Sociological Imagination Abolitionism- Prisons and Police

Question 1

What are the key readings?

Answer 1

Yeomans, Cox + Hall & Winlow

Question 2

What are the key points from Hall & Winlow

Answer 2

Textbookifcation= How criminology picked a select number of theories to show a certain narrative
‘labelling theory and Foucauldian theory… criminality and deviance as products pf social reaction’

Question 3

What are the key points from Cox?

Answer 3

‘juvenile delinquency as a social problem in Western Europe’ p.19
Juvenile institutions to regulate
There are parallels historically in Vietnam where industrialised caused an increase in the younger gen
Fears of ‘promiscuity’ p.19
‘houses of correction’ in France which moved to Vietnam
Under research of young delinquency in Vietnam
Vietnam delinquency now more recent as ‘dancing has beeb banned in karaoke bars, motorbike street races are heavily policed…computer games are to be restricted’ due to murders where the offenders were teenage boys and it linked to computer games (Steinglass, 2009)

Question 4

What are the key points from Yeomans?

Answer 4

Rock, 2005, criminology does not consider how the present and past harms are linked but instead are becoming better instead of worsening
criminological imagination= ‘affords a crucial position to historical context as part of a trinity of factors’
CI= ‘multiple perspectives’ and should be refractive’
criticism= ‘can sometimes be bound up with recent social changes
connect individual lives to their social context’
‘identifying the origins of contemporary phenomena might allow for the building of theory that can then be applied in other contexts
an exploration to the past means that we can see that the responses to crime have always existed
decreasing of moral panics

Question 5

What is criminology? Maguire et al 1994

Answer 5

The only highly developed social science which explicitly takes a social problem… as its definining subject matter

Question 6

What is criminology? (Young)

Answer 6

An instrumental means of training future employees of crime control industry

Question 7

What is the significance of criminological theory?

Answer 7

Attempts to define, explain, understand and analyse
Challenge and redefine dominant assumptions of crime
Aids in understanding of CJS responses

Question 8

What occurs from the contradictory nature of criminological theory?

Answer 8

Disillusionment

Question 9

Who coined the term textbookifcation of criminological theory?

Answer 9

Hall & Winlow, 2012

Question 10

What did Hall & Winlow mean by textbookifcation?

Answer 10

How there is a narrow story of the history of crime + punishment

Question 11

What are the two criminologies?

Answer 11

Positivism and sociology of deviance

Question 12

What is positivism?

Answer 12

Abstracted empiricism
Orthodox
Analytic individualism
Minimal theory

Question 13

What is the sociology of deviance?

Answer 13

Ethnographic + qualitative work
Interdisciplinary
Concerned with structure and social conditions
Engaged with theory-making

Question 14

What has occurred through positivism?

Answer 14

Growing CJS and prison industrial complex
Replacing the welfare state
More attention on war on crime
Neoliberal political economy favouring understanding people through an individualist basis
Government funding supporting research that produces concrete evidence rather than questioning

Question 15

What is the sociological imagination?

Answer 15

A way of interpreting the world and approaching social problems
Grasping history and biography and the relations between the two

Question 16

What are the three dimensions to understanding social problems?

Answer 16

Biography
History
Structure

Question 17

How should social problems be interpreted?

Answer 17

Within the wider context of individual lives + social realities which they occur

Question 18

Who coined the term personal troubles and public issues?

Answer 18

Mills

Question 19

What are private troubles?

Answer 19

Tendency to view behaviour in terms of individual characteristics + abilities
We are detached from the wider social world and experience our own lives and interpret others as the same

Question 20

What are public issues?

Answer 20

To cultivate sociological imaginations we ned to connect with others’ lives with larger understanding of social, eco and political change
When we find the patterns to private troubles they become public issues

Question 21

What does political discourse do to public issues?

Answer 21

Portray them are private troubles rather than outcomes of structural + political arrangements

Question 22

What is the criminological imagination?

Answer 22

Being open to seeing the world from different perspective to develop empathy to those we consider reprehensive and think imaginatively

Question 23

What does a criminological imagination require?

Answer 23

An intellectual understanding of determining contexts
An ability to imagine the relationship between individual and the structural forces within they exist
Ability to emphasise to victims and offenders
An ability to understand injustice and be moved to challenge it