Crime and Deviance 4

CRIME CONTROL, SURVEILLANCE, PREVENTION AND PUNISHMENT, VICTIMS, AND THE ROLE OF THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM AND OTHER AGENCIES 

The Criminal Justice system:  crime prevention

• Situational crime prevention: (supported by right realists)
  • Clarke: people will commit crimes when the benefits outweigh the costs- therefore it was better to make it harder for people to commit crimes than to make punishments harsher.
  • Newman: if you created a defensible space through the design of houses/ streets crimes would reduce. Ie target hardening such as improving locks, or changing the layout of areas with high rates, such as by imroving street lighting. 
  • Critiques 
  • Garland: it doesnt deal with the causes of crime so will just lead to crime displacement 
  • Katz: challenged the idea that crime was based on rational calculation. 
  • SCP can only fight oppurtunist crime and therefore cannot address domestic crime/ corporate crime. 
• Community safety/crime reduction 
  • Community additional measures to ensure situational measures work. These include:
    • Intervention: identifying and intervening with the groups most likely to commit crimes
    • Community: involve the local community to help combat crime 
  • An example of an intervention study was the Perry Pre-School Project in the US where 2 groups of disadvantaged 3-4 y/os. 1 group were given pre-school support and weekly visits from social workers. By the time the children reached 27 the first group had half the number of arrests as the group with no support. 
  • The idea of the community has been developed by the NR and Wilsons 'broken windows' which aimed to influence the gov to strengthen local communities and increase the powers of the police to issue anti-social behaviour orders. 
  • Garland:
    • believes we have moved away from preventing crime to managing it. 
    • Penal welfareism (catching, punishing and rehabilitating) has been seen as a failure as 60% of those sent to prision reoffend. 
    • This has been replaced by a culture of control where adaptive responses lead the government to identify potential criminal groups and intervene at an early stage.
    • Now an expressive strategy whereby politians aim to make the public thick crime is declining. 
    • Actuarialism fits into this as athe police target grouos who they believe are most likely to commit crimes rather than establish guilt. 
  • Foucault and Cohen: the community safety policy has arision out of public concern for crime- this has given the gov more power to intervene in new areas of social life such as the family and school. 

The police

• Traditional beat officers phased out in 1960s and replaced by officers who respond to incidents in cars. This was then replaced by neighbourhood policing where teams of police get to know the community as well as using reactive policing. 
• Consensual approach to policing: sees the police to have a key role in the local area and in responding to the needs of the pop 
• Conflict approach: Scratton: believes the police should be seen as an occupying force imposed on WC and EM communities to restore law and order to reflect the intrests of the powerful
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