Crime Prevention and control
Situational crime prevention
- Reducing opportunities for crime through target hardening.
- Can displace crime.
- May apply to rational crme such as petty theft
Environmental crime prevention
- Wilson and Kelling argue ‘broken windows’ prompt a spiral of decline.
- An absence of both formal social control and informal control means members of the community fell intimidated and powerless.
- Solution is to crack down through environmental improvement strategy, and zero tolerance policing will halt neighbourhood decline and prevent serious crime taking root.
Social and Community crime prevention
- These seek to deal with social conditions that predispose someone to future crime e.g. full employment to reduce the opportunity for crime and restrict poverty.
- In Perry Pre-School project in Michigan, a group of disadvantages 3-4 year olds were given intellectual enrichment programme, they were found to have far fewer arrests for violent crime, property crime and drug compared with peers not on the project.
Surveillance
Foucault – the panopticon
- Foucault distinguished between two different forms of power:
- Sovereign power – Monarch exercised power over people by creating a visible spectacle e.g. execution
- Disciplinary power – dominant after the 19th century and keeps people governed through surveillance
- He uses the Panopticon prison design to describe this
- If people have the constant assumption that they’re being watched they will commit to self-surveillance and behave appropriately, through the feeling they’re being watched.
Synoptic Surveillance
- Mathiesen – top down and bottom down surveillance has increased, so everybody watches everybody, this includes the media and the public.
Surveillant assemblages
- Haggerty and Ericson – surveillance involves the manipulation of digital data rather than physical bodies e.g. facial recognition CCTV.
Actuarial justice and risk management
- Feeley and Simon see this as a new form of surveillance, it involves the use of calculations of risk to identify the likelihood of people committing crime
- As it uses official statistics, a young, black man is more likely than a old, white female to be according to Lyon profiled as a potential criminal and more likely be prosecuted.
Labelling and Surveillance
- Norris and Armstrong found that CCTV operators target young black men, leading to a self-fulfilling prophecy and the criminalisation of black youth is revealed and others are lessened as theirs is ignored.
Punishment
- Different forms of punishment
- Deterrence – prevent future crime.
- Rehabilitation – reforming offender to not offend
- Incapacitation -removing offenders ability to offend e.g. execution or imprisonment
- Retribution – society is entitled to take revenge fo the offender breaching the moral code.
Durkheim
- Punishment upholds social solidarity and reinforce shared values, he identifies two types of punishment
- Retributive justice – traditional society has a strong collective conscious, so punishment is severe and vengeful.
- Restitutive justice – in modern society, there is extensive interdependence between individuals. Crime damages this and the function of justice should be to repair the damage e.g. compensation.
Marxism
- Punishment is part of the ‘repressive state apparatus’ (Althusser)
- The form of punishment reflects the economic base of society
- Under capitalism, imprisonment becomes the dominant punishment because, in the capitalist economy, time is money and offender ‘pay’ by doing time.
Trends in punishment
Changing role of prisons
- Originally used to hold people until punishment was decide, it was seen as a punishment in itself later on.
- Seen as most severe in Liberal Democracies
- Since the 1980s there has been a call for populist punitiveness, leading to tougher sentences – increasing the prison population.
- Garland says the UK and US is entering ‘mass incarceration’, in the US over 3% of the adult population has had some jurisdictial restriction on their liberty
Transcarteration
- Trend in Transcarteration – people moving from one institution to another e.g. care à young offenders institution à
Alternatives to prison
- Recent growth in the rate of community based controls e.g. curfews, community service orders and tagging.
Victims of crime
- Christie argues that the definition of victim is socially constructed and there is a stereotype of the perfect victim in the media and the CJS.
Positivist victimology
- Seeks patterns is victimisation and identify characteristics of victims that contribute to their victimisation.
- Victim proneness e.g. being less intelligent
- Victim precipitation – Wolfgang’s study of 288 homicides found that 26% of the time the victim initiated the violence
Critical Victimology
- Structural factors such as capitalism and patriarchy leave women and the poor at greater risk.
- Through the Criminal justice process the police can deny someone victim status e.g. if the police don’t listen to a case of domestic assault.
- Tombs and Whyte show that employers violations of the law leading to deaths injury show that workers are often shown as accident prone workers
Patterns of victimisation
- Repeat – 4% of the population are the victim of 44% of crime
- Class – poor more likely – crime highest is areas of unemployment
- Age – young more vulnerable to assault, sexual harassment, theft and abuse at home.
- Ethnicity – Minority groups are at greater risk than whites of being a victim of crime in general and the victim of racially motivated crime
- Gender, men à violence, women à domestic and sexual violence, stalking and harassment.
Impact of victimisation
- Crime may create indirect victims e.g. friends, relative and witnesses.
- Hate crimes against minorities may create a ‘wave of harm’ where it radiates to whole communities, not just the primary victim.
- Secondary victimisation: in addition to the impact of crime itself, individuals may suffer further victimisation in the CJS e.g. rape victims.
- Crime may create fear of becoming a victim, even if such fears are irrational e.g. women are ore afraid of going out in fear of attack, when men are more likely to be the victim of an attack