Control, punishment and victims

Situational crime prevention

Situational crime prevention

→ Right realist approach, pre-emptive strategies

• Rely on reducing opportunities for crime

• Targeting specific crimes by target hardening (altering environment to reduce rewards of crime)

→ e.g. locking doors, security guards

→ rational choice theory; increasing the costs of crime

→ Port Authority Bus Terminal, NY: designing crime out of toilets

Evaluation of situational crime prevention

→ may just displace crime (move to diff time/place/victims)

→ fails to explain white collar crime

→ do all criminals make rational choices?

Types of displacement

→ Spatial; moving it elsewhere

→ Temporal; committing it at a diff tiem

→ Target; diff victims

→ Tactical; diff methods

→ Functional; committing diff crimes

Wilson & Kelling -- broken windows theory

→ Right realist approach

→ Crack down on all disorder to stop bigger crimes happening

• e.g. towing away abandoned cars

Environmental crime prevention

→ Broken windows theory

→ Zero tolerance policing; to prevent serious crime

Eval of environmental crime protection

→ Seen in New York

→ Mixed results; did it really cause the fall in crime

Social and community crime prevention

→ Emphasises dealing with social conditions predisposing people to crime

• employment policies reduce poverty, so liekly to reduce crime as a side effect

→ Long-term strategies to tackle root causes (left realist)

• e.g. Perry pre-school project

Surveilling

→ Monitoring behaviour for the purpose of control

→ Often data-gathering tech e.g. CCTV, digital footprint

→ CCTV has little effect on crime + may just displace

Foucault -- power

Sovereign vs disciplinary

→ Sovereign power; pre-modern soc, monarch inflicted punishment on the body + was a visible spectacle e.g. execution

→ Disciplinary power; governing body AND mind via surveillance

Foucault -- panopticon

Panopticon used to explain disciplinary power

→ Prison design where cells visible to guards, but prisoners dont know if theyre being watched so must self-survey

→ Other institutions follow these patterns

Evaluation of Panopticon

→ Exaggerates the extent of control

• e.g. psych patients can resist control

• CCTV cams dont prevent crime, may displace it

The dispersal of discipline

→ Not just prison subjecting people to disciplinary power

→ Also mental asylums, factories, schools

Mathiesen -- synoptic surveillance

Increase in top-down + bottom-up surveillance in late modernity

→ Everybody watches everybody; synopticon

Mann et al -- synoptic survillance

‘Sousveillance’ bottom up scrutiny e.g. camera ownership

→ Mounted cameras on helmets

→ Ring doorbells

→ Also media scrutiny of powerful groups e.g. public filming one another, filming police wrongdoing

• dash cams, phone cameras

Evaluation of Synopticon

→ Doesn’t reverse established hierarchies of survillance

Haggerty & Ericson -- surveillant assemblages

Surveillance tech now involves manipulating digital data, rather than physical bodies (e.g. Panoptiocn prisoners)

→ Trend towards combining tech into ‘surveillant assemblages’ e.g. analysing CCTV with facial recognition

Feeler & Simon -- actuarial justice

Actuarial justice is new form of surveillance to calculate chance of someone offending

→ Focus on groups + just on preventing offending not rehabilitating

→ Profiles individuals to give them a ‘risk score’

• e.g. passenger screening at airports

→ BUT risk factors compiled with official stats, leads to police targeting + SFP

Norris & Armstrong -- labelling with surveillance

CCTV operators target young black men based on racist stereotypes

→ Creates SFP by criminalising black youths

Aims of sentencing -- punishment

→ Deterrence

→ Rehabilitation

→ Incapacitation

→ Retribution

Durkheim -- punishment/funct

Function of punishment is upholding social solidarity/reinforce shared values via expressing moral outrage

Types of justice -- punishment/funct

→ Retributive; society has strong collective conscience, punishment is severe/vengeful

→ Restitutive; extensive interdependence of individuals in modern society, crime damages this so justice should repair the damage e.g. via compensation

Purpose of punishment -- functionalist

→ Maintain collective conscience

→ Heals wounds opened by criminals

Eval of functionalist perspective on punishment

→ Too simplistic

→ Traditional societies often also have restitutive justice, not just retributive, e.g. blood feuds

Marxism, capitalism and punishment

→ Punishment is part of repressive state apparatus, maintain capitalist social order

→ For of punishment reflects economic base of society

• Strict discipline, subordination, loss of liberty

→ Imprisonment = dominant punishment in capitalism, because time is money, offenders ‘pay’ by doing time

Changing trends in prisons -- trends in punishment

→ Prison used to be primarily used for holding offenders before punishment

→ In liberal democracies prisons seen as most severe punishment, but may actually make bad people worse

• Seen in rate of reoffending

→ Move towards ‘populist punitiveness’ since 80s, politicians call for tougher sentneces + causes rise in prison population

• UK has higher proportion of prisoners than rest of W. Europe

Garland -- trends in punishment

US/UK moving into an era of mass incarceration

Downes -- trends in punishment

Prison servers ideological function of unemployment

Transcarceration -- trends in punishment

This is moving people between prison-like institutions

→ e.g. brought up in care, then young offenders, then prison

→ Blurring boundaries between crim justice and welfare agencies

• Social services/health/housing being given a crime control role

Alternatives to prison -- trends in punishment

→ Growth in community-based controls e.g. curfews, community service

Cohen -- alternatives to prison

This has just cast the net of control over more people

→ May divert young people INTO the CJS, not away from it

Does prison work?

→ Imprisonment has little effects n crime rate

→ ‘Universities of crime’, many go on to commit worse crimes

→ High rates of reoffending, recidivism

• 2/3 of prisoners reoffend

Christie -- victim

‘Victim’ is a socially constructed category

→ stereotypes of an ideal victim held by media as a blameless, weak individual

Approaches to victimology

→ Positivist victimology

→ Critical victimology

Positivist victimology

→ Based on interpersonal crimes of violence

→ Looks for patterns to identify characteristics contributing to victimisation

• Victim proneness; characteristics making Vs different/more vulnerable to non-Vs

• Victim precipitation; e.g. V triggering events

Wolfgang -- PV

26% of homicides involve V triggering events leading to murder

Eval of positivist victimology

→ Borderline victim blaming

→ Wolfgang shows victim-offender relationship; often just by chance which party becomes the victim

→ Ignores structural factors influencing victimisation e.g. poverty

→ Ignores situation where V isnt aware theyre a V e.g. crimes against environment

Critical victimology

→ Looks at how structural factors make powerless groups more likely to be victimised

→ State applies victim label to some but not others

• e.g. police fails to press charges against man for DV, so denies wife victim status

Tombs & Whyte -- CV

Employer violations of law leading to injury are often explained as the fault of the worker

→ This has ideological function; hides crimes of powerful

Eval of critical victimology

→ Ignores role Vs may play in their victimisation

• e.g. own choices, offending themselves

→ Helps draw attention to the construction of ‘victim’ status, how this benefits the powerful

Patterns of victimisation

• repeat victimisation — only 4% of population are victims of 44% of all crimes

  • more likely to be repeat victim if you’re part of a powerless group

• class — poor more likely to be victims

• age — young are more vulnerable to assault/SA/theft/abuse at home

• ethnicity — ME groups at more risk than white people, esp due to racial crimes

• gender — males at greater risk of violent attacks, females of domestic/sexual violence/stalking/harassment

Impact of victimisation

• crime may have physical and emotional impact on victim

  • feelings of helplessness, security-consciousness, difficulty in social functoning

secondary victimisation

• may also create indirect victims e.g. family/witnesses

• hate crimes create waves of harm radiating out to whole communities

• crime could create fear of becoming a victim

  • e.g. women being scared of going out and being attacked, though men are more likely to experience violence