Crime prevention & Punishment

Social and community crime prevention

• Left realism → tackle the root cause (marginalisation and relative deprivation)

• Deal with social conditions that cause people to commit crime. By introducing social policies and other community initiatives

• e.g. Perry Preschool project: Pre-school enrichment programme for 3-4 year old African American children from disadvantaged backgrounds at risk of social exclusion. Resulted in fewer arrests for violent, property and drug related crime when they progressed into adulthood.

Environmental Crime Prevention

• Wilson & Kelling: ‘Broken windows’, Zero tolerance

• Deals with any signs of disorder by cleaning the environment and a zero tolerance policing strategy

• e.g. Cleaning up graffiti, fixing vandalism, strict policing

Situational Crime Prevention

• Rational Choice theory - Clarke

• Prevent crime by increasing the risk of being caught and reducing the rewards e.g. ‘target hardening’ - locking doors, security guards, re-shaping environment to ‘design crime out’ of an area

Foucault: The Panopticon

• Prison design where prisoner's cells are visible to guards, but guards are not visible to prisoners

• Not knowing whether guards are watching them → prisoners must constantly behave as if they are being watched (controls physically aandd their mind - disciplinary power)

• Surveillance turns into self-surveillance in institutions - e.g. schools

Mathiesen: The Synopticon

• In late modernity, we have the panopticon occuring, but also everybody watches everybody - Synopticon

• e.g. Car dash cams, media scrutinising powerful groups

Feeley & Simon: Actuarial justice

• Police calculate and predict likelihood of people offending, risk scores calculated based on age, sex, ethnicity, religion etc.

• Anyone scoring enough on risk factors can be stopped and questioned

Functionalist view of punishment

• Durkheim: Upholds social solidarity

• Pre-modern societies relied on retributive justice, punishment about getting revenge and showing moral outrage → harsh and public punishment

• Modern societies rely upon restitutive justice, crime damages society, so punishment should repair damage e.g. fines to fix things, community service

Marxist view of punishment

• Althusser: Part of repressive state apparatus defending ruling class power and property from the lower classes through physical control

• Form of punishment reflects dominant based of society e.g. under capitalism, prison is dominant form of punishment because time is money and offenders ‘pay’ by ‘doing time’ (free labour)

Garland: Trends of incarceration

• Mass incarceration: USA and UK = large prison population. Over 3% of population in USA have restricted freedom as punishment. Represents a move towards just keeping ‘risky’ people under control (rather than solving root causes). Just satisfies public anger rather than reducing crime

• Transcarceration: Moving people between different prisons like institutions e.g. in-care, then in YOI, then adult prison

• Indicates prison not effective at rehab

Downes: Imprisonment

• Prison soaks up the unemployed (40% of prison population were unemployed before) → makes capitalism look like it is working better than it is