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Control, Punishment & Victims

CRIME PREVENTION & CONTROL
1. There are several approaches to crime prevention. These raise the issue of social control - the capacity of societies to regulate behaviour.
  1. SITUATIONAL CRIME PREVENTION (SCP)
    1. SCP strategies are a pre-emptive approach that relies on reducing opportunities for crime. They target specific crimes by managing or altering the environment & aim at increasing the risks of committing crime & reducing the rewards.
    2. 'Target hardening' measures including locking doors, security guards, re-shaping the environment to 'design crime out' of an area.
    3. Underlying SCP is rational choice theory: the idea that criminal act rationally, weighing up the risks & rewards of a crime opportunity.
    4. SCP measures may simply displace crime, moving it to different places, time, victims, types of crime etc.
    5. This approach may explain opportunistic petty street crime but not whit-collar, corporate & state crime. The assumption that criminals make rational calculations may not be true of violent & drug-related crimes.
  2. ENVIRONMENTAL CRIME PREVENTION
    1. WILSON & KELLING argue that 'broken windows' (signs of disorder, e.g. graffiti, begging, littering, vandalism) that are not dealt w/ send out a signal that no one cares, prompting a spiral of decline.
    2. An absence of both formal social control (police) & informal control (community) means members of the community feel intimidated & powerless.
    3. The solution is to crack down on any disorder through an environmental improvement strategy (e.g. abandoned cars promptly towed away) & a zero tolerance policing strategy. This will halt neighbourhood decline & prevent serious crime taking root.
  3. SOCIAL & COMMUNITY CRIME PREVENTION
    1. Rather than emphasising policing, these strategies emphasise dealing w/ social conditions that predispose some individuals to future crime.
    2. Because poverty is a cause of crime, general social policies may have a crime prevention role; e.g. full employment policies are likely to reduce crime as a 'side effect'.
    3. The Perry pre-school project in Michigan gave an experimental group of disadvantaged 3-4 year olds a 2 year old intellectual enrichment programme. The longitudinal study following their process into adulthood showed far fewer arrests for violent crime, property crime & drugs compared w/ peers not in the project.
PUNISHMENT
1. There are different justifications for punishment & they link to different penal penalties.
  1. Deterrence - punishment may prevent future crime from fear of further punishment.
  2. Rehabilitation- reforming/re-educating offenders so they no longer offend.
  3. Incapacitation - removing the offender's capacity to re-offend, e.g. by execution, imprisonment
  4. Retribution - the idea that that society is entitled to take revenge for the offender having breached its moral code.
2. DURKHEIM: A FUNCTIONALIST PERSPECTIVE
  1. DURKHEIM argues that the function of punishment is to uphold social solidarity & reinforce shared values by expressing society's moral outrage at the offence.
  2. DURKHEIM identifies 2 types of justice, corresponding to 2 types of society:
    1. Retributive justice - traditional society has a strong collective conscience, so punishment is severe & vengeful.
    2. Restitutive justice - in modern society, there is extensive interdependence between individuals. Crime damages this & the unction of justice should be to repair the damage (e.g. through compensation).
3. MARXISM: CAPITALISM & PUNISHMENT
  1. Punishment is part of the 'repressive state apparatus' that defends ruling-class property against the lower classes.
    1. The form if punishment reflects the economic base of society.
    2. Under capitalism, imprisonment becomes the dominant punishment because, in the capitalist economy, time is money & offenders 'pay' by 'doing time'.
4. FOUCAULT: THE BIRTH OF THE PRISON
  1. FOUCAULLT'S Discipline & Punish contrasts 2 different forms of punishment, which he sees as examples of sovereign power & disciplinary power:
    1. Sovereign power - in pre-modern society, the monarch exercised physical power over people's bodies & punishment was a visible spectacle, e.g. public execution.
    2. Disciplinary power becomes dominant from the 19th century & seeks to govern not just the body, but also the mind through surveillance. FOUCAULT use the panopticon to illustrate this.
  2. FOUCAULT argues that other institutions (e.g. mental asylums, barracks, factories, schools) followed this pattern & disciplinary power has now infiltrated every part of society, bringing its effects to the human 'soul' itself.
5. TRENDS IN PUNISHMENT
  1. THE CHANGING ROLES OF PRISONS
    1. Pre-industrial Europe has a wide range of punishments, e.g. banishment, fines, flogging, execution. Prison was used mainly for holding offenders prior to punishment.
      1. Only later is imprisonment seen as a form of punishment in itself.
      2. In liberal democracies, imprisonment is often seen as the most severe form of punishment but, as most prisoners re-offend, it may just be a way of making bad people worse.
    2. Since the 1980s, there has been a move towards 'populist punitiveness'. Politicians call for tougher sentences, leading to a rising prison population. The UK imprisons a higher proportion of people than almost any other country is Western Europe.
    3. Most prisoners are young, male & poorly educated. Ethnic minorities are over represented.
    4. GARLAND argues that the USA & to some extent the UK are moving into an era of mass incarceration. In the USA, over 3% of the adult population now have some form of judicial restriction on their liberty.
  2. TRANSCARCERATION
    1. There is a trend towards transcarceration (moving people between different prison-like institutions), e.g. brought up in care, then a young offender's institution, then adult prison.
    2. There has been a blurring of boundaries between criminal justice & welfare agencies e.g. social services, health & housing are increasingly given a crime control role.
  3. ALTERNATIVES TO PRISON
    1. Recently, there has been a growth in the range of community-based controls, e.g. curfews, community service orders, tagging.
    2. 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.
THE VICTIMS OF CRIME
1. One definition of victims is those who have suffered harm (e.g. physical or emotional suffering, economic loss) through acts that violate the laws of the state.
2. CHRISTIE argues that 'victim' is a socially constructed category; e.g. the stereotype of the 'ideal victim' held by the media, public & CJS is a weak, blameless individual who is the target of a stranger's attack.
3. There are 2 approaches to victimology:
  1. POSITIVIST VICTIMOLOGY
    1. POSITIVIST victimology focuses on interpersonal crimes of violence. It seeks patterns in victimisation & aims to identify the characteristics of victims that contribute to their victimisation, e.g. victim proneness (i.e. the characteristics that make victims different from & more vulnerable than non-victims, e.g. being less intelligent), victim precipitation (e.g. WOLFGANG'S study of 588 homicides found that 26% involved the victim triggering the events leading to murder, e.g. being the 1st to use violence).
    2. This approach is close to being 'victim-blaming'.
    3. Ignores structural factors such as poverty & patriarchy.
  2. CRITICAL VICTIMOLOGY
    1. Structural factors, e.g. patriarchy & poverty, place powerless groups such as women & the poor at greater risk of victimisation.
    2. Through the criminal justice process, the state applies the label of victim to some but withholds it from others; e.g. when police fail to press charges against a man for assaulting his wife, she is denied victim status.
    3. TOMBS & WHYTE show that employers' violations of the law leading to death or injury to workers are often explained away as the fault of 'accident prone' workers.
4. PATTERNS OF VICTIMISATION
  1. Repeat victimisation - a mere 4% of the population are victim of 44% of all crimes. Less powerful groups are more likely to be repeat victims.
  2. Class - the poor are more likely to be victims, e.g. crime is highest in areas of high unemployment.
  3. Age - the young are more vulnerable to assault, sexual harassment,theft, & abuse at home.
  4. Ethnicity - minority groups are at greater risk than whites of being victims of crime in general & of racially motivated crime.
  5. Gender - males are of greater risk of violent attacks; females are more likely to be victims of domestic & sexual violence, stalking & harassment.
5. THE IMPACT OF VICTIMISATION
  1. Crime may have a serious physical or emotional impact on its victim, e.g. feelings of helplessness, increased security-consciousness, difficulties in social functioning.
  2. Crime may create 'indirect' victims, e.g. friends, relatives & witnesses.
  3. Hate crimes against minorities may create 'waves of harm' that radiate out to intimidate whole communities, not just the primary victim.
  4. Secondary victimisation: in addition to the impact of crime itself, individuals may suffer further victimisation in the CJS, e.g. rape victims.
  5. Crime may create fear of becoming a victim even if such fears are irrational; e.g. women are more afraid of going out for fear of attack, yet young men are more likely to be victims of violence.
  6. FEMINISTS attack the emphasis on 'fear of crime' for focusing on women's passivity when we should focus on their safety - the structural threat of patriarchal violence that they face.

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Control, Punishment & Victims

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