Crime Prevention & Control - Topic 9
Situational Crime Prevention (SCP)
A strategy for reducing opportunities for crime. It aims to manage the immediate environment of particular crimes (eg: burglary).
Ron Clarke describes it as ‘a pre-emptive’ approach that relies, not on improving society or its institutions, but simply on reducing opportunities for crime.
Clarke has 3 features of situational crime prevention
They are directed at specific crime
They involve managing or altering the immediate environment of the crime
They aim at increasing the effort and risks of commiting crime and reducing the rewards
Felson - Port Authority Bus Terminal - was poorly designed and looked awful, so people started commiting small crime such as vandalism, which got worse and worse, such as luggage theft and drug dealing
EVALUATION - SCP works however usually it will just lead to displacement rather than a reduction of crime.
Displacement
Chaiken - Displacement Theory says situational crime theory only displaces crime rather than reduce crime. Chaiken found that a crackdown on subway robberies just displaced robbers to streets down the road
Displacement can take several forms..
Spatial - moving elsewhere to commit the crime
Temporal - committing it at a different time
Target - choosing a different victim
Functional - commiting a different type of crime
Tactical - using a different method
Environmental Crime Prevention
Wilson & Kelling argue that ‘broken windows’ (signs of disorder) that aren’t dealt with send out a signal that no-one cares, prompting a spiral of decline
An absence of a both formal social control and informal control means members of the community will feel intimidated and powerless
Crack down on any disorder: Wilson & Kelling argue solution to crime is to crackdown on all disorder with zero tolerance policing, and police must pro-actively tackle crime
Evidence - Clean Car Program in New York - cars were taken out of service if they had any sort of defect, like graffiti. Found that as a result graffiti was largely removed from the subway
This led to a fall in the crime rate in the 1990s
Decline in drug crime
Zero tolerance influenced political movements and policies
EVALUATION - Jock Young argues that the idea of zero tolerance worked is a myth, in reality, crime was not profound in this period, it was just heavily exaggerated
Social and Community Crime Prevention (Left Realism)
Emphasises on the the potential offender and their social context - aiming to remove criminals
The roots of crime are found in social conditions, such as poverty, unemployment and poor housing
The Perry pre-school project aimed at reducing criminality - an experimental group of 3-4 year olds were offered a two year intellectual enrichment program. Found that by 40 they had much less arrests than those who didn’t undergo the program.
EVALUATION - The previous approaches take for granted the definition of crime and focus on low-level crimes and interpersonal crime - this disregards the crimes of the powerful and the environment
FOUCAULT - Birth of the prison
Sovereign Power - in pre-modern society, the monarch exercised physical power over people’s bodies and punishment was a visible spectacle (public executions)
Disciplinary power - became dominant from the 19th century and seeks to govern not just the body, but also the mind through surveillance. Focault uses the Panopticon to illustrate this.
The Panopticon is a prison where prisoners’ cells are visible to the guards, but the guards are not visible to the prisoners. Not knowing if they are being watched means the prisoners must constantly behave as if they are (being watched). Surveillance turns into self-surveillance: control becomes invisible, ‘inside’ the prisoner.
EVALUATION - Focault exaggerates the extent of control (eg: even psychiatric patients can resist control.
Synoptic Surveillance
Mathiesen (1997) argues that in latemodernity, there is an increase in both the top-down surveillance that Focault discusses, and in surveillance from below. Mathiesen calls this the ‘Synopticon’ - where everybody watches everybody
This includes media scrutiny of powerful groups, and members of the public monitoring each other or filming police wrongdoing.
EVALUATION - McCahill (2012) argues that this doesn’t reverse the established ‘hierachies of surveillance
Surveillant assemblages
Haggerty and Ericson (2000) point out that surveillance technology now involves mainpulation of digital data, rather than physical bodies (eg: prisoners in the panopticon)
They note the trend towards combining different technologies into powerful surveillant assemblages (CCTV can be analysed for facial recognition)
Punishment:
Briefly outline how punishment may reduce crime in the following ways:
a) Deterrence: Punishment may prevent future crime from fear of further punishment (eg: Margaret Thatcher’s policies included this)b) Rehabilitation: Reforming/re-educating offenders so they no longer offend. (Training offenders, education/programs)
c) Incapacitation: Removing the offender’s capacity to re-offend (execution/imprisonment)
Briefly outline how punishment may act as a form of retribution
- The idea that society is entitled to take revenge for the offender having breached its moral code.
Durkheim: A functionalist perspective
According to Durkheim, what is the function of punishment?
- To uphold social solidarity and reinforce shared values by expressing society’s moral outrage at the offence.
Briefly explain the following types of justice:
a) Retributive justice: Traditional society has a strong collective conscience, so punishment is severe and vengeful.
b) Restitutive justice: In modern society, there is an extensive interdependence between individuals. Crime damages this and the function of justice should be to repair the damage.
EVALUATION: Durkheim’s view is too simplistic: Traditional societies have more restitutive rather than retributive justice.
Marxism: Capitalism and Punishment
According to Marxists, what is the function of punishment?
- It’s part of the ‘repressive state apparatus’ which defends ruling class property against the lower class. To stablisise social order
According to Marxists, what is the form of punishment under capitalism?
- Imprisonment, as it reflects the economic base of society
According to Melossi and Pavarini, how does imprisonment reflect capitalist relations of production
- Imprisonment becomes the dominant punishment as in the capitalist economy, time is money and offenders ‘pay’ by doing time in prison.
The changing roles of prison:
How has the role of prison chnaged since the enlightenment?
- Prison was used mainly for holding offenders. However, following the enlightenment that imprisonment was seen as a punishment himself, where offenders would be ‘reformed’ through hard labour, religious instruction and surveillance.
Imprisonment Today
Why may imprisonment today not be an effective method of rehabilitation?
- Prison now reinforces ideas of criminal behaviour and isolaiton, and just makes bad people worse.
Despite this ineffectiveness, why have prison populations increased in England and Wales?
- Harsher sentencing and stricter laws have driven more people into prisons.
Transcarceration:
There is a trend towards transcarceration - an idea that individuals become locked into a cycle of control (brought up in care —> to YO institutions --> Mental hospitals —> Prison
There has been a blurring of boundaries between criminal justice and welfare agencies
Alternatives to Prison
Recently there has been a growth in the range of community-based controls (curfews/tagging etc.)
Cohen argues that this has simply cast the net of control over more people. Rather than diverting young people away from the criminal justice system (CJS), community controls may divert them into it