H1 t/m H5 Flashcards
Definition Criminology
The study of crime; justice and law; other issues; the broader dynamics of societies in terms of informing how those things exist and are experienced
What are factors to consider when seeking to explore and understand crime & justice?
- social & cultural context
- political climate
- nature of the economy
- process of globalisation
- technological progress
- human rights agenda
etc….
skills & competences of a criminologist
- finding appropriate materials
- using materials in appropriate way (evidence driven —> arguments supported by appropriate evidence)
- being a critical enquirer
- being a reflective learner
- being a pragmatic researcher
- being digitally competent
- being an advocate for change
Definition criminal justice system
the process through which the state responds to behaviour that is deemed unacceptable
Stages of criminal justice
- charge
- prosecution
- trial
- sentence
- appeal
- punishment
Processes & agencies of the criminal justice system
- law-making
- enforcement of law (police)
- processing, defence & sentencing of suspect (via crown prosecution & court system)
- instruments for punishment (prison & probation)
deviancy
= acts that are outside of mainstream values & norms of a society; may be illegal or legal, but will often eventually become formally criminalized when there is enough reaction
Harms based approach
There are harms caused by behaviours that are often not dealt with by law. The approach considers a range of issues (not explicitly focusing on crime ), such as working conditions —> harm carried out against people and groups, which demands attention & action)
acquisitive crimes
acts that involve the acquisition of property, money or anything else that is a tangible reward
expressive crimes
acts that do not, seemingly, involve the acquisition of goods, but instead are linked to emotions and emotional release where the act itself is the goal
property crimes
acts involving the acquisition of property or damage to property
crimes against the person
crimes that directly involve an act against an individual or group of people
sexual offences
acts covering all manner of unwanted or inappropriate sexual behaviour against a person, or group, physical or otherwise
white-collar crime
acts committed by people usually in a work context, for their own personal gain, offending within respectable or status-based professions, as opposed to ‘blue-collar’ workers (manual workers)
corporate crime
acts committed by/on behalf of a company that in some way benefit company goals
crimes of the powerful
acts committed by those in positions of power, where they are abusing their position of power and acting with some form of corruption and impunity
state crimes
acts committed, or commissioned, or advocated in some way by the States to achieve their goals
peace crimes, including crimes against humanity
acts that are so abhorrent or terrible, that they go against humanity as a whole, and they have their own lable
social harms
linked to the harms-based definition of crime. Acts that harm communities or specific groups of people and are often not dealt with by formal laws
war crimes
acts committed during conflicts and wars, whereby state actors breach domestic or usually international laws regarding warfare, and usually involve a disregard for human rights
status offences/crimes
acts that are prohibited, usually only for certain groups or in the context of certain conditions
hate crimes
acts committed where the victim or victims are targeted because of their personal characteristics
cybercrime
acts committed using or facilitated by emerging information and communication technologies, typically the internet
problems with theory
- heuristic tools —> mental shortcuts / simplifications for making sense of something
- unrealistic simplificatinos
- gaps in theory (one theory needs to fill in the gap of another)
- assumption of early writers did not take into account the full complexity of human behaviour and decision-making
classicism (theory)
offending as a consequence of people choosing to commit crime, based on them weighing-up situations and likely outcomes
- free will; choice
- crime as a rational act
positivism (theory)
there is individual positivism & social/sociological positivism
people engage in offending because they are influenced by forces outside of their own control / some people don’t have the capacity to act rationally
actions influenced by:
- internal forces (biology, psychology)
- external forces (social conditions, culture)
critical theories
they challenge the status quo, and ask questions of the role of the state, laws and the criminal justice system
how crime is defined, who is labelled as offenders, how crime is responded to, are often said to relate to inequality, power, and even social control
5 blocks of theory
- choice and decision-making
- individual pathologies
- social pathologies
- critical approaches
- integrated accounts
block 1: choice and decision-making
offending as a rational decision-making process
- expected outcome
- classicism
- response to crime: make offending more difficult & punishment outweighs gains of crime
block 2: individual pathologies
offending as a consequence in some way of biological or psychological abnormalities of an offender
- positivism
- response: treating/rehabilitating offenders to remove abnormalities/pathology that caused the offending
block 3: social pathologies
offending as consequence of an abnormality or pathology in the context outside of an individual
block 4: critical approaches
crime in the context of wider social processes, such as inequality, class, power and marginalization of some groups
- crime as a response mechanism or surviving in groups
block 5: integrated accounts
combined elements of ideas from other blocks for a more comprehensive or complete understanding
Counting crime: what to count?
Depends on what is defined as crime, which can vary also. Measures for counting crime tended to follow the legal definition of crime.
2 measures to count crime
- official crime data (official statistics; police reports)
- information taken from victimization survey work
- self-report survey (extrapolating from victimization survey data) —> unreported crimes of unrecognized crime by victim, or victimless crimes
- data from non-governmental organisations & investigative journalism
first 2 are the main measurements
process of official recorded data
- recognizing the crime
- reporting it
- recorded
for crime event to end up in data it has to have gone through the 3 stages
attribution
more and more of the total is lost over time through various stages
self-report surveys
counting crime with an offender-focused approach
