Chapter 6 Crime and Criminal Justice. Norms, Law, and Crime Norms are rules and expectations by...

Chapter 6

Crime and Criminal Justice

Norms, Law, and Crime

• Norms are rules and expectations by which a society guides the behavior of its members

• Laws are the norms created through a society’s political system.– Civil law defines the legal rights and

relationships involving individuals and businesses

– Criminal law focuses on people’s responsibilities to uphold public order

Norms, Law, and Crime

• Crime: the violation of the criminal laws enacted by federal, state, or local governments– Misdemeanors are less serious

offenses punishable by less than one year in prison

– Felonies are more serious crimes punishable by at least one year in prison

The Crime Problem

• Most people in the U.S. think crime is a serious problem– Much greater crime problem

compared to other high-income nations

– more handgun murders than any other high-income country

• Fear of crime is itself a social problem, because it limits the things people do and the places they go

Crime Statistics

• The FBI’s Uniform Crime Report (UCR) is a main source of crime statistics providing data on– crimes against property (burglary,

larceny-theft, motor-vehicle theft, and arson)

– crime against persons (murder and manslaughter, aggravated assault, forcible rape, and robbery)

Crime Statistics

• Problems with the UCR– only includes crimes reported to

police…how much crime goes unreported?

– only gathers statistics on “street crimes” committed by ordinary people, not the more “elite” crimes (e.g., fraud, price fixing, and toxic dumping)

Violent Crime: Patterns and Trends

• Crime rate for property offenses is 7 times than for violent crimes against persons

• Violent crime rose quickly from 1960 until the early 1990s

• After that, the trend turned downward

Murder

• Most murder victims are males, with African Americans being at especially high risk

• FBI data show that nearly half of all murder victims knew the offender

• The high murder rate in the U.S. demands that we take a critical look at the role of handguns

Forcible Rape

• Nationally, only one-half of women who are raped make a report to the police

• Rape statistics don’t reflect attempted rape, sex with a minor, or attacks on males

Aggravated Assault

• Aggravated assault accounts for nearly 2/3 of all reported violent crime

• Aggravated assault is very much a male crime, with the majority of both victims and offenders being men

Robbery

• Robbery involves both stealing and threatening another person, which makes this both a property and a violent crime

• This the least likely of all violent crimes to result in an arrest– victims usually don’t know a robber

so that identification is difficult

Property Crimes

• Burglary– only 14% of cases are cleared– Majority of those arrested are male

and under 25• Larceny-theft

– includes shoplifting, pick pocketing, purse-snatching

– the most common of all the serious crimes tracked by the FBI

Property Crimes

• Motor-vehicle theft– only 15% of cases are cleared– 2/3 of those arrested are under 25

and male• Arson

– the arson rate is holding steady– majority of those arrested are under

25 and male

“Street” Crime: Who Are the Criminals?

• Age– for all offenses, there is a strong link

between crime and youth• Gender

– In 1999, males accounted for 70 % of arrests for property crime

– For violent crime, men are arrested in 83% of the cases

– Women are more often arrested for larceny-theft, fraud, and prostitution

– For all serious crimes, the number of women arrested is increasing


• Social class– Research shows that people of lower

social position are involved in most arrests for street crime

– The link between class and criminality depends on the kind of crime one is talking about


• Race plays a large part in the crime picture several ways– the deprivation faced by black

youths may lead to hostility towards the police and various facets of the “system”

– prejudice based on race may prompt people to suspect blacks on the basis of skin color

– research suggests that such biases may lead police to arrest African Americans more than whites


• 2/3 of black children are born to single mothers and may be at a higher risk for criminality

• Asian Americans are underrepresented in street crime statistics because– of higher income levels– a strong cultural emphasis on family

discipline and honor

Juvenile Delinquency • Any violation of criminal law may lead a

court to declare a minor “delinquent”• In juvenile courts, the focus is on

helping children straighten out rather than simply punish them– in the cases of serious offenses,

officials may try a juvenile as an adult

– When found guilty, they are held in a juvenile detention center until of legal age, when they are transferred to an adult prison to serve out the rest of their sentence

Hate Crimes

• A criminal offense against a person, property, or society motivated by the offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or ethnicity/national origin– Because hate crimes are not always

reported, their true extent is probably far greater than criminal statistics indicate

White-Collar Crime

• Unlawful activities committed by people during the course of their employment or regular activities– Edwin Sutherland pioneered the study

of white-collar crime– A recent trend in white-collar crime

involves computers - both hackers and thefts

– When white-collar offenders are caught, their cases are usually heard in a civil court - and they rarely go to jail

Corporate Crime

• An unlawful act committed by a corporation or others operating on its behalf (e.g., environmental pollution and gross negligence)– Most of these offenses are tried in

civil courts so that no individual is charged with criminal behavior

Organized Crime

• A business operation that supplies illegal goods and services (e.g., gambling, sex, or drugs)– has a long history in the U.S.– RICO

Victimless Crimes

• Offenses that directly harm no one but the person who commits them (e.g., gambling and prostitution)

• Laws regulating victimless crime vary from place to place

Biological Causes of Crime

• Cesare Lombroso pioneered theory that criminals were physically different from law-abiding citizens– identified certain traits of

lawbreakers: low foreheads, protruding ears, excessive hairiness

– His work was flawed because he failed to see that physical traits found among prisoners were also found in the general population


• In the mid-20th century, William Sheldon found that males with athletic builds (mesomorphs) were more likely to become criminals than fat, round people (endomorphs) or thin, wiry people (ectomorphs)– Results were confirmed by the Gleucks

(1950) – They cautioned that rather than a

muscular build causing criminal behavior, probably athletic boys become more independent and less sensitive to others


• XYY chromosome theory:– Men with an extra Y chromosome

may have an increased chance of becoming criminals

• Some geneticists think we may eventually be able to identify criminals before they commit crimes

• The evidence linking criminality to any genetic trait is not conclusive

Psychological Causes of Crime

• Like biological research, the psychological study of crime also focuses on individual traits; in this case, abnormal personalities

• Peckless and Dinitz explained delinquency in terms of a boy’s degree of moral conscience– nondelinquent boys felt more strongly

about right and wrong

Psychological Causes of Crime

• One problem with this approach is that many serious crimes are committed by people who are quite “normal”

• A second problem is that psychological theories consider only the individual, not how society defines them

Structural-Functional Analysis: Crime is Useful

• Emile Durkheim: the Functions of Crime– Crime affirms a society’s norms and

values– Recognizing crime helps everyone

recognize the line between right and wrong

– Reacting to crime helps bring people together

– Crime encourages social change• Durkheim explains that crime is normal

for society


• Robert Merton: Strain theory– Crime is a product of society itself– He suggests that patterns of rule

breaking depend on how society’s goals affect different categories of people, who do not all have the same opportunities to achieve those goals

– There are five outcomes of this situation – conformity, innovation, ritualism, retreatism, and rebellion


• Cloward and Ohlin: Opportunity structure– Becoming a criminal depends on the

presence of illegitimate opportunity– Patterns of conformity and criminality

depend on people’s relative opportunity structure


• Travis Hirchi argues that social ties discourage crime

• He identifies four kinds of social ties that operate to control crime:– attachment to other people– commitment to conformity– involvement in conventional activities– a belief in the rightness of cultural

norms and values

Symbolic-Interaction analysis: Labeling Crime

• Focuses on how and why society defines some people who break the law as criminals while paying little attention to others

• This perspective - what becomes a crime and who becomes a criminal - is part of a process of social definition that changes from time to time and from place to place

Symbolic-Interaction analysis: Labeling Crime

• Howard Becker: Labeling Theory– Crime and all forms of rule-breaking

results not so much from what people do, as from how others respond to those actions

Symbolic-Interaction Analysis: Labeling Crime

• Edwin Lemert: Primary and Secondary Deviance– Explored how individuals can have their

lives changed by the labels others apply to them

– Primary acts of deviance (skipping school, underage drinking) may have only passing significance

– The reaction of others to primary deviance can provoke secondary deviance - when the individual takes on a deviant identity

Symbolic-Interaction Analysis: Labeling Crime

• Erving Goffman: the Power of Stigma– A stigma is a powerful negative social

label that radically changes a person’s self-concept and social identity

– Once stigmatized, an individual may find that conventional friends disappear

– A criminal prosecution can be a powerful ritual that stigmatizes an individual

Social-Conflict Analysis: Crime and Inequality

• Karl Marx: Class and Crime– Understood social problems in terms

of class conflict – Crime was seen as a product of social

inequality– Solution to the crime problem is to

eliminate capitalism in favor of a more egalitarian system

Social-Conflict Analysis: Crime and Inequality

• Feminist theory: Gender and Crime– Socialist feminists believe that the

solution to crime begins with eliminating capitalism

• All feminists agree that subordinating women to men forces them to look to crime as a means of coping with their exploitation and enabling themselves to make a living

The Criminal Justice System

• Police make choices about what warrants their attention

• In a five city study, Smith and Visher found the following factors guided police in arrest decisions:– How serious is the crime?– What does the victim want?– Is the suspect cooperative?– Does the suspect have a record?– Are bystanders watching?– What is the suspect’s race?

The Criminal Justice System

• Two changes in police policy have helped bring down the nation’s crime rate – community policing – zero tolerance

Courts

• In principle, the U.S. court system is an adversarial process by which the prosecutor presents the state’s case against the suspect and the suspect’s attorney presents a defense

Courts

• The reality of justice however, is something much different. – 90% of criminal cases are settled

through plea-bargaining – While plea-bargaining saves the time

and expense of a trial, efficiency doesn’t always produce justice

Punishment

• There are four justifications for a society punishing its wrongdoers– retribution– deterrence– rehabilitation– societal protection

Punishment

• In recent years, the greatest debate concerning punishment has centered on the death penalty– the U.S. is one of the few high-income

nations that puts convicted offenders to death

Politics and Crime: Constructing Problems and

Defining Solutions• Conservatives believe that people raised

in strong, law-abiding families are unlikely to commit crime– Most conservatives favor tougher laws,

more aggressive policing, and harsher penalties as ways to combat the crime problem.

– They believe the key to controlling crime is parents teaching children to make the right choices in a world of pressures

Politics and Crime: Constructing Problems and Defining Solutions

• Liberals believe that many people live in situations that pressure them to break the law– Crime is caused by a harmful

environment, particularly living in poverty

– To liberals, jobs are the key to a drop in the crime rate

Politics and Crime: Constructing Problems and

Defining Solutions

• The radical left believes the real crime of society is tremendous economic inequality – The radical solution begins with a

restructuring of the economic and political system toward a more egalitarian social order that can make a real claim to justice

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