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Introduction to Criminology – ELSA
Notes
Week 1
LECTURE – INTRODUCTION TO CRIMINOLOGY

Crime = intentional act or omission in violation of

criminal law, committed without defense
or justification, and sanctioned by the state
as a felony or a misdemeanor

- Social construct

Deviant behaviour = activities that fall outside the range of

normal societal toleration

Crime control = shaped by social influence

Criminology = scientific multi- and inter-disciplinary

discipline which studies crime, criminals,
and the criminal justice system

AIMS OF CRIMINOLOGY

o Define crime
o Map and measure crime
o Explain crime
o Oredict crime
o Prevent crime
 o Studies criminal law
→ How laws emerge
→ How they work
→ How the criminal justice system works
→ Is it effective?
→ What happens to violators?

“INTERDISCIPLINARY”

• Philosophy
• Sociology
• Psychology
• Biology
• Anthropology
• Others

RESEARCH METHODS

➔ Psychological testing
➔ Interviews
➔ Large scale quantitative analysis of crime patterns

THE HISTORY OF CRIME

Changes in: • Criminalization
• Perception of crime and criminals
• Crime patters
• Crime control
• Historical context
• Availability of data

MAINSTREAM CRIMINOLOGICAL THEORIES

 LEVEL CAUSES THEORIES
Micro Individual Biological
Psychological
Classical
Meso Environment Social learning theories
Chicago school
Macro Society Strain theory
Critical criminology
Marxism

LEVEL 1 – MICRO – INDIVIDUAL:

o Nature vs nurture debate

▪ Nature = how you were born
▪ Nurture = how you were raised

o Development

LEVEL 2 – MESO – THE ENVIRONMENT

o Family, school, neighborhood

o Social environment and social learning
o Influence of friends

LEVEL 3 – SOCIETY

o Economic distribution of wealth

o Inequality and strain
o Struggle for power
 CENTRAL IDEAS BEHIND THEORIES

 HUMAN NATURE: predestined or free will?

 CHARACTERISTICS OF SOCIETY: consensus* or conflict**?
 CAN CRIME BE EXPLAINED BY DIFFERENCES AND INEQUALITIES?

*consensus = crime is considered deviant behaviour

**conflict = natural consequence of struggle for power

HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT
➔ Individual perpetrator (=powerless)
➔ Social processes
➔ Social structures
➔ Organized crime
➔ State crime and international crimes (powerful)

TYPES OF CRIME

- PROPERTY
- VIOLENT
- ORGANIZED CRIME
- WHITE COLLAR
- POLITICAL

READING

CHAPTER 1 – INTRODUCTION
CRIMINOLOGY = study of crime, criminals, and criminal justice

➔ Any study of crime must involve the study of law

- How laws emerge

Criminology - How laws work

- How laws get violated
- What happens to violators

• Laws = relative, historically shaped

• Many criminologists believe that they should not be bound by law in their
studies of crime

*most common type of crime = property crime

CRIMINOLOGICAL METHODS

Epistemology = ways in which we choose to find out about the world

➔ There are many kinds of research methods

SOCIOLOGY AND THE “SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION”

SOCIOLOGY = systematic study of human society

- A form of consciousness, a way of thinking, a critical way of seeing
- Nothing is self-evident, fixed or “obvious”
- Transforms personal problems into public and political issues

SOCIOLOGY AND THE “CRIMINOLOGICAL IMAGINATION”

➔ Sociological introduction to criminology

Main question in sociology: what is society?
 What brings people into relationships with others?
 What can cause these relationships to end?
 How can cause these relationships to break?
  If they are not repaired, what are the consequences?
➔ Realizing there are general patterns of social life that shape people’s life experiences,
attitudes, beliefs, behaviour and identity

CRIMINOLOGICAL IMAGINATION involves:

◼ Crime = truly sociological concept; it is a social construct; while is much
agreement, what is considered crime varies
◼ The criminal is also socially constructed
◼ Crime control and punishment are also framed by social influences, that
determine the seriousness of acts and their priority

SOCIOLOGY, SOCIAL DIVISIONS AND CRIME

• Social divisions = central to sociology

• For a long time – main focus = inequalities associated with social/economical
positions
• Other divisions are relevant as well:
o Social and economic
o Gender and sexuality
o Ethnic and racialized
o Age divisions

CHAPTER 2 – HISTORIES OF CRIME

HISTORICAL PATTERNS: DECLINING VIOLENCE

➔ Many historians: past societies have been more violent than contemporary ones
➔ Past societies had a lot of violence, much was not prosecuted
➔ Violence peaked in 16th century, but then declined since the elite started solving their
problems through other means
➔ Europeans began to exercise a new kind of self-control over their bodies and
behaviour
➔ From 1950s onwards: crime has increased

BRITISH PROSECUTION PATTERNS

• Recorded crime rose sharply in early 19th century, stabilized until early 20th century
and then rose again after WW2
EXPLANATIONS:
1. Modernization – urbanization, migration, industrialization

2. Changes in control

Time period Phenomenon

1850-1910 1. Rising living standards
2. Political stability
3. Strong centralized regulatory state
20th century 1. Increased opportunities to commit
new crimes
2. Trends in the economic cycle
3. Breakdown in the fragile public
order consensus

TRENDS IN HISTORICAL WRITING

Women
White male Juveniles
Race
The underclass
Colonialism
 MEN AND CRIME

1960-70 -Radical historians wanted to study

“history from below”
- Wanted to realize the impact of
capitalism
➔ Defining feature of “social crime”: most ordinary people believed that these actions
were justifiable

1980 – class and crime began to change

Social history – Critique:

1. Studies of pre-capitalism → crime and disorder not just products of “modern”
struggles

2. Crime and its control – many varied social meanings: as much bound with issues
of nation, race, sensation and science as they were with economic inequalities

3. Historians of gender and family relation – highlighted many kinds of less than
heroic man crimes

➔ Western societies → increasingly intolerant of male violence  harsher penalties

➔ Criminalization of much of the “traditionally acceptable” male behaviour

WOMEN AND CRIME

• High female prosecution rates 1500-1800

• Falling rates 1800-1950
• Higher rates 1950-now

Before urbanization, slander was a very serious offence, frequently committed by women

TIME PERIOD EXPLANATIONS

1500-1800 Women were more engaged in public, street
and neighbourhood life – slander as a very
serious offence  conviction of large
numbers of women
1800-1950 Particular nature of early modern modes of
law enforcement, later, as it became more
specialized, it became more masculinized 
less convictions of women
Many offences committed by women were
dealt with outside of the criminal justice
system: alcoholism, soliciting etc.  not
recorded in criminal statistics
Women were sent to inebriate’s
reformatories, religious rescue homes,
hostels and asylums instead of prisons

YOUTH AND CRIME

Most prosecuted crime – committed by young people

EXPLANATIONS:
1. Commit more crime of a kind that people think should be reported
2. Younger offenders are more likely to be pursued by the criminal justice system

disorderly youth cultures

Research focuses on:
youth justice procedures

➔ Juvenile delinquency = far from new

➔ Each adult generation → experience recurring and familiar set of fears – unruly
behaviour in public space, lack of respect for traditional values – as “new”; believe
that young people’s behaviour was “worse” than it had been when they were young.
adults always perceive the social
worlds of the young as unfamiliar
 Ageing process =

➔ Youth crime and disorder = subject of debate since the 1500s

➔ Industrialization + urbanization  more opportunities for youth crime, as well as new
responses to youth crime

THE DANGEROUS CLASS”, “UNDERCLASS”, “RACE” AND “CRIME”

Many sociologists and criminologists: today’s society = much more unequal than in the past
social exclusion = prevalent
➔ Concerns about the “dangerous classes” and their links to crime – since early 19th
century

“Dangerous class” = social groups who are economically marginalized,

socially stigmatized and who appear to others to live
by a “different” set of moral values

➔ Definitions of “dangerousness” were (and remain) closely linked to perceptions of

class and race

Week 2
LECTURE – CRIMINOLOGICAL THEORIES

DEMONOLOGICAL THEORY

The Middle Ages

o Criminals – possessed by demons
o Crime = sin
o “Dangerous classes”
o Irrational tests were conducted to determine guilt/innocence
o Extreme punishment

i.e. witch hunts – Spanish Inquisition

 CLASSICISM

Cesare Beccaria (1738-1794): On crimes and punishments

• Age of Enlightenment
• Revolutionary concept of human beings – rational and free people with human rights
• Crime = calculated
• Penal system: fair and deterrent
• Abolishment of torture and the death penalty – discipline was preferred (predictable)

 huge influence on the criminal justice system

Jeremy Bentham
• Human beings = rational actors
• Hedonism: maximize pleasure, minimize pain
• Punishment → proportional
NEOCLASSICAL THEORIES
• Deterrent effect on criminal law

NEOCLASSICAL THEORIES

I. RATIONAL CHOICE THEORY – Cornish and Clarke (1986)

➔ People within certain circumstances make a choice (either break/abide by the law)
➔ People balance costs and benefits
➔ Choices affected by - Social factors
- Individual traits
- Attitudes

➔ Fight crime  make it less rewarding

 SITUATIONAL SCHOOL/OPPORTUNITY THEORIES
- Crime occurs on the meeting of a motivated offender with a suitable target in the
absence of a capable guardian

crime

lack of a guardian

Rational choice…
➔ Not very useful to predict the behaviour of individuals – pros and cons list is different
for everyone, can’t know for sure
➔ Useful to measure the effect of certain changes
o Surveillance
o Higher punishments
o Chance of getting caught In order to lower crime rates, measure the effect of
o Preventive measures certain changes

II. PATERNOSTER (1989)

• Chances of getting caught > punishment
• Rejection of family & friends > reaction of the State

Importance of classical theories – important to know in order to form your own ideas

III. POSITIVISM
➔ Use empirical methods, research
➔ The ones prior used their own rationality
➔ Focus: behaviour, causes
➔ Development of criminal types
➔ Behaviour determined, not chosen
➔ Treatment instead of punishment

CESARE LOMBROSO (1835-1909)

• “First real criminologists” because he conducted a lot of researches
• Atavism  criminals = Biologically and evolutionary
backwards

• Thought criminals had criminal characteristics, especially distinctive physical

appearance
• Used anthropology
• Very flawed research – flawed empirical work
• The fact that he used research methods was important enough for future criminology
theories

OTHER CRIMINOLOGISTS
◼ Enrico Ferri → criminal sociology
There are many causes of crime:
o Physical causes: climate, geographic location
o Anthropological causes: age, sex, and psychological make-up
o Social causes: population density, religion, economic conditions

◼ Quetelet (1796-1874)
o Used statistics to explain crime
o Studied crime patterns
o Variables, as sex and age

◼ William Sheldon (1898-1977)

o A certain body type is linked to criminality
 NEOBIOLOGICAL THEORIES
• People start to realize there are certain biological factors that play a role on the
commission of crime
• Nature vs nurture debate
• Brain disorders
• Behavioural genetics
• Evolutionary psychology
• Neurosciences
• Research here is very empirical, very large samples are used, use of longitudinal
surveys
• Focus on the criminal career approach
o Onset, persistence, escalation, desistance
• Identify risk factors – examples:
o Bad behaviour in class
o Aggression, lying, dishonesty, impulsivity
o Bad upbringing
o Criminal behaviour of parents
o Low intelligence and bad school results
o Poor schooling
o Divorce of parents
o Social-economic deprivation
➔ Children who cause trouble in their youth are most are most likely to become
criminals

PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES

• Processes within the human brain help explain crimes

• Psychology studies these processes
• All human beings go through several phases in which they are socialized
• These processes can show deficiencies

Essentially:
 Certain DNA Bad upbringing criminal

Important disciplines in expertise:

FIELD PSYCHOLOGY PSYCHIATRY FORENSIC

PSYCHIATRY
SUBJECT Studies personality Diagnosis of mental Studies the
MATTER and human disorders relationship between
behaviour a mental defect and
crimes

Example: Antisocial Personality Disorder

o Diagnostic and statistical manual (DSM-4)
▪ “the essential feature of the Anti-social Personality Disorder is a
pervasive pattern of disregard for, and in violation of, the rights of
others that begins in childhood or early adolescence and comes into
adulthood”
o Lack of empathy
o Disregard for the rights of others
Serial killer
o Have specific brain features
o Have a certain upbringing

James Fallon - Researched psychopaths

- Discovered that he himself is a psychopath when he
was looking at the brain scans of his family members
- He realized that most psychopaths are not criminal
and most criminals are not psychopaths
  factors are very interrelated!

Psychological theories nowadays focus on…

o Intelligence
o Personality
o Hyper-activity (ADHD)
o Personal characteristics
o Impulsivity

- Situational
➔ Psychological theories focus on Genes and situational
explanations
factors can interrelate!
- Biological factors
(i.e. genes)

Psychopath Sociopath
Emphasis on brain Emphasis on upbringing

EFFECT ON POLICY
→ Treatment: cure the criminal
→ Counselling
→ Rehabilitation

TWO DIFFERENT VIEWS

POSITIVIST SCHOOL CLASSICAL SCHOOL

Human behaviour = controlled by forces out People are rational human beings who make
of our control (either biological or deliberate choices they have a free will
psychological) Make crime less profitable in order to
reduce it
 The born criminal and the sick (predisposed
criminal)
Prescribe treatment to cure criminal
EARLY SOCIOLOGICAL THEORIES

Core ideas:
1. Crime is normal
2. Crime is related to conflict
3. Crime is linked to city life
4. Crime is learned learned behaviour
5. Crime: normal reaction to abnormal circumstances (strain, anomie)
6. Lack of attachment is a cause

I. ANOMIE THEORIES

Emile Durkheim – founding father of sociology (along with Weber and Marx)

Anomie = Breakdown of the ability of society

to regulate the natural appetites of
people – state of normlessness

Crime = Natural and normal

phenomenon, serves certain
functions
• Promotes unity

II. CAPITALISM AND CRIME

Conflict model explains the process of

criminalization
Karl Marx
Crime = rational response to inequitable
conditions

• Working class is deprived (exploitation)

• Crime = label → powerful groups control the labelling process
• Challenges basic assumptions of mainstream criminology
III. CULTURAL TRANSMISSION, CITY LIFE AND THE CHICAGO SCHOOL

• ‘Broken window theory’: if a neighbourhood looks bad  there is a lot of crime there
• Crime depends on the area where you live – distinct areas
• Study crime rates
• Observation of city life
• City life is different:
o Anonymity
o Less social control

Criminogenic factors → contribute to crime

▪ Population density
▪ Heterogenous populations
▪ High mobility – moving in an out
▪ Low social and economic status
▪ Highway accessibility

CHICAGO SCHOOL
o Study crime rates
o Look at different zones
o Explain crime rates by looking at social disorganization

DIFFERENT CRIME RATES

 IV. CRIME IS A LEARNING PROCESS

Edward Sutherland • University of Chicago

• Huge influence on criminology
• Almost all behaviour is learned
behaviour
• Criminals are not any different from
ordinary people
• Criminal behaviour is learned

DIFFERENTIAL ASSOCIATION

• Crime can be explained by

copying the behaviour of
“significant others” (family,
friends, characters, people
someone values)
• Frequency, duration, priority,
and intensity with these
contacts matter as well

NEUTRALIZATION TECHNIQUES – Sykes and Matza (1957):

➔ Criminal does not qualify the act they did as a crime
➔ Denial of responsibility, harm of everyone, the existence of victims
➔ Condemning the condemners
➔ Appeal to higher authorities

V. ANOMIE AND THE STRESSES AND STRAINS OF CRIME

Merton (1910-2003): • American dream – lack of means of

achieving this
• Opportunities to fulfill dreams  available to
everyone
• Discrepancy  antisocial behaviour
• Legitimate aim + lack of legitimate means
 illegitimate means
 Cultural goals Institutionalized means
Conformism + +
Innovation + -
Ritualism - +
Retreat - -
Rebellion  

Innovation, retreat, rebellion  crime

CLASSIC STRAIN THEORY

• Discrepancy between goals and means
• Legitimate aim but lack of legitimate means  people rely on illegitimate means

VI. GANGS, YOUTH AND SUBCULTURE

• Subculture of delinquency
• Juvenile gangs (lower-class)
• Crime as a reaction to anomie

Cohen: lower-class reaction theory

Cloward & Ohlin: differential opportunity

SOCIAL CONTROL THEORIES

➔ How society tries to maintain social control
➔ How it succeeds/fails to do so

Travis Hirschi (1969): - Causes of delinquency

- “Everyone would violate the law if
they wouldn’t get caught”
 SOCIAL BOND THEORY

• People who break the law have a broken bond with society  reducing personal
stakes in conformity
o Social bond – attachment
o Commitment
o Involvement
o Belief
o Socialization
▪ Extent to which people are bonded to society
▪ Prevents people from committing crimes
▪ Not everyone is socialized in a similar way
o Law abiding citizens and criminals do not intrinsically differ
DIFFERENCES

Biological, psychological, and differential Control theories

association
People – by nature – obey the law People – by nature – violate the law

RADICALIZING TRADITIONS

LABELLING THEORY
• Individuals are deviant mainly because society labels them as deviant; people
stigmatized as a criminal  becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy
• Crime = a label (social construct), crime  an act
• Definition of crime – enforced by the powerful
• Labelling process starts when you are getting caught
• Stigmatization

REINTEGRATIVE SHAMING
• Shaming theory – makes it worse
• Make criminals be ashamed of their peers
• Reintegrative shaming
John Braithwaite:

CONFLICT THEORIES
• Macro perspective
• Differential distribution of power and wealth  crime
• Criminal law is not neutral but it is an instrument of power
• Focus: society, the governmental reaction and labelling process

FEMINIST CRIMINOLOGY
• Mainstream criminology fails to include gender as a central force
• Blind to ideological bias and ignoring women
• Do theories apply to women?
• Victimization of women
• Gender differences in crime
• Gendered justice

SOCIAL CHANGE
1. Crime and the movement to late modernity
2. Post-modernism and crime
3. Globalization and crime
4. The risk society

READING

CHAPTER 4 – THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND EARLY TRADITIONS

Classicism XVIII century

Positivism XIX century

Drew upon Enlightenment ideals and

characterized offender as a rational,
free willed actor
Cesare Beccaria
Jeremy Bentham

Classical school of criminology – XVIII century

Cesare Lombroso More empirical, scientific approach; using

Enrico Ferri techniques of other sciences; behaviour was
determined rather than chosen; treatment
Francis Galton was more appropriate than punishment

➔ However, crime and criminology have been around before the XVIII century
➔ As old as human civilization
o Need to be cautious of histories of criminology that suggest no one had
thought about crime before the XVIII century
o Older ways of thinking about crime did not disappear with modern age

XVIII brutality → XIX organization

 this transition resulted from the shift to an understanding of crime based on Enlightenment
ideas; Montesquieu, Rousseau, Voltaire: contributed to a move away from ‘Barbaric”
systems to rational systems
Peter Hamilton (socialist): 10 features of Enlightenment philosophies
• Reason = way of organizing and gaining knowledge
• Empiricism = factual knowledge gained through the senses and observation
• Science = particularly experimental scientific observation and revolution
• Universalism = the search for general laws and principles
• Progress = improvement of “human condition”
• Individualism = individual experience as a starting point
• Toleration = minority religious beliefs  inferior
• Freedom = humans should be free from tyranny
• Human nature = universal
• Secularism
 Enlightenment ideas  classical approach to crime
- More rational and fair system for organizing punishment
Main concern = Establish a more just social order
and ensure greater equality for
its citizens

Cesare Beccaria – seen as founder of this movement

• Social contract theory

• “Free will”
• Punishment as deterrent
• Utilitarianism
• Secularism

CLASSIC THOUGHT IDEAS OF PUNISHMENT

▪ Punishment can only deter if it is PROPORTIONAL to crime

a. Severity of punishment corresponds to the severity of the harm done
b. The type of punishment resembles the crime, so society can learn to associate it
with the crime
 Punishment = public, prompt, necessary, the
least possible in the given
circumstances, proportionate,
dictated by the laws

Cesare Beccaria – “Dei delitti e delle pene”

Jeremy Bentham – proportionality, visibility, inspection

- Ideas don’t appear out of the blue: they emerge from historical change
 ideas don’t just vanish; they can be modified, rebranded, or reworked
i.e. classicism remains part of the criminal justice system today

Problems with the classical model:

▪ Presents an overly rational vision of human nature, ignores the complexities of
human behaviour
 ▪ Classicism: free choice  crime; but is everyone equally free? Do they all have
the same choices?
▪ Assumes that individuals live in societies that are organized and fair, can we have
justice in an unjust society?

THE POSITIVIST MOVEMENT

Lombroso – Thought criminals had biological

anomalies/a distinct appearance

Flawed experiment:
anyone can have
these traits

However, he is credited for re-focusing criminological thinking on the criminal type

Collaborated with Enrico Ferri – three-way view on the causes of crime

Anthropological: Social:
Telluric:
heredity and population,
physical
constitution religion, education

➔ “Every crime is a result of the interaction of these three causes”

Divided criminals into 5 types:

1) Criminal lunatics
2) Born incorrigibles
3) Habitual criminals
4) Occasional criminals
5) Emotional criminals

Adolphe Quetlet – tried to determine the “average man” in order to study criminals

THE POSITIVIST VIEW

• The criminal is a specific type of person

• The criminal differs from others; focus upon finding criminogenic characteristics
• The criminal is driven “into” crime through factors outside their control

Problems:
▪ Assumes that people are driven into crime; assumes people are not free; denies the
meaning of crime and the appeal for committing crimes
▪ Exaggerates the difference between criminals and non-criminals
▪ Tendency to neglect the workings of the penal system
Issue Classical school Positivist school
Roots Enlightenment Modern science
Focus Criminal administration Criminal person
Approach Philosophical – social Scientific, positivism
contract theory, Laws
utilitarianism Measurements
View of human nature Free will Determined by biological,
Hedonism psychological, and social
Morally responsible for your environment
own behaviour Moral responsibility
obscured
View of justice system Social contract: exists to Scientific treatment system
protect society; due process to cure pathologies and
 and concern with civil
rights; restrictions on system concern with civil rights
Definite sentence
Form of law Statutory law; exact
specifications of illegal acts
and sanctions
Purpose of sentencing Punishment for deterrence;
sentences are determinate
(fixed length)
Criminological experts Philosophers; social
reformers
rehabilitate offenders; no
Indefinite sentence
Social law; illegal acts
defined by analogy;
scientific experts determine
social harm and proper form
of treatment
Treatment and reform;
sentences are indeterminate
(variable length until cured)
Scientists; treatment experts

CHAPTER 5 – EARLY SOCIOLOGIES OF CRIME

- Analysis of the ways of thinking about crime introduced by sociologists in the

XX century
- Although some of their work has been criticized, much remains relevant today

BASICS OF THESE THEORIES:

I. Crime is “normal” in all societies
o Serves certain functions
o Cannot be easily eliminated

II. Crime is bound up with conflict

(often by a class-based nature)
o Easily understood in terms of social divisions and interests (especially
economic)

III. Crime is bound with tension

o Breakdown of the smooth workings of society
 o Can be understood by looking at the tensions in a society

IV. Crime is strongly (but far from exclusively) linked to city life
o Modern cities  cultural enclaves
o Crime can be usefully understood by mapping these “criminal areas”

V. Crime is learned in ordinary situations

o May be usefully understood by looking at life histories and how people
learn their values

VI. Crime through a lack of attachment to groups valuing law-abiding behaviour

o May be understood through the breakdown of social controls

I. THE NORMALITY OF CRIME

Emile Durkheim - “there is nothing

abnormal about
deviance”
- Normal part of
society

Functionalist perspective: looks at

the ways in which societies become
integrated as their various parts
perform various vital functions

CRIME AND DEVIANCE – 4 FOUNDATIONS

a. Culture = moral choices between the

good and bad in life

➔ The conception of the “good” rests upon an opposing notion of the “the bad”
➔ No justice without crime
➔ Deviance = indispensable to generating and sustaining morality
b. Deviance = clarifies and stakes out moral
boundaries

c. Responding to deviance promotes social unity

➔ People react with collective outrage

d. Deviance encourages social changes

➔ Today’s deviance sometimes becomes tomorrow’s morality

Mary Douglas: “Where there is no differentiation,

there no defilement”

Problems with functionalism:

▪ Can’t explain differences in types of crime

II. THE EGOISM OF CRIME IN CAPITALIST SOCIETY

• Marxist theory and Conflict theory

• Capitalism generating high levels of crime
• Worker is poor; he is deprived of almost all pleasures; he does not fear the
penalties of the law
• If demoralization of a worker passes a certain point  he will turn into a criminal
• Worker loses all will and has to follow blindly the laws of nature

Problems with Marxism:

▪ Many of Marx’s predictions have not come true
▪ Structuralist and deterministic predictions are too strong
 III. ANOMIE AND THE STRESSES AND STRAINS OF CRIME

Robert K Merton - Crime and deviance as an individual

adaptation to pressures flowing from
the social structure
- Strains and tensions of capitalist
society lead to crime

Social structure  Culture

Provides economic routes to success Provides norms, values and goals

ANOMIE = tension; norm breakdown

ADAPTIATIONS = solutions to the American Dream
INNOVATION the
= attempt to achieve a culturally
approved goal (wealth) by innovational
means

RITUALISM Eschewing
= the cultural goals in favour of
almost compulsive efforts to live
“respectably”; they embrace the rules to
the point where they lose sight of their
larger goals (i.e. people working in
corporations)

RETRATISM rejections
= of both cultural goals and means so
that one “drops out” (i.e. addicts)

• Crime is induced through a system that has potential for contradiction and profit

This theory is relevant for: • Delinquent gang theory

• Understanding the criminogenic effects
of rapid social change
 Problems with anomie theory:
▪ Presumes goals and values; nowadays, societies are too complicated for a
simple unitary idea to be valid
▪ People are socialized to different sets of values
▪ We do not necessarily have to see crime as motivated by painful sources or
solely background structural factors

Influence of this theory: pointed sharply to the economic factors shaping crime

IV. CHICAGO SCHOOL

• City of Chicago was famous for the study of sociology
• Borrows some early social work traditions
• Their approach to the study of crime:
1) May be more common in the city because it generates a distinct way of life
▪ Greater tolerance for diversity, less controlling environment but more
criminogenic one

2) Crime can be found in “natural habitats”

▪ Certain ways of life are found in certain areas

3) Crime is learnt in the same way as everything else

4) Crime is best studied through a range of different methodologies which when
put together bring about a richer understanding of crime

5) Crime may be best dealt with through coordinated agencies

THE ZONAL THEORY OF CRIME

• Urban industrial community of Chicago may be described as consisting of 5
successive zones:

1. Retail, financial, recreational, civic, and political centers

- Few people live there

2. High density and low-cost housing

- Change is rapidly taking place
- Slum districts

3. Beyond factory but surrounding the city

- Remains accessible
4. Inhabited by families engaged in professional and clerical pursuits
- Home of the middle class

5. Suburban districts

➔ There were distinctive areas where crime rates were much higher;
➔ There, ethnic communities conflicted, housing was rundown, poverty was more
widespread
 V. CRIME AS LEARNED IN ORDINARY SITUATIONS

DIFFERENTIAL ASSOCIATION THEORY

Edwin Sutherland - Crime is a normal learning process

- Learning any social patterns (even
deviant) is part of a group process
- A person’s tendency towards
conformity or deviance depends
on the relative frequency of
association with others who do
the same
9 propositions that form this theory:

1) Criminal behaviour is learnt

2) …in interaction with other persons in a process of communication
3) Principal part of learning criminal behaviour – within intimate personal groups
4) Learning includes
a. Techniques
b. Motives, attitudes
5) The direction of motives is learned from definitions of legal codes as favourable or
unfavourable
6) A person becomes delinquent of an excess of definitions favourable to violation of
law
7) Differential associations very in frequency, duration, priority, or intensity
8) This process of learning involves all other mechanisms involved in other learning
9) Criminal behaviour is not an explanation but an expression of general values

Problems with the Chicago school:

▪ The concentric zone model is not a general case
▪ Just because certain areas accommodate more criminality it does not
mean that people in those areas are criminals
 ▪ Does not explain why some people become criminals and some don’t
▪ Not everyone shares the same cultural standards for morality
▪ Conception of criminality almost always targets poor people
▪ Not everyone who violates conventional cultural standards is a deviant

VI. GANGS, YOUTH AND DEVIANT SUBCULTURES

Albert Cohen - Delinquents engaged in short lived

hedonism and in a “reaction formation”
to the frustration experienced as part of
the class system
- They gain status among their peers
- They become delinquent out of status
frustration

Bridge between the Chicago tradition and the strain tradition → young people have access to
different kinds of youthful cultures – 3 major kinds:
1) Criminal
- Close bonds between different age levels of offender
 rapid integration of new individuals into levels of crime

2) Violent
- Violence becomes the means through which to resolve their frustrations and
problems

3) Retreatist/drug
- Withdrawal from the wider social order

DEVIANCE • Grows out of the relative opportunity

structure that frames young people’s
CONTROL THEORIES
lives
 I. NEUTRALIZATION THEORY

Sykes and Matza - Boys commit delinquent acts when their

commitment to the moral order is weakened
- They do this through techniques of moralization

Stories people tell themselves which break bonds

through such devices as blaming others, denying
responsibility or refuting the harm of their actions

Five major techniques:

1. Denial of personal responsibility by detailing their background (i.e. broken
home)
2. The denial or harm to anyone
3. The person injured/wronged is not a victim
4. The delinquent condemns condemners: “society is more corrupt than I
am”
5. Delinquent groups loyalties supersede loyalty to the norms of an
impersonal society

II. SOCIAL CONTROL THEORY

Travis Hirschi - “Why do people refrain from committing crime”

- Delinquent acts result when an individual’s bond to
society is weak
- Conformity arises from four types of social controls
that create a social bond
ELEMENTS EXAMPLES
- The weaker any of these controls are, the more
1) ATTACHMENT Identification with peers or parents
likely criminal acts are
2) INVOLVEMENT Time-consuming activity, lack of boredom
3) COMMITMENT Investment in society, educational aspiration
 4) BELIEF Respect for authorities, absence of
neutralization

➔ Individuals with high self-control will be substantially less likely at all times of their
life to engage in criminal activity
➔ Many criminologists think it is the most influential theory on delinquency

Problems with control theories:

▪ Works from the assumption that most of us would commit crimes if we had
the chance
▪ Neglects offenders’ motivations
▪ Difficulties ascertaining how tight these bonds have to be

REINTEGRATIVE SHAMING

John Braithwaithe - Sanctions imposed by relatives, friends or a

personally relevant collectivity have more
effect on criminal behaviour than sanctions
imposed by legal authority

Shame = All social processes expressing disapproval that have the

aim of inducing remorse in the offender
o Effective in complex urban societies, as well as in simpler ones

WRITTEN OUT OF CRIMINOLOGICAL HISTORY

I. Early black sociologists

• Perspectives of African Americans remain on the periphery of the discipline
• Their work centers race and racism
 • Influenced by the Chicago school and emphasize social disorganization, anomy, and
the ecology of crime
• Suggested that the ending of slavery meant they had to adjust to new ways of living
and create new kinds of moral values; cope with a stressful free market while they
faced racial prejudice; many migrated north  disorganization of cities
• Racialized justice quick to criminalize and exploit black groups  they lost faith in
“white” justice

II. Early sociological studies in women and girls

• Women and girls’ bodies, hormones, and sexuality were believed to shape their
behaviour as much as socio-economic questions about class, aspiration and anomie
• Puberty  sexual tension  cause girls to break moral codes or commit crime
• One study suggests that physical defects and lack of physical attractiveness have
played a part in causing delinquency

CHAPTER 6 – RADICALIZING TRADITIONS

- Theories of the late XX century
- Many of these are responses of earlier theories

1960s: o Era when all kinds of established authority came to be

challenged
o Academic disciplines also experience some profound
upheavals
o The very idea of “crime” and “deviance” was challenged; all
assumptions came under critical scrutiny
The radical shift in emphasis  LABELLING THEORY
o Politics became an integral part of criminology
➔ New divisions and schemes of this theory subsequently appeared, which proposed:
• Turn away from conventional theories of crime; crime = socially constructed
theory, which differed throughout history and cultures  it could not be a
“criminal type” since it depended on who defined the laws
• Pathologies, disorganization, stress, etc.  rejection of crime; see crime as a
special form of conflict
 • Crime and deviance as ideologically driven categories; concerns of criminology –
role of social control
• Re-examination of youth cultural theories of crime, more emphasis on culture
• Fresh concern with gender
• Criminology as part of the very problem it tries to solve

“DEVIANCE” AND LABELLING – “LABELLING THEORY”

1960s-1970s: - Labelling theory became the dominant sociological theory of

crime
- Focus on societal reactions to crime (from public opinion of
authorities)
➔ This theory highlights social reaction
➔ Rooted in the idea of W.I. Thomas: “When people define situations as

real, they become real in their

consequence” – “self-fulfilling
prophecy”

MAIN THEORISTS
1) Edwin Lemert
• Many episodes of norm violation have few reactions from others and little effect of a
person’s self-concept = PRIMARY DEVIANCE
• Response to initial deviance can set in motion SECONDARY DEVIANCE = repeated
norm violations, take on a deviant identity
“primary, secondary” – distinction between original and effective causes

Primary deviance Secondary deviance

Has only marginal implications for the Become central facts of existence for those
status of psychic structure of the person experiencing them, altering psychic
concerned structure

2) Howard S Becker
• Focus on marijuana use and its control
• Ways in which cultures and careers were shaped by negative sanctions against drug
use
• Who applies the label of “deviant” to whom? What kind of consequences does this
have?
DEVIANCE – not quality of the act the person commits, but rather a consequence of the
application by others of rules and sanctions to an “offender”
• Challenged standard definitions of deviant behaviour
• Show how sanctions against drug use led to distinctive subcultures and careers as
drug users which would not exist without sanctions – SANCTIONS SHAPED THE
NATURE OF DRUG USE

3) Stanley Cohen
• Mods and rockers came into being because of the responses of the media, police, and
courts
MORAL PANIC = heightened awareness of certain problems at key moments

4) Edwin Schur
• Legal response to “victimless” crimes generates more problems than it solves (i.e.
homosexuality, abortion, drugs)

*the labelling perspective brought political analysis to deviancy study

*labelling was a political act
LABELLING THEORY – key component in the development of the sociology of
deviance
• Highlights societal reactions to crime and deviance

Problems with labeling theory:

▪ Seen as a liberal theory, gives too little attention to the state, power, and
economy
▪ Political right sees this as too sympathetic to the crime
▪ Neglect of the origins of deviance, no initial motivations steering individuals
towards deviance
▪ Rigorous positivist social scientists say it lacks evidence
 ▪ Although rejects determinism, focuses on determinism by societal reactions

HOWEVER, several of the labelling theory’s key themes has entered

criminological research under different guises – modern day reincarnations:
a. THEORY OF MORAL PANICS
o Focus becomes the exaggerated responses of control agencies in
creating anxiety

b. THEORY OF SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONISM

o Conditions must be brought to people’s notice, in order to become
problems
o Looks at how society labels things and how others respond to it
consequently

c. ENHANCED UNDERSTANDING OF SOCIAL CONTROL

CRIME AS CONFLICT

Karl Marx: “to be radical” = to grab things at the root

→ root of this political vision = class conflict

Alvin Gouldner – criticizes Becker’s PARTIZAN (=strong supporter of a party, biased)
society:
• Amounts to little more than well-meaning zookeeping
• Criticizes the portrayal of the deviant as a passive victim of an intolerant society,
rather than a defiant rebel against it

ECONOMIC CONFLICTS

Jeffrey Reiman - Poor are arrested and charged out of proportion

compared to other members for the kinds of
crimes the poor generally commit
- The criminal justice system is tolerant to crimes
poor people never have the opportunity to
commit
- The criminal justice system is designed to
maintain, not reduce crime
 THE NEW CRIMINOLOGY

• Significant interest since the 70s

Ian Taylor
Paul Walton “The New Criminology”
Jock Young

• Substantial critique of all aforementioned theories

• Argued that most existing theories of crimes:
➔ Had not looked at a wide range of questions
➔ Had often ignored wider material conflicts at the root of much of the criminal process
➔ Too deterministic: little role for the human creative factor
➔ Had inadequate epistemologies (=theories on how we know the truth)
➔ There are limitations on the “radical” theories of the 60s-70s too
➔ From their work
 materiality of crime/critical criminology/neo-Marxist criminology
o The crimes of the powerful deserve focus
o Causes of crime = the social structure (inequalities of the wealth and
power, property and life chances)

LEFT REALISM
• Counter the resurgent right wing criminology through a renewed commitment to
social democratic principles and a return to Merton’s understanding of anomie to
confront crime
• Focuses on what was conceived as “the square” of crime
 STATE OFFENDER
Criminal justice Individual/
agencies, corporation
political system

SOCIETY VICTIM
Individual/
group

- All four factors need to be looked at when considering all types of crimes

VICTIMS:Overwhelmingly poor, working-class and often

those who are marginalized because of their

ethnicity
- Causes of crime need to be looked for in deep, structural inequalities

RELATIVE DEPRIVATION
Perceived disadvantage
arising from a specific
comparison

CRIME

MARGINALIZATION
People live on the edge
of society, little stake in
society overall
 • Argue for policies involving fundamental shifts in economic situations, enlightened
prison policies, environmental design
• See crime in context

LEFT IDEALISM
• Idealism because of a stress of ideas rather than material reality

CRIMINOLOGIES FROM THE RIGHT – THE NEW RIGHT

1. Natural law philosophy to criminalize “victimless crimes” that do not violate

anyone’s rights (i.e. drunkenness, homosexuality, prostitution) in order to “police
the morals of America”
2. Emphasize the virtues of the free market economics as solutions to social
problems
3. Continuing importance of deterrence, free will and individual responsibility
4. Neo-conservative
o Poverty does not cause crime
o Crime caused by the collapse of civic socialization of young people,
community failure and family breakdown

“Broken windows” image – explains how neighborhoods descend into crime and disorder
when minor incivilities set things in motion

THE BIRMINGHAM CIRCLE AND THE NEW SUBCULTURAL

THEORY
• Important development
Why do women commit way less crimes than men do?
Carol Smart - Women have been neglected in the study
of crime
- When they have been included, the
approach was sexist
 Three major contributions of the feminist approach:
1. Showing how women have been neglected
o All leading theorists = men
o Wrote almost exclusively about men

2. Perspective to suggest new areas of study

o Gendering of sexual violence, awareness of violence against women, rape,
gendering of social control

3. Way of bringing gender to the forefront and especially the role of men and
masculinity in crime
o Study of women in crime, how they are handled differently by police, centrality of
sexual violence

Women coming before criminal courts experience DOUBLE DEVIANCE

▪ Women’s crime rates are low, so when they do offend it is considered worse
▪ They are placed in double jeopardy:
1. Sanction of the criminal justice system
2. Harshly treated because seen as deviant as women; they disappoint
traditional gender role expectations

o Many more man than women commit crimes

o Girls and women seen to be more regulated
o There is a dominant of masculinity to be found in many societies that highlights
power, dominance, aggressiveness, “performing as men” while they engage in
criminal behaviour

FOCAULT AND DISCOURSE THEORY

• Work looks broadly at a member of institutions

• Questions roots and patterns of ideas found in social life
• Concern about criminology: sees is emerging as a discipline at the same time as a
whole new apparatus of crime control is brought into being
CHAPTER 7 – CRIME, SOCIAL THEORY, AND SOCIAL CHANGE

- Some ideas on criminology may be outdated, but they all provoked thought
- The world is undergoing significant and continual social change
- Impact on how we think about crime and on crime itself

Four general trends:

I. Movement to a late modern society
II. Drift towards postmodernism
III. The speeding of globalization
IV. The emergence of a risk society

I. CRIME AND THE MOVEMENT TO LATE MODERNITY

• Modern world now seen to be giving way to a late modern world

• New ways of thinking about crime and control are now necessary

CHANGES
o Mass consumerism  increased desires for commodities  escalation
in credit card use  potential increase in fraud
o Restructuring of labour market  more casual employment  more
people entering informal or underground economy  looking for
alternative ways of survival like crime
o Changes in families  different kinds of households and growing
numbers of women at work  older controls on behaviour become
weakened or as population becomes older, more crimes of and
against the elderly
o Changes in social ecology  new crimes connected to the
environment come into being
 o Cars, suburbs  shifts in demography and city life  crimes
facilitated by movement
o New forms of information technology  new types of crime
o Social impact of mass media  from how people view criminality and
their response
o 9/11  more security on international terrorism

Jock Young – The Exclusive Society

➔ Economic
o People excluded from the labour market
➔ Social
o People are excluded from society
➔ Expansion of the criminal justice system

II. POSTMODERNISM AND CRIME

Postmodernism = Much less certain and more professional

view of the world is in the making

Postmodernist criminology:
• Sees the whole modern criminological world as misguided
• Asks the same questions and gets the same answers, failing to solve the problem of
crime
• World made up of many shifting differences
• There is no one story to be told of crime
• Respecting the existence of a plurality of perspectives, against the notion that there is
a single truth from a privileged perspective

Stuard Henry
Constitutive Criminology:
Dragan Milanovic
• Abandonment of the futile search of causes of crime
• Human beings are responsible for actively constructing their
social world, but at the same time are shaped by the world they
create
• Basics of crime = socially constructed and discursively
constituted exercise of unequal power relations
• Crime = the power to deny others the ability to make a
 CULTURAL CRIMINOLOGY

• Roots: Birmingham Centre and New Criminology

• Role of image, style and meaning in illicit subcultures and mediated processes
through which crime and punishment are constructed
• Commodification of crime and intense pleasures when doing wrong
• How classism marginalizes people

III. GLOBALIZATION AND CRIME

• World  increasingly connected

• Influence many criminogenic processes:
o Eased movement of illegal goods, people, and money
o Significant shifts in the distribution of wealth

Globalization – many meanings:

1. Increasing interconnectedness of societies
2. Increasing interconnectedness of crim across societies
3. Various processes
 Globalization = how each community adapts and responds to the global flow

Focus of global criminal economy

▪ Arms and weapons trafficking
▪ Trafficking in nuclear materials
▪ Smuggling of migrants
▪ Trafficking of women and children
▪ Trafficking in body parts
▪ Money laundering

International drug trafficking

➔ Partly fueled by demand
➔ Partly fueled by supply – people depend on drug production

Globalization of social control

i.e. Centre for the International Crime Prevention (UN)

Rebirth of human rights theories

• Criminology’s global concerns have aroused more and more interest in such
rights issues

IV. THE RISK SOCIETY: ACTUAL JUSTICE AND CONTRADICTORY

CRIMINOLOGIES

Risk = Now a dominant theme in contemporary life,

virtually everything we do has danger associated

with it

Anthony Giddens - One of the defining features of late

modernity = the development of a
calculative attitude in individuals and
institutions to deal with the issues of risk,
trust, and security
Ulrich Beck - Risk society = distinct stage of modernity that has
replaced the class society of the industrial era
- New technologies are generating risks that are very
different from earlier ones
- People living in risk societies don’t care about justice
and equality, they care about preventing danger

The genealogy of risk

• Second major perspective on risk
• More of an impact in criminology
• Risk = particular way of thinking
Week 3
LECTURE – TYPES OF CRIME I

• Used as scientific classificatory system

• Utilized as an educational tool
Real value → educational value
Provide illustrative schemes
• Although subject to abstractions and overgeneralization, enables us to oversimply

CATEGORIES
1. Violent crimes
2. Property crimes
3. Public order crimes
4. Organized crimes
5. White-collar crimes
6. Political crimes and terrorism

1. Violent crimes
i.e. homicides (multiple murder)
sexual assault
robbery
domestic violence

*Hate crime = motivated in part or singularly by personal

prejudice against others because of diversity
 • Race
• Sexual orientation
• Religion
• Ethnicity
- Extremist • Disability
- Excitement
- Resentment

MULTIPLE MURDER

o Serial killer
o Mass murder
o Spree murder

Many serial killers:

- Bedwetting, fire starting, cruelty to animals
- Dysfunctional families
Sociopath → very bad upbringing
Psychopath → birth defects

CRIME AND EMOTION

o Passion can cause crime

▪ Primary emotions: happiness, fear, anger, depression
▪ Secondary emotions: hate, shame, guilt, pride, wonder, resentment
o Culturally and socially shaped
o Vary in intensity
o Shame can be a cause of violence
o Not a single cause of crime, multimer factors come into play

Robbery = theft through violence/threat of violence

 Professional Opportunistic Addict Alcohol
Long term Infrequent and Support Support habit
commitment to unplanned addictive habits
crime

DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

▪ Child abuse
▪ Spouse abuse
▪ Elder abuse
▪ Kidnapping

➔ Problems with criminalizing domestic violence = privacy of home

“Dark figure” = A lot of crime we do not know of
because it is not reported

Figure = number

SEXUAL VIOLENCE

- Main aim = overpowering, not sex

Reasons:
o Doing gender
o Show power
o Psychiatric problems

Rape myths
• Women seduce men
• Women enjoy coercive sex
• Men have coercive sexual needs and drives
• Typical rapist is a stranger/black
 2. Property crimes

= involves stealing or damaging someone’s property without force/threat of force

(otherwise, robbery)

Most frequently reported crime

Rise because:
• Population growth
• Urbanization
• Economic hardships
• Unemployment

Decline because of:

• Tougher criminal justice system
• Growing wealth/equality

Typical victims:
o Employers
o Poor people
o Ethnic groups
o Young people
o People living in certain areas

3. Public order crimes

→ illegal because they offend public morality
▪ Prostitution
▪ Alcohol and narcotic abuse
▪ Gambling
▪ Disorderly conduct

READING
CHAPTER 10 – CRIME AND PROPERTY

Property crime = most frequently reported crime

• Involves stealing and dishonestly obtaining or damaging another’s property (tangible
or intangible)
• Theft = social construct
• We tend to associate “fraud” with crime for gain or major financial gains (scandals)

PATTERNS OF PROPERTY CRIME

- The category in which we place property crime = very important

- Crime statistics = useful starting point for understanding patterns and decisions of
crime

From 1830s onwards – 6 main types of crime:

▪ Offences against the person
▪ Offences against property (with violence)
▪ Offences against property (without violence)
▪ Malicious offences against property
▪ Offences against the currency
▪ Miscellaneous offences

• Population growth
• Urbanization  changing level of property crime

• Changing levels of unemployment

REASONS FOR PROPERTY CRIME

o Class conflict perception of society: crime as an element of the struggle between
capital and labour
o Others suggest a change in the administration of the criminal justice system, the
“civilization” of the population and a diminishing fear about the “dangerous class”
o New opportunities and means of theft have emerged through time, according to the
context of the crime

COMPARATIVE CRIME
• Increased post-war, 1960-1970s
• Har started decreasing ever since

THE HIDDEN FIGURE OF PROPERTY CRIME

Police High profile planned Withdrawal of police

interest operations against a interest in a
particular type of particular kind of
offence crime
Results Increase in arrests, Numbers may fall
discoveries, and
recordings of many
new offences

REASONS PROPERTY THEFT IS NOT REPORTED

o Incident seems “too trivial”, or the victim feels like there is

HIDDEN
FIGURE OF nothing they can do about it
PROPERTY o Dislike of the police
CRIME
o Extent of insurance cover

HIGH REPORTING RATES BECAUSE OF…

→ Seriousness of offence
→ Need to report in order to make insurance claim

- Variation in…
 o Types of goods taken
o Motives behind theft
o Perceptions

- Theft must be viewed in the social and economic context of a State/area etc.

PROFILE OF PROPERTY CRIME OFFENDERS

XVIII-XIX- Young, male, poorly educated, poorly employed

in low skilled and paid jobs

Professional property DIFFERENCES Amateur property crime

crime
MOTIVATION
TEMPTATION
SKILL
EXPERIENCE
PLANNING
OPPORTUNITY

Maguire – three types of burglars:

1) Low level
• i.e. juveniles, young adults
• Lack a commitment to crime and do not usually think of themselves as thieves
• Opportunists, involvement is short lived

2) Middle level
• Begin at a young age, wove into and out of crime
• Usually older, more skilled and experienced
• Search out targets across a wider geographic area
• Access to external sources to assist them
3) High level
• Carefully plan their crimes
• Possess skill and technical expertise to overcome complex security measures

EVERYBODY DOES IT
o Vast range of criminals that are “ordinary people”
o Many of them think their behaviour is not criminal (Neutralization theory)

Occupational structure = key variable in workplace crime

 conditions of work may create a criminogenic environment that opens
opportunities and rationalizations for rule bending

Occupations that are highly structured and characterized by

▪ Controlling rules
▪ Minimal autonomy Theft in the context of teamwork
▪ Tight workgroups

SOCIAL DISTRIBUTION OF CRIME

- Burglary = unevenly distributed through time and space

- Patterns of burglars are often determined by the routine of their victims

SOCIAL CLASS
• Lower classes = particularly vulnerable to crime problems
o Few home security measures
o High-crime areas

Repeat victimization = Same location, person, household, business, or

vehicle suffers more than one crime event over a

specified period of time
 FACTORS:

ETHNICITY AGE GEOGRAPHY

Ethnic minority groups are
generally more at risk than
whites when it comes to
household crimes; link to
poverty
Prevalence of property Urban areas and poorest
crime in young people’s “striving areas” have the
lives most crime

CONTROLLING PROPERTY CRIME

- Considerable inconsistency in the way in which the criminal justice system

perceives and treats “the crimes of the powerless” as opposed to “the crimes of the
powerful”
- The concentration of criminal justice responses against low-level property
offenders has impacted most of those who are already economically and socially
marginalized

OTHER FORMS OF PROPERTY CRIME

I. Theft and illegal transport of cultural property

• Major form of transnational crime
• Cultural property = moveable/immovable property of great importance to
the cultural heritage of a people
• Architectural works, sculptures, manuscripts
• These crimes have potential of robbing peoples of their cultural heritage

II. Theft of intellectual property

 • Theft of intangible property
• Copyright infringement, counterfeiting of trademarks, making potential
products
• Exists at different levels
• Production of goods/currency and their distribution
• Who suffers and who benefits from the global trade of counterfeit goods?
Ranging from fake drugs (consumer gets harmed) to fake clothing items
(consumer wins)

III. Biopiracy
= practice of companies that have asserted a right of ownership over genetic
material taken from living organisms
• Patent law – extended to allow the ownership of DNA, cells and other
biological materials

CHAPTER 11 – CRIME, SEXUALITY, AND GENDER

- Sex offences are not as common as many other offences

- However, these crimes tend to provoke a great deal of anxiety and concern
- Lately there has been an increase, despite still being massively underreported →
glare of public scrutiny is too traumatic, victims may be unaware a crime has been
committed, and even when it is reported, getting a conviction may be difficult
- Accusations made by women are not taken seriously

Two major sets of explanations that have been used to understand an array of sex
offenders:
Psychopathological sex killers Common “everyday” cases
Most Most cases
Overwhelmingly committed by men

Sex crimes as a way of “doing gender”; men can

draw upon social resources in the wider culture to
give meanings to their masculinities and make
 Sociologists:

Feminists sociological and socio-legal theories

➔ Link crime to masculinity
➔ Power plays an important role in understanding sex offenders, from sexual
violence to pornography

Violence against women include:

• Rape
• Incest
• Battering
• Sexual harassment
• Pornography

Kelly: Sexual violence occurs in the context of women’s

resistance and men’s power

*recent feminist work: some women can be involved in sexual violence (as perpetrators)

RAPE AS SOCIAL CONTROL

Until 1970: - Women were, at least in part, to blame for their assault
- It was argued that it is the most likely to occur in situations where
the offender interprets the victim’s behaviour as signaling
availability for sexual contact (changes her mind, accepts a drink
from a stranger, wearing “provocative clothing”)
- Such a way of thinking can encourage “rape myths”, which are
still relevant in our criminal justice system
- These myths are presumptions that women are tempting
seductresses who invite sexual encounters, women eventually
relax and enjoy coercive sex, that men have urgent and
• Rapists – more likely to be a man acquainted or intimate with his victim
• There are contradictory societal expectations
o i.e. woman is too upset/ashamed to report BUT woman is so upset she should
report
o Both of these views exists but only the latter is written into the law ; any delay
to report is used against her; in court, she should appear upset as the victim but
calm as a witness
• Rape = central issue for second wave feminists:
1) All women inhabit a mental world where they are constantly in fear of
getting raped
2) Men have a “trump card” to play in keeping women in their place;
suggested that rape is a prime mode of social control
Rape = Punitive action directed towards women in order to

maintain the dominant position of males; stay in your

homes, stay in suitable attire, stay loyal to your
husbands, stay submissive in your manner

3) Rape – critical function: a conscious process of intimidation by which all

men keep all women in a state of fear

➔ Marriage laws and rape laws developed alongside each other, reflected the view
that women are the “property” of their husband

DATE RAPE

• Also called “acquaintance rape”

• A sexual encounter may start as consensual but then become coercive
• Most rapes occur this way
• Offenders and victims are acquainted in some way
• Experience much lower levels of public support
• Encounter outright media “hostility” for “teasing men”, “leading them on”, “being
naïve” and even for placing false accusations

RAPE, WAR, CRIME, AND GENOCIDE

• Bound up with conflicts, colonization and ethnic cleansing

• Has been used as an instrument of war
• Despite being recognized as a crime by various international criminal tribunals and
legal instruments, it has been usually treated by military and political leaders as a
“private crime” committed by individuals or accepted as a part of war
• This was until 1990s, when International Criminal Tribunals for the former
Yugoslavia and for Rwanda both brought sexual violence charges

Rwanda - Landmark judgment

- Rape prosecuted as an act of genocide on the
grounds that it could be motivated by a desire to
change the genetic basis of an ethnic group

PORNOGRAPHY

Pornography either…
a. Central to women’s oppression and should be subjected to state controls
▪ Against women’s interests, must be campaigned against

b. Women’s rights to buy, view and enjoy pornography are to be upheld

OPPOSITION
• Connection between sex and violence reinforce masculinity and male power
and depersonalize, objectify, and degrade women
 • Criminologists have linked crime and pornography in many ways:
o The coercive tactics, including trafficking, that might force women and
children to appear in pornography
o Extent to which pornography shapes sexual violence against women
o Illegal distribution of images

THE INSTRUMENTAL AND SYMBOLIC ROLE OF LAW IN SEX

CRIMES

• INSTRUMENTAL
LAW
• SYMBOLIC

I. Instrumental role
• Practical: bring about a desired effect (stop rape)

II. Symbolic role

• Campaigns reassert existing moral orders

Panics around sex crimes

➔ Major social problem
➔ Sometimes reach levels of mass hysteria
➔ Sometimes we never hear of them
➔ There are periods and periods when sex crime is a great issue
➔ Sexuality appears to be a major device used to tap into all sorts of social anxieties,
generate panic, denote deviance, and demarcate boundaries

THE CHANGING CHARACTER OF SEX CRIMES

o What can be designated as a “sex crime” can change over time
i.e. homosexuality, prostitution
 SEX CRIMES AND THE INTERNET
o Recently – new area of sex offences
o Cyber-stalkers, cyber-rape, childhood security, pedophile abductions, camcorder sex,
new forms of porn and of accessing it
o Largely uncharted area
o New offences added to the penal code

CHAPTER 12 – CRIME, THE EMOTIONS, AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

- Human emotions – significant part in the commission of crime, in punishment,

and in social control

REDISCIVERING THE EMOTIONS

• The subject of emotion has been only a peripheral interest within

criminological theory and inquiry
• The emotions should not be reduced to psychological status, but as social
and cultural practices that both come from within ourselves and from the
outside

Defining feature of Western thought (historically):

➔ How emotion and reason have been regarded as opposing forces; emotional
beneath the rational, sign of the primitive, natural, and feminine

STATUS, STIGMA, AND SEDUCTION

Erving Goffman - Contemporary interest in crime and emotions – traced

back to Albert Cohen’s study of delinquent boys; sought
to demonstrate how “psychogenic and subcultural
factors” combined to produce delinquency through the
humiliating “status frustrations” experienced by
working-class boys and the alienating differences for
class-based value systems; captures how perceptions of
social worth regulate human conduct
“spoiled identity” = the pain and shame associated with being less than

human

- Inappropriateness of the term “deviance” to describe physical handicap, ethnic

difference, and numerous forms of social affiliation

Katz: Each specific crime offers distinctive ways of overcoming the mundane
routines of everyday life through presenting unique emotional
attractions that provide a dialectic process through which a person
empowers the world to seduce him to criminality

Criticism of this:
▪ Disregards the wider social context in which all action takes place
▪ Fails to secure “serious distance” (implying that offending stories
are taken at face value)
▪ Lacks any “systematic explanation” of any “motivational accounts”

CONCEPTUALIZING EMOTIONS
o Now much agreement that happiness, fear, anger, and depression are universal to
all humans; are even said to be hardwired into human neuroanatomy
o ¾ emotions are negatively tuned
o These primary emotions shape and color other emotions like hate, shame, guilt,
pride, wonder, resentment, nostalgia, and dread amongst many

Theodore Kemper - Secondary emotions are socially constructed and

arise from specific contexts where experiences
are learnt
o Important to recognize that there is considerable cultural and social variation in
how these emotions are experienced, expressed, and practiced
o Considerable criminological attention: fear

FEAR OF CRIME
• Complex human emotion
• Ubiquitous, felt by every living creature
• Actual sources of dread are socially distributed
Different societies → different ways of living + dangers that haunt them

Research on the fear of crime – late 1960s

 intense empirical, theoretical and political disputes in 1980s

Today – fear of crime is a sub-discipline itself and is probably the main legacy of
endless national crime surveys

• Few issues trouble people in Europe and the US more than crime
• From the 1960s, interviewing citizens about their personal experiences of
crime became commonplace
o Obtain a more accurate view on victimization levels
o Information on the public’s beliefs and attitudes towards crime,
punishment, policing, and prevention
• Fear of crime typically measured by responses to questions like: “How
safe do you feel walking alone at night”

Criticism of Fear of Crime:

▪ Fails to explicitly mention crime
▪ Cannot do justice to the emotional complexity of fear
▪ Ignored the fluidity of lived experiences
▪ Respondents are “forced to use the same language to express very different
feelings”
 URBANISM, ANXIETY, AND THE HUMAN CONDITION
• Understand the ways fears and anxieties are locally constructed

Taylor & - Fear of crime as a condensed metaphor which attempts to

Jefferson capture broader concerns over the pace of socio-economical
change

→ defensive middle class suburban social movements  deeper fears about

joblessness and house prices, not by immediate sets of problems
→ worries about crime are tied to less articulated troubles generated by
changes in economic, moral, and social life
→attempts to situate the individual’s fears in specific everyday contexts

• Introduction of the psychoanalytical theory, into the fear of crime – much

potential
• Anxiety is the price we pay for having a sense of self
• Anxiety = universal feature of the human condition
• Dynamic unconscious defences against anxiety are a commonplace and
constructive aspect of response to threats: denial, splitting, and projection
• Notion of human subjectivity that recognized
o The non-rational
Aspects of people’s
o The unintentional
actions and experiences
o The emotional

Criticism:
▪ Approach is more about feeling than structure
▪ Focus on the unconscious, to ignore the conscious strategies and
various circuits of communication

• People don’t always live in fear, but the emotional intensity varies and we
find imaginative ways of ignoring it or adapting to precarious
environments
 HATE CRIME

• One of the most explicit connections between crime and a specific emotion
→ hate crime
Hate crimes = offences that are motivated in part or singularly by personal
prejudice against others in case of a diversity

• Most incidents that are criminalized are very extreme

• Crimes motivated by hate cause damage to the victim beyond the crime
itself
• There can be no explanation/a range of explanations
o “for the fun of it” – payoff is psychological as well as social: thrill
of making someone suffer + approval from peers
o Resentment – feeling rejected by society
o Perceived or real threat

SELF ESTEEM, SHAME, AND RESPECT

Shame = primary emotion generated by the negative evaluation of

self in the eyes of others

Self-esteem = how a person manages shame

• anger can be a protective measure to act against shame
• Role of shame in restorative social processes

Humiliation, rage, and edgework

• Humiliation arises from the violation of a respected social role
• Reaction = last defence of respectability
• Compulsion, driven by rage, arising from the killer’s emotional
comprehension of the humiliation they have suffered
Edgework = Form of “experiential anarchy” that is much more real

than the circumstances of everyday experiences

• While this may be an essential part of street life for underclass male youth,
it also has routine features
WEEK 4
LECTURE – TYPES OF CRIME II

I. Organized Crimes

Types and causes can be very diverse:

• Group behaviour – distressing and degrading mob mentality
• Peer pressure
• Social dynamics

Social-psychological explanations:

➔ Wanting to belong – Identity is important in groups; people want to feel

comfortable, gives a collective identity, makes people feel like they are part of
something.
➔ Herd behaviour – the need to fit in
➔ “Us versus them” – conformity; wanting to belong creates this mentality, very
soon people start to feel superior, which makes them feel very good.
➔ Strongly conforming to others – A single person is not likely to commit the act,
but being a part of a group makes it more likely
➔ Confidence – peers around you increase motivation to commit certain acts

Social Dynamics:
• Groups, peer pressure and conformism
• Social processes and group dynamics
• Organizational structures and features
• Social norms and values
• Hierarchy and obedience

Organized Crime
 Definition: when an organized group of people participates in illicit activity
Prepared to use force and violence
Examples:
• Drug trafficking
• Human trafficking
• Money-laundering

Characteristics:

o Commitment to crime as full-time business

o Professionals
o Long-standing organizations
o Abuse of power
o Legal business can be a front for criminal activity

Organization:
o Planning
o Coordination
o Concealment
o Group membership
o Hierarchy
o Use of violence

Structure:
o Criminal groups can be organized and structured in many different ways; can be:
• Very sophisticated
• Very loosely organized
o Profession is learned
o Existence of subcultures
o Changing morality

II. White collar crime

 Definition: crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the
course of their occupation;

Examples:
• Corruption
• Fraud
• Environmental crimes
• Price fixing
• Industrial espionage

Occupational crime Organizational crime Corporate (business) crime

Personal violations that take
place for self-benefit during
the course of a legitimate
organization
Crime committed on behalf
of and for the benefit of a
legitimate organization
Crime committed in free
enterprise economies, which
involves criminal activity on
behalf of and for the benefit
of a private business
corporation

Edwin Sutherland (1883-1950):

- Sociology professor at the University of Chicago
- President of the American Sociological Society
- Presidential address in 1939 – “White-Collar Criminality”

Characteristics:
• High social status
• Codes of silence and protectionism
• Companies prefer resignations over scandals
• Statistics are not kept
• Behaviour often not criminalized
• Widespread acceptance
• Damage and loss widespread
• Abuse od trust and authority
 Example: Ford Pinto case
- Surge of gas prices in the 1970s, smaller and more efficient cars were more appealing
- Ford wanted to rush a car into production to compete
- The car had a defect that made it catch on fire very easily in the event of a rear-end
collision, very risky
- Government regulations at the approved of this, became a question of morality
- Ford used the utilitarian approach: redesigning the car’s gas tank meant minimum
suffering for a lot of people, while releasing the model without the fix meant great
suffering, but only for a few
- Utilitarian question was answered by weighing the monetary values of both sides
- They decided to go through with the production, without fixing the issue
- Thinking with no human element

Problems with regulatory systems

➢ Focus on street crimes
➢ Fines are insignificant
➢ No prison sentences
➢ Conflicts of interest

III. Political Crimes

Motivation: Ideology
Aim: gain or maintain political power

Crimes by government Crimes against government

Human rights violations, international Espionage, assassinations, terrorism
crimes
 Terrorism
➢ Definition:
o Difficult to define terrorism
o Very fine line between terrorist and freedom fighter, depends on
perspective
▪ ‘only difference between a freedom fighter and a terrorist is
whether you agree with their cause’
o EU framework decision, based on:
▪ Intimidation
▪ Destabilization
➔ Overthrow the regime, terror as a tactic to show people what ‘they can do’
o Distinction between goals and means

Old terrorism New terrorism

Tight local organization
Local political objectives
Relatively low levels of violence
Relative restraint regarding tactics
Threat to specific authorities
Loose global network
Located in failed states/failing states
High levels of violence
Less restraint regarding tactics
Threat to strategies interests of the West
Use of high-tech communication

Waves of terrorism

Wave Period Name Who Methods

1 1860-1920 Anarchist Rebels against Political
Soviet Union assassinations
2 1920-1960 Anti-colonial Former colonies Attacks on police
3 1960-1990 New left ETA, IRA, PLO Kidnappings,
hijackings and
assassinations
 4 1990-now Religious Afghanistan, Very violent and
Egypt, Al deathly, suicide
Quaeda, ISIS attacks

➢ Aims:
o Overthrow the government
o Gain or maintain political power
o Spread terror
o Create a better world

- Do not see themselves as terrorists, they believe they are acting for the greater good
- Problems with terrorist aims – no rooms for people with different views to fit in

ISIS Ideology:
• Create an Islamic State and return to pure Islam
• Very conservative and radical interpretation of Islamism
• Recreate the world according to Allah’s ideas and vision
• Represent all Muslims
• Purify corrupted Muslims
• Clear division Muslims and non-Muslims (‘us vs them’ prerogative)
• Conquer entire world
• Allah – sole legitimate authority and entitles them to use violence
• Holy war
• All those who have different beliefs are the enemy
• Violence = acceptable, for the purpose of establishing the desired perfect state

Rejection of many ‘modern’ values:

▪ Human rights
▪ Man-made law
▪ Democracy
▪ Modernization
▪ Western values in general
▪ Recognition of political leaders = sin
 ▪ No diversion from the ideology is accepted, ideology = God’s will

➢ Explanations:
(1) Mental illness and pathological disorders
(2) Background
(3) Radicalization process:
▪ Personal hardship/unhappiness
▪ Social marginalization
▪ Perceived injustice
▪ Social identification
▪ Desire for vengeance
▪ Group processes
▪ Search for solutions
▪ End justifies means
▪ Violence is form of purification

Catalysts:

Individual Social level External level

Personal loss
Discrimination, violence
Recruitment (bottom up)
Radical friends
Provocative statements,
discrimination, call for
action
Political circumstances: Abu
Ghraib

Radicalization – stages:

Deprivation, discrimination
 Uncertainty, anger, contempt

Political and ideological extremism

Lone Wolves
❖ Often cases of psychiatric illnesses
❖ People with a criminal record
❖ Drinking, drugs
❖ Fascination with violence
❖ Violent past, domestic abuse
❖ Different group
❖ Easy to affiliate with terrorist groups because it gives them the pass to be extremely
violent

Broader Causes:
• Migration
• Social change
• Alienation
• Chronic shortage of employment

Research on terrorism:
- After 9/11
- US and UK
- Inter- and multidisciplinary
- Lack of empirical data
- Reliance on media sources
- Focus on
 o Individuals
o Causes
o Counter-terrorism
▪ 9/11 laws and treaties
▪ Powers of police, secret services
▪ Surveillance
▪ Restriction of Human Rights
▪ Liberty vs security
▪ Prevent radicalization

READING
CHAPTER 21 – POLITICAL VIOLENCE, TERRORISM AND COUNTER-
TERRORISM

Key Issues:
◼ What are the key problems concerning the definition of terrorism?
◼ How have criminologists engaged with the issue of terrorism?
◼ Has research given us any useful answers for why people carry out terrorist acts?
◼ What are the main approaches to countering terrorism and what are the key
controversies and debates that accompany them?

➔ Increase in academic interest in terrorism since 9/11

➔ Criminology has been too slow to engage with this rapid growth of academic interest

DEFINING TERRORISM
Brian Jenkins (2000) – terrorism = the use/threat of violence to create an atmosphere of fear
and alarm and thus bring about a political result
Eugene McLaughlin (2006) – terrorism = an essentially pre-meditated political act, the
intention of which is to influence policy by creating an atmosphere of fear and threat,
generally for a political, religious or ideological cause

• No internationally agreed definition of terrorism

• Disagreement, because of:
o Relative
o Emotive
…driven label
o Pejorative
o Ideologically

Subjectivity of the label “terrorist” due to the “TERRORIST VS FREEDOM FIGHTER”

cliché
➔ Moral relativism of terrorist action
➔ Simply confuses the goal of terrorism with the activity; these are distinct often times.

Terrorism = wide range of extremely different activities

USE OF DEFINING TERRORISM

o Definitions of what constitutes legitimate/illegitimate violence are highly contested
and ideologically constructed
o “terrorist” label = potent means to delegitimize the activities of particular groups and
justify intensive law enforcement responses that may not be deemed acceptable in
other circumstances
o Prior to 9/11, UN Resolutions excluded the work “terrorism”
o Wake of 9/11 attacks, UNSC passed Resolution 1373, containing the phrase
“suppress all acts of terrorism” but included no definition of “terrorism”
Problem:
➔ States may justify repressive measures against forms of political expression or against
minor infractions

o New definition – Resolution 1566

 “…criminal acts, including against civilians, committed with the intent to cause death
or serious bodily injury, or taking of hostages, with the purpose to provoke a state of
terror in the general public or in a group of persons or particular persons, intimidate
a population or compel a government or an international organization to do or to
abstain from doing any act, which constitute offences within the scope of and as
defined in the international conventions and protocols relating to terrorism, are under
no circumstances justifiable by considerations of a political, philosophical,
ideological, racial, ethnic, religious or other similar nature…”

“under no circumstances justifiable” = removes any legal “just” cause from political
violence  violence aimed at overthrowing repressive regimes = TERRORISM

Criticism of contemporary definition of terrorism:

❖ Too “bottom-up” – focus in individuals and groups, instead of “top-down” – focus on
State repression
❖ Too broad
❖ Ignores the most significant and abundant type of violence, committed by States

Renewed focus on crimes of the powerful

Conceptual shifts in criminology over the past 40

years

Early XX century:
• Criminology separated crime from politics

Key differences between “old” terrorism and “new” ones:

OLD TERRORISM NEW TERRORISM

 i.e. PIRA
Tight local organization
Local political objectives
Relatively low levels of violence
Relative restraint regarding tactics
Threat to specific authorities (i.e. specific
governments)
i.e. al Quaeda
Loose global network
Located in failed/failing states (i.e.
Afghanistan)
High levels of violence
Less restraint regarding tactics
Threat to strategic interests of the West and
the notion of cosmopolitan society
Use of high tech communication to
coordinate and promote themselves

Defining terrorism = PROBLEMATIC

Unlikely that consensus will be reached

McLaughlin (2006) – “too many variations exist for the word “terrorism” to be a meaningful
term”

Many criminologists → the way transgressive behaviours become labelled as criminal is

the product of: • SOCIAL
• LEGAL …constructions
• IDEOLOGICAL

UNDERSTANDING TERRORIST ACTION

Researching terrorism:
➢ Explain why people become (and stay) involved in terrorist activity

Debates over terrorism: plenty of heat, very little light

Reasons for this:

▪ Events are very rare – hard to distil trends and general principles of
action
 ▪ Much of the research is neither empirical, nor does it engage with
primary resources
▪ Narrow focus: only the US and the UK as ‘relevant’ States
▪ Over-reliance on media sources

EXPLAINING TERRORISM: REDISCOVERING POSITIVISM

Problem: previous learning (and its shortcomings) has been relatively ignored
➔ Many “new” theories are repeatedly presented, that have been previously offered –
and challenged

Most prominent reinvented analyses – based on:

• Positivist criminology
o Focus on the psychological
(even pathological)
abnormalities of the
terrorist
o Identify deterministic
factors that “radicalize”
them

Criticism – majority targeting conventional positivist criminological theories apply:

▪ Shifting notions of transgressive behaviour over time
▪ “transgressive” characteristics (i.e. aggression) often lead to success in conventional
and legitimate activities (i.e. business)
▪ Failure to account why other people having the same characteristics do not engage in
terrorism

Case of terrorism – additional arguments:

o Unstable lifestyles: loyalty in the face of continued hardship, commitment to the
greater ideological cause

BEYOND THE INDIVIDUAL

Problematic: Individual accounts of terrorist

action and the idea that terrorists
are very distinct from communities
they are drawn from
Increased interest in the social and environmental contexts of terrorist activity:
 groups escalate their violent activities when in competition with others for constituencies
of support
 peer groups and other close social interactions as am important factor in becoming
involved with criminal activity

Sageman v Hoffman debate → around the degree of leadership and structural coherency of al
Quaeda activity:

Sageman Hoffman
“leaderless jihad” – operated through Recent al Quaeda activities operated
unstructured, self-starting and distanced through more structured and guided sets of
terrorist groups arrangements

Recruitment – occurred in 4 stages:

1. 1980s – Afghan Arab militants who
fought the Soviets
2. 1990s – Middle class people drawn
to global Jihadi struggle, often part
of European diasporas, educated in
Western universities
3. 2011 – after the fall of the Taliban,
motivated by invasions in
Afghanistan and Iraq, inspired by
the actions of former recruits,
formed more fluid and disconnected
network
4. Reactionary, revivalist principles
“built on the belief that the world
has decayed into a morass of greed”
as motivation

Migration
 Bases of analysis of more
Social change sociologically informed analyses

Alienation
ANOMIE STRAIN THEORY:
Analyses featuring ANOMIE STRAIN
• Explain the prominence of middle class and affluent terrorists

Burke (2007): high levels of middle-class suicide bombers  a well-developed higher

education system and a shortage of jobs; also, a suicide bomber with an ‘important’ job (i.e.
doctor) is more impactful than a low-class suicide bomber

Summary: sociologically informed analyses of terrorist action  new ways of thinking about
the issue

However, problems of these approaches:

➔ Generality of analyses: difficult to explain different intensities and levels of
involvement within groups
➔ Only have a partial view on who gets involved; clandestine, rare activity; few get
convicted, difficult to get testimonies about terrorist groups from insiders

DIFFERENTIATING CRIME AND TERRORISM

Reasons why criminologists have been slow in engaging with the study of terrorism:
→ Key differences in: • Motivations
• Activities …between criminality and terrorism
• Ambitions

Some criminologists: differences between crime and terrorism do not exist

Rational choice approaches Reduced to “the outcome of an

interaction between motivation
Crime control approaches and opportunity”
Problems with these approaches:
▪ Reduced into over-deterministic models – people don’t always act rationally
Other differences between crime and terrorism: performance – ostensibly similar acts can be
performed very differently

COUNTERING TERRORISM

Defining + Explaining terrorism  important implications for the way terrorism is tackled
Effect → • Appropriateness
• Effectiveness …of counter terrorist strategies
• Acceptability

Proportionality of counter-terrorist measures

USA – Homeland Security UK – CONTEST (COuNter TErrorist

STrategy)
New and potent centralized security Overarching counterterrorism agency
Counter-terrorism organizations

Shift towards diversification of counter-terrorism practice – explanations:

• Neo-liberal trends: functions and responsibilities of
the State become devolved into
non-state actors
IMPLICATIONS

o Terrorism aspires to coerce

the state, but responsibility
of State actors
o The State constitutes the
definitive “risk holder” in
relation to terrorism
 Michel Focault - “dispositif” = a thoroughly heterogenous
ensemble, constituting of discourses,
institutions, architectural forms, regulatory
decisions, laws etc.
- “governmentality” = complex and diffused
relations of power where the central State has
little presence

➔ For all the focus on non-state organizations, the State remains a highly prominent
actor

JUDICIAL RESPONSES

9/11  Rapid law-making in many countries → police

and criminal justice agencies have
unprecedented powers

❖ These provisions clash with human rights provisions

POLICING TERRORISM

Police – received CONSIDERABLE and CONTROVERSIAL powers

i.e. “stop and search
detainment for however long, without being charged
led to

➢ Excessive use of power

➢ Inefficiency of laws

Increasing police discretion → raising the likelihood that officers’ background

prejudices begin to inform operational decision-making
 INTELLIGENCE

Intelligence work = most effective method of tackling terrorism

Divided into two broad areas:

“Human” Intelligence “Signals” Intelligence

Pursuit of individuals or use of informants Use of codes, communication, and data

➔ Recent years: distinctions between the two are less clear

• Opacity o Importance of coordination

Increased: • Growth CONSEQUENCES and collaboration between
• Complexity agencies
o Extent and prioritization of
information data overload

SURVEILLANCE
➔ Consistent feature of urban settings dating back to antiquity
➔ During modernity – became an integral ordering feature of societies
➔ “Surveillance society”
➔ “top-down” coercive nature of surveillance
➔ Surveillance = central to counter-terrorist activities; cuts across many practices:
intelligence work, policing and trend towards fortified urban environments

Post 9/11 – rapid intensification in the o SCALE

o POTENCY …of surveillance
o INTENSITY

➔ Growth in the COHESION of counter-terrorist surveillance strategies

➔ Most familiar form of counter-terrorist surveillance: public space cameras to capture
images of suspects in the aftermath of an attack
 Effectiveness of cameras:
Successful Unsuccessful
Single actors targeting public settings with 9/11 and similar events, of a more organized
the intent to escape afterwards and larger nature

Debate: Benefits and harms of surveillance

→ trade-off between LIBERTY and SECURITY

However, increased surveillance  enhanced security

- May also impose broader social harms beyond liberty and privacy:
o Decline in levels in trust
o Surveillance “creep”
o “Social sorting”
▪ Surveillance used to sort subjects into categories which may impact
severely an individual’s chances, right to mobility, and access to
credit and services
▪ i.e. no-fly lists

Most significant cost of surveillance → does not impact everyone equally:

o Main targets: margins of society, already disadvantaged/members of
poorly defined “suspect populations”

❖ Increased use of public mobile phone and social media footage as

investigation tools

FORTIFIED URBANISM

Oscar Newman – “Defensible Space”

= manipulate the built environment
to reduce the possibilities/impact of
terrorism
 Prominent themes:
▪ Control of traffic flows and parking to restrict the access of vehicles carrying bombs;
objects designed to withstand high-speed collisions
▪ Shatterproof glass in buildings in risk areas
Flying glass = principal cause of casualties in terrorist attacks
▪ Few places where packages could be concealed (i.e. no bins, manhole covers shut)

Critics: cities  increasingly militarized, partitioned and reinforced by intensive

policing and regimes of technological surveillance

Western Cities Militarized counter-terrorism Overseas

measures

PREVENTING RADICALIZATION

Controversial form of counter-terrorism = use of community-focused

initiatives to prevent individuals
from becoming violent radicals

Criticisms:
➔ Rooted in a romanticized belief of recreating cohesive self-policing communities that
have never existed
➔ The way “radicalization” has been envisaged in deterministic and linear ways that do
not know the complex, diverse and dynamic nature of violent activity
➔ Overwhelmed attention of Muslim groups rather than other groups (i.e. far right)
➔ Operated as a type of Trojan horse: a seemingly benign vehicle that enabled state
agencies to penetrate local communities for intelligence gathering purposes.

CHAPTER 22 – STATE CRIME, WAR CRIME AND HUMAN RIGHTS

Key Issues:
◼ How can crimes of States be best conceptualized and understood by criminology?
◼ What kinds of crimes do particular types of States commit and under what types of
circumstances do they commit what?
◼ Why have State crimes been relatively ignored by criminology?
◼ What situations lead to otherwise law-abiding people to engage in mass State
sanctioned violence?

Maintain social order

• Make laws
• Employ police
• Armies and military
weaponry
Protect their populations

THE DENIAL OF CONTEMPORARY BARBARISM

- Classic European sociologists in the XIX and XX centuries – preoccupied with

understanding modernized societal development
o Saw this as placing societies on a path towards increased peace

Emile Durkheim (1893-1960) – ‘cult of the individual’ had developed = individual human
life had become sacred

Norbert Elias (1939-1978) – bodily emotions and violent activity were placed under
increasing social control in the ‘civilizing process’

Public execution, torture and inhumane detention were all gradually outlawed
More humane ways of engaging in international conflict: developed notions of
‘civilized warfare’ and ‘rules of war’ agreed upon by many nations

The Geneva and Hague Conventions

 ➔ Establish international laws and agreements to govern state conduct in war
➔ Provide backbone of international Humanitarian Law
➔ Upheld and enforced by UN Security Council  binding to all UN members

The Geneva Convention The Hague Convention

Originates in an 1864 rule that established
agreement for a neutral body to provide aid
to battlefield casualties in war zones – Red
Cross
1906 – humane treatment of prisoners of
war and prohibited targeting civilians in war
1899 and 1907
Drew on earlier Geneva Conventions
Also established an international court –
Permanent Court of Arbitration
Rules governing the use of particular
weapons in war

➔ Codified in Nuremberg trials

➔ Ratified by over 194 countries

Modernization = cause of humane civilization and the pacification of society

- Criticisms:
o Revisionist historians and post-colonial theorists:
▪ Existence of the European slave trade
▪ Existence of European colonialism
o XXth century historians:
▪ With the onset of WW1, the world paradoxically descended into
barbarism

In addition to over 50 million people killed in WW2, around 25 millions of people have been
killed ever since:
- Mostly civilians
- By their own governments
- Internal conflicts and religious/nationalist/ethnic violence

Cohen – questions:
o Why is it that criminology focuses on minor crimes and lets mass atrocity go on with
little comment?
➔ By ignoring/denying State crimes  effectively allow them to flourish

o If much of criminology is motivated by a desire to curb human suffering, why has it

ignored crimes of states?
➔ Both states and societies engage in a number of forms of justification
and denial and atrocity that has the effect of:
o Facilitating
o Legitimizing …state crime

o Normalizing

States → ‘spirals of denial’ in order to hide and forget their illegal activities
1. Try to employ total denial by suggesting an atrocity simply didn’t happen
o Effectively blocks any kind of interrogation/conversation about the events
o Allows states to silence their critics, hide from prosecution, forget their
activities

2. If ‘total denial’ is exposed, States may engage in ‘partial denial’

o ‘something happened, but what really happened is something else’

USA – renaming and re-framing torture

▪ Allows the US legal protection to use torture
▪ Enables a partial denial of their activities

New 21st century paradigm of normalized torture

3. Neutralization of their activities

o ‘what happened was justified’
o Denial of
 ▪ Injury
▪ Responsibility
▪ Victims

o Condemn their condemners

o Appeal to higher loyalties – ‘for the greater good’

Spirals of denial → increasingly difficult to maintain

▪ The internet
▪ Camera-phones Unraveling spirals of denial
▪ Globalization
▪ Proliferation of human rights

The allied war on terror and the legality of the war in Iraq → interest in State
crime

Cohen – ‘by-stander effects’ to restrict focus on State crimes:

o Lack of identification with geographically and socially distant victims
o General inability to be able to conceive of effective interventions to prevent
state atrocity
o A sense of diffused responsibility where everybody asserts that everyone else
should do something about it rather than themselves, resulting in no action by
anybody

TYPES OF STATE CRIME

William Chambliss’ presidential address (1989)  State crime emerged as a clearly

articulated topic of criminological interest
 - Developed the concept of ‘state organized crime’ = acts defined by law as criminal
and committed by the state officials in the pursuit of their job as representatives of the
state
- Criminal acts that benefited only individual officeholders  included, unless official
state policy
- i.e. complicity in piracy, drug and arms smuggling, money laundering

Criticism:
▪ Concept = too narrow, only focuses on crimes according to law
▪ Ignored most types of war crime

Chambliss (1995) – broadened definition:

State organized crime includes behaviour that violates international agreements and
principles established in the courts and treaties of international bodies:
◼ War crimes Geneva and Hague Conventions – include
◼ Crimes against humanity o Genocide
o Illegal invasion
◼ Repressive state crimes o Torture
o Slavery
Crimes outlawed by
international human rights law
which govern states’ actions
toward their own populations
during peacetime

Democratic states limit their citizens’ human rights as well:

• Rarely so severe
• In times of emergency – fears of security dominate over the fears of citizens

CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY: COLONIALISM AND SLAVERY

o European Slave Trade Some of the largest, most

o Western European Colonization notable State crimes in history
 ➔ Continue to influence contemporary state crimes and social injustices

16th century – British state began a long reign of colonization

▪ By the early 20th century, Britain rules over 1/5 of the population and ¼ of the
world

PERMANENT SETTLEMENTS SMALLER, TEMPORARY

SETTLEMENTS
North America, Australia, New India, East Africa
Zealand
Exploit the sea and the land for Exploiting only some specific
products to trade industries
These colonies remain today

Major resource that the British took from Africa – human slaves
o Transported predominantly to the Caribbean and American colonies
o Forced to work on the plantations
o Roughly 11 million people were transported from Africa during the Atlantic
slave trade

Murder

characteristic features of the

of indigenous people
history of a number of today’s
Subjugation settler nations like the USA,
Canada and Australia

Exploitation
Ethnocide = under a supposedly rational and humanitarian claim
to be civilizing ‘savage’ indigenous peoples, the aim
was to completely erase indigenous cultures from
the colonies

❖ Rule of law was suspended in order for these activities to have occurred

Colonial police and justice tended to be composed of two separate systems:

Modern rational justice system Violent militarized system

For white Europeans For the others who were deemed
irrational and thus unable to be
controlled through modern systems

1990s – settler nations admitted that they had committed numerous state crimes
against indigenous peoples

However → sizeable groups of indigenous groups in Australia, New Zealand, the US

and Canada continue to be subject to high levels of State control and live at a
disadvantage to the settlers

Legacy of slavery in the US – continues in the present day:

▪ Huge over-representation of black people in the criminal justice systems
▪ Slavery → laid the foundation for African Americans disadvantaged social
and economic position
 Colonies that have gained their independence from European settlers:
➔ Dehumanizing and violent legacy of colonialism still lingers
➔ Hierarchical symbolism and extreme violence of colonial domination
becomes inculcated into the psyche of colonial peoples to the detriment
of their countries following independence
➔ Usually through the means of violent revolution, indigenous elites take
control of the post-colony and govern through the violent and
kleptocratic colonial systems that had formed their colonial
consciousness
➔ Challenged by other indigenous groups, results in cycles of violence
and civil wars

GENOCIDE: A CRIME OF OBEDIENCE

reliant on the cooperation of • Regular soldiers

Large scale crimes • Police
• Civilians

‘Banality of evil’ – series of researches that imply that most people will do what they
are told by authorities regardless of the potentially atrocious outcomes in doing so

MODERNITY AND THE HOLOCAUST

Zygmunt Bauman (1989) – modern organization produces the perfect conditions

for obedience

Lay at the heart of the

German population’s
involvement in the
Holocaust

Central achievements of modern civilization:

 1. Division of labour
o Enabled German soldiers and civilians to dethatch themselves from the
outcomes of their activities
o Every person – ‘simply doing a small task’
o Organization obliterated personal responsibility

2. Bureaucratization
o People were rather defined as rational units/numbers
o Dehumanizing victims
o People concerned with achieving technical outputs of the bureaucratic system

3. Repetition and routine characteristics of the bureaucratic world

o Effect of normalizing the act of violence
o Becomes psychologically easier to simply carry on

4. Instrumental rationality
o Rational methods are employed to achieve ‘progress’ rather than any moral,
spiritual or aesthetic guides of behaviour

Highly rational organizational system  irrational outcomes

Bauman – we still live in this kind of society, Holocaust could happen again
Problems with this approach:
➔ Rwandan genocide didn’t occur through a system like this, but rather
directly through large marauding groups

Criminology – much work to do → develop effective theoretical tools to understand

state-sanctioned atrocity
o Most analyses of state crimes have grown from sociology and psychology

Important psychological work – Crimes of obedience (1989): study on the Vietnam war;
three general causes that enable crime of obedience:
1. Authorization – people tend to blindly follow orders from the authority, regardless of
the outcomes
 2. Routinization – becomes taken for granted, inhibits people’s reflection on the morality
of their actions
3. Dehumanization – humanity of victims is always linguistically re-categorized in order
to exclude people

General features of mass state violence throughout history

CONCEPTUAL AND DEFINITIONAL ISSUES

Criticism of international laws and treaties with respect to state-organized crime:

I. STATE CORPORATE CRIME

Isolating state activities from interests and influences that lie outside the state itself

Kramer and Michalowski (1993) – state crimes and corporate crimes are
committed in conjunction

State-initiated State-facilitated
States direct, initiate or approve corporate Government fails to regulate corporate
misconduct activity and misconduct, usually as a result
of shared interests between corporations and
states
Failure to enforce laws and regulations that
result in unnecessary death or injury
i.e. privatization of the post-war Iraq i.e. UK government’s failure to regulate and
economy interrogate drug test results by large
pharmaceutical companies in the 1990s

II. SOCIAL HARMS

States = the power to make laws + ability to criminalize certain actions
 Have power to avoid the criminalization of their own acts
i.e. allied invasion of Iraq, although UN Secretary General deemed it illegal according
to international law

Ability to shield of criminal labels + power to criminalize the actions of others

Criminologists should avoid any legal basis for the definition of state crime
➔ Explore activities which are socially injurious, regardless if they are
deemed criminal or not

III. CRIMES OF GLOBALIZATION

Definition: mass social harms caused by the imposition of global finance onto the
people of developing nations through the imposition of international financial
organizations (i.e. World Bank)

financial help
Financial Institutions Developing Nations

structural adjustments

Structural adjustments:
▪ Privatizing state assets
▪ Opening up economies to cheap imports
▪ Devaluing currency

Financial organizations:
➔ A small number of nations exert control over them (i.e. USA)
➔ Tend to regulate themselves with no independent oversight
 ➔ Expansion of global capital often takes precedence over what happens
to the people
➔ Western corporations move into the developing world to exploit
resources

Friederichs & Friederichs (2002) → these are ‘crimes of globalization’ initiated by the
Western States
Crimes of globalization:
o No laws are broken but the actions of international financial organizations
(cooperating with transnational corporations) can be seen to produce
widespread social harms  subject of criminological investigation
Week 5
LECTURE – STATE CRIMES , MEDIA, PUNISHMENT

State Crimes = crimes committed by the government

i.e. corruption, human rights violations, international crimes

State = different entity  different position in crime compared to the individual

Differences:
o Power = ability to make other people do things they would otherwise not do, which
can be based on:
▪ Authority = power based on consent
▪ i.e. democracy

▪ Force = power based on other means

▪ i.e. violence, intimidation, threat

If a State loses Authority …but wants to keep Power

use of

Force

Criminology before – ignore State crimes and focus on petty crimes

 - However, State crimes = more violent

INTERNATIONAL CRIMES

International = crimes which endanger global peace and security

→ every state has an interest to fight them
▪ Often committed in the manifestation of political power

i.e. war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, aggression

FEATURES OF A STATE

➔ Monopoly of arms
➔ Legitimate use of violence

States are bound by human rights treaties

o Difficult to enforce

i.e. the USA redefined torture as to exclude severe and psychological pain;
waterboarding was considered an ‘enhanced interrogation technique’

NAZI GERMANY

Holocaust
• One of the most well documented genocides
• State induced genocide
• Used “industrialized killings”
• Bureaucracy of death
• Extremely well organized
 • Supported by ideology
• Millions involved
• Most perpetrators were “armchair perpetrators”

Finding a scapegoat – ideal if you have an identifiable group in society

➔ More comforting to blame a specific group

MODERNITY AND THE HOLOCAUST

❖ Modern genocide = genocide with a purpose

 believed they were acting for the greater good

❖ Modernity = rational and controlled world

❖ Extermination = means of creation, not destruction
❖ Modern technological-bureaucratic patterns of action

Controlling the world according to their principles

Extermination as a means of creation not destruction

EFFECTS OF BUREAUCRACY

 Functional division of power

o Involvement of millions
o ‘Small cogs in a big machine”

 Substitution from a moral to a technical responsibility

o Dehumanization of bureaucratic objects

MODERN GENOCIDE FEATURES

 ◼ Bureaucracy as a means
◼ Murder as an organized routine, emotions were excluded
◼ Strict hierarchic responsibility: obedience to authority
◼ Ideology: create the perfect society – victims killed because they do not fit in this
scenario
◼ Violence, torture and even genocide became a technique

“The banality of crime” – the Milgram experiment

Banal how people

1. Autonomous state
come to commit
2. Agentic state
such crimes
a. Person giving orders is a
qualified authority
b. Subject believes that the
authority will take
responsibility for their actions

Obedience = very important

➔ Crucial part of society
➔ Trained from a young age to obey
➔ Hard to stand up against authority because
o They trust the authority
o They believe the authority will take responsibility

One of the reasons why people don’t start after they have been committing a spree of
immoral acts
➢ Much easier to go on than accept responsibility
➢ Stopping  acknowledge you were wrong
→ this is also true with by standers: acceptance of lesser forms of crime/other immoral acts
will gradually lead to a greater tolerance

Obedience interrelated Conformism

Towards authority Towards peers

CRIMES OF OBEDIENCE

• A lot of international crimes are crimes of obedience

Definition: a crime of obedience is an act performed in response to orders from

authority that is considered illegal or immoral by the international community

➢ Not necessarily a direct order

➢ Behaviour against the orders of the authority is condoned
➢ Actor thought this was expected from them

SOCIOLOGICAL PROCESS

• Authorization: refers to the phenomenon in which force and violence are

perceived as legitimate means to protect national security
• Routinization: refers to the phenomenon in which using force and violence
becomes part of a routine
 o On their first crime, people feel bad, but after they rationalize what
they are doing in order to soothe themselves it becomes increasingly
easier for them to follow orders
• Dehumanization: refers to the process whereby victims are excluded from the
moral universe of the perpetrators

DIFFERENT TYPE OF CRIME/CRIMINAL

➔ State as the perpetrator instead of protector

State crimes Individual crime

State as the perpetrator instead of protector Individual criminal as the perpetrator
against the protecting state
Laws aren’t violated because the state Individuals’ actions are against the law
deems their actions acceptable

PUNISHMENT

• Means of crime control

• Raises ethical dilemmas – moral justifications
• Goals of punishment?
• Is punishment effective?

Main principles:

Reductivist/Utilitarian Retributivist Just deserts

principles principles
Prevention of crime Punish past crimes Penal system part of
(individual and general) Punishing people welfare state
- Deterring because they deserve it Rights of the guilty and
potential An eye for an eye imprisoned
criminals Restor violated Need to protect
- Reforming actual equilibrium prisoners
criminals Condemn offence
- Locking criminals Punishments =
up proportional
Instrumental ends to Not lead to further
punishment inequality

SOCIOLOGISM AND PUNISHMENT

- Durkheim and social solidarity

o Punishments are functional
- Marx and the economy
o Penal practices serve class interests
- Focault and disciplinary power
o How power operates
- Feminist challenges
o Too much focus on men

CRIME AND MEDIA

▪ Media blurs the boundaries between fact, fiction, and entertainment

▪ Promotes stereotypes
▪ Popular fascination with crime
 ▪ Representation of criminals in literature, culture, tv, movies, songs –
eroticization of violence
▪ Reality TV: OJ Simpson, 9/11 attacks
▪ Copycat murders

CRIMES IN CYBERSPACE

▪ Child pornography
▪ Websites promoting extremist and radical views
▪ Copyright violations
▪ Electronic harassment
▪ Hacking

READING

CHAPTER 15 – THINKING ABOUT PUNISHMENT

Punishment = a legally approved method designed to facilitate the task of crime control
➔ Raises important ethical dilemmas
 ➔ Requires moral justifications – derives from state authority

1. Moral philosophy – distinguishing between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’

Justifications of punishment – firmly rooted in in broader moral and political philosophies

that often conflict

2. Sociology of control

• Attend to the uses of punishment through considering the wider aspects of social
control to reveal ‘deeper structures’ of penal systems
• Raises basic questions about the ways in which society organizes and deploys its
power to punish

Philosophy of punishment Sociology of control

How things should be Why particular societies adopt specific
models of punishment

- Different rationales coexist in uneasy hybrid combinations

- Punishment, as a social institution, is an inherently complex business that needs to be
approached from a range of theoretical perspectives
- One of the most enduring problems, hence why punishment has developed into an
established subdiscipline of moral philosophy
PHILOSOPHICAL JUSTIFICATIONS

Every time a court imposes a sentence →emphatically declares, in both

physical and symbolic sense, the sovereignty of the political power to which it
owes judicial authority
consequence of
 Close proximity between the power to punish and the power to rule;
o Has become an axiom of political theory that the act of judicial sentencing
requires to be justified in reference to some greater moral or ethical principle
than merely the will of the sentencer/lawgiver

Purpose of justifications:

REDUCTIVIST RETRIBUTIVIST
Prevention of future crimes Look to the past to punish crimes already
committed

In practice: in most criminal justice systems the two different rationales

uncomfortably coexist and tensions arise

I. Reductivist principle

• Justifies the punishment on grounds of its alleged future consequences

• Its arguments supported by the utilitarian form of moral reasoning
o Origins: Plato and Pythagoras, 5th century BC
o Famously advanced by Jeremy Bentham
o He argued that moral actions are those that produce ‘the greatest happiness of
the greatest number’ of people
o For punishment to reduce future crimes, the pain and unhappiness must be
‘outweighed by the avoidance and unpleasantness to other people in the future
– morally right from an utilitarian point of view’
o Pointing to a future of greater good, focus on the instrumental ends of
punishment
o The human wellbeing matters and moral rules ought to be evaluated in light of
their effect on human wellbeing
• Established what is good to do on grounds of social usefulness
 • Judges actions by their consequences
• ‘The good’ = human happiness
• The wrong experienced by the offender is outweighed by the compensating good
effects for overall human well-being

Avoidance of future crimes through:

a. Deterring potential criminals
- Crime can be discouraged through the public fear of the punishment they may receive
if they break the law

Individual deterrence General deterrence

Occurs when someone finds the experience Offenders are punished not to deter the
of punishment so unpleasant that they never offenders themselves, but to
wish to repeat the infraction for fear of the
consequences
Little value as a moral justification for penal Justifies penal policy
policy

➔ Severe punishments have been shown to be ineffective in the discouraging of the

reoffending
b. Reforming actual criminals

Reform Rehabilitation
The 19th century development of prison More individualized treatment programs
regimes that sought to change the offender introduced in the 20th century in conjunction
through a combination of hard labour and with the emergence of the welfare state
religious instruction
Both are based on the idea that punishment can reduce crime if it takes a form that will
improve the individual’s character so that they are less likely to reoffence in the future

c. Incapacitation – Keeping actual or potential offenders out of circulation

▪ Idea that an offender’s ability to commit further crimes should be removed
Physical removal Geographical removal

▪ Advocates for the protection of potential victims as the essence of punishment

▪ Many contemporary criminal justice strategies subscribe to this doctrine
o Fills the void created by the collapse of rehabilitation and the associated
argument that ‘nothing works’
o Claims to offer a means of social defence through removing offenders from
society and therefore eliminating their capacity to commit further crimes
▪ Has become the main philosophical justification for imprisonment many countries

II. Retributivist principles

• View that wrongdoers should be punished because they deserve it, irrespective of any
future beneficial consequences
• Principle dates back from antiquity:
o Code of Hamurabi – 1750BC – ‘an eye for an eye’; based on the principle of
lex talonis – the law of retaliation
• Principle developed by Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant into a highly
influential technique of utilitarian justifications of punishment
o Duty to punish = categorical imperative that restored the moral equilibrium
o Introduced a crucial distinction between:

Desire Duty
What it would be good to do on grounds of What we have a right to do
utility

o Without this distinction, there would be illiberal consequences that can flow
from utilitarian reasoning – times when the individual is sacrificed for the
general welfare of many (i.e. torture)
o Justice is an issue of doing right rather than what would be good to do
 • Increased attraction of utilitarian justifications in the 19th and 20th century →
retributivism falling from favour – archaic and reactionary feelings of revenge
• Most striking developments of the last 30 years = revival of retributivism under the
guise of ‘just deserts’

III. Just deserts

• 1970s – birth of the prisoners’ rights movement

o Need to protect prisoners and others from the arbitrary and discretionary
powers of state bureaucracies
• New retributivism arguments emerged → just deserts
o Insists that offenders should only be punished as severely as they deserve in
reaction against the unfair excesses of rehabilitation and incapacitative drive
from the conservatives

• Key elements of just deserts:

o Proportionality – the offender should only be sentenced according to what the
act deserves
o Denunciation – condemnation of the offence through restoring the moral
equilibrium whilst expressing social disapproval
• These principles
o Recall Cesare Beccaria’s arguments for due process in the criminal justice
system
o Based on a similar understanding of the social contract – apply equally and
fairly to everyone
• Fundamental flaw: only applicable to social relations that are just and equal,
otherwise there is no equilibrium to restore
o In this case: offenders tend to already be socially disadvantaged 
punishment increases inequality rather than reducing it

Hybrid compromises
➔ In practice: most criminal justice systems combine these differing rationales in uneasy
combinations

SOCIOLOGICAL EXPLANATIONS

- Sociologists attend to the way in which penal policy is determined by political forces
and the struggle of contending interests, rather than by normative argument or
relevant empirical difference

1. DURKHEIM AND SOCIAL SOLIDARITY

➔ Examined the relationships between crime, law, and punishment to reveal the
mechanisms that create and sustain social solidarity
Functionalism = what role it performs in preserving social stability and promoting
moral consensus

▪ Although his ideas have been rejected for their inherent conservativism, importance
with respect to the functionalism of punishment

o At the core of Durkheim’s work: concern with social security

o Punishment – important role in the creation of solidarity
o “Passion is the soul of the punishment” – arises from moral indignation and a
ritualized expression of social values against those who have violated the
sacred moral order

PUNITIVE PASSIONS AND DEGRADATION RITUALS

- Durkheim draws attention to the expressive qualities of punishment: all healthy

consciences come together to reaffirm shared beliefs through dutiful outrage that
constructs a public wrath

His legacy:
- Nietzsche: punishment gratifies sadistic and cruel tendencies in the human condition,
even if we’re in denial
 - George Herbert Mead: collective hostility against a criminal has the effect of uniting
members of the community in the emotional solidarity of aggression
- Svend Ranulf: criminal law developed as a consequence of middle class moral
indignation
- Harold Garfinkel: rituals in the courtroom should be understood as a degradation
ceremony as moral indignation serves to effect the ritual destruction of the person
denounced by defining the accused as the enemy of society

Modern penal systems:

Declaration of punishment Delivery of punishment

Public ritual Now characteristically occurs behind closed
Focus of public and media attention doors
Has much lower level of visibility

- Form that punishment takes is not specified

2. MARX AND POLITICAL ECONOMY

- Addresses a whole new range of themes as much as reinterprets Durkheim’s

- Societies must be understood in terms of how economic structures condition social
practices
- Consider punishment in relation to economic structures and examine the class
interests served by penal practices
- Punishing offenders for breaking laws maintains and reinforces the position of the
ruling class, rather than a benefiting society as a whole
- Punishment as a social institution → important role as a repressive state apparatus
- One of the earliest Marxist analyses: highlights the relationships between the form
that punishments take and the economic requirements of particular modes of
production
- Problems: excessively rely on the concept of ‘labour market’ to explain forms of
punishment
- Principle of less eligibility: vital to the management of inequality in capitalist
societies
o The standard of living within prisons must be lower than that of the lowest
stratum of the working class
- Basic thesis: the reason why prison has developed as the response to crime in
capitalist societies is because of the development of the wage labour, which crucially
has put a price on time  natural that criminals should pay for their crimes by doing
time

PUNISHMENT, IDEOLOGY AND CLASS CONTROL

- Penal sanctions of capitalist societies articulate bourgeois mentalities and ideological

conceptions relating to the commodity form: an exchange transaction, in which the
offender pays a debt and concludes the contractual obligation through serving a prison
sentence
- Dual functions of criminal law:
o Legitimation
o Class coercion
- The expansion of capital punishment as a ‘rule of terror’ on the part of aristocracy
over the poor = central factor contributing to the culture of deference sill in evidence
today
- Law can function ideologically to legitimate the existing order, but
o If the law is evidently partial and unjust, it will mask nothing, legitimize
nothing, contribute nothing to any class’s hegemony
- Law = arena of class struggle, rather than the exclusive possession of a ruling class
- Punishment not as a simple response to crime but as an important element in
‘managing the rabble’
Criticism:
 ◼ Criminal law and penal sanctions command a wide degree of support from the
subordinate classes and such practices afford a degree of protection previously
unrealized

3. FOCAULT AND DISCIPLINARY POWER

Focault:
- Enormous influence over criminology over the past 30 years
- Discipline and Punish (1977)
o Detailed analysis of the emergence of the prison in the 19th century
o An account of how power operates in the modern era
o Opens with two fundamental transformations in penal practices:
▪ Disappearance of the public spectacle
▪ Installation of a different form of punishment by the 19th century
o These developments = illustrative of how power operates in a modern society
- Prison represents a disciplinary mode of power, very different from the direct,
arbitrary and violent rules of the past
- Power in capitalist society – exercised at the lowest possible cost (economically and
politically), while effects – intensified and extended throughout the social apparatus
Criticism:
◼ Its ‘appalling’ historical inaccuracies
◼ ‘impoverished’ understanding of subjectivity
◼ Preference for ‘ascetic description’ over normative analysis
◼ Not being able to tell the difference between prison and life outside

THE PUNITIVE CITY AND SURVEILLANCE SOCIETY

- 1970s: Many Western societies – decarceration and the use of alternative sanctions
- Community coercions = more humane and less stigmatizing means
Criminology – Stan Cohen:
- The development of community corrections marks both a continuation and an
intensification of the social control patterns identified by Focault
- There is now a blurring of where prison ends and community begins with an
accompanying increase in the total number of offenders brought into the system
- Recruitment of friends, relatives and neighbors into the web of surveillance through
curfews, tracking and tagging  “punitive city”
Applicability of Focault’s ideas to contemporary patterns of punishment
- Developments since 1990s – rapid expansion of:
o Electronic
Greatly enhance the
o Visual technologies surveillance capacities of a
o Information State

- Surveillance operates in so many spheres of daily life that it is impossible to avoid:

o Most social encounters and economic transactions → subject to electronic
recording, checking and authorization
o Urban fortress living – moved from a dystopian vision to become a reality
▪ Contemporary surveillance both inclusionary (sense of safety, security
and order) as well as exclusionary (sadistic street environments to
displace the homeless from certain parts of the city)

FEMINIST CHALLENGES
- Main philosophical and sociological traditions have largely ignored the punishment of
women
- Study of gender continues to be marginalized and remains a male-dominated
discipline: constitutes largely of academic men studying criminal men
- The costs to criminology of its failure to deal with feminist scholarship are perhaps
more severe than they would be in any other discipline
o i.e. when women are punished, this is as much about upholding traditional
gender stereotypes as well as penalizing criminality
- Control of women → process of transcarceration = the movement of offenders
between different institutional sites
o There is a continuum regulation in women’s lives that encompasses:
▪ The penal system
▪ Mental health Informal social (and anti-social) controls
 ▪ Social welfare

- Gender divisions are as fundamental to structuring punishment as those of class and

race

FEMINIST JURISPRUDENCE
Underpinning proposals:
1. Legal categories which are supposedly gender neutral, instead reflect male
dominance
2. There is a kind of reasoning, characteristic to women, that is excluded from
criminal justice decision making

CHAPTER 20 – CRIME AND THE MEDIA

• Relationship between crime and media – subject of intense debate for a long time
• Debates over the harmful effects of popular culture on public morality
o Often driven by a class antagonism, generational fear, social change, symbolic
decline and technological development
• Media and pop culture are fascinated with crime to the extent that the distinction
between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ is hard to tell
o Partly as a consequence of reality TV → blurs boundaries between fact, fiction
and entertainment
o Initial reactions are formed within established media interpretative frames
o Development of a visual criminology (Keith Heyward)

Visual criminology
➔ Decisive moment has been reached – no longer possible to divorce crime and control
from how they are visually represented
➔ Photography = vital element in the construction of the modern criminal subject,
central to the dynamics that shape social practices in significand and often disruptive
ways
 o Ability to authentically record the truth + radically new way of seeing the
world = status of photography as a medium

BLURRING BOUNDARIES
• Long history of popular fascination with crime
• Boundaries between fact and fiction have always been fairly fluid

Popular
Heightened The
fascination with
anxieties of crime media
crime

Print
Telegraph Electronic age → mediatization
Wireless

• It is becoming increasingly different to distinguish between media image and social

reality

Three distinctive approaches in criminology

1. ‘Ill effects’ debate – Assess whether media through ‘depictions of crime violence,
death and aggression’ can be said to ‘cause’ criminal conduct
2. Examines how crime news unjustly stereotypes groups in the orchestration of moral
panics and → heightens the fear of crime
3. Broader consideration of how crime and punishment have been consumed, imagined
and represented in pop culture; there are diverse media forms to excavate as opposed
to the singular preoccupation with news content found in earlier criminal media
studies

MEDIA EFFECTS, POPULAR ANXIETIES AND VIOLENT

REPRESENTATIONS
- One of the most researched issues in the social sciences
- No clear evidence for or against behavioural claims has yet been produced
- Most of the ‘effects studies’ – based on banal and outmoded understanding of science:
o A group of subjects undergo various form of exposure to media stimulus and
some aspect of their behaviour is measured – attitudes before and after the
experiment
o The artificiality of such experiments often compromise them
o Fail to place effects in their social contexts
o Studies rely on mechanistic fairy tales about how audiences process messages
Problem: assuming that the relationship between media and its effects is
simple and straightforward

- Public opinion: media violence → real violence  drives the dominant research
tradition
- One way of approaching the issue: consider who is supposedly at risk from the media
o Not the “educated” and “cultured” middle classes
o Those who are affected the most are the young, especially the working-class
young
- Blaming the medium for a particular crime: popular anxieties in the present often rely
on idealized images of the past – driven by generational fear and class antagonism

Two major difficulties between drawing direct causal links between media images
and forms of social behaviour:
1. They’re unprovable: ignoring that correlation  causality
2. Making such links draws attention away from the real causal factors of the
behaviour in question

➔ Complex issues on how the media represents violence have to be adequately

addressed in criminology in future research – examples of questions:
o How the eroticization of violence and the spread of pornography as an
industry → altered the newsworthiness of crimes and redefined acceptable
behaviour, while the press coverage continues to distort and demean victims
 o Why the audience of a splatter movie reacts with laughter instead of fear when
faced with violence, blood, mutilations, and killings
▪ Need to place violent representations in broader cultural contexts

o Grotesque violence is deeply embedded in human storytelling

o ‘Pathos formula’ = powerful cultural force central to Western culture and
aesthetics where victims of cruelty are shown to actively participate and take
pleasure from their own destruction
 The desire for disturbing imagery and horrific stories is not a pathological
departure from social norms, but it is rather the norm

DRAMATIZING CRIME, MANUFACTURING CONSENT AND NEWS

PRODUCTION

• The press and broadcast news report crime → now an established field in criminology
Critical scholars in the 1960-70s: sought to unmask the ideological role of the media
Central issue: how the media promote damaging stereotypes of social groups
(especially the young) to uphold the status quo
Overall legacy of this approach: it is a sustained attempt to analyse the ‘social
production of news’ to reveal the ways that media ‘inculcate and defend the
economic, social, and political agenda of privileged groups’

• Role of crime news: news media are as much an agency of policing as the law-
enforcement agencies whose activities and classifications are reported on – they
reproduce order in the process of representing it
o The organizational requirements of news production reinforces a tendency
towards the standardized and ideological nature of news content so that the
state is able to secure consent for its actions

CURRENT DEBATES

◼ New approaches to the complex and more increasing differentiated field of news
production will need to be developed, because of:
 o News coming in many different forms: serious, soft, hard, and popular
o The way they are delivered: online or in traditional print
o Global broadcasting
o Increasing concentration of media ownership
o New technologies
◼ Recent work: how these technologies in the hands of ordinary citizens have changed
public perceptions of policing in these new media environments
o i.e. emergence of mobile camera phones + social media platforms →
challenging official versions of events in the cases of police misconduct
◼ Revamping of the ‘moral panic’ term → a number of authors turned to the term ‘risk
society’

IMAGINING TRANSGRESSION, REPRESENTING DETECTION AND

CONSUMING CRIME

• Stories of transgression – central to every culture’s imagining of its origins

• Pleasure and dangers posed by transgression and ‘otherness’ that make such
narratives so seductive for readers
• Central themes to emerge in the early 20th century: ambivalent but central place of the
city in modern sensibility and the place of the individual moral agent in the face of
social organizations too extensive to direct or comprehend
• TV cop programme – genre that is continually being ‘reinvented’;
• Move towards the medicalization of crime – focus shifting from police to forensic
pathologists and criminal psychologists

CRIME IN CYBERSPACE

• The Internet – part of an information revolution that has crucial implications for
representations of crime + offering opportunities for committing/being a victim of
crime
• Internet = global network of interconnected computers
 Types of activity that might be regarded as criminal:
▪ Accessing, creating and distributing child pornography
▪ Websites espousing misogynist, homophobic or racist hate
▪ Copyright violations of intellectual property rights through ‘digital
piracy’
▪ Electronic harassment (including, spamming, stalking and extortion)
▪ Hacking (encompassing simple mischief through to political protest)

• Cybercrime = significantly new phenomenon

• The processes of economic globalization, which are being facilitated by Internet and
web-based information and communication technologies, provide the resources as
well as raise the prospect of globally organized criminal networks
o Easier to bypass national boundaries
o Offer more sophisticated techniques to support and develop networks for
criminal activity

Cybercrime – 2 categories:
New crimes using new tools Conventional crimes using ICTs
Hacking, viruses Fraud, stalking, identity theft

TYPES OF CYBERCRIME

1. Child pornography
• Most public concern over the Internet → child pornography
• Dual problems of illegal pornography of minors:
o Child pornography
o Minors accessing pornographic content

2. Hate crime
• Especially from groups on the political far-right
 3. Intellectual property rights
• Napster case
• Suggestions that ‘digital piracy’ will continue to undermine record company profits
• Markets expand and respond to technological innovations
o i.e. Apple iTunes

4. Electronic harassment
• Spamming
• Online personal defamation
• Stalking
• Extortion
• Identity theft

5. Hacking
• Involves breaking into computer systems and networks to embrace so many virtual
acts of sabotage, intrusion, infiltration, theft, and fraud
• Hacktivism

6. State surveillance
• Brought into sharp focus after 9/11

7. Commercial surveillance
• Rapidly growing phenomenon
• Raging from Cookies (client-side persistent information) – give extensive tracking
capacities to companies eager to exploit data from individuals – to data processing
companies – provides information on how well and by whom websites are used
Week 6
LECTURE – RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

REQUIREMENTS

• Basic understanding of research and research methods is paramount to a lawyer

• Develop a theory
• Theory = reasonable explanation of reality
o i.e. criminological theories help explain crime

• Social science researches have to be developed through a certain methodology

• Methodology = collection and analysis of accurate data or facts
o Objective
▪ Value free
▪ Don’t start with strong ideas
o Ethical
▪ Very important requirement
▪ Social sciences, psychology
▪ i.e. Milgram experiment
▪ Ethical limits need to be respected
o Professional integrity
▪ Don’t influence the results

TWO MAIN TYPES OF RESEARCH

QUANTITATIVE
Explaining phenomena by collecting
numerical data that are analyzed using
mathematically based methods (in particular
statistics)
Collect a lot of data from many sources
QUALITATIVE
Umbrella terms for a large number of
different research methods
Collect more insightful data from fewer
sources
Look at relations, patterns etc. and try to Don’t look at the overall picture, focus on
come to a conclusion something in particular and go in depth
i.e. research on murders in a country i.e. interview a specific murderer about his
motives, etc.

I. QUANTITATIVE METHODS

STEPS
1. Data gathering
2. Mathematical analysis – statistics
3. Draw conclusions – calculate
4. Find explanations – why does data/numbers go up/down?
5. Develop theories

1. Data gathering

SOURCES
a. Police statistics
Problems: bias, abuse of power, “dark figure”, inaccuracy of reports, racism,
victimless crimes (no clear individual victim – i.e. corruption)

b. Prisons
Problems: wrongful convictions, a lot of criminals get away with it

c. Court cases
Problems: biased, especially in the case of common law, innocent until proven
guilty → many people are not convicted, unsolved crimes

➢ Important sources of data, but are not necessarily accurate

➢ All of the sources above have one main problem: dark figure
 BEST SOURCE → Surveys
➔ A lot of the dark figure is exposed
➔ i.e. dark figure is larger in cases of sexual assault and domestic violence
➔ Survey  interview

• Victim surveys – claimed victimization

• National Crime victimization survey

Problems:
o Expensive
o Representative sample
➔ You have to ask the right people
➔ i.e. if 40% of the population is students  40% of the representative sample
should be students
o False reports
o Memory loss – many people repress traumatic events
o Sampling bias
o Coding errors – when transferring the data

- Limitations: disclaiming section in the research paper

- Surveys need to be clear, have a lot of answering options, be worded correctly

Not a perfect method, but might be the best we have

 in Criminology, we don’t have the accurate numbers

When people present research, objective truth is automatically assumed by the large public;
important to ascertain the methods used in order to conclude how accurate the research is

2. Analysis
• How reliable are data?
• Absolute figures vs relative figures
 o Absolute figures – i.e. number of murders in the US > NL  the US has a
larger population
o Relative figures – percentages
• Which statistical methods were used>
• Cause and effect?
• Other causes?
• Theory development

CONCEPTS
▪ Sample = subset of a statistical population that accurately reflects the members of the
entire population
▪ Variable = concept that has been operationalized or measured in a specific manner
and that can vary or take on different values, usually of a quantitative nature
▪ Operationalization = process of defining concepts by describing how they are
measured
▪ Validity = accuracy of measurement
▪ Reliability = consistency of stability of measurement; can similar results be
concluded from a similar research?

CORRELATION  CAUSATION
- 2 things that correlate are not necessarily related/causal
- Correlation
o One of the most common and useful statistics
o A single number that describes the degree of relationship between two
variables
o Ranging from 0 to 10

B
 INTERNATIONAL COMPARISONS
• Different definitions
• Different ways of reporting
• Quality of data
• Factual inequalities
• Cultural differences
• Recording crime
• How to deal with crime

➔ Have a critical stance on facts and figures; they have a limited value, but they
often have a lot.

II. QUALITATIVE METHODS

Examples:
• Psychological profiling
• Interviews
• Life history participant observation
• Experiments
• Analysis of diaries

INTERVIEWS
▪ Best known method
▪ In-depth
o Ask many more questions
o Narrative criminology: see the world through the eyes of the perpetrator
▪ Various forms
▪ Personal experience
 Problems:
❖ Lies
❖ Bias: people tell their truth – always a slight bias when people are interviewed

Survey Interview
Small questions Complex questions
Limited number of questions Numerous questions
Can’t go in depth Possibility to go in depth

PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION
▪ Studying criminals ‘au naturel’
▪ See the world through their eyes
▪ Researcher pretends to be part of the criminal world
Problems:
o Sometimes too dangerous:
▪ If they commit a crime you have to report it to the police
▪ Might be forced to commit crimes yourself
o They might behave differently around the researcher

LIFE HISTORY AND CASE STUDIES

▪ In-depth close up
▪ Long interviews
▪ Follow people’s whole life story – genealogical lines
▪ Longitudinal studies

EXPERIMENTS
▪ Very controlled situation, environment

Well-known experiments:
o Milgram experiment
 o Zimbardo prison experiment (Stanford)

ETHICS
• Request permission
• May deceive subjects?
• What may you make them do?
• Confidentiality and anonymity?
• Respect privacy
• May not expose them to risks
• May not hurt them or cause permanent damage
• May not discriminate

PROBLEMATIC ISSUES
• Security issues
• Ethical issues
• Comparative issues
• Bias in researcher
• Truth
• Objectivity
• Representativity

CRIME, PLACE, SPACE

• Where does most crime occur?

• Who commits the crime?
• Why?
• Characteristics of the are
• Root causes

Gang rape → group cohesion

Groups need cohesion

- Shared ideology → cohesion
- People forced into being perpetrators → need
cohesions → gang rape → can no longer be just a
victim, is also a perpetrator
READING

CHAPTER 3 – RESEARCHING CRIME

- Criminological researchers come from a variety of disciplines and draw from a range
of research techniques
- Recent years – more reflection on research methods and techniques

CRIMINOLOGICAL RESEARCH METHODS

• Criminologists → their own data through their own research projects

• Research methods, according to:
o Expertise
o Area of interest

Types of sociological approaches to crime:

 Method Quantitative Qualitative
Examples Surveys Interviews
Statistical analysis Participant observation
Prediction studies Ethnography

➔ Mixed methods: aim to combine these two approaches in interesting ways

o Increasingly favoured
o i.e. evaluation research, evidence-based policy making

Experimental criminology:
- Defining feature: seeks to test out its theories in the criminal justice field and
make policy recommendation based on ‘hard’ evidence of what works
Social psychologists:
• Analyze relations between individuals and society
• Also use experimental and mixed method approaches
• Focus on questions on
o Motivation
o Stigma
o Emotions
o Individual and community perceptions of crime
o Receptiveness pf particular kinds of offenders to particular kinds of
sanctions

Criminological research:
- University: funded by Research Councils, derived from governments
- Other state bodies Questions on ownership, tailoring
- Voluntary/private sectors the research to meet the funders’
ambitions

CRIMINOLOGICAL DATA

I. Main source of criminal statistics – criminal justice system:

o Police
 o Courts
o Prisons

II. Information from outside the criminal justice system:

a. Mass media
▪ Vast amount of crime coverage and comment
▪ Television, film, news media, and the internet
▪ Represent crime and justice in different ways

b. Charities and voluntary organisations

▪ Significant role in criminal justice by providing services but also by creating
criminological data research reports
▪ Publicize state crime around the world
▪ i.e. NGOs

c. Private companies
▪ i.e. banks, credit suppliers, insurance agencies – exchange huge amounts of
information about their customers
▪ Person with criminal record can be denied services

d. International bodies
▪ Source of global and comparative criminological data
▪ i.e. United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute

THINKING CRITICALLY ABOUT STATISTICS

Joel Best (2002) – people respond to statistics in three distinct ways:

1) Awestruck – treat research with reverence and as if they represent the clear
truth
2) Naïve – more critical, but tend to accept statistics as ‘hard facts’
 3) Cynical – very suspicious about statistics, deliberately used to mislead and
deceive
- He advises us against all three
- Be critical and develop a questioning perspective which allows us to evaluate
merits and limitations of statistics

REDORDED CRIME

• Criminologists generate their own data in their research

• However, they are very likely to draw on official criminal statistics
• Main sources = government departments responsible for criminal justice
o Readily available to everyone
• However, recorded crimes no not reflect the full extent of unlawful activity
• Recorded crime statistics are guided by guidelines
• For a crime to be registered in official data, a number of things have to happen:
o Recognition that a potentially criminal incident has taken place by a victim or
witness
o Reporting of that incident to the police
o Acknowledgement by the police that a potentially criminal incident has
occurred
o Recording by the police of the incident as an alleged crime
→ Only a proportion of crimes make it through ‘the crime funnel’
→ Represent only the tip of the iceberg – many victims do not report crimes to the
police
→ The recording of crime involves complex processes of interpretation and
interaction

Racist incidents – an example of thinking critically about recorded crime:

Racist crime = where victims are targeted because of their ‘race’ and ethnicity
• Under reporting because of dissatisfaction with the police handling the reported
incidents
o Delays before police attend incidents
 o Refuse to acknowledge racial motives behind incidents
o Reluctant to prosecute perpetrators
o Victims themselves being subjected to hostile treatment from the police

NATIONAL CRIME VICTIMIZATION SURVEYS

• Provide an important alternative way of generating data about crime (especially

underreported crime)
• Asking samples of people directly about their experiences of crime victimization
• Key way of addressing the ‘dark figure’ pf unreported crime
• Can also be usefully compared to self-report studies
• Useful in providing insights into under-reported and under-recorded crime
• However, they have their limitations:
o Focus on individuals and households
o Do not focus on collective victims (i.e. state crime)
o They define ‘crime’ and ‘criminal’ in very limited terms and highlight
‘conventional’ crimes over others

INTERNATIONAL, LOCAL, CAN COMMERCIAL CRIME

VICTIMIZATION SURVEYS

a. International
- Large scale international victim surveys
→ Make international comparisons
- i.e. European Union International Crime Survey, International Crime Victim
Survey
Problems:
▪ Cultural perception of crime differs

b. Local
- Significant contribution to knowledge about crime
- Highlighted the uneven distribution of risks of victimization – certain ages/social
groups = more frequently subjected to crime than others
 c. Commercial victimization
- Ask owners of retail and manufacturing premises about the crime they have
experienced at a particular period of time
- Provide alternative measure of crime – some premises are subject to repear
victimization

THINKING POSITIVELY ABOUT CRIME VICTIMIZATION

• Crime statistics provide more of an insight into official definitions of crime, crime
recording, and policing than into actual levels of unlawful activity
• Offer plenty of potential

CRIMINOLOGISTS AND CRIMINALS

• Criminologists have tried to look beyond formal criminal statistics and do their own
research

Robert E. Park - Anthropological methods can be used in Western urban

research and the social scientists should study people in their
everyday environments
City = social laboratory, where crime could be studied in situ
➔ Developed a distinctive approach to social research, social life,
and the study of deviance – the Chicago School

• Used a particular mix of

ethnographic and other
qualitative research methods
• Aimed to capture the complexity
of social life through interviews,
the study of personal documents
and observational methods
• Ethnographer = participates in a given social setting, ‘amid the action’ for an extended
period of time
o Makes regular observations of people and events in that setting
o Listens to people and engages in conversations
o Interviews informants about issues that cannot be observed directly
o Writes a faithful representation of what they have discovered in their study
MORAL, ETHICAL, AND LEGAL ISSUES

• Ethnographic methods – sometimes raise particular moral, ethical, legal difficulties

o Researchers have to decide where/whether to draw a line
o Researchers should be prepared to engage in/witness crimes themselves

Make ethical decisions on:

➔ How far they are prepared to go
➔ What kind of knowledge is ethical to possess
➔ What criminal acts are inappropriate for the study
➔ What responsibilities they might have to victims, criminals, those involved
in crime control, to themselves and to their profession

Criticism:
▪ Can easily ‘become a tool’ in illegal activity
▪ ‘Reinforce’ criminal activity by observing, rather than challenging it

CODES OF ETHICS

• Most academic associations and research funding bodies → codes of professional

ethics to promote ‘good practice’ in research
• Cover issues such as:
o Consent
o Confidentiality
o Access
o Transparency
o Risk assessment
 o Data protection
Functions
➔ Protect the interest of those taking part in research
➔ Promoting professionalism among researchers

Problems with restrictive ethical codes – probably relevant to other areas of

criminological and sociological research
o Is a criminologist working within tight ethical codes still able to conduct
effective research in ‘closed’ worlds? i.e. child sexual abuse, trafficking,
corporate crime
o Is it always possible/desirable for research aims to be ‘transparent’ and
equally open to all parties?
o Excessive risk assessment → researchers no longer take risks?

TAKING SIDES IN CRIMINOLOGICAL RESEARCH

These broad concerns → have shaped sociological criminology since the 1960s:

I. Becker – ‘underdog sociology’

• Many researchers want their research to contribute to social change

Howard Becker – “Whose Side Are We On?”

▪ Sociologists must take sides in their work since they cannot,
by definition, be on all sides
▪ Sociologists should take the side of the subordinate party
▪ Since not being biased is not an option, researchers should
make bias visible
▪ ‘the question is not whether we should take sides, since we
inevitably will, but rather whose side are we on?’
▪ Does not mean researchers should reject impartiality, just
specify their own bias
• Connected to his wider and very influential concept of labeling
 o Researchers should focus on the experiences of groups labelled as deviant
by those in authority
o Their experiences were overshadowed because their ‘right to be heard’ and
‘credibility’ was much weaker than those with the power to label, control,
and punish
o It was the researcher’s job to address the balance and challenge authority

II. Ohlin and policy-forming sociology

Lloyd Ohlin – “Delinquency and Opportunity”

• Delinquency = product of blocked opportunities in connection with poverty,
connection, and employment (less connected to labelling)
• It was still a researcher’s job to challenge authorities and policymakers, but by
playing a part in the policy making process
• Researchers should use the kinds of research methods that would generate the
kind of data to provide the kind of evidence that policymakers could not ignore

CHAPTER 8 – CRIME, PLACE, AND SPACE

Think spatially about crime:

1. Where recorded crime takes place
- Build up a profile of the places/environments where most crime and control
encounters occur

2. How places can be altered in ways that might reduce crime

- Involve a number of factors as well as agents

3. Consider how we come to know about space and crime in the first place and what we
do with that knowledge
- Mapping statistics = central methodological tool in this criminological research
 - Raises questions about the source of statistics and the nature of mapping
technology
1. OFFENDERS, OFFENCES, AND PLACE

• At present, there is no single term to denote the study of crime and place

Park and Burgess - relationship between urban environment, actions,

and values
- social science as a form of ‘human ecology’
- ‘Zonal theory of urban development’ in Chicago

➔ More recent criminological research → linking a community’s crime levels to its

capacity for collective efficacy

• Early work on crime: offenders and where they lived and socialized
• Later work (1970s onwards): focused on offences and victims
o Victim surveys → area victimization rates (level of offences against a
particular group in an area) to be compared with the area of offence rates (all
recorded offences in a particular area)
• Connections between poverty, place, and crime are still debated by criminologists
o Importance with looking at economic disadvantage in relation to parents,
friends, schools, and other networks which make up a neighbourhood
o Some argue that it is not the setting (or space) alone, but the community
connected to it; the more collective efficiency → the less likely crime can
happen

SPATIAL DISTRIBUTION OF CRIME

• Very uneven distribution

• Patterns and concentrations also differ by crime type
 2. CRIME PREVENTION, SPACE, AND COMMUNITIES

- How to change these dynamics and the places in which they are played out in
order to reduce crime?

CHANGING SPACES: URBAN DESIGN AND CRIME

Oscar Newman – ‘defensible space’

- Argue that it was possible to modify the built

environment to reduce the opportunity for crime and to
promote community responsibility
- Shape new approaches within what was still referred to
as environmental criminology

• Street fixtures – benches, bus shelters, playgrounds, and lighting – designed to

screen out undesirable activity
• Crime as an inevitable phenomenon that can best be managed by reducing the
opportunity to commit an offence rather than by reducing the individuals’
desire to commit the crime in the first place
o Criminology remains divided on the implications of this:
o Some argue that it addresses the needs and empowers the communities
o Others that it fails to address the root causes of the poverty,
deprivation, and spatial exclusion, which lies behind so much recorded
crime
• Need to move beyond urban design to address community relations

LIVING IN SPACES: EVERYDAY NEGOTIATIONS OF DISORDER

Ways in which people try to minimize their exposure to crime:

a. Modifying movements
b. Securing their home workplace, neighbourhood
c. Relocating altogether
 3. MAPPING AND THE USES OF GEO-DATA

• Mapping = vital research tool in studies of crime and place

• Maps – visual representations of crime and a means of explaining its spatial
relationships

- Geographical information systems – impact on the criminal justice practices

o Development of crime maps
- Sites like these raise issues about the status of what has been termed ‘personal
geo-data’
o Sharing such data outside the context of tis creation has implications for
privacy, transparency, and ownership

CRITICAL CARTOGRAPHY

• Maps – always need to be interpreted

• Never neutral, despite the fact that we often treat them as they are
• Critics argue that whenever we look at a map, we see it from the point of view or
perspective of the person or object with the power to gaze out over the whole territory
• Mapping – always been a powerful tactic of governance and surveillance
o i.e. colonization

Week 7
LECTURE – VICTIMOLOGY
 VICTIMOLOGISTS
Study:
• Victims
• Causes of victimization
• Consequences One topic, from all angles
• Role of the criminal justice system
• Role of society

- Not only victims of crime, but also victims of:

o Terror attacks
o Natural disasters Broad and specialized
o Poverty

CRIME VICTIMIZATION SURVEY

➔ Measure crime patterns

➔ Understand the impact of crime
➔ Characteristics of victims
➔ Public attitudes to crime
There are useful things to gather from these surveys

CONSEQUENCES FOR VICTIMS

• Material losses – stolen goods

• Physical
loss in productivity
• Emotional
Important Depression,
not to undermine this
Important reduction in victims
not to judge self-
esteem, PTSD
Important not to act like you know what victims want victims want → you might
know what they need in general, but what they individually want can be very
different
 OTHER CONSEQUENCES

• Characterological self-blame (victimization is deserved)

o i.e. domestic abuse
• Behavioral self-blame (need to change behaviour)
o i.e. beaten up because you went out  don’t go out anymore 
consequences
• Learned helplessness (become passive and numb)
o Feel like they cannot do anything about it
o Habitual, in the longer run
o Makes you an even more likely target the 2nd time

FLIGHT
ATTACK FRIGHT on the spot reaction
FREEZE

• Survival guilt (Holocaust and genocide survivors)

o Guilty that they survived and other did not

A VICTIM OR A SURVIVOR

VICTIM SURVIVOR
Entails pity Entails they are able to put it in the past

COSTS:
Individual System
Property loss Insurance
Medical care Health care systems
Sick leave Employers
Reduction of quality of life Mental health care
Legal fees Legal system
 THEORIES OF VICTIMIZATION

• Explain why a person is victimized – to see to what extent a victims

lifestyle creates opportunities for a motivated offender to commit crimes.
• Study why perpetrators select certain victims: motivated offender, suitable
target, absence of capable guardian.

Hans von Hentig – Causes of victimization

▪ Ignorance of risk taking
▪ Do not recognize threats or don’t respond appropriately
▪ Do not recognize danger
▪ Provoke victimization through violence an aggression
▪ Inability to activate assistance in the community
▪ Unable to defend oneself

Why is this research dangerous?

➔ Could lead to victim blaming because of increased focus on the characteristics of the
victim
HOWEVER
➔ Find correlations and causes
➔ Understand why perpetrators
➔ Help victims
➔ Bring policy changes

Benjamin Mendelsohn – characterization of victim

▪ Completely innocent
▪ Minor guilty
▪ As guilty as the offender
▪ As more guilty
▪ As most guilty
▪ Simulating/imaginary victim
 SEXUAL VIOLENCE

- Alcohol use
- Seductive behaviour
- Revealing clothes
- Language use
- Bad reputation
➢ Blame the victim

➔ Already a huge dark figure from unreported crimes

➔ However, a lot of criticism comes from society

VICTIMIZATION AND STEREOTYPES

Nils Christy – the ideal victim versus non-ideal victims

• Danger of blaming the victim
• Discrimination in the criminal justice system

Common misconception: ideal victim = old lady

However, typical victim (in the USA):
▪ Male (except sexual violence)
▪ Black people and mixed race
▪ Age group 18-20
▪ Low income
▪ People from large households

This relates to:

o Where the person spends their time
o Where they live
o Specific neighbourhood Structural causes of victimization
o Family structure
 o Wealth inequalities/poverty

JUST WORLD THINKING

= the belief in a just world

• Belief that nothing bad happens to an actor unless they commit a wrong
• Creating a world in our minds in which people get what they deserve
• We think we can control what happens
• Intention to blame people who are in a bad situation
• Protects us and our view of the world
➔ People want to and have to believe they live in a just world so that they can go about
their daily lives with a sense of trust, hope and confidence.

BYSTANDERS

Bystander = person present but not involved, a spectator, an onlooker

o Proximity of the event
o Does not act
➔ By not acting  support the perpetrator

PROCESS

1) Notice that something is going on

2) Interpret the situation as an emergency/crime
o Very important step
▪ Alone – give your own interpretation
▪ Together – look at others to interpret and define a certain social context
3) Degree of responsibility felt
o Diffusion of responsibility – it must be the responsibility of others
4) Form of assistance
5) Implement the action choice
 • Social influence = Bystanders monitor the reactions of other people in such an
emergency situation to see if others think it is necessary to intervene
• Diffusion of responsibility = every bystander assumes that someone else is going
to intervene, each individual feels less responsible and refrains from doing
anything
• Bystander effect = the greater the number of bystanders, the less likely it is that
any one of them will help

Social influence
Important phenomena that explain
Diffusion of responsibility
the behaviour of bystanders
Bystander effect

VICTIMS AND THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM

o Victims initiate the criminal justice system

o Report crime
o Provide evidence

o Victimless crimes

- Victims nowadays can go to court and tell how they felt

o Focus on suspects
o Victims want to tell their story
o Knowledge and acknowledgement
o Justice done
o Mediation and reconciliation
o Compensation and reparation

VICTIMIZATION

Primary victimization Secondary victimization

How the crime affected the victim How the responses of others affect the
victim
READING

CHAPTER 9 – VICTIMS AND VICTIMIZATION

- Crime = behaviour that is prohibited by criminal law

- Straightforward conceptualization
- However, tells us little about whereby certain victims and harmful acts come to be
recognized as part of the crime problem, while others remain hidden
- Victims = central role in initiating the criminal justice process

THE ROLE OF VICTIMS IN THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM

• Role of victims largely confined to reporting crime and/or providing evidence

• Before: role of the victim was very different and much more extensive
o Most crimes were considered a private matter between the victim and the
offender (except cases of treason or sedition)
 o Private thief-takers cashed in on rewards offered by the government; also
played a part in investigating the offence
o The victim would make the decision whether or not to go to prosecution; took
on the role of prosecutor in the court
→ some victims had more access to justice than others

DEFINING CRIME AND VICTIMIZATION

• Not all harmful activities are seen as criminal

• i.e. offences who do not have a direct, tangible victim are often not considered as
‘real’ crimes (corruption) → indirect victims
• Attempt to broaden the definition of victims to include both direct and indirect
victims, but also to include a range of abuses and harms relating to the criminal abuse
of power (i.e. abuse of human rights)
• Victimless crimes – forms of behaviour that is considered illegal despite the fact that
it is consensual in nature

THE HIERARCHY OF VICTIMIZATION

• Some victims enjoy a higher status in the crime discourse, their experiences are taken
more seriously than others

Niels Christie – ideal victim

Ideal victim Non-ideal victim

Typology Elderly woman or child
Societal perception Considered weak,
vulnerable, innocent, and
deserving of help
Young men, homeless people,
car-owners who do not lock
their cars, drunken victims of
assault
Less deserving of sympathy
because of their
characteristics (i.e. physical
strength) or inaction (they
 should have protected
themselves)

Hierarchy of victimization
- Best exemplified by the ambivalent position of women as victims of sexual or
domestic violence
- Historians have used a variety of sources to show that in the past, only certain women
that presented themselves in certain ways were likely to succeed in bringing their case
to public attention or secure a conviction
- Nowadays, feminist criminologists argue that focusing on the characteristics or
behaviours of victims as factors in crime has a tendency of reinforcing gender
stereotypes and in distinguishing between innocent and blameworthy victims →
victim blaming
- Such stereotyping has a massive effect on victims çunwillingness among some
victims to cooperate with the police and courts

DIFFERENT TYPES OF VICTIMOLOGY

Karmen – three strands within criminology:

1. The conservative
o Defines the discipline in four ways:
a. Crime as a distinct problem with particular focus on the highly visible forms of
crime victimization
b. Concerned to render people accountable
c. Encourages self-reliance
d. Focuses on notions of retributive justice
o Generally aims to identify particular patterns of victimization and to examine the
actions or patterns of lifestyle of individual victims that may have contributed to the
crime victimization
o Victims’ conscious and unconscious role in their own victimization

2. The liberal
o Also includes more hidden types of criminal victimization and abuses by white-collar
elites, corporations, and businesses
o Most victims of fraud are unaware that they have been victimized at all, or unwilling
to recognize
o This type of criminology is concerned with making the victim whole again –
restitution, mediation, reconciliation

3. The radical-critical
o Extends the focus of the discipline even further
o Extends to all forms of human suffering
o Based on the recognition that poverty, malnutrition, inadequate health care, and
unemployment are all just as socially harmful as, if not more harmful than, most of
the behaviours and incidents that currently make up the official crime problem
o Criminal justice system also contributes to the problem of victimization →
institutional wrongdoing that violates human rights, police rule-breaking, wrongful
arrest and false imprisonment etc.
o Challenges the dominant understandings of what constitutes the ‘crime problem’ and
its impact on individuals and whole communities

CRIME VICTIMIZATION SURVEYS

• Key aspect of victim-oriented research

• Have helped to
o Redress an imbalance in early criminological works
o Provide insights into the hidden figures of crime and sensitize policymakers to
the range and diversity of victim experiences with crime
• However, they have serious limitations:
o They suffer from a general inability to tap certain forms of crime where there
is no clear/identifiable victim (indirect victim) – i.e. crimes committed in the
corporate boardroom, in the financial marketplace, on the internet or directed
against the environment
o Tendency to focus the notion of criminality on the conventional crimes, while
other equally harmful acts, and victims, remain hidden
• International crime surveys problems:
o Rely on standardized concepts of crime
o Tend to ignore different cultural perceptions that may affect the respondents
o Respondents may have different thresholds of what they consider as
unacceptable and criminal behavior
 findings from victimization surveys must be interpreted very carefully, in
the knowledge that any differences may reflect definitional variations as much
as variations in prevalence or incidence

SOCIAL VARIABLES IN CRIME VICTIMIZATION

• Individuals – affected by crime differently
• Evidence suggests that the risk or crime victimization = unevenly distributed
between various sections of the population
• These variables include:

I. SOCIAL CLASS
o Crime victimization surveys → most marginalized groups living in the poorest
areas generally bearing the burden of crime
o Vicious cycles of decline in particular areas an on particular estates
o Most crime is intra-class and intra-racial, committed by relatively
disadvantaged perpetrators on relatively disadvantaged victims

II. AGE
o Children under the age of 1 are more at risk to be murdered than any other
group
o In general, the more socially vulnerable the victim and the more private and
intimate the setting of the crime’s commission, the less visible the crime
o Victim surveys – young people are at least as likely to be a victim of a crime
as adults are;
o Children and young people are affected not only by conventional
crimes, but also by crimes specific to their age (child abuse, bullying,
crimes behind closed doors)
 o The elderly can be subject to abuse behind closed doors in care facilities or
private homes

III. GENDER
o Men are more likely to be victims of violent attacks, particularly by strangers
and other men in public spaces
o Women are more likely to be victimized in the home – they are main victims
of reported and unreported sexual violence
▪ More likely to have experienced repeated victimization

IV. ETHNICITY
o People belonging to a ethnic minority groups are generally more likely to be at
risk of crime victimization than the indigenous populations
▪ Also routinely subjected to racial violence and harassment
▪ Some violent offences as best seen as a process, as the cumulative
impact of threats, domestic assaults, name calling, racial insults, abuse,
graffiti and punching cannot be captured by the mere counting of each
individual incident
o Minority ethnic groups have pointed to persistent police failure as well
▪ Institutional racism → ethnic minorities are unjustly treated by the
police

THE IMPACT OF CRIME

• Not only are social groups and individuals differentially vulnerable to crime
victimization, they are also differentially fearful about crime
• Fear of crime – problem in its own right
• Most concerned = women, the poor, those in unskilled occupations and those living in
inner cities (or areas with high levels of disorder)
• One in four Black and Asian respondents → worried about being racially harassed

Primary victimization Secondary victimization

Affected by the crime itself Affected by the way in which people
respond to the crime

Effects on victims:
- Physical injury
- Financial damage
- Damage to property
- Lose time
- Stress
- Shock
- Sense of intrusion of privacy
- Anger Emotional effects
- Fear
- Trouble sleeping
- Crying

• Reaction of criminal justice agencies and other experts may exacerbate such a
negative impact for the victim
o Victims begin with positive outtakes on their situation
o Become increasingly critical as their cases progressed – secondary
victimization
• Increased recognition of indirect victimization
o i.e. families of murder victims – suffer the profound trauma of bereavement

TOWARDSA A VICTIM ORIENTED CRIMINAL JUSTICE PROCESS

• Marginalization and silencing of victims in the court process

• Recent attempts to develop a more victim-oriented criminal justice system

CHAPTER 23 – CRIMINOLOGICAL FUTURES

- Criminology addresses a wide range of problems, issues and challenges to society
- Investigates and theorizes about crime and control developments that threaten and
protect the social, moral, and economic orders of life that we take for granted
- Reflect on the current and future state of crime and control
- Briefly explore how we can take a sociological approach to the public and private
issues that concern criminology

VISIONS OF THE FUTURE

Possible futures of criminology:
a. ‘More of the same’ but with interesting and important diversifications
b. Some of the big changes in crime, control, and criminology will see further
amplifications, eventually resulting in paradigm changes

• The idea that criminology might look entirely different than it does today is not
necessarily probable
o This is because if we look back, developments in understandings have, by
large, been the products of new variations on existing themes and traditions
o Familiar patterns of problems, methods and theories that receive an occasional
‘shake-up’ to produce variations

PERSISTENCE OF THE PAST

• Persuasive reasons to assume that some current patterns of crime will simply continue
as they are
• At the same time, some currently insignificant types of crime may become popular in
ways we cannot predict
• Others are currently neglected and will attract more attention because of social and
demographic changes we can predict