Topic 9 Control punishment and victims

What are the 3 types of crime prevention?

• Situational crime prevention

• Environmental crime prevention

• Social and community crime

What is situational crime prevention + sociologist?

• Clarke. This aims to reduce the opportunities for crime by directing specific crimes and to increase the effort and reducing the rewards for crime. This correlates with the ‘rational choice theory’ and believes that we should focus on the immediate crime situation where prevention is greatest.

• Marcus Felson and Bus terminal in Year York was reshaped which designed crime out eg large basins to small basins.

What is the criticism for situational crime prevention and its sociologist?

• Chaiken et al

• Crime does not reduce, it just becomes displaced, such as spatial temporal tactical target and functional.

• Only looks at opportunistic petty street crime, disregards violent or white collar crime

What is environmental crime prevention and its sociologist?

• Wilson and Kellings. Based on Broken Windows, the idea of disorder and the absence of control leads to crime. We must take an environmental improvement strategy and a zero tolerance policing strategy and prevents serious crimes taking place.

What is the evidence for environmental crime prevention +eval?

• Clean car programme. Between 1993 and 1996 there was a significant fall in crime in the city including a 50% drop in homicide rates

• HOWEVER, NYPD benefited from 7000 more officers, Decline in the availability of crack cocaine.

What is social and community crime prevention?

• To remove the conditions that predispose people to crime. Tackle the root causes of offending, rather than removing opportunity for crime. PERRY PRESCHOOL PROJECT for disadvantages black children in Michigan, a 2 year intellectual programme. For every dollar spent on the programme, $17 was saved on welfare prison etc

What is the criticism for all 3 crime prevention and controls?

• Do not tackle corporate crime, focus on low level or interpersonal crimes only.

Define surveillance.

• The monitoring of public behaviour for the purposes of population or crime control

Explain Foucault’s birth of the prison and its relation to surveillance.

• Sovereign power and disciplinarian power shift overtime. The panopticon illustrates disciplinary power, where guards can see prisoners byt prisoners cannot see guards so they might be watched, forcing then to be disciplined with the hopes of rehabilitation

What is a criticism to foucault?

• Feminists such as Koskela believe CCTV and other forms of surveillance are a form of the male gaze and does not make women more secure.

What are the 3 Surveillance theories since foucault?

• Synoptic surveillance

• Actuarial justice and risk management

• Labelling and Surveillance

What is synoptic surveillance + sociologist?

• Mathiesen believes the media also enables the many to see the few, there has been a rise in surveillance from below along with foucaults argument, also called the ‘synopticon’ where everybody watches everybody

• Thompson states that powerful groups such as politicians fear the media and acts as social control over their activities.

What does Mccahill argue?

• Occasional bottom up scrunity is unable to reverse hierarchies of surveillance, police have powers to confiscate the cameras and mobile phones and ‘citizen journalists’

What is actuarial justice and risk management + sociologist?

• Feeley and Simon. Actuarial justice is a damage limitation strategy to reduce crime by using statistical information to pick out likely offenders. It is focussed on groups rather than individuals.

What is an example of social sorting and categorical suspicious?

2010 West midlands police sought to introduce a counter terrorism scheme around 2 mainly muslim suburbs of birmingham with around 150 cameras some of which covert, whole communities under suspicious. lead to self fulfilling prophecy

How is labelling and surveillance a newer form of surveillance?

• Norris and Armstrong note that CCTV operators make discriminatory judgements about who among the thousands of potential ‘suspects’ should be focussed on. Often, it is young black males who are targeted, judgements are based on typifications.

What are the 2 justifications for punishment?

• Reduction

• Retribution

What are the 3 ways reduction can be achieved?

• Deterrence. Punishing the individual prevents them from committing crime again, but also deters other members of the public from committing crime

• Rehabilitation is the idea that punishment cant be used to reform or change offenders, such as education so they can earn an honest living out of prison

• Incapacitation. Use of punishment to remove offenders capacity to offend again like prison cutting off hands or execution

How is retribution achieved?

• Retribution means ‘paying back’, and believes the offender should be punished as society is entitled to take its revenge, it is expressive as it expresses society’s outrage

What are the two perspectives on punishment

• Functionalist

• Marxists

What is the functionalist perspective of punishment

• Durkheim believes punishment upholds social solidarity and reinforce shared values, and that punishment is primarily expressive

What are the two types of justice durkheim identifies in two different societies?

• Retributive justice, common in traditional societies where punishment is primarily expressive as there is strong collective conscience

• Restitutive justice in a modern society, where the function of punishment is to restore societies equilibrium, it is more instrumental.

What is the marxist perspective of punishment?

• The function of punishment is to maintain existing social order and is a part of the ‘repressive state apparatus’ put forward by althusser

What does Thompson state in relation to the marxist view of punishment?

• Thompson describes how 18th century punishments such as hanging for theft and poaching were part of a ‘rule of terror’ by the landed aristocracy over the poor

What does imprisonment look like today?

• Prison is the most severe form of punishment in liberal democracies without the death penalty, but is proven to be ineffective as about 2/3 of criminals commit crime on release. Since the 1980s there has been greater harshness on crime.

What stat shows the UK imprisons a higher proportion of people than any other country from western europe?-

• 147 out of 100,000 people are in prison, compared to 100 in france and 76 in germany

What is the era of mass incaceration?

• Garland argues the USA is moving towards an era or mass incarceration, where black americans only make up 13% of the population, but 37% of the us population, which could have an ideological function. The US prison system soaks up about 30-40% of the unemployed making capitalism look more successful.

What does the UN define as a victim?

• A victim who has suffered harm through acts which violate the laws of the state

What does Christie define as a victim?

• Victims are socially constructed, the stereotype of the idea victim ( a weak innocent blameless individual such as a woman) who is the target of a strangers attack.

What is positivist victimimology?

• Miers argues positive victimology wants to identify patterns of victimisation and to identify victims who have contributed to their own victimisation

What did Wolfgang find?

• Wolfgang’s study of 588 homicides in Philly found that 26% of crimes the victim triggered the event leading to the homicide, for example by being the first to use violence

What are criticisms to positivist victimology?

• Amir’s claim that 1/5 rapes are victim precipitated is not very different from saying the victim ‘asked for it’

What is critical victimology?

• Structural factors place certain individuals at greater risk of victimisation

• The states power to apply or deny the label of a victim

What sociologists give example of the states power to apply or deny labels?

• Safety crimes where employers violations lead to the death or injury of workers are often explained as accident prone, similar to rape cases and victims are denied their labels.

What is the criticism to critical victimiology?

• Denies the influence victims have on making themselves the victim.

What are the patterns of victimisation?

• Class, poorest more likely. Newburn and Rock survey of 300 homeless people found 1 in ten had been urinated on

• Age, younger people

• Ethnicity, POC

• Gender, Males. 70% of homicide victims are male