Topic 9 -Control, Punishment and Victims Flashcards
what are the 2 justifications of deliberately inflicting harm as punishment?
- reduction
- retribution
explain reduction in regards to justifying punishment involving harm
- it prevents future crime through:
- deterrence- punishing individual discourages future offending
- rehabilitation- punishment can reform offenders so they no longer offend
- incapicitation- punishment that removes offenders capacity to offend e.g. execution or castration
is reduction instrumental or expressive?
instrumental
explain retribution in regards to justifying punishment involving harm
- means paying back
- rather than preventing future crimes it is the idea that offenders deserve to be punished
is retribution expressive or instrumental?
- expressive of societies outrage
what is the functionalist approach to 2 types of justice?
- retributive justice
- restitutive justice
what perspective and who had an approach of punishment of 2 types of justice?
- functionalists
- durkheim
what is retributive justice?
- a system of criminal justice based on the punishment of offenders rather than on rehabilitation.
what is restitutive justice?
- process through which parties with a stake in a specific offence collectively resolve how to deal with the aftermath of the offence and its implications for the future.
- restoring things to how they were before the offence
what is the marxist approach to punishment?
- the punishment of the crime should be appropriate for the acts performed.
- it should also take into account the social class of which the perpetrator is a member.
- the main purpose of punishment should be simply to ensure that society is maintained and protected.
what did rusche and kirchhemer argue about penal systems?
- each type of economy has its own corresponding penal system
- money fines are impossible without a money economy
what do melossi and pavarini say about imprisonment?
- reflects capitalist relations of production
- capitalism puts a price on workers time: prisoners do time to pay for their crime
- prison and capitalist factory have similar disciplinary styles
what are examples of sophisticated technology used in surveillance today?
- CCTV cameras,
- biometric scanning,
- automated number plate recognition,
- electronic tagging
- databases
what sociologist identified 2 types of power and what are they?
- foucault
- sovereign power
- disciplinary power
what is sovereign power?
- This was typical before the 19th century,
- monarch had absolute power over people and their bodies.
- Control was asserted by inflicting disfiguring, visible punishment on the body.
- Punishment was brutal, emotional spectacle such as public execution.
what is disciplinary power?
- This became dominant from the 19th century.
- In this form of control, a new system of discipline seeks to govern not just the body, but the mind or ‘soul’.
- It does so through surveillance.
why does foucault reject the liberal view about bodily punishment and what are the 2 views?
- liberal view- societies became more civilised or humane.
- foucault- disciplinary power replaced sovereign power simply because surveillance is a more efficient ‘technology of power’
what is an example of disciplinary power in prisons?
panopticons
what is a panoptican?
- This was a design for a prison in which each prisoner in his/her own cell is visible to the guards from a central watchtower, but the guards are not visible to the prisoners.
- Thus the prisoners don’t know if they are being watched, but they do know that they might be being watched.
- As a result, they have to behave at all times as if they were being watched, and so the surveillance turns into self-surveillance and discipline becomes self-discipline.
how is the principle of the panoptican used today?
- The use of CCTV cameras. The UK is one of the most policed countries in terms of the high number of CCTV cameras.
- Members of society assume they are being watched by CCTV and therefore behave in an orderly manner.
explain the dispersal of discipline
- Foucault argues that the prison is just one of a range of institutions that, from the 19th century, increasingly began to subject individuals to disciplinary power to induce conformity through self-surveillance.
- These include mental asylums, barracks, factories, workhouses and schools.
give 4 evaluations of foucault
- Foucault also exaggerates the extent of control. E.g. Goffman shows how some inmates of prisons and mental hospitals are able to resist controls.
- CCTV cameras are a form of panopticon – we are aware of their presence but unsure whether they are recording us. However they are not necessarily effective in preventing crime, they could just displace it.
- It may be that CCTV falsely reassures the public about their security, even though it makes little difference to their risk of victimisation.
- Feminists such as Koskela also criticise CCTV as an extension of the ‘male gaze’. While it renders women more visible to the voyeurism (sexual interest in or practice of watching other people engaged in personal behaviours) of the male camera operator, it does not make them more secure.
what did bauman and lyon say about surveillance?
- there is liquid surveillance
what is liquid surveillance?
- society is so fluid that we are in a liquid phase
- today people find their movements monitored and tracked.
give 4 surveillance theories since foucault
- synoptic surveillance
- surveillant assemblages
- actuarial justice and risk management
- labelling and surveillance
what is synoptic surveillance?
- mathiesen argues that the media allows many to see the few
- panoptican allows few to see the many
what is surveillant assemblages?
- abstracting human bodies from their territorial settings, and separating them into a series of discrete flows
- e.g cctv can be combined with facial recognition
what is actuarial justice and risk management?
- Borrowing from the insurance industry, this approach calculates the statistical risk of certain events occurring, such as the likelihood of drivers being involved in accidents.
what is labelling and surveillance?
- cctv operators make judgements about who are potential suspects
- linked to typifications
what are the 3 types of crime prevention strategies?
- situational crime prevention
- environmental crime prevention
- social and community crime prevention
which sociologist is linked to situational crime prevention?
clarke
what are the 3 characteristics of reducing opportunities for crime?
- directed at specific crimes
- managing or altering immediate environment of crime
- increasing effort and risks of committing crimes and reducing rewards
what theory underpins situational crime prevention?
rational choice theory
what is rational choice theory?
- idea that criminals make a decision about the costs and benefits of the crime before committing it
- they will only commit if the benefits outweigh the costs
what does situational crime prevention assume about crime?
opportunistic
what is an example of situational crime prevention?
- target hardening like locking windows and doors, increased surveillance like CCTV, making petrol pay by card only instead of cash (reduces reward)
what is an example of situational crime prevention in NYC?
Felson and bus terminal
* poorly designed and provided opportunity for criminal behaviour
* theft, rough sleeping, homosexual liasons
* they reshaped the physical environment to stop the crimes
* large sinks got swapped to single hand basins so homeless people couldnt bathe in them
give 4 evaluations of situational crime prevention
- displacement
- focus on opportunitic street crime, ignores white collar
- assumes criminals make rational decisions, ignores the fact drugs or alcohol could have influenced them
- ignores root causes of crime e.g. poverty and poor socialisation
what are the 5 types of displacement and explain them
- spatial- moving somewhere else to commit the crime
- temporal- committing it at a different crime
- target- choosing a different victim
- tactical- using a different method
- functional- committing a different type of crime
what theory and sociologists are associated with environmental crime prevention?
- wilson and kelling
- broken window theory
what is the broken window theory?
visible signs of crime, antisocial behavior and civil disorder create an urban environment that encourages further crime
what is an example of an environmental crime prevention strategy?
zero tolerance policing
who’s theory is 0 tolerance policing and what is it?
- Wilson and Kelling’s
- idea that disorder and the absence of control leads to crime. Their solution is to crack down on any disorder
what is the evidence of environmental crime prevention in New York?
explain what it is
- Kelling’s Clean Car Program on the subway in New York
- state would remove carriage if it had graffitti on and only return when was clean
- did it until the point that people did not graffitti in them anymore
give 4 evaluations of enviromental crime prevention and zero tolerance
- There were also 7,000 extra officers deployed in New York, which may be the real reason why crimes were reduced.
- There was a general decline in the crime rate in major US cities at the time – including ones where police did not adopt a zero tolerance policy.
- There was a decline in the availability of crack cocaine so less opportunities for crime to take place.
- While deaths from homicides fell sharply, attempted homicides remained high. It’s been argued that the fall in the murder rate owed more to improved medical emergency services than policing.
what is social and community crime prevention?
- place emphasis firmly on the potential offender and their social context
- remove the conditions that predispose individuals to crime in the first place.
- These are longer term strategies, since they attempt to tackle the root cause of offending
what is the evidence of social and community crime prevention?
- perry pre school project
- The project targeted a small sample of 3-4 year-old black children who participated in an intellectual enrichment programme.
- They were compared to a control group who were not part of the programme.
- They were more likely to:
Graduate from high school.
Be in stable employment.
Not be in prison.
what are evaluations of social and community crime prevention?
- only tackles crime by the working class
- Marxists would argue that even where such programmes have produced some limited improvements in social conditions, they do nothing to tackle the structural inequality inherent in the capitalist system.
- Some (such as Michel Foucault) would argue that these sorts of schemes really provide the state with new opportunities to put the public under surveillance and are about control and power rather than crime prevention.
- things like perry pre shcool project take time and are expensive
