9. Control, punishment and victims
- Created by: Amy Parkinson
- Created on: 04-05-15 16:06
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- Control, punishment and victims
- Crime prevention and crime
- Situational crime prevention
- CLARKE
- Situational crime prevention is a 'pre-emptive approach that relies, not on improving society or its institutions but simply on reducing opportunities for crime'
- He identifies 3 features of measures aimed at situational crime prevention:
- They are directed at specific crimes
- They involve managing or altering the immediate environment of the crime
- They aim at increasing the effort and risks of committing crime and reducing the rewards
- Most theories offer no realistic solutions to crime
- The most obvious solution is to reduce the opportunities to commit crime
- Underlying situational crime prevention approaches is a rational choice theory of crime which argues that criminals act rationally, weighing up the risks and rewards of criminal acts
- This rational choice idea contrasts with theories of crime that stress root causes such as socialisation or capitalist exploitation
- Displacement
- Situational crime prevention only displaces crime
- Displacement can take several forms:
- Spatial: moving elsewhere to commit crime
- Temporal: committing it at a different time
- Target: choosing a different victim
- Tactical: using a different method
- Functional: committing a different type of crime
- EVAL
- Situatiional crime prevention works to some extent in reducing certain kinds of crime. However, with most measures there is likely to be some displacement
- It tends to focus on opportunistic petty street crime. It ignores white collar, corporate and state crime which are more costly and hamrful
- It assumes criminals make rational calculations
- It ignores the root causes of crime such as poverty or poor socialisation
- CLARKE
- Environmental crime prevention
- WILSON & KELLING
- They use the phrase 'broken windows' to stand for all the various signs of disorder and lack of concern for others
- They argue that leaving broken windows, tolerating aggressive begging etc. sends out a signal that no one cares
- In such neighbourhoods there is an absence of social control from the police and informal control from the community
- As the police focus on more serious crimes and ignore petty nuisance behaviour, respectable people begin to move out of the area and it becomes a magnet for more deviants
- Their solution is to crack down on any disorder using an environmental improvement strategy and zero tolerance policing
- Great sccesses have been claimed for zero tolerance policing
- However in the example of zero tolerance policing in New York it is unclear how far the strategy was the cause of the improvements
- Social and community crime prevention
- These policies place the emphasis on the potential offender and their social context
- The aim of these strategies is to remove the conditions that predispose individuals to crime in the first place
- The Perry pre-school project
- Aimed at reducing criminality amongst disadvantaged black children in Michigan
- The children who received a 2-year intellectual enrichment programme had significantly fewer arrests by the age of 40
- More had also graduated from high school and were employed than those who did not receive the help
- These approaches about crime prevention take for granted the nature and definition of crime
- Situational crime prevention
- Punishment
- 2 main justifications have been offered since punishment involves a process of deliberately inflicting harm:
- 1. Reduction (it prevent future crime) by acting as a deterrence, rehabilitating criminals and incapacitates offender's
- 2. Retribution (an expressive rather than instrumental view of punishment- it expresses society's outrage)
- Sociologists are interested in the relationship between punishment and society
- DURKHEIM: a functionalist perspective
- Punishment functions to uphold social solidarity
- He identifies 2 types of justice corresponding to 2 types of society:
- Retributive justice: in traditional society solidarity is mechanical (similarity). This produces a strong collective conscience. Punishment is severe and cruel and its motivation is purely expressive
- Restitutive justice: In modern society society is organic (difference). Punishment aims to make reinstitution- to restore thing to how they were before the offence. Its motivation is instrumental, to restore society's equilibrium
- However in reality, traditional societies often had restitutive justice rather than retributive justice as DURKEIM thought
- MARXISM: capitalism and punishment
- The function of punishment is to maintain the existing social order
- Punishment is part of the repressive state apparatus, which means it defends r/c property against the lower classes
- The form of punishment reflects the economic base of society
- RUSCHE & KIRCHHEIMER
- Under capitalism, imprisonment becomes the dominant form of punishment because the capitalist economy is based on the exploitation of wage labour
- MELOSSI & PAVARINI
- Imprisonment is a reflection of capitalist relations to production. For example,
- Capitalism puts a price on the worker's time; so too prisoners 'do time' to 'pay' for their crimes
- The prison and capitalist factory both have a similar strict disciplinary style, involving subordination and loss of liberty
- Imprisonment is a reflection of capitalist relations to production. For example,
- Foucault: birth of the prison
- Differentiates between 2 types of punishment which he sees as examples of sovereign power and disciplinary power
- Sovereign power= typical before the 19thC when the monarch had power over people and their bodies. Inflicting punishment on the body was the means of asserting control. Punishment was a spectacle
- Disciplinary power= 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 surviellance
- The Panoptican
- He uses the example of the Panoptican which was a design of a prison where the guards could see all prisoners but prisners could not see the guards
- Therefore, there was always a chance the prisoners were being watched but they were not sure
- This surveillance turned into self-surveillance and self-discipline. Control therefore takes place inside the prisoner
- The change from sovereign to disciplinary power shows how power operates in society as a whole
- EVAL
- The shift from corporal punishment to imprisonment is less clear than Foucault suggests
- Unlike Durkheim, Foucault neglects the expressive (emotional) aspects of punishment
- He exaggerates the extent of control. GOFFMAN: inmates are able to resist controls in institutions such as prisons and mental hospitals
- Until the 18thC, prison was used mainly for holdng offenders prior to their punishment (e.g. flogging)
- It was only following the Enlightenment that imprisonment began to be seen as a form of punishment in itself, where offenders would be 'reformed'
- Punishment has not proved to be an effective form of rehabilitation- many see it as an expensive way to make bad people worse
- Prison population has swollen to record size which has led to overcrowding, even worse sanitation, barely edible food, clothing shortages, lack of educational and work opportunities and inadequate family vistis
- The prison population is largely male, young and poorly educated
- Black and ethnic minorities are over-represented in OFs of prison populations
- GARLAND
- The UK is moving into an era of mass incarceration
- The reason for mass incarceration is the growing politicisation of crime control
- For most of the last C there was a consensus which GARLAND calls 'penal welfarism'- the idea that punishment should reintegrate offenders
- However, since the 70s there has been a move towards a new consensus based on more punitive and exclusionary, 'tough on crime' policies and this has led to an increase in prison pop.
- There is also a trend towards transcarceration- the idea that individuals become locked into a cycle of control, shifting between different carceral agencies during their lives
- In recent years there has been a growth in the range of community-based control, such as curfews, community service orders and electronic tagging, to try and divert young people away from crime
- 2 main justifications have been offered since punishment involves a process of deliberately inflicting harm:
- The victims of crime
- CHRISTIE
- The notion 'victim' is socially constructed
- The stereotype of the ideal victim favoured by the media, public and CJS is a weak, innocent and blameless individual
- We can identify 2 broad perspectives of victimology; positivist and critical victimology
- Positivist victimology
- MIERS's 3 features of positivist victimology
- 1. It aims to identify the factors that produce patterns' in victimisation- especially those that make some individuals or groups more likely to be victims
- 2. It focuses on interpersonal crimes of violence
- 3. It aims to identify victims who have contributed to their own victimisation
- The idea of victim proneness focuses on the social and psychological characteristics of victims that make them different from and more vulnerable than none victims
- WOLFGANG's study of 588 homicides in Philadelphia
- 26% involved victim precipitation- the victim triggered the events leading to the homocide
- EVAL
- This approach identifies certain patterns of interpersonal victimisation but ignores wider structural factors influencing victimisation
- It can easily tip over into victim blaming
- It ignores situations were victims are unaware of their victimisation
- MIERS's 3 features of positivist victimology
- Critical victimology
- Based on conflict theories such as Marxism and feminism
- Focusses on 2 elements:
- Structural factors such as patraicrhy and ppoverty
- The state's power to apply or deny the label of 'victim' (the label is a social construct)
- The failure to label hides the crimes of the powerful and denies the powerless victims any redress
- In the hierarchy of victimisation the powerless are most likely to be victimised yet least likely to have this acknowledged by the state
- EVAL
- Disregards the role victims may play in bringing victimisation on themselves through their own choices
- Patterns of victimisation
- Class; the poor are most likely to be victimised
- Age; younger people are more at risk of victimisation
- Ethnicity; minority ethnic groups are at greater risk of being victims of crime
- Gender; males are at greater risk of being victims of violent attacks especially by strangers. However women are more likely to be victims of domestic violence, slaking, harassment...
- Repeat Victimisation; those who have been victims in the past are more at risk of future victimisation
- The impact of victimisation
- Crime may have serious physical and psychological impacts on its victims
- Crime may also create 'indirect' victims such as witnesses
- Hate crimes against minorities may create 'waves of harm'
- Secondary victimisation is the idea that victims may suffer further victimisation at the hands of the CJS
- Fear of victimisation
- CHRISTIE
- Crime prevention and crime
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