MT3 - Punishment, control and victims of crime Flashcards
Justifications for punishment
Providing rehabilitation: through education so criminals get jobs and dont reoffend
Incapacitation: keeps criminals locked up so they are prevented from breaking the law
Acting as a deterrence
Durkheim’s theory of punishment
Punishment is healthy and functional - function of punishment is to maintain social solidarity and reinforce shared norms and values to maintain value consensus
Punishment is expressive; it expresses society’s outrage
Marxist theory of punishment
Punishment is part of the repressive state apparatus as it maintains the existing social order: the form of punishment reflects the type of economic base of the society e.g capitalism puts a price on the workers time, as do prisoners ‘do time’ to ‘pay’ for their crime (or ‘repay a debt to society’)
Alternatives to imprisonment
Probation - offenders released under supervision
Electronic monitoring (tagging) - moniter curfews
Fines - sum of money paid for a crime
Situational crime prevention - Clark +C
Based on the rational choice theory
Aims to reduce opportunities for crime through surveillance and target hardening (locking doors)
+C: SCP measures don’t prevent crime, they displace it. Forms include - spatial (moved to another place), temporal (diff time), tactical (another method)
Felson - supports SCP
The Port Authority Bus Terminal in NYC used to provide opportunities for crime e.g. luggage theft from the toilets, drug dealing and rough sleeping.
The bus terminal was then redesigned to discourage crime
Environmental crime prevention - Wilson and Kelling
Based on the ‘Broken window’ article whereby a single broken window in a neighbourhood will lead to disorder
Includes an environmental improvement strategy (mending anything that is broken immediately) + zero tolerance policy (tackle every single, even minor, sign of disorder)
+C Little empirical evidence that disorder, when left unchallenged, causes crime + ignores wider structutal causes of crime (poverty)
Social/community crime prevention +C
Aim to remove the (root causes) conditions that predispose individuals to crime e.g. poverty
Support the use of social and community crime prevention methods: Provision of facilities such as youth centres + Multi-agency approach – CJS working together with other social departments.
+C: ignore most w/c are not criminal and ignore idividuals choice to commit
doesnt tackle WCC crime
The Perry preschool programme - supports social/community prevention
A longitudinal study following until they were 40
3-4 year olds offered a 2 year enrichment had significantly fewer arrests and more graduated high school and were employed compared to control group (with no programme)
Panoptic surveillance
Few watch the many (being watched by control room staff)
becomes self-surveillance – we know we are being watched so we ‘watch’ our own behaviour – stopping ourselves from committing a crime because we know we are being watched.
+C: after a while people get used to it and their behaviour reverts to normal. It can also be accused of displacing crime
Synoptic surveillance
Many watch the few - ‘powerless’ (ordinary people) can watch the ‘powerful’ (the police/politicians ) which then controls the behaviour of the powerful.
+C: Synopticon can not always revers established hierarchies of surveillance, e.g. under anti-terror laws (terroism act 2000) the police have the power to confiscate the cameras and phones of citizen journalists.
