Sociology Crime: Media And Conrtol,punishment And Victims

Question 1

Sociology crime: Media
Representations of crime

Answer 1

Dickinson
30% of newspapers devote space to crime
-exaggerates police success
-exaggerate the risk of being a victim

Question 2

Sociology crime: Media
News values

Answer 2

Cohn
-news is manufactured
-news values is a criteria by which editors decide it’s newspaper worthy
These include:
Higher status, risk, violence,personalisation

Question 3

Sociology crime: Media
Media as a cause of crime
Ways media might cause crime?

Answer 3

-imitation- copying deviant role modes
-Transmitting knowledge of criminal techniques
-glamourising offending
-desensitisation-repeated violence

Question 4

Sociology crime: Media
Fear of crime

Answer 4

Tumber
-media exaggerate crime and exaggerate the risks to certain groups of people becoming victims
-found a correlation between media consumption and fear of crime with heavy TV users expressing greater fear of becoming a victim

Question 5

Sociology crime: Media
Fear of crime critique

Answer 5

-The correlations doesn’t prove that media viewing causes fear
-e.g it may be that those who are already afraid of going out at night watch more TV

Question 6

Sociology crime: Media
Relative deprivation

Answer 6

Lea and Young
-left realists argue that mass media increases the sense of relative deprivation among poor and marginalised social groups
-poorest groups have media access this then presents everyone with imagines of materialistic goods as the norm which results in relative deprivation
-Merton says this pressure causes deviant behaviour when the oppertunity to achieve it legitimately is blocked

Question 7

Sociology crime: Media
Cultural criminology

Answer 7

Young
-argue that the media turn crime itself into the commodity that people desire
-encouraging crime consumption
-‘mediascape’ blurring between the imagine and crime
E.g police record they’re work to use for reality Tv as a promo

Question 8

Sociology crime: media
Moral panic and mods and rockers

Answer 8

Cohan
-press exaggerated and distorted events that began a moral panic
-this lead to police arresting more youths and courts harsher penalties
-this confirmed the truth of the media reaction and created more public concern

Question 9

Sociology crime: Media
Deviance amplification spiral

Answer 9

Cohan
-media make it look like events are spreading and getting out of hand
-this leads to an increase control response from police
-the media further amplified the deviance by defining the groups which lead to youths adopting them and self fulfilling prophecy

Question 10

Sociology crime: Media
Critique of moral panic

Answer 10

Thornton
-moral panics are now routine and have less impact
-harder for media to create moral panic due to not as much being regarded as universally deviant e.g in the past single motherhood

Question 11

Sociology crime: Media
Cyber-crime

Answer 11

-new types of media is often met with a moral panic e.g horror comics, video games
-all accused of corrupting young
-same with the internet
-new crime using new tools
Wall said an example of cyber crime:
cyber-theft- includes identity theft or violation of intellectual property

Question 12

Sociology crime: control, punishment and victims
Situational crime prevention

Answer 12

Clarke
-aims to reduce opportunities for crime
-e.g ‘target hardening’ measures like locking doors and windows to increase effort a burglar needs to make
-this assumes criminals have rational choice and weight up costs and benefits

Question 13

Sociology crime: control, punishment and victims
Critique of situational crime prevention

Answer 13

Displacement
-Doesn’t reduce crime simply displaces it
-if criminals are rational they will simply more to softer targets
E.g
-target different victim
-tactical using different method

Question 14

Sociology crime: control, punishment and victims
Environment crime prevention

Answer 14

Broken windows
-lack of concern for disorder in neighbourhoods
-graffiti,littering
-police are only concerned with serious crime leading to respectable members leaving the community
-leads to spiral of decline

Question 15

Sociology crime: control, punishment and victims
Panopticon

Answer 15

Foucault
-design for a prison in which every cell is visible to the guards from a central tower but guards aren’t a visible to prisoners
-this lead to prisoners not knowing weather they’re being watched
-leads to self surveillance and becomes self discipline
-now operates every where not just in prisons

Question 16

Sociology crime: control, punishment and victims
Critique of Foucault

Answer 16

Norris
-reviews dozens of studies found that CCTV reduced crime in car parks but has little to no effect on other crime
-could cause displacement

Question 17

Sociology crime: control, punishment and victims
Synoptic surveillance

Answer 17

Mathiesen
-Panopticon can only allow the few to monitor the many
-where as with media it allows a top-down approach that allows surveillance from below

Question 18

Sociology crime: control, punishment and victims
Critique of synoptic surveillance

Answer 18

McCahill
-sometimes this bottom up won’t work due to anti terrorism laws, police have power to confiscate the cameras and phones of ‘citizen journalists’

Question 19

Sociology crime: control, punishment and victims
Justification for deterrence

Answer 19

-punishing the individual discourages them from future offending
-‘making an example’ of them may also act as a public deterrent
-Thatchers ‘short,sharp,shock’

Question 20

Sociology crime: control, punishment and victims
Justification for rehabilitation

Answer 20

-punishment can be used to reform or change offenders so they no longer offend
-e.g training so they can earn an honest living

Question 21

Sociology crime: control, punishment and victims
Justification for Incapacitation

Answer 21

-removes the offenders capacity to offend again
-e.g imprisonment or cutting off hands

Question 22

Sociology crime: control, punishment and victims
Functionalist perspectives aims

Answer 22

Durkheim
-aim of punishment is to uphold social solidarity and reinforce shared values

Question 23

Sociology crime: control, punishment and victims
Restitutive justice

Answer 23

Durkheim
-crime is interdependent so it needs to be repaired
-e.g compensation
-it’s needed to return society to its equilibrium

Question 24

Sociology crime: control, punishment and victims
Marxism

Answer 24

-the function is to maintain social order
-as part of a repressive state apparatus
-defending ruling classes property against lower classes
-capitalism puts a price on workers time: so too prisoners ‘do time’ to ‘pay’ for their crime against society

Question 25

Sociology crime: control, punishment and victims
Positivist victimology

Answer 25

Mires
-aims to identify what factors produce patterns in victimisation (what makes them more likely)
Von hentig
-found that females and the earldely are more likely to be victims due to some sense of invite being a victim

Question 26

Sociology crime: control, punishment and victims
Critique of positivist victimology

Answer 26

Amir
-claim that this can be seen as victim blaming
-claims that one in five rapes a victim precipitated is not very different to saying they asked for it

Question 27

Sociology crime: control, punishment and victims
Critical victimology

Answer 27

-Based on Marxism and feminism
-structural factors like patriarchy and poverty which powerless groups like women or the poor are at greater risk of victimisation
Whyte
-safety crimes where employers violate the law that leads to death or injury of workers are often explained as an accident prone worker

Question 28

Sociology crime: control, punishment and victims
Critical victimology label

Answer 28

-state have the power to apply or deny the label victim
-the criminal justice system have the power to apply to the label and remove it
-e.g if the police decide to not press charges against a man for assaulting his Wife which removes his criminal status