Reducing crime and deviance Flashcards
What are the 2 approaches to reducing crime and deviance?
Reducing
- Left wing= tackle poverty
- Right wing= fight crime
How do the left wing intend to tackle poverty?
Reducing
- Increase benefits
- Improve education
- Offer retraining schemes to the unemployed
- Improve facilities (playgrounds, youth clubs, parks, libraries)
How do the right wing intend to fight crime?
Reducing
- More police officers
- Install CCTV
- Better street lighting
- Improve security
- Equipping shops with radios
How do left-wing theories tackle the social causes of crime?
Preventing
- Reduce income inequality (taxation, benefits)
- Raise living standards (higher quality social housing, affordable housing)
- Reduce unemployment (create jobs, encourage investment)
- Improve education and training (apprenticeships, retrain older people)
What does Clarke say about right wing prevention of crime?
Preventing
- Criminality= conscious choice
- Factors affecting criminality:
- Criminal opporutnities available
- Likelihood of getting caught
- Consequences of getting caught
What does right wing crime prevention focus on?
Preventing
- Making crime more diffcult to commit, and making capture/punishment more likely
What is situational crime prevention?
Preventing (right wing)
- Making a specific crime more difficult to commit
- Clarke- opportunity theory (people commit crime is there is opportunity to do so)
- Target hardening- makes it difficult to commit crime (e.g: steering locks)
What are some examples of situational crime prevention?
Preventing (right wing)
- Makes crime harder, riskier, less rewarding
- Increased surveillance- CCTV
- Reduces anonymity- ID checks
- Deflecting offenders- public spaces created, so reduction in loitering areas
- Remove means to commit crime- anti-climb paint/spikes on fences
What is environmental crime prevention?
Preventing (right wing)
- Wider measures reducing deviant behaviour
What are some examples of environmental crime prevention?
Preventing (right wing)
- Broken windows policing- Wilson and Kelling- crack down on minor offences to create a culture of lawfulness and prevent more serious crime
- Rapid repair of vandalism- graffati/ broken windows quickly fixed to prevent areas looking neglected
- Urban design improvements- ‘defensible space’ (Newman) promotes well-lit pathways, sightlines, secure entryways
- Community engagement programmes- neighbourhood watch
- Improve public spaces- increase visability
What did Tony Blair say in 1993 on crime?
Punishment
- ‘We will be tough on crime, and tough on the cause of crime’
- Blair= labour, left wing- tackle poverty
- Fight crime- appeal to right wing
What is retribution?
Punishment (right wing)
- Makes the offender pay/suffer
- Seen as punitive/form of revenge
What is rehabilitation?
Punishment (left wing)
- Aim to reintegrate offender back into society, reforing them, addressing causes of offending
What did Braithwaite say about the 2 types of shaming through punishment?
Punishment
- Disintegrative shaming (right)= prevelant in traditional retributive justice. Offender is labelled and stigmatised, affecting their self-concept (Becker- master status)- leads to increased offending
- Reintegrative shaming (left)= focus on behaviour, not offender, encourage remose- face up to consequences. Make amends, avoid making same mistakes again
What is the left-wing approach to punishment?
Punishment
- Prevent reoffending by showing error of ways- impact of crime on victim and society
- E.g: community service, treatment programmes, restorative justice
What is restorative justice?
Punishment (left)
- Braithwaite= ‘crime hurts, justice should heal’
- Fosters dialogue between victim and perpetrator
- Offender takes responsibility
- Victim and offender= central to the process
- High rate of victim satisfication, and low reoffending rates
What are some examples of left wing punishment in the real world?
Punishment
- US example= Red Hook communitu justice court transformed crime rates in Brooklyn- focus on tackling issues at source, i.e. community mediation sessions
- UK example= Surrey- youth crime reffered to by a panel of police and youth support workers- gave caution/ youth restorative intervention (YRI)
What is the right wing approach to punishment?
Punishment
- Favour harsh, punitive sentences
- Punishment must fit the crime
- Acts as detrrence, retribution, and public denunciation (Functionalist public degredation ceremonies- reinforce boundaries)
What did Murray say about punishment?
Punishment (right)
- Prison works as a force of retributive justice
- Three strikes and your’re out policy= life imprisonment with no parole for 3rd offence- leads to quadrupling of prison population
What are the right-wing ideas on social control?
Control (right)
- Increased surveillance
- Target hardening
- Support direct policing and state interventions into community/family life
- Increased visibility= more ‘bobbies on the beat’
What did Wilson and Kelling say about control?
Control (right)
- See the role of the police as one or order maintenance
What did Chief inspecter of constabulary Tom Winsor say about control?
Control (right)
- ‘Police should focus on preventing crime, rather than catching criminals’
- Targets possible offendes and crime hotspots
- Reduces crime, saves money
What is the zero tolerance idea?
Control (right)
- Agressive policing of minor/anti-social crime to ‘clean up the streets’
- Links to broken windows theory
- Re-emphasises shared norms, values, boundaries
- Pionereed by NYPD in 1990s- Zimring (2011)= found homocide rate fell by 82%
- Used alonsgide situational crime prevention
- E.g: Southport riots
What are the right wing military tactics to control society?
Control (right)
- Kettling (confinement by police)
- Baton charges, water canons, plastic bullets
What does Murray say about the welfare state?
Control (right)
- Over-generous, benefits system, encourages fecklessness, prevents families and individuals from taking responsibility for their actions
- Argues benefits should be cut
- ‘If you can’t afford to bring up your children, they should be adopted’
- Stigmatisation- community sanction behaviour rather than tolerating it
What are the left-wing ideas on social control?
Control (left)
- Focus on relationships between the police, the criminal justice system, and the community
What do Lea and Young say about control?
Control (left)
- Public lack confidence in the police- believe them to be prejudiced
- Caused by drift to conflict policing (military style tactics), rather than consensual policing
