TSCOF: Cicourel and typification Flashcards
Overview
Police officers’ decisions about who to arrest are influenced by their stereotypes
about offenders.
Cicourel found that officers’ typifications – their common sense theories or stereotypes of what the typical delinquent is like – led them to concentrate on certain ‘types’. This resulted in a class bias as the working class fitted the police typifcations most closely.
In turn, this led police to patrol w/c areas more intensively, resulting in more arrests & confirming their stereotypes. Cicourel also found that other agents of social control within the criminal justice system reinforced this bias
Justice is fixed not negotiable
In Cicourel’s view, justice is not fixed but negotiable. E.g. when a middle-class youth was arrested, he was less likely to be charged. Partly this was because his background did not fit the idea of the police’s ‘typical delinquent’, & also because his parents were more likely to be able to negotiate successfully on his behalf (e.g. convince social control agencies that their son was sorry & that they would monitor him, etc.)
As a result, he was more likely to be ‘counselled, warned & released’ rather than prosecuted.
Crime stats
official crime statistics do not give us a valid picture of the patterns of crime & cannot be seen as facts as they are socially constructed due to the typifications of officers & the negotiation of justice. Instead, we should treat them as a topic for sociologists to investigate – e.g. the processes that create them.
Cicourel’s theory is also helpful in describing the formation of deviant subcultures. It helps to explain why some groups may feel marginalised by social control agencies which could lead to forming a deviant subculture in order to gain status.
