Cicourel: Negotiation of Justice 1968

• Cicourel 1968: officers typifications (stereotypes) led them to concentrate on certain types of people
• Law enforcement showing class bias. In turn, working class areas have more working class people within causing the police to patrol those areas more leading to more arrests and the confirmation of their bias
• Other agencies reinforced this bias - specifically probation officers held the commonsense theory that juvenile delinquency caused by a broken home and thus less likely to suport non-custodial sentences for them
• Justice is not fixed but negotiable
• Crime statistics should be used as a topic to study rather than a resource to inform studies
• Official Crime Statistics so not give a valid picture of crime as justice is negotiable
• Official Crime Statistics are socially constructed as at each stage, a social control agency decides whether the case be brought depending on their label which is informed by typifications
• Official Crime Statistics only show us about the activities of the police rather than the amount of crime in society and who commits it
• Different 'decision gates' for different social control agencies
• Dark Figure of Crime: difference between the official statistics and the 'real' rate of crime
• Alternative Statistics: some sociologists use victim surveys to gain a more accurate view of the amount of crime
• Alternative Statistics/Victim Surveys:

  1. people may be more likely to forget, conceal or exaggerate if they have committed a crime or been a victim of one
  2. usually only contain a selection of less serious offences