Week #7 Flashcards
What is Clarke article main argument?
We spend time wondering how to change people so they won’t commit crime, so we will focus on places instead of people and prevent crime in that way
What are the different approaches to crime prevention?
- Eliminate the disposition to offend
• Social prevention (education, jobs, etc.)
• Rehabilitation - Block the disposition to offend
• Deterrence (formal and informal social control)
• Formal - Has to do with the CJS
• Informal deterrence – deterred because it would damage attachments, or investments
• Incapacitation
• Locking people up and making them incapable of committing crime on the outside - Reduce opportunities to offend
• Manipulation of the physical and/or social environment
• This is what we are discussing today, with Clarke article
What is environmental criminology?
o Encompasses various approaches aimed at reducing crime by examining the physical environment in which crime occurs
o Rooted in human and social ecology
• i.e., relationship between humans and their natural, social and built environments (coined 1907)
• has to do with European migration to the US
o Examines how criminal opportunities are generated given an existing physical setting
Explain the four determinants of crime?
o Crime has four determinants: law, offenders, targets, and places
• Classical criminology focuses on deterrence
• Positivist address underlying causes of criminal dispositions
• Environmental criminology brings targets and places into focus
What are moral statistics?
• Andre-Michel Guerry “moral Statistics”
o Lawyer and amateur statistician, France 1802-1866
- examining the intercorrelation of moral statistics and geography – before Durkheim and long before the advent of multivariate statistics
o Maps out crimes against person, crimes against property
o geographically analysis, population of suicide, donations to the poor, literacy etc.
Explain the evolution of criminal theory?
o Classical School • Cesare Beccaria • Jeremy Bentham o Cartographical School (early-mid 19th century) in between classical and bio positivism • Guerry (1829-1864) o Biological Positivism (mid-late 19th) o Psychological positivism (early 20th) o Sociological positivism (20th c to present)
What is the chicago school?
o In the 1920s, sociologists at the University of Chicago examined the relationship between poverty, social disorganization and crime
o Partly interested because of poor immigrants, and in late 1920s there was great depression, interested in poor huddled masses of immigrants
o Focused on notion of urban ecology – the interrelationship between human organisms and the environment
o 60-70% of Chicago is foreign born, US is 30% at that time
What is concentric zone theory?
o Robert Park had theory called concentric zone theory
• As one moves out from the center of the city, you would have different zones with different types of people living in them, with different crimes and rates of problems
Explain the Concentric Zone Model
Burgess Concentric Zone Model • 1. Central Business District • in the middle • 2. Transitional Zone • recent immigrant groups • deteriorated housing and poverty • factories for labour • abandoned buildings • 3. Working Class Zone • Single family tenements made for poor but better than previous • 4. Residential Zone • Single Family Homes • Yards/ Garages • 5. Commuter Zone • Suburbs • Poor folks lived in center zone • Park and Burgess used ideas from zone model to develop social disorganization theory • Took the zone model and put it on to a map of Chicago, and found that rates were higher in the second zone and decline as you get further away from it
What is social disorganization theory?
o Delinquency results primarily form a breakdown of institution, community-based controls
o Disorganization is caused but rapid industrialization, urbanization and immigration
What are the 3 primary causes of social disorganization?
- residential instability
- people try to leave bad zones immediately, influx of poor
- no stability
- Racial/ ethnic heterogeneity
- Filled with different ethnic European groups, no one can understand each other without English
- Poverty
- Causes SD because if you want to organize schools but must work all day there are no PTA meetings, so busy trying to eat
- Between these factors, the whole neighborhood is disorganized
- Leads to development of criminal values and traditions which replace conventional ones and are self perpetuating
What are the social implications of social disorganization theory?
o Normal individuals responding in normal ways to abnormal conditions
o Social institutions conform to ecological principles of dominance, invasion and succession
o This is a theory which doesn’t consider dispositions of crime in people but places, unit of analysis is are not people
o All this mapping showed that there were higher rates of crime in 2nd zone, and people who moved in there became criminals, so it was about place not about Europe sending deviant individuals, it’s the environments they are placed in
o Pins on a map, the police beginning to map
Who is Jane Jacobs?
• Life and Death of Great American Cities (BOOK by Jane Jacobs, 1961)
o Wrote the book as a protest piece against the renewal of the cities, in process of destroying slum areas where city officials wanted to basically gentrify
o Jane said this was counter productive
o Argues well-meaning urban renewal in the 1940s and 1950s resulted in the decline of life and vibrancy of many American cities
What is the problem of urban renewal to jane jacobs?
• Problem: Grandpa is no longer on the street to discipline, he is up on the apartment in 12G, total lack of informal social control
• Before renewal Grandpa can see his stoop, but the public land outside apartments is shared
o Problems New high-rise neighborhoods are:
• Sterile (empty on street)
• Create no-man’s lands down beneath devoid of people and activity
• Removes eyes on the street which fosters crime (grandpa)
What is the solution to urban renewal?
If old neighborhoods MUST be renewed
• Build mixed use structures (residential, business, entertainment, etc.)
• Create squares (torv) as natural gathering points, etc.
