Chapter 1: What is Criminology?

Chapter 1: What is Criminology?

·        Criminology:  The scientific study of crime and criminal behaviour, which are defined by reference to criminal law

o   Relatively recent development

·        Study of crime in Canadian universities began during the 1950s at UBC

o   Created as an emerging sense that correctional efforts (rehabilitation of offender) would be assisted by accumulating a body of knowledge

§   argued that offenders could no longer be seen as born criminals, and they pointed to the local Haney Correctional Centre as the site of an emerging progressive correctional administration that was concerned about developing educational and vocational programs, maintaining family and community ties for offenders, and developing programs of probation and parole

·        The program was short lived

·        In 1963 Montreal and Toronto established criminology centers in their respective universities

·        Additionally, from 1960 to the present, Sociology programs focus on understanding crime as a form of deviance and then studying the process of defining criminal law, the social precursors to involvement in crime and the potential range of appropriate and/or effective responses to lawbreakers

Emergence of Criminology in the Postwar Era

·        Urbanization and Industrialization are key features of social life in Canada, UK, and US

o   Migration from rural to urban areas and creation of new crime from urban poor

§  Condemnation against vagrancy, drunkenness and prostitution

o   Also, inexpensive labour from China, Japan and other 3^rd world countries

§  Threat to established labour and brought parts of their culture

·        Opium, Hashish, cocoa, and cocaine

o   These were resisted and criminally prohibited with laws put in place for deportation and restrictions on immigration

·        Deviation: Behaviour that differs from accepted social norms; it may include acts that violate specific rules (crime), sexual behaviors, or non-criminal acts that challenge accepted values

·        Changes created tension

o   Changes in institutional practices as well such as public execution, moved away from the public and urged for more humane treatment of lawbreakers

·        End of Second world war meant conflicts = threats

o   Crime rates increase from youth rebellion

o   Cold war had large impact of global end

·        Demographic shift

o   The percentage of young men dramatically increased starting mid 1960s from baby boomers

·       

§  Age and sex correlate to crime

·        Demographics: Statistical data relating to characteristics of a population, such as relative size of age groups, gender balance, or any other measurable information.

·        Correlates: Factors that do not cause crime but are strongly linked to criminal behaviour.

·        Alcohol consumption increased dramatically by 50%

o   Birth control also played major part and divorces dramatically increased

·        Crime rates decreased dramatically (not surprising)

A Discipline or a New Home for Already Established Disciplines:

·        The criminology field has been interdisciplinary in its orientation

o   Based on sociology, psychology, law, geography, history, political science, and economics, forensic entomogy, computer science, chemistry and biology (Very Broad)

·        Forensic Entomology: Study of insects to assist in legal investigations, insects found on corps can help identify facts about the time and place of a victims death

·        Psychology, as the study of individual behaviour, tends to focus on the criminal individual, often classifying this individual, trying to predict the risk of reoffending, and then evaluating the effectiveness of various forms of rehabilitation or treatment.

o   Psychological explanations of crime have evolved over the years, moving from Freudian psychoanalysis to personality theory, to theories of moral development, and, more recently, to developmental conceptions of criminal involvement (Moffitt, 1993).

·        In all these constructions of crime, the individual is front and centre: An individual’s psyche and behaviours are the focus of the study of crime.

·        Sociological analyses of crime are, not surprisingly, focused on the social order—the extent to which social forces work to define crime and to create conditions in which crime might either flourish or diminish.

o   Sociological analyses of crime are essentially trying to understand how the social context of our lives works to create law and certain

·        Sociology has, historically, been the dominant paradigm within criminology, giving rise, among other conceptions, to social control theory, labelling theory, differential association, notions of anomie, and, more recently, to a range of critical theories of crime: moral panics and the culture of control, Marxian and neo-Marxian analysis, Foucauldian perspectives, and postmodern conceptions of criminality.

o   For as long as criminology has been a subject for academic inquiry, social analyses of crime, law, and deviance have tended to be pre-eminent. Crime and criminal conduct have been regarded as more likely to be driven by social conditions than by individual aberrations.

·        Criminality: The state of being criminal; criminal acts or practices

·        The study of law is also central to the study of criminology, arguably perhaps the most central of all disciplines, as it defines the landscape of crime, setting out the specifics of prohibited behaviours and the penalties that may attach to various acts of law-breaking.

·        Study of the history of law provides insight into the changing nature of crime, allowing students to come to terms with the malleable nature of some forms of deviance, and the evolving nature of what might be viewed as appropriate responses to crime. A consideration of the evolution of criminal law provides insight into the creation of new forms of criminality.

o   For example, legal analysis allows for discussion of the emergence of a global prohibition of certain mind-active drugs in the early 20th century, described in the case study that begins this chapter.

§  Prohibition is an experiment that began as a moral crusade against intolerable harms but is now facing difficult challenges to both its empirical logic and its corresponding moral underpinnings.

§  Similarly, study of the history of criminal law allows students to view changing responses to long-established and universally condemned forms of conduct.

·        Ex. in Canada in the latter half of the 19th century, capital punishment was regarded in law as an appropriate punishment not only for murder but for many other crimes. Study of subsequent amendments to criminal law, and the debates that surrounded these amendments, allows students to reflect on not only changing approaches to the punishment of crime but also on the logic and utility of these changing approaches.

·        The disciplines of history, geography, political science, and economics have, historically, been less central to the study of criminology than have psychology, sociology, and law, but they have each made different kinds of contributions. The social and spatial geography of crime have been critical to the development of programs of crime prevention through environmental design and to the tracking of serial predatory offenders across time and space (Brantingham & Brantingham, 1984; Rossmo, 1999).

·        Detailed histories of crime, law, and criminal behaviours have permitted greater understanding of the utility of law and a range of various legislative and policy initiatives, and of the kinds of variables that might either foster crime or serve to diminish it. More recently, the discipline of economics has also made important contributions to criminology, permitting evaluative analyses of the costs and benefits of various crime-reduction initiatives. With recent developments in the utility of gathering DNA at crime scenes, and in studying key elements of the decomposition of bodies to determine time of death (a key aspect of forensic entomology), the fields of chemistry and biology have both become a significant part of criminology, providing evidence that can be both inculpatory and exculpatory.

·        The faculty in departments and schools of criminology do appear to represent a variety of disciplines: law, psychology, sociology, economics, geography, and the natural sciences. But they also have individuals with doctorates in criminology.

What Do We Study:

·        What is studied varies on what the discipline of Sociologists and field of training is in

·        Criminalization: To define an act as a crime and thereby subject hat act to formal punishment

o   Drug use, abortion and even prostitution all reexamined in regards to criminology

§  criminologists have examined the legal history of criminalization and its consequences, but they have also considered the effectiveness of the law, its intended and unintended consequences, the harms imposed by these illegal activities, and the harms imposed by the laws that control these activities.

Why Crime Rates Change:

·        Variability in data and inaccurate reporting

·        Different states, willingness to report crimes, the significance of the incidents, police resources and both individual and societal attitudes towards involvement with police and the criminal justice system

·        Pattens of increase and decrease are not universal

o   explanations for these increases or decreases vary for different types of crime and are not consistent across nation-states

§  Ex. Improvement in vehicle security have reduced auto thefts

·       

·        Some individuals have personality traits and characteristics that make them related to crime, but biology does not predetermine criminality

o   Ex. If fathers of Danish adoptions had criminal history, kids also more likely to have criminal records as well

·        Research has served to confirm the thrust of this finding. Although our tendency has been to view crime as environmental in origin, research data suggest that our biology can also create challenges and predispositions that can, in some circumstances, outweigh environmental influences.

·        Again, while biology may not be determinative, we are learning that it is not as unimportant as was once thought. Just as intellectual and athletic abilities are widely acknowledged to have a genetic backdrop, we are now accepting that difficult personalities can have a biological origin (Raine, 2013).

·        Traits: Those attributed or features that distinguish or characterize an individual

o   Brain injury can slo have impact on predisposition to crime

·        Study of the criminal has also allowed us to understand that some of our populist conceptions often have little empirical support

o   Sex offenders are, rather, a much more diverse population, their crimes encompassing a range of offences, from incest and inappropriate touching to predatory attacks on strangers; predatory attacks on strangers are actually very rare events (Bonnar-Kidd, 2010; Bonnycastle, 2012).

o   Sex offenders (with the notable exception of pedophiles) also tend not to specialize in sex o

o   ffences; they are more accurately classified as anti-social deviants who commit a range of crimes, some of which happen to be sex offences (Lussier et al., 2010). We’ve also learned that most sex offenders have relatively low rates of reoffending, again contrary to populist conceptions (Hanson & Bussière, 1998).

§  These findings raise important questions, for example, about the empirical logic of a sex offender registry or, perhaps put more critically, about the size of our sex offender registry. Why, we might ask, do we have a registry that houses such a varied range of offenders, particularly when the rates of reoffending for most of these kinds of crime are much lower than for other crimes?

·        Empirical: Understood or verified through experiment, measurement or direct observation; as opposed to theoretical

·        Stigmatize: To strongly disapprove of a person or behaviour; to find disgraceful

Criminology in Aid of Detection and Avoidance of Crime

·        Crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED): Seeks to manage crime by decreasing both the opportunity for a crime to occur and an individual motivation to commit a crime, and simultaneously increasing the risk to the offender if the crime is committed

o   Critics say that this doesn’t really help as it only displaces crime into less protected environments and does not address the root causes or motivations of the criminal offenders

o   Shifts the responsibility from the state to the individual

·        Electronic monitoring (ankle monitor): permits both pre-trial release into the community and the serving of a sentence within the community, often referred to as home detention.

o   Advantages:

§  The process avoids the costs of placing the offender in a correctional facility and the well-documented negative impacts of incarceration on the individual

o   Concerns:

§  Net widening: Imposing a form of control on individuals who might otherwise not be subject to such control; Also, invasion of privacy

§  How to respond when the offender goes out of the area

§  Notes: it seems that it is an effective public safety alternative to the use of imprisonment, reducing reoffending for the population placed under such surveillance

·        Interventions: Strategies intended to shape the physician environment to mitigate crime, as various programs targeting individual offenders, offering alternatives to criminal behaviour

·        Geographic Profiling: A tool that allows officers to focus on the likely residence of offenders in cases of serial crimes

·        Net widening: Imposing a form of control on individuals who might otherwise not be subject to such control

·        DNA evidence can be mishandled and ignored

o   Important tool in the detection of crimes

The Study of Crime: What Theories, What Methods:

·        Vast amount of approaches in studying crime

o   Detailed examination of the legal history

o   Evaluation and effectiveness of various criminal sanctions and geographic profiling

·        The heart of the criminological enterprise are courses that are focused on theory and methods

·        Theories that guide criminology and criminologists

o   focus on the power of the state and its potential for abuse

o   others might describe themselves as rational choice theorists, arguing that crime occurs because of rational choices made by willing (or largely willing) actors

o   Others use learning theory as a guide for their scholarly analysis.

§  One prominent department of criminology focuses on teaching theories related to anomie, differential association, social control, social disorganization, routine activities, deterrence, and developmental approaches.

§  A theory course in another department of criminology has a somewhat overlapping agenda that includes labelling theory, differential association, Marxist theories of crime, and moral regulation.

·        Qualitative: Relating to the study of phenomena based not on measurement but on an exploration of the reasons for human behaviour and the qualities of subjective experience.

·        Quantitive: Relating to the measurement of something—its quantity—rather than its qualities.

·        These distinctions also have some elasticity; as noted above, there are sociologists who conduct research that is very much quantitative, relying on the analysis of large sets of data, and there are psychologists who focus on qualitative approaches to crime and criminal behaviour by interviewing offenders and their victims.

o   The combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, also known as a mixed methods approach, has gained popularity during the past 25 years.

§  Ex. the current divide between quantitative and qualitative research is restricting our ability to develop a coherent understanding of crime and criminal justice, and mixed methods—combining qualitative and quantitative approaches in a single study—provide a way out of this difficulty