exam 3 Flashcards
What are the fundamental assumptions of Labeling Theory?
- agencies of social control (think broadly) type and categorize people according to race, class, and demeanor and then focus attention on them
- through this process of differential selection these agencies unintentionally create, intensify, or perpetuate secondary deviance
What book did Frank Tannenbaum write?
Crime in Community (1938)
What book did Edwin Lemert write?
Social Pathology (1951)
What is the book “crime in community” about?
- dramatization of evil theory
- all youth engage in normal youthful misbehavior
- ex. people playing baseball in the street and hit a women’s window to her home repeatedly until she calls the police
- if you’re receiving negative cues by authority figures/people in general, at what point do those negative cues reach a saturation point and become dramatized and the subject comes to see the cues as their label?
what are Lemert’s findings as written in “social pathology”?
- our theories are always going to be limited/incomplete due to lack of research evidence
- his solution: since statistics only provide a partial measurement to crime, we can never theorize about all crime (primary deviance) we can only measure secondary deviance
- secondary deviance: occurs after the subject has taken on a deviant self identity (they see themselves as a deviant and no longer a law-abiding citizen) therefore they will act in a way that is consistent with an identity that is deviant
what caused labeling theory to take hold in the 1960’s?
-social upheaval
-turbulence
-riots
-war
-questioning of american institutions
What was Lyndon B. Johnson’s idea to combat rising crime rates?
- he wanted to take science to try and solve the rising crime rates
- he put together a group of leading criminologists and scientists and enacted a series of presidential crime commissions
What were the findings of the presidential crime commissions?
- they found that not only was our criminal justice system NOT effective but it was doing more harm than good
- by arresting, labeling, and incarcerating people it was actually intensifying crime rather than reducing it
what did the presidential crime commissions suggest the government does to make the CJS more effective?
- decentralization
- 3 D’s : diversion, decriminalization, and deinstitutionalization
- diversion= exploded, biggest of the 3, wanted to minimize contact with the CJS
- decriminalization= rethink the laws
- deinstitutionalization= discharge (a long-term inmate) from an institution, replacing long term stays at psychiatric hospitals with less isolated community mental health services
- 3 D’s : diversion, decriminalization, and deinstitutionalization
How did Pres. Johnson go about accomplishing decentralization?
by enacting:
- the safe streets act
- the omnibus crime bill
what theory did the presidential crime commissions embrace?
labeling theory
prior to the 1960’s what was the belief concerning the CJS? how did the 1960’s change that?
1) the CJS operated with disinterested professionalism (the system did its job the way it was supposed to)
2) the 1960’s made people critical of the CJS and more aware of what was actually going on
What were the negative effects of diversion?
- contributed to overcrowding aka net widening
- disrupted families
- drew kids and parents into the CJS that shouldn’t have been there
what did Blomberg’s study on North County focus on?
the efficacy of the diversion program they created
what were the four major components of North County’s diversion program?
- youth house
- drug abuse unit
- community outreach centers
- family intervention unit (major component)
Youth House (part of North County’s diversion program)
- detention is a very criminogenic environment (hard to deal with)
- intended to be in a neighborhood close to where they lived so they could still be able to go to their school
- intention was that they would only be there until they could reach a solution with family to put an end to their presence in the court/prison system
Drug Abuse Unit (part of North County’s diversion program)
- primary function was NOT direct services, it was meant to be educational and would assist with referrals for drug treatment specialists
- documents of referral
- if parents thought their kids were doing drugs this place would help find out
community outreach centers (part of North County’s diversion program)
- targeted in high crime areas
- provided all kinds of services for youth
- they envisioned that rather than being arrested, an officer would issue the child a citation to go to an outreach center and if they were to comply they would have no record
- most that went were self-referrals
- kids saw that the centers would host fun events so they wanted to be apart of that whilst getting help
-they wanted to help kids plan their future
- kids saw that the centers would host fun events so they wanted to be apart of that whilst getting help
family intervention unit (part of North County’s diversion program)
- came to typify diversion
- to be eligible: the youth and the parents needed to agree to participate in 5 whole family counseling sessions
- these sessions would take place between 60-90 days
- consisted of various state intervention into family matters that often did not have good outcomes (did more harm than good)
- units were modeled after the work of Virginia Satir
- her book was “conjoint family therapy”
- imagery: a family unit is like a combustible engine, it has multiple parts and if one-part stops working then the whole engine will
- she stated that you must do whole family counseling
what form of criminology does FSU use today?
translational criminology