Crime Prevention And Control Flashcards
key things in crime control, punishment and victims
Crime prevention and control
Surveillance
Punishment
Victims of Crime
Three main crime prevention strategies
Right Realist:
Situational crime prevention - reduce the opportunities to commit crime
2. Environmental crime prevention - improve the environment
• Left Realist:
3. Social and Community crime prevention - improve social conditions and community ties
Situational crime prevention sociologist
Clarke
Situational crime prevention
Ron Clarke (1992) describes situational crime prevention as a pre-emptive approach that relies, not on improving society or its institutions, but simply on reducing opportunities for crime’.
Three features of situational crime prevention
He identifies three features of measures aimed at situational crime prevention:
• They are directed at specific crimes.
• They involve managing or altering the immediate environment of the crime.
• They aim at increasing the effort and risks of committing crime and reducing the rewards.
Types of situational crime prevention
For example, ‘target hardening’ measures such as locking doors and windows increase the effort a burglar needs to make, while increased surveillance in shops via CCTV or security guards increase the likelihood of shoplifters being caught.
Underlying situational crime prevention approaches is an ‘Opportunity’ or rational choice theory of crime. This is the view that criminals act rationally, weighing up the costs and benefits of a crime opportunity before deciding whether to commit it. Clarke argues that most theories offer no realistic solutions to crime. The most obvious thing to do, 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.
Study of situational crime prevention
Marcus Felson (2002) gives an example of a situational crime prevention strategy. The Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City was poorly designed and provided opportunities for deviant conduct. For example, the toilets were a setting for luggage thefts, rough sleeping, drug dealing and sexual activity. Re-shaping the physical environment to ‘design crime out’ greatly reduced such activity. For example, large sinks, in which homeless people were bathing, were replaced by small hand basins.
Critic of situational crime prevention
Displacement
Displacement as a critic of situational crime prevention
One criticism of situational crime prevention measures is that they do not reduce crime; they simply displace it. After all, if criminals are acting rationally, presumably they will respond to target hardening simply by moving to where targets are softer. For example, Chaiken et al (1974) found that a crackdown on subway robberies in New York merely displaced them to the streets above.
Forms of displacement
Displacement can take several forms:
• Spatial - moving elsewhere to commit the crime.
• Temporal - committing it at a different time.
• Target - choosing a different victim.
• Tactical - using a different method.
• Functional - committing a different type of crime.
Evaluation of situational crime prevention
Situational crime prevention works to some extent in reducing certain kinds of crime. However, with most measures there is likely to be some displacement.
• It tends to focus on opportunistic petty street crime. It ignores white collar, corporate and state crime, which are more costly and harmful.
• It assumes criminals make rational calculations. This seems unlikely in many crimes of violence, and crimes committed under the influence of drugs or alcohol.
• It ignores the root causes of crime, such as poverty or poor socialisation. This makes it difficult to develop long-term strategies for crime reduction.
Environmental crime prevention sociologist
James Q. Wilson and George Kelling’s (1982) article, Broken Windows
Environmental crime prevention
Wilson and Kelling 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.
This includes undue noise, graffiti, begging, dog fouling, littering, vandalism and so on. They argue that leaving broken windows unrepaired, tolerating aggressive begging etc, sends out a signal that no one cares.
In such neighbourhoods, there is an absence of both formal social control (the police) and informal control (the community). 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 the neighbourhood into a spiral of decline. Respectable people move out (if they can) and the area becomes a magnet for deviants.
Solution to environmental crime prevention
Zero tolerance policing
wilson and Kelling’s key idea is that disorder and the absence of controls leads to crime, Their solution is to crack down on any disorder, using a twofold strategy. First, an environmental improvement strategy; any broken window must be repaired immediately, abandoned cars towed without delay etc, otherwise more will follow and the neighbourhood will be on the slide.
Secondly, 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 it it is not criminal. This will halt neighbourhood decline and prevent serious crime taking root.
Evidence of zero tolerance
Great successes have been claimed for zero tolerance policing, especially in New York (where Kelling was an adviser to the police). For example, a ‘Clean Car Program’ was instituted on the subway, in which cars were taken out of service immediately if they had any graffiti on them, only returning once clean. As a result, graffiti was largely removed from the subway. Between 1993 and 1996, there was a significant fall in crime in the city, including a 50% drop in the homicide rate - from 1,927 to 986.
Eval of zero tolerance
However, it is not clear how far zero tolerance was the cause of the improvements.
• The NYPD benefited from 7,000 extra officers.
• There was a general decline in the crime rate in major US cities at the time - including ones where police did not adopt a zero tolerance policy.
• The early 1990s had seen a major recession and high unemployment, but from 1994 many new jobs were being created.
• There was a decline in the availability of crack cocaine.
• While deaths from homicides fell sharply, attempted homicides remained high. It has been suggested that the fall in the murder rate owed more to improved medical emergency services than policing.
Nonetheless, zero tolerance has been very influential globally, including the UK, where it has influenced antisocial behaviour policies.
Social and community crime prevention
social and community prevention strategies place the emphasis firmly on the potential offender ares their social context. The aim of these 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 for crime.
Because the causes of crime are often rooted in social conditions such as poverty, unemployment and poor housing, more general social reform programmes addressing these issues may have a crime prevention role, even if this is not their main focus. For example, policies to promote full employment are likely to reduce crime as a ‘side effect.
Study of social crime prevention
Perry pre school project
Perry pre school project
One of the best-known community programmes aimed at reducing criminality is the experimental Perry pre-school project for disadvantaged Black children in Ypsilanti, Michigan.
An experimental group of 3-4 year olds was offered a two-year intellectual enrichment programme, during which time the children also received weekly home visits.
A longitudinal study followed the children’s subsequent progress. It showed striking differences with a control group who had not undergone the programme. By age 40, they had significantly fewer lifetime arrests for violent crime, property crime and drugs, while more had graduated from high school and were in employment. It was calculated that for every dollar spent on the programme, $17 were saved on welfare, prison and other costs.
Eval of social crime prevention
• Marxists argue situational crime tends to focus on petty crime
• Left Realists argue it fails to address the causes of crime
• Strategy has been more successful preventing suicides
• Replacing toxic household gas of 1960s with less toxic gas of 1997
Meaning of surveillance
Surveillance can be defined as:
the monitoring of public behaviour for the purposes of population or crime control. It therefore involves observing people’s behaviour to gather data about it, and typically, using the data to regulate, manage or ‘correct’ their behaviour.
Sociologist behind surveillance
Foucault
Foucaults study
Birth of prison
Foucault and the birth of prisons
Michel Foucault’s (1979) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison opens with a striking contrast between two different forms of punishment, which he sees as examples of sovereign power and disciplinary power
Foucault and different forms of punishment
Sovereign power
Disciplinary power
The panopticon
The dispersal of discipline
Sovereign power
Sovereign power was typical of the period before the 19th century, when the monarch had absolute power over people and their bodies. Control was asserted by inflicting disfiguring, visible punishment on the body (such as branding or limb amputations). Punishment was a brutal, emotional spectacle, such as public execution.
Disciplinary power
Disciplinary power becomes dominant from the 19th century. In this form of control, a new system of discipline seeks to govern not just the body, but the mind or ‘soul’. It does so through surveillance.
One view is that brutal bodily punishment disappeared from Western societies because they became more civilised or humane. Foucault rejects this liberal view. Instead, he claims that disciplinary power replaced sovereign power simply because surveillance is a more efficient ‘technology of power°- that is, a more effective way of controlling people,
The panopticon
Foucault lustrates disciplinary power with the Panopticon. This was a design for a prison in which each prisoner in their own cell is visible to the guards from a central watchtower, but the guards are not visible to the prisoners. Thus the prisoners don’t know if they are being watched, but they do know that they might be being watched. As a result, they have to behave at all times as if they were being watched, and so the surveillance turns into self-surveillance and discipline becomes self-discipline.
Instead of beino take iscediasieehatemarks the ourse;or the body, control takes place ‘inside’ the prisoner.
Unlike sovereign power, which seeks simply to crush or violently repress offenders, disciplinary power involves intensively monitoring the individual with a view to rehabilitating them. For this reason, Foucault sees experts as having an important role to play in applying their specialised knowledge to correcting the individual’s deviant behaviour.
In fact, Foucault argues that the social sciences, and professions such as psychologists, were born at the same time as the modern prison.
The dispersal of discipline
The ‘dispersal of discipline’
Foucault argues that the prison is just one of a range of institutions that, from the 19th century, increasingly began to subject individuals to disciplinary power to induce conformity through self-surveillance. These include mental asylums, barracks, factories, workhouses and schools.
Furthermore, non-prison-based social control practices, such as community service orders, form part of a ‘carceral archipelago’. That is, a series of ‘prison islands’ spreading into other institutions and wider society, where professionals such as teachers, social workers and psychiatrists exercise surveillance over the population.
In Foucault’s view, disciplinary power has now dispersed throughout society, penetrating every social institution to reach every individual. Thus the form of surveillance in the Panopticon is now a model of how power operates In society as a whole.
Criticisms of Foucault
Foucault’s work has stimulated considerable research into surveillance and disciplinary power - especially into the idea of an ‘electronic Panopticon’ that uses modern technologies to monitor us.
However, Foucault has been criticised on several grounds.
For example, the shift from sovereign power and corporal punishment to disciplinary power and imprisonment is less clear than he suggests. He is also accused of wrongly assuming that the expressive (emotional) aspects of punishment disappear in modern society.
Other criticisms of Foucault
Goffman
CCTV
Feminists
Goffman and critic of Foucault
Foucault also exaggerates the extent of control. For example, Goffman (1982) shows how some inmates of prisons and mental hospitals are able to resist controls.
Foucault also overestimates the power of surveillance to change behaviour. As we have seen, in the Panopticon, people become self-disciplining because they cannot be sure they are not being monitored.
CCTV cameras
CCTV cameras are a form of panopticism - we are aware of their presence but unsure whether they are recording us.
However, they are not necessarily effective in preventing crime. Norris’s (2012) review of dozens of studies worldwide found that while CCTV reduced crimes in car parks, it had little or no effect on other crime, and may even cause displacement.
The case for CCTV assumes that criminals know they are being watched and care enough to be deterred by this.
However, Gill and Loveday (2003) found that few robbers, burglars, shoplifters or fraudsters were put off by CCTV.
Its real function may be ideological, falsely reassuring the public about their security, even though it makes little difference to their risk of victimisation.
Feminists critic of Foucault
Feminists such as Koskela (2012) also criticise CCTV as an extension of the ‘male gaze’. While it renders women more visible to the voyeurism of the male camera operator, it does not make them more secure.
Surveillance theories since Foucault
Synoptic surveillance
Surveillant assemblages
Actuarial justice and risk management
Labelling and surveillance
Synoptic surveillance sociologist
Thomas Mathiesen 1997
Thompson
Mann et al 2012
Synoptic surveillance
In Mathiesen’s view, while the Panopticon allows the few to monitor the many, today the media also enable the many to see the few. In late modernity, he argues, there is an increase in the top-down, centralised surveillance that Foucault discusses, but also in surveillance from below.
Mathiesen calls this the ‘Synopticon’ - where everybody watches everybody.
For example, Thompson (2000) argues that powerful groups such as politicians fear the media’s surveillance of them may uncover damaging information about them, and this acts as a form of social control over their activities.
Another example of synoptic surveillance is where the public monitor each other, as with video cameras mounted on cycle helmets or dashboards to collect evidence in the event of accidents. This may warn other road users that their behaviour is being monitored and result in them exercising self-discipline. Similarly, widespread mobile phone ownership means that ordinary citizens may now be able to ‘control the controllers’, for example by filming police wrongdoing.
Mann et al (2003) call this ‘sousveillance’ (from the French sous meaning ‘under’ or ‘below’). Foucault’s panopticism cannot account for this surveillance from below.
Eval of synoptic surveillance
However, as McCahill (2012) argues, occasional bottom-up scrutiny may be unable to reverse established ‘hierarchies of surveillance’. For example, under anti-terrorism laws, police have powers to confiscate the cameras and mobile phones of ‘citizen journalists*
Surveillant assemblages sociologists
Haggerty and Ericson (2000)
Surveillant assemblages
Foucault’s panoptic approach is based on the idea that surveillance involves the manipulation of physical bodies in confined spaces such as prison. However, as Haggerty and Ericson (2000) argue, surveillance technologies now involve the manipulation of virtual objects (digital data) in cyberspace rather than physical bodies in physical space.
Until recently, surveillance technologies tended to be standalone and unable to ‘talk’ to one another. However, there is now an important trend towards combining different technologies. For example, CCTV footage 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
‘data double’ of the individual.
Actuarial justice and risk management sociologist
Feeley and Simon (1994)
Actuarial justice and risk management
Feeley and Simon (1994) argue that a new ‘technology of power’ is emerging throughout the justice system. Feeley and Simon apply this idea to surveillance and crime control. For example, airport security screening checks are based on known offender ‘risk factors’. Using information gathered about passengers (e.g. their age, sex, religion, ethnicity etc), they can be profiled and given a risk score (e.g. young males may be scored higher than old females).
Anyone scoring above a given level is then stopped, questioned, searched etc.
Unlike disciplinary power, the aim of this surveillance is not to correct, treat or rehabilitate. Instead, it just seeks to predict and prevent future offending. According to Feeley and Simon, it does so by applying surveillance techniques ‘to identify, classify and manage groups sorted by levels of dangerousness’. As Jock Young (1999) notes, actuarial justice is basically a damage limitation strategy to reduce crime by using statistical information to pick out likely offenders.
Ways actuarial justice and risk management differ from Foucault
It differs from Foucault’s disciplinary power in three main ways:
• It focuses on groups rather than individuals.
• It is not interested in rehabilitating offenders, but simply in preventing them from offending.
• It uses calculations of risk, or ‘actuarial analysis’. This concept derives from the insurance industry, which calculates the statistical risk of particular events happening to particular groups; for example, young drivers’ risk of having an accident.
Another form of actuarial justice and risk management
Social sorting and categorical suspicion
Social sorting and categorical suspicion
According to David Lyon (2012), the purpose of this ‘social sorting’ is to be able to categorise people so they can be treated differently according to the level of risk they pose. One effect of this is to place entire social groups under what Gary T. Marx (1988) calls ‘categorical suspicion’ - where people are placed under suspicion of wrongdoing simply because they belong to a particular category or group. For example, in 2010 West Midlands police sought to introduce a counter-terrorism scheme to surround two mainly Muslim suburbs of Birmingham with about 150 ANPR cameras, some of them covert, thereby placing whole communities under suspicion (Lewis, 2010).
Eval of actuarial justice and risk management
One problem with actuarial justice is the danger of a self-fulfilling prophecy. For example, profiles of typical offenders are often compiled using official crime statistics. If these appear to show for example that young Black inner-city males are the group most likely to carry a weapon, then police using this data will be more likely to stop them than members of other groups. Consequently, even if in reality all social groups have exactly the same likelihood of carrying a weapon, young Black male offenders will still be more likely than others to be caught, convicted and end up in the crime statistics, thereby seeming to confirm the validity of the profiling.
Labelling and surveillance sociologists
Ditton et al (1999)
Norris and Armstrong (1999)
Labelling and surveillance
According to Ditton et al (1999), in one major city centre the cameras were capable of zooming in on vehice tax discs from hundreds of metres away to see whether the tan had expired. However, the system’s managers did not think this was a suitable use of the technology and so the offences of the motorists were left unchecked.
By contrast, research shows that CCTV operators make discriminatory judgments about who among the thousands of potential ‘suspects’ appearing on their screens they should focus on. For example, Norris and Armstrong (1999) found that there is ‘a massively disproportionate targeting of young Black males for no other reason than their membership of that particular social group.
Such judgments are based on the ‘typifications’ or stereotypical beliefs held by those operating surveillance systems about who are likely offenders. One result of these beliefs is a self-fulfilling prophecy in which the criminalisation of some groups (such as young Black males) is increased as they are targeted and their offences are revealed, while the criminalisation of others (such as motorists) is lessened because their offences are ignored.
Two major justification for punishment
reduction and retribution.
Reduction
One justification for punishing offenders is that it prevents future crime. This can be done through:
• Deterrence
• Rehabilitation
• Incapacitation
Deterrence and reduction
• Deterrence Punishing the individual discourages them from future offending. ‘Making an example of them may also serve as a deterrent to the public at large. Deterrence policies include Mrs Thatcher’s Conservative government’s ‘short, sharp shock’ regime in young offenders’ institutions in the 1980s.
Rehabilitation and reduction
• Rehabilitation is the idea that punishment can be used to reform or change offenders so they no longer offend.
Rehabilitation policies include providing education and training for prisoners so that they are able to ‘earn an honest living’ on release, and anger management courses for violent offenders.
Incapacitation and reduction
Incapacitation is the use of punishment to remove the offender’s capacity to offend again. Policies in different societies have included imprisonment, execution, the cutting off of hands, and chemical castration.
Incapacitation has proved increasingly popular with some politicians, with the American ‘three strikes and you’re out’ policy (where committing even a minor third offence can lead to lengthy prison time) and the view that ‘prison works’ because it removes offenders from society.
This justification is an instrumental one - punishment is a means to an end, namely crime reduction.
Retribution
Retribution means ‘paying back’. It is a justification for punishing crimes that have already been committed, rather than preventing future crimes. It is based on the idea 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.
Sociological perspectives on punishment
Durkheim: a functionalist
perspective
Marxism: capitalism and punishment
Functionalists and punishment
Functionalists such as Durkheim (1893) argue that the function of punishment is to uphold social solidarity and reinforce shared values. Punishment is primarily expressive
- it expresses society’s emotions of 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.
Types of justice - functionalist
Two types of justice
While punishment functions to uphold social solidarity, it does so differently in different types of society. Durkheim identifies two types of justice, corresponding to two types of society.
- Retributive justice
- Restitutive justice
Retributive justice
In traditional society, there is little specialisation, and solidarity between individuals is based on their similarity to one another. This produces a strong collective conscience, which, when offended, responds with vengeful passion to repress the wrongdoer. Punishment is severe and cruel, and its motivation is purely expressive.
Restitutive justice
In modern society, there is extensive specialisation, and solidarity is based on the resulting interdependence between individuals. Crime damages this interdependence, so it is necessary to repair the damage, for example through compensation. Durkheim calls this restitutive justice, because it aims to make restitution - to restore things to how they were before the offence. Its motivation is instrumental, to restore society’s equilibrium. Nevertheless, even in modern society, punishment still has an expressive element, because it still expresses collective emotions. In reality, however, traditional societies often have restitutive rather than retributive justice as Durkheim thought. For example, blood feuds (where a member of one clan is killed by a member of another) are often settled by payment of compensation rather than execution.
Marxism capitalism and punishment sociologists
E.P. Thompson (1977)
Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer (1939)
Melossi and Pavarini (1981)
Marxism capitalism and punishment
They are interested in how punishment is related to the nature of class society and how it serves ruling-class interests.
For Marxists, the function of punishment is to maintain the existing social order. As part of the ‘repressive state apparatus’, it is a means of defending ruling-class property against the lower classes. For example, E.P. Thompson
(1977) describes how in the 18th century punishments such as hanging and transportation to the colonies for theft and poaching were part of a ‘rule of terror’ by the landed aristocracy over the poor.
The form of punishment reflects the economic base of society. As Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer (1939) argue, each type of economy has its own corresponding penal system. For example, money fines are impossible without a money economy. They argue that under capitalism, imprisonment becomes the dominant form of punishment.
Similarly, Melossi and Pavarini (1981) see imprisonment as reflecting capitalist relations of production. For example:
• Capitalism puts a price on the worker’s time; so too prisoners ‘do time’ to ‘pay’ for their crime (or ‘repay a debt to society’).
• The prison and the capitalist factory both have a similar strict disciplinary style, involving subordination and loss of liberty.
Prisons factors
The changing role of prisons
Imprisonment today
The era of mass incarceration
Transcarceration
Alternatives to prisons
The changing role of prisons
Pre-industrial Europe had a wide range of punishments, including warnings, banishment, transportation, corporal punishment and execution. Until the 18th century, prison was used mainly for holding offenders prior to their punishment (such as flogging). It was only following the Enlightenment that imprisonment began to be seen as a form of punishment in itself, where offenders would be ‘reformed’ through hard labour, religious instruction and surveillance.
Imprisonment today
In liberal democracies that do not have the death penalty, imprisonment is regarded as the most severe form of punishment. However, it has not proved an effective method of rehabilitation - about two-thirds of prisoners commit further crimes on release. Many critics regard prisons as simply an expensive way of making bad people worse.
Imprisonment since the 1980s
since the 1980s there has been a move towards ‘populist punitiveness’, where politicians have sought electoral popularity by calling for tougher sentences. For example, New Labour governments after 1997 took the view that prison should be used not just for serious offenders, but also as a deterrent for persistent petty offenders.
Size of prisons
the prison population has swollen to record size: between 1993 and 2021, the number of prisoners in England and Wales almost doubled to reach a total of 80,000. One consequence has been overcrowding, added to existing problems of poor sanitation, barely edible food, clothing shortages, lack of educational and work opportunities, and inadequate family visits (Carrabine et al 2020).
This country imprisons a higher proportion of people than almost any other in Western Europe. For example, in England and Wales, 130 out of every 100,000 people are in prison. Corresponding figures for some other countries are France 93, Germany 69, Ireland 74, Sweden 68 and Iceland
33. However, the world leaders are Russia (328) and the USA (639).
The prison population is largely male (only about 5% are female), young and poorly educated. Black people and other minority ethnic groups are over-represented.
The era of mass incarceration
According to David Garland (2001), the USA, and to a lesser extent the UK, is moving into an era of mass incarceration.
For most of the last century, the American prison population was stable, at around 100-120 per 100,000. In 1972, there were about 200,000 inmates in state and federal prisons.
However, from the 1970s, the numbers began to rise rapidly, and there are now 1.4 million state and federal prisoners in prisons like Rikers Island, plus 750,000 in local jails. A further 4.5 million are under the supervision of the criminal justice system (on parole, probation etc) - in total, over 3% of the adult population. This is over three times the European rate of imprisonment, despite the fact that rates of victimisation in the USA are about the same as those in Europe.
For example, while Black Americans are only 12% of the US population, they make up 33% of the prison population.
Compared with White males, Black males are six times more likely to be in prison, and Hispanic and Native American males are twice as likely.
Garland quote
Once figures reach these proportions, Garland argues,
‘It ceases to be the incarceration of individual offenders and becomes the systematic imprisonment of whole groups of the population. In the case of the USA, the group concerned is, of course, young Black males’.
Ideological function of prisons
This may have an ideological function. As David Downes
(2001) argues, the US prison system soaks up about
30-40% of the unemployed, thereby making capitalism look more successful.
Garland argues that the reason for mass incarceration is the growing politicisation of crime control. For most of the last century there was a consensus, which Garland calls ‘penal welfarism’ - the idea that punishment should reintegrate offenders into society.
Eval of incarceration today
However, since the 1970s, there has been a move towards a new consensus based on more punitive and exclusionary
‘tough on crime’ policies, and this has led to rising numbers in prison. As we saw in Topic 5, this has led for example to a rise in the number of females convicted of violent crime, despite a lack of evidence that they are actually committing more offences.
Another reason is the use of prison to wage America’s ‘war on drugs’. As Simon (2001) argues, because drug use is so widespread, this has produced ‘an almost limitless supply of arrestable and imprisonable offenders’
Transcarceration
As well as mass incarceration, there is a trend towards transcarceration - the idea that individuals become locked into a cycle of control, shifting between different carceral agencies during their lives.
For example, someone might be brought up in care, then sent to a young offenders’ institution, then adult prison, with bouts in mental hospital in between.
Some sociologists see transcarceration as a product of the blurring of boundaries between criminal justice and welfare agencies. For example, health, housing and social services are increasingly being given a crime control role, and they often engage in multi-agency working with the police, sharing data on the same individuals.
Alternatives to Prisons
In the past, a major goal in dealing with young offenders was diversion” - diverting them away from contact with the criminal justice system to avoid the risk of a self-fulfilling prophecy turning them into serious criminals. The focus was on welfare and treatment, using non-custodial, community-based controls such as probation.
In recent years there has been a growth in the range of community-based controls, such as curfews, community service orders, treatment orders and electronic tagging.
However, at the same time, the numbers in custody have also been rising steadily, especially among the young.
This has led Stanley Cohen to argue that the growth of community controls has simply cast the net of control over more people. Following Foucault’s ideas, Cohen argues that the increased range of sanctions available simply enables control to penetrate ever deeper into society.
far from diverting young people from the criminal justice system, community controls may divert them into it. For example, some argue that the police have used ASBOS a Way of fast-tracking young offenders into custodial
sentences.
Victims of crime meaning
The United Nations defines victims as those who have suffered harm (including mental, physical or emotional
Suffering, economic loss and impairment of their basic rights) through acts or omissions that violate the laws of the state.
Sociologist behind the meaning of victims
Nils Christie 1986
Nils Christie definition of victim
Nis Christie (1986) takes a different approach, highlighting the notion that ‘victim’ is socially constructed. The stereotype of the ‘ideal victim’ favoured by the media, public and criminal justice system is a weak, innocent and blameless individual - such as a small child or old woman - who is the target of a stranger’s attack.
Views of victimology
Positivist victimology
Critical victimology
Patterns of victimisation
Positivist victimology sociologist
Miers (1989)
Hans Von Hentig (1948)
Marvin Wolfgang’s (1958)
Features of positivist victimology
Miers (1989) defines positivist victimology as having three features:
• It aims to identify the factors that produce patterns in victimisation - especially those that make some individuals or groups more likely to be victims.
• It focuses on interpersonal crimes of violence.
• It aims to identify victims who have contributed to their own victimisation.
What do earlier positivist studies focus on
The earliest positivist studies focused on the idea of victim proneness.
Victim proneness
The earliest positivist studies focused on the idea of victim proneness. They sought to identify the social and psychological characteristics of victims that make them different from, and more vulnerable than, non-victims. For example, Hans Von Hentig (1948) identified 13 characteristics of victims, such as that they are likely to be females, elderly or ‘mentally subnormal’. The implication is that the victims in some sense ‘invite’ victimisation by being the kind of person that they are. This can also include lifestyle factors such as victims who ostentatiously display their wealth.
An example of positivist victimology is Marvin Wolfgang’s
(1958) study of 588 homicides in Philadelphia. Wolfgang found that 26% involved victim precipitation - the victim triggered the events leading to the homicide, for instance by being the first to use violence. For example, this was often the case where the victim was male and the perpetrator female.
Eval of positivist victimology
• As Fiona Brookman (2005) notes, Wolfgang shows the importance of the victim-offender relationship and the fact that in many homicides, it is a matter of chance which party becomes the victim.
• This approach identifies certain patterns of interpersonal victimisation, but ignores wider structural factors influencing victimisation, such as poverty and patriarchy.
• It can easily tip over into victim blaming. For example,
Amir’s (1971) claim that one in five rapes are victim precipitated is not very different from saying that the victims ‘asked for it’.
• It ignores situations where victims are unaware of their victimisation, as with some crimes against the environment, and where harm is done but no law broken.
What is critical victimology based on
Critical victimology is based on conflict theories such as Marxism and feminism, and shares the same approach as critical criminology. It focuses on two elements:
Two elements of critical victimology
Structural Factors
The state’s power to apply or deny the label of victim
Sociologist behind critical victimology
Mawby and Walklate (1994)
Tombs and Whyte (2007)
Structural factors
• Structural factors, such as patriarchy and poverty, which place powerless groups such as women and the poor at greater risk of victimisation. As Mawby and Walklate (1994) argue, victimisation is a form of structural powerlessness.
• The state’s power to apply or deny the label of victim
‘Victim’ is a social construct in the same way as ‘crime’ and ‘criminal’. Through the criminal justice process, the state applies the label of victim to some but withholds it from others - for example when police decide not to press charges against a man for assaulting his wife, thereby denying her victim status.
Similarly, Tombs and Whyte (2007) show that ‘safety crimes’, where employers’ violations of the law lead to death or injury to workers, are often explained away as the fault of ‘accident prone’ workers. As with many rape cases, this both denies the victim official ‘victim status’ and blames them for their fate.
Tombs and Whyte note the ideological function of this
‘failure to label’ or ‘de-labelling’. By concealing the true extent of victimisation and its real causes, it hides the crimes of the powerful and denies the powerless victims any redress. In the hierarchy of victimisation, therefore, the powerless are most likely to be victimised, yet least likely to have this acknowledged by the state.
Eval of critical victimology
• Critical victimology disregards the role victims may play in bringing victimisation on themselves through their own choices (e.g. not making their home secure) or their own offending.
• It is valuable in drawing attention to the way that ‘victim’ status is constructed by power and how this benefits the powerful at the expense of the powerless.
Patterns of victimisation factors
Class
Age
Ethnicity
Gender
Repeat victimisation
Age
Younger people are at more risk of victimisation. Those most at risk of being murdered are infants under one, while teenagers are more vulnerable than adults to offences including assault, sexual harassment, theft, and abuse at home. The old are also at risk of abuse, for example in care homes, where victimisation is less visible, but in general, the risk of victimisation declines with age.
Class
The poorest groups are more likely to be victimised.
For example, crime rates are typically highest in areas of high unemployment and deprivation.
The fact that marginalised groups are most likely to become victims is borne out by a survey of 300 homeless people (Newburn and Rock 2006). This found that they were 12 times more likely to have experienced violence than the general population. One in ten had been urinated on while sleeping rough.
Ethnicity
Minority ethnic groups are at greater risk than White people of being victims of crime in general, as well as of racially motivated crimes. In relation to the police, minority ethnic groups, the young and the homeless are more likely to report feeling under-protected yet over-controlled.
Gender
Males are at greater risk than females of becoming victims of violent attacks, especially by strangers. About 70% of homicide victims are male. However, women are more likely to be victims of domestic violence, sexual violence, stalking and harassment, people trafficking and - in times of armed conflict - mass rape as a weapon of war.
Repeat victimisation
Repeat victimisation refers to the fact that, if you have been a victim once, you are very likely to be one again.
According to the British Crime Survey, about 60% of the population have not been victims of any kind of crime in a given year, whereas a mere 4% of the population are victims of 44% of all crimes in that period.
The impact of victimisation
Crime may have serious physical and emotional impacts on its victims. For example, research has found a variety of effects (depending on the crime), including disrupted sleep, feelings of helplessness, increased security-consciousness, and difficulties in social functioning.
Crime may also create ‘indirect’ victims, such as friends, relatives and witnesses to the crime. For example, Pynoos et al (1987) found that child witnesses of a sniper attack continued to have grief-related dreams and altered behaviour a year after the event.
Similarly, hate crimes against minorities may create ‘waves of harm’ that radiate out to affect others. These are
“message’ crimes aimed at intimidating whole communities, not just the primary victim. Even more widely, such crimes also challenge the value system of the whole society.
Factors under impact of victimisation
Secondary victimisation
Fear of victimisation
Secondary victimisation
Secondary victimisation is the idea that in addition to the impact of the crime itself, individuals may suffer further victimisation at the hands of the criminal justice system.
Feminists argue that rape victims are often so poorly treated by the police and the courts, it amounts to a double violation.
Fear of victimisation
Crime may create fear of becoming a victim. Some sociologists argue that surveys show this fear to be often irrational. For example, women are more afraid of going out for fear of attack, yet it is young men who are the main victims of violence from strangers. However, feminists have attacked the emphasis on ‘fear of crime’. They argue that it focuses on women’s passivity and their psychological state, when we should be focusing on their safety - i.e. on the structural threat of patriarchal violence that they face.
