Crime control, punishment and victims.

Last Lesson Recap

1. Using your notes create a mindmap/diagram that will help

consolidate knowledge on Globalisation, Green Crime & State

Crime

2. Quick Check QuestionsPage 135

Lesson Objectives

• Understand and be able to evaluate a range of crime prevention and control strategies

• Understand and be able to evaluate different perspectives on punishment

• Know the main trends in sentencing and understand their significance

• Know the main patterns of victimisation and be able to evaluate sociological perspectives on victimisation

Crime prevention Activity

• Have you or your family taken any crime prevention measures or precautions in the last year? For example, are you careful in the way you use your mobile phone?

• Have you been reluctant to go out at night alone? Do you ever carry any pepper spray/ whistle/ alarm? Is your home alarmed?

• Do you have locks on windows and security lights? If you drive, have you stopped leaving items inside your car when it is parked?

• Design a questionnaire and carry out a small survey amongst your fellow students to assess how widespread these precautions are in your locality.

Situational crime prevention

• Ron Clarke ( 1992) argues for a pre-emptive approach which looks at reducing opportunities for crime.

• He identifies 3 features of measures aimed at situational crime prevention: 1. They are directed at specific crimes, 2. They involve managing/altering immediate environment of the crime and 3. They aim at increasing the effort and risks of committing crime and reducing rewards

• As a right realist he believes target hardening (locking doors and windows) and more CCTV/security will increase the risk of being caught and lower the rewards.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIGUVu3x0kQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfuMEGMersE&feature=related

• Underlying SCP is rational choice theory (what is this?)

• Clarke suggests most theories offer no realistic solution. Most crime is opportunistic so we need to reduce the opportunities

Read bottom pg 137 and how SCP worked at NYC bus terminal (Felson)

Evaluation• SCP works to an extent in reducing certain kinds of crime,

however with most measures there is likely to be displacement

• Over focuses on opportunistic petty street crime & ignores white collar, corporate and state crime (costly & harmful)

• Assumes criminals make rational calculations, this is unlikely in many crimes of violence and drug/alcohol fuelled crimes

• Ignores root of crime e.g. poverty or poor socialisation. Making it difficult to develop long term strategies for crime reduction

• CCTV operators focus disproportionately on young males. Feminists suggest CCTV is an extension of male gaze and is part of the problem not a solution

Environmental Crime Prevention

• Wilson & Kelling argue that ‘broken windows’ (signs of disorder e.g. graffiti, begging, littering, vandalism) that are not dealt with send out a signal that no-one cares, encouraging a spiral of decline.

• An absence of formal social control (police) and informal control (community) means members of the community feel powerless and intimidated

This is what I call a perfect

neighbourhood

Wilson and Kelling (1982)Wilson and Kelling (1982)

• Well-maintained areas• Low crime rates• Feel apart of society • Less likely to offend

Wilson and Kelling (1982)Wilson and Kelling (1982)

Oh my! What is this world coming to, I don’t feel safe anymore!

• No social control• Loose their sense of belonging• Increase in crime • Damaged society

Etzioni (1993)Etzioni (1993)

• The solution is to crack down on any disorder using 2 strategies:

1.environmental improvement strategy- repair any broken window immediately, tow abandoned cars without delay

2.Zero tolerance policing- instead of reacting to crime, police must pro actively tackle even the slightest sign of disorder even if not criminal. Halting neighbourhood crime and preventing serious crime taking root

Social & Community Crime Prevention

• Rather than emphasising policing, these strategies emphasise dealing with the social conditions that predispose some individuals to future crime.

• Longer term strategies since they attempt to tackle root cause of offending rather than removing opportunities for crime.

• As poverty is cause of crime, general social policies have crime prevention role e.g. Full employment policies are likely to reduce crime as a ‘side effect’

Read about the Perry pre- school project (pg 139)

Social & Community Crime Prevention

• Rather than emphasising policing, these strategies emphasise dealing with the social conditions that predispose some individuals to future crime.

• Longer term strategies since they attempt to tackle root cause of offending rather than removing opportunities for crime.

• As poverty is cause of crime, general social policies have crime prevention role e.g. Full employment policies are likely to reduce crime as a ‘side effect’

Read about the Perry pre- school project (pg 139)

Additional Policies:

• Educational Programmes aimed at improving educational success in inner city comps & reducing

exclusions and number of 16 year olds leaving school with no qualifications

• Min pay legislation- people paid fair wage and not tempted to become welfare dependent

• Reduction in wealth and income inequalities • Economic investment in poorer urban communities

to create jobs e.g. Westfield's Stratford

• These approaches (SCP, ECP and S&CCP) take for granted the nature and definition of crime.

• They focus on low level &/or interpersonal crimes of violence (disregard crimes of powerful & environmental)

• Definition of ‘crime problem’ reflects priorities of politicians and agencies tasked with crime prevention

• Results suggest crime strategies do not take into consideration all crimes e.g. environmental crime which is harmful to health of local communities

Recap Questions

• What is SCP?• What criticisms exist of SCP techniques?• What is ECP based on?• How is ECP implemented?• S&CCP emphasises dealing with social

conditions that predispose people to crime. What ways do they suggest in order to tackle the problem?

Victims of CrimeVictims of Crime

• Victim: those who have suffered harm (inc mental, physical or emotional suffering, economic loss and impairment of basic rights)

• Christie (1986): Victim is a concept like crime that is socially constructed, who is and isn’t a victim changes depending on the context.

• Stereotype of ‘ideal victim’ favoured by media, public & CJS is a weak, innocent and blameless victim e.g. child, old woman

• Important to study victimology- they provide most of the evidence used in detection of offenders and act as witnesses. Two approaches (positivist & critical)

Positivist Victimology

• Focuses on interpersonal crimes • It tries to identify why certain people are victims

of crimes. • Aims to identify patterns of victimisation• Early work focused on victim proneness meaning

finding social and psychological characteristics that made them more vulnerable than non-victims e.g. female, elderly, lower intelligence. Implication is that in some way ‘invite’ victimisation

• Victim Precipitation- Wolfgang’s study of homicides found that in 26% of cases the victim triggered the events leading to murder e.g. by using violence first

AO2:

• Wolfgang shows importance of victim-offender relationship (in many homicides matter of chance which party becomes the victim)• Ignores wider structural factors influencing victimisation e.g.

poverty & patriarchy• It’s close to being victim blaming (linked to rape & victim asking

for it)• Ignores situations where victims are unaware of victimisation e.g.

environmental or where harm is done but now law broken

Critical Victimology• Based on Marxism and Feminism it wants to highlight

structural factors like poverty or patriarchy which put the powerless at greater risk of being a victim.

• Victimisation is a form of structural powerlessness

• Through the CJS the state applies the label of victim to some but withholds it from others e.g. when police fail to press charges against a man for assaulting his wife, she is denied victim status

• Tombs & Whyte (2007) show that employers violations of the law leading to death or injury to workers are often explained away as the fault of accident prone workers

Evaluation

• Disregards the role victims may play in bringing victimisation on themselves e.g. not making their homes secure

• It is valuable in drawing attention to the way the ‘victim’ status is constructed by power and how this benefits the powerful at the expense of the powerless

Patterns & The impact of Victimisation

• The average chance of an individual being the victim of a crime in any one year is about 1 in 4, this risk is unevenly distributed between social groups

1. Predict what you think will be the trends in victimisation and age, class, ethnicity and gender

2. Compare your predictions to page 144 and summarise the stats

3. Read through the impact of victimisation and summarise

Victimology: The study of victims

Patterns of victimisationClass

The poorest groups are most likely to be victims of all crimes. Homeless people are 12 times more likely to experience violence than the general population.

AgeYounger people are most at risk of crimes like assault, theft, sexual harassment. Infants under one are at most risk of being murdered.

EthnicityMinority ethnic groups most at risk of all crimes. Ethnic minorities most likely to feel under-protected yet over controlled.

GenderMales most at risk of violent attacks especially by strangers. 70% of homicide victims are male.

Repeat victims

Once you have been a victim once you are very likely to be again. Suggests people were victims for a reason, perhaps even targeted.

The impact of victimisation

Research has found that a variety of effects such as disrupted sleep, feelings of helplessness, increased security-consciousness and difficulties in socialising. Crime can also create fear in communities, these are referred to as indirect victims.

Women who have been raped but whose cases have failed in court are also victims of the legal system.

Fear

The media has a large part to play when stirring up fear but statistically speaking men are more likely to be victims of violence yet some women fear going out late at night.

Quick Check Questions pg 145

Q1, 2 and 3

Punishment

Prison – key facts

8.75 million people in prisons across the world.

The U.S has the highest prison population compared with population

The U.K has the highest prison population in Europe.

• There are different justifications for punishment and they link to different penal policies.

• Deterrence- punishment may prevent future crime from fear of further punishment

• Rehabilitation- Reforming/re-educating offenders so they no longer offend e.g. anger management

• Incapacitation- Removing the offenders capacity to re-offend e.g. execution/imprisonment/cutting off hands

• Retribution- The ideas that the society is entitled to take revenge for the offender having breached its moral code (expresses societies outrage)

Functionalism & Punishment (Durkheim)

• Function of punishment is to uphold social solidarity and reinforce shared values by expressing society’s moral outrage at the offence

• Through use of public trials and punishment, society's shared values are reaffirmed & its members come to a sense of moral unity

• There are two types of justice; retributive and restitutive

1. Retributive Justice- Traditional society has a strong collective conscience, so punishment is severe and vengeful

2. Restitutive Justice- In modern society there is extensive interdependence between individuals. Crime damages this and the function of justice should be to repair the damage e.g. through compensation

AO2: Durkheim’s view is too simplistic; traditional societies often have restitutive rather than retributive justice e.g. blood feuds settled by compensation rather than execution

Repressive State Apparatuses• Those systems and structures in a society that control the relations of

production through mainly repressive, physical means. Althusser claims that these structures are necessary (in conjunction with ISA e.g. media, family, religion) to maintain the reproduction of the relations of production, or in other words, to keep the labourers labouring for the State and the bourgeoisie society.

• The RSAs include the following: government (including administration at all levels),

• police,• courts,• prisons,• the military, etc.

They argue that harsh punishments are part of the Repressive State Apparatuses (RSA) which keep the working class in their place

Marxism: Capitalism & Punishment

• Interested in how punishment is related to the nature of class society and how it serves the ruling-class interests

• Function of punishment is to maintain existing social order (Repressive State Apparatuses)

• It’s a means of defending ruling class property against lower classes

• The form of punishment reflects the economic base of society (money fines impossible without a money economy)

• Under capitalism imprisonment becomes the dominant punishment because in the capitalist economy, time is money and offenders ‘pay’ by ‘doing time’ (repay debt to society)

• Prison & capitalist factory have similar strict disciplinary styles involving subordination and loss of liberty

Box 2.3Page 141

What differences appear between these two descriptions?

The Birth of The Prison

• Sovereign power – punishment before the 19th century were a public spectacle with hangings and stockades, its was a way of asserting the monarchs power over its citizens.

• Disciplinary power – punishment after 19th century was not just about governance over the body but the mind or soul, this is done through surveillance – Panopticon (pg 141)

Prisons are a metaphor for how all of us are

controlled and watched by those in power.

We are under surveillance all the time: CCTV, our loyalty cards, ID cards…

we’re all becoming prisoners.

AO2:

• Foucault's claims of a shift from corporal punishment to imprisonment is over simplistic

• He exaggerates the extent of control (e.g. even psychiatric patients can resist control)

Trends in Punishment1. Read through Imprisonment Today

and summarise what is suggested about the changing role of prisons (pg 141)

2. Also make a brief note of the era of mass incarceration (maybe jot down some statistics)

2. Transcarceration- trend towards this (moving people between different prison like institutions in

their lives) e.g. brought up in care, young offenders institute then adult prison

• It is a product of the blurring of boundaries between CJS and welfare agencies e.g. social services, health & housing are increasingly being given a crime control role (engage in multi agency working with police)

3. Alternatives to Prison- • In the past goal of dealing with young offenders was

‘diversion’ – diverting away from CJS to avoid risk of SFP turning them into serious criminals. Focus was on welfare & treatment using non custodial community based controls

• Recently there has been a growth in the range of community based controls e.g. curfews, community service orders, tagging

• Cohen argues that this has simply cast the net of control over more people....increased range of sanctions enables control to penetrate ever deeper into society

• Rather than diverting young people away from the CJS community controls divert them into it e.g. ASBO’s fast track way into custodial sentences

Quick Check Questions pg 145

Q4- 8