legitimised a series of tough law and order responses to young offenders
- Although this event is tragic, this kind of murder by children is very rare and the press reaction was out of all proportion
↳ the mail and other papers variously referred to the two offenders as freaks of nature, as having hearts of evil, as boy brutes, monsters, animals and the spawn of Satan - The press started to look around for other crimes involving young people and singled these out for specifically attention, giving the public the impression of a rising tide of youth crime in the early 1990s
- Immediate response was condemnation and this triggers a number of reforms in the youth CJS which led to much harsher treatment of young offenders
↳ EG: introduction of curfews for young people in some areas, clamping down on truancy and 2003 Anti-Social Behaviour Act - All this resulted in more young people being sent to jail and by 2001 there was a 91% increase in the number of under 18s sentences to detention
- Argued that it’s unusual that one event managed to trigger a sustained moral panic about youth
↳ the public is now extremely sensitive to incidents of youth deviance and young people are now labelled if they hang around in large groups or even just wear hoodies, let alone if they do anything worse
4
Q
Direct affects/the influence of media on our behaviour
A
- The media is crimogenic
- New media might be making levels of crime worse and also creating new ways of committing crime
Greer and Reiner - ways media can have crimogenic effects
- can have the indirect effect of encouraging consumption
- reduce the effect of social control: by portraying the CJS as inept or unjust
- Can glamorise crime and potentially cause copy cat crimes
- Can give people the expertise or imagination to commit crimes
- The media has a direct effect on behaviour and can increase criminality: people watch something and reenact it or it makes them more violent or prone to criminality
↳ it can be cathartic: people watch/play it to release emotional tensions - The hypodermic-syringe model of media effects suggests that behaviours can be directly affected by watching media content eg through copycat behaviour, disinhibition or desensitising people
↳ Bandura’s Bobo Doll Experiment: children mimicked behaviour when shown the aggressive model, even coming up with new ways to attack the doll & children shown a non-aggressive model played in a quiet and subdued manner
↳ Evaluation: this demonstrated that children are able to learn social behaviour such as aggression through the process of observational learning (watching the behaviour of others)
5
Q
Postmodernists - the media creates opportunities for new types of crime
A
- New opportunities for crime that the media has produced especially through the firms social social media and the ways in which the internet can increase other types of crime/criminality
- Greer and Reiner: large amounts of crime behind committed through the internet ‘facilitating all sorts of crimes’ such as fraud, identity theft, child porn, grooming to organising transnational crime and terrorism
6
Q
Fear of Crime and Media Links
A
- The media can cause an irrational fear of crime by exaggerating and publicising the most violent and non-typical crimes
- Those that read tabloids are most likely to be afraid of becoming a victim of crime; particularly victims of violent crime
- Difficult to make a direct link between media portrayal and violence the fear of crime
- Gerbner and Gross - Mean World Syndrome: those who watch more TV think society is more dangerous than it actually is
7
Q
Media effects on the CJS
A
- Coverage can create a political context
- Some papers may portray rehabilitation as ‘soft’ on crime
- It helps to create a climate in which there is widespread support for an emphasis one law and order along with the acceptance of high levels of surveillance and harsh punishments for offenders
- Garland: the media gives out messages that the public are fed as to what type of punishment is acceptable
8
Q
Globalisation and Crime
A
- Giddens: globalisation is the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped to be events occurring many miles away and vice versa
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David Held: greater interconnectedness of social life and social relationships throughout the world
↳ as a result of globalisation, what happens in one part of the world can quickly affect other parts or the world -
Manuel Castells: there is now a global criminal economy worth over one trillion per annum
↳ The Drugs Trade: by far the most widespread global crime, worth an estimated $300-400 billion a year at street prices
↳ People Trafficking: Estimated that 600-800k men, women and children are trafficked across international borders each year in which approx 80% are women/girls and up to 50% are minors
↳ Global Cyber Crime: many traditional crimes have taken a new turn with the presence of the internet, such as crimes against children, financial crimes, and even terrorism
↳ insurance company Lloyds estimates that cyber crime costs companies $400 billion a year
9
Q
Organised crime and global criminal networks
A
- Involve complex interconnections which transcend national boundaries including the American Mafia, Columbian drug cartels, the Russia Mafia, Chines Triads, and the Silican Costa Nostra
- They have developed because of the growth of an information age in which knowledge as well as goods and people can move quickly and easily across national boundaries (due to globalisation)
Misha Glenny
- These networks form a global criminal economy which accounts for 15% of global trade
- Drug trafficking estimated 8% of world trade
- Trade in weapons, pharmaceuticals, nuclear materials etc provide and control illicit services most notably gambling and prostitution
- They also engage in cybercrime, robbery, kidnapping, extortion, corruption and piracy and terrorism
- Suggests that organised criminal gangs are especially important in helping the trade in illegal goods and services
↳ they have become especially influential in those areas of the world where there is poor governance, inaccessible terrain, high levels of corruption and easy access to weapons and access to transnational networks
Evaluation of Glenny
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Dick Hobbs and Colin Dunningham: organised crime has expanded on the back of globalisation
↳ criminal organisations like the Mafia are not dominant, but most global crime operates through a global system; there’s a global distribution network built from local connections
10
Q
Analysis: Global inequality makes crime worse
A
- The extent of global inequality is one of the major causes of international crime
- Wealth in the developed world increases demand for global goods and services, and poverty in the developing world creates supply of criminal products and services
- In developing countries, providing illegal goods for shipment to wealthier people can be more lucrative than producing something illegally
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Columbia: 20% of the population depend on the cocaine trade which is more profitable than growing coffee
↳ in other poor countries where the climate doesn’t help growing drugs, other illegal opportunities can be attractive such as prostitution or other forms of slavery through trafficking networks
11
Q
Ian Taylor - Globalisation/Capitalism and Crime
A
- Economic globalisation has led to more crimes being committed by elites (which go unnoticed by the West)
- Problems of global finance and tax havens, the problems of TNCs and ‘Law Evasion’ and the problem of increasing inequality caused by globalisation
Example 1) Global Finance, Tax Havens and Tax Evasion
- For elites, the ability to move finance around the world with minimal control enables a whole range of financial crimes, from tax evasion and insider trading to defrauding organisations such as the EU out of grant and subsidy money
- The Global Superrich have $21 trillion stored away in offshore bank accounts, which are evading tax
- Existence of tax havens allows organised crime gangs to launder the profits from illegal activities such as drugs production and distribution
Example 2) TNCs Criminal Activities
- TNCs have shifted their production to developing countries in search for greater profitability because poorer countries tend to have fewer environmental regulations and so corporation can pollute more freely in those countries and profits aren’t affected
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Union Carbide In Bhopal India: illustrates the problem of law evasion and corporate irresponsibility perfectly as the plant accidentally leaked swamy gas fumes into the surrounding atmosphere in 1984 which resulted in over 3500 deaths and causes permanent injury to at least a further 25k
↳ the company set up the plant because the pollution controls in India were less rigid than in the USA and the escape of gas was caused by inadequate safety procedures at the plant, making this a criminal case of negligence - Bhopal has in unusually high incidence of birth defects, growth deficiency., cancers, diabetes and other chronic illnesses
- Union Carbide paid £282m in damages and 26 years later (in 2010) 8 people (all Indian) were sentenced for 2 years for their crimes of negligence
↳ no one on the board of the company has faced criminal charges
12
Q
State Crime
A
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Green and Ward: state crime is illegal or deviant activities perpetrated by the state, or with the complicity of state agencies
↳ committed by or on behalf of nation states in order to achieve their policies
Mcloughlin - Types of State Crime
- Crimes by security forces: eg genocide, torture, imprisonment without trial
- Political crimes: eg censorship, corruption or rigging elections
- Economic Crimes: violation of health and safety laws, cooperating illegally with TNCS
- Social and cultural crimes: eg vandalism
- The fact that Nations States (countries) maintain power and control over their populations mean they can engage in large scale crimes which victimise extremely large numbers of people
↳ Eg Genocide or dictatorships
Examples of state crimes - corruption (political crimes)
- Politicians siphoning money off to their private bank accounts, unfairly granting government contracts in return for bribes and electoral fraud
- Seems to be a correlation between corruption, war and conflict and poverty
Difficulties of prosecution
- the states power means it can more easily conceal its crimes or evade punishment
- Principle of national sovereignty makes it difficult for external agencies to intervene in the affairs of a nation state
13
Q
Dependency perspective on state crime
A
- State crimes are linked to colonialism
- Frank: theft of resources through violence, conquest and slavery led to the development of capitalism
- State crimes against the powerless is a systematic part of development as it is a means whereby rich countries make themselves rich at the expense of poor ones
14
Q
Analysis of State Crime - The culture of denial
A
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Cohen: states often develop a culture of denial to respond to accusations of abuse involving a three stage spiral
↳ Denial of the event, redefining the event and justification
↳ Denial of responsibility: individuals may say they were following orders and it was their superiors who were responsible
↳ Denial of victim: saying that the actual victims are terrorists and therefore the state is the real victim
↳ Matza and Sykes - Techniques of neutralisation: states make abuses seem more acceptable, without challenging the idea that human rights abuses are normally wrong
Cohen - Crimes of Obedience
- Authorisation by the state, which it’s citizens are persuaded to have. a duty to obey
- Routinisation of abuse so that it becomes a normal part of a days work or ‘no big deal’ once the individual has overcome their initial moral repugnance
- Dehumanisation of people who are regarded as the enemy so that a normal mortality does not apply
- Evaluation: useful in understanding state crimes because it provides an extra dimension to understanding why human rights abuses continue to occur and remain despite international agreements, laws etc within nation states themselves that often prohibit these abuses
15
Q
Green Crime
A
- Crime against the environment
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Traditional Criminology: green crime is any activity which breaches a law which protects the environment
↳ environmental crime is only that which is an illegal act which directly harms the environment
↳ Limitation: laws which protect the environment are not particularly well established in many countries, so many acts which harm the environment are not illegal
↳ Marxism: it’s capitalist class that shape the law and define crime so they practice selective law making and enhance their profits -
Green criminology: criminologists should study environmental harms whether or not there is legislation in place and whether it not laws are actually broken
↳ form of Transgressive criminology: it oversteps the usual definitions to include new issues
↳ Limitations: green criminologists are not clear about what constitutes as environmental harm, it is very broad - Walters: we should use the term eco-crime (rather than environmental or green crime) to identify actions that threaten the long term sustainability of life and harm against nature
