Crime and Deviance with Theory and Methods

• Agenda setting: The power of the media to bring public attention to particular issues and problems
• Crime: An act against the law
• Deviance: Behaviour that violates significant social norms
• Deviancy amplification: The process whereby the mass media can exaggerate the significance of a particular social issue and create moral panic.
• deviant career: The sequence of movements people make through a particular subculture of deviance after being labelled
• Folk Devils: Individuals and groups singled out for special attention and blame because they are seen to represent a challenge or threat to the existing moral order
• Hate crimes: Attacks based on a person's race, religion, or other characteristics
• Hegemonic masculinity: The belief in the existence of a culturally normative ideal of male behavior
• Hegemony: The domination of one state or group
• Indictable offence: A serious criminal offence
• Institutional Racism: Patterns of discrimination based on ethnicity that have become structured into existing social institutions e.g the police
• Marginality: The status of being between two cultures at the same time
• Master status: One status within a set that stands out or overrides all others
• moral entrepreneurs: Individuals or groups who come to define an act as a moral outrage and who lead a campaign to have it defined as deviant and to have it made illegal and therefore subject to legal enforcement
• Restorative justice: Punishment designed to repair the damage done to the victim and community by an offender's criminal act
• Secondary Deviance: Subsequent acts of rule breaking that occur after primary deviance and as a result of your new deviant label and people's expectations of you
• Social control: Attempts by society to regulate people's thoughts and behavior
• Social exclusion: A sense of powerlessness when individuals feel alienated from society
• Societal Deviance: Acts that are seen by most members of a society as deviant
• Victimology: The study of the victim's role in criminal events
• White collar crime: Crime committed by people of high social position in the course of their occupations
• Broken Windows Theory: A theory proposing that even small acts of crime, disorder, and vandalism can threaten a neighborhood and render it unsafe
• Chivalry thesis: The belief that the police and courts, because they are male dominated, are easier on women
• Strain theory: Merton's theory that deviance occurs when a society does not give all its members equal ability to achieve socially acceptable goals
• Anomie: A sense of aimlessness or despair that arises when we can no longer reasonably expect life to be predictable; too little social regulation; normlessness
• Status frustration: A form of culture conflict experienced by lower-class youths because social conditions prevent them from achieving success as defined by the larger society
• Focal concerns: Values, such as toughness and street smarts, that have evolved specifically to fit conditions in lower-class environments
• Bond theory: Inner controls are most effective when the individual has strong attachments, commitments, involvement with society and share common beliefs with people whom they admire and feel close to.
• Crimonogenic Capitalism: Crime is inevitable in capitalism as capitalism is crimonogenic. Working Class crime is because capitalism is based on the exploitation of the w/c and so crime may be the only way some women can survive, consumerism and alienation.
• Selective law enforcement: Agents of formal social control punish some individuals and not others based on profiling.
• New Criminology: A branch of criminological thought, prominent in Great Britain in the 1970s, that regarded deviance as deliberately chosen and often political in nature. The new criminologists argued that crime and deviance could be understood only in the context of power and inequality within society.
• Self-fulfilling prophecy: Living up to a label you have been given
• Left Realism: An approach that is left-leaning but realistic in its appraisal of crime and its causes. Crime is seen as class conflict in an advanced industrial society.
• Right Realism: Sees crime, especially street crime, as a real and growing problem that destroys communities, undermines social cohesion and threatens society. Offer practical solutions to the problem of rising crime.
• Marginalisation: The social process of becoming or being isolated and left out
• Relative Deprivation: The perception that one is worse off relative to those with whom one compares oneself
• Rational Choice Theory: A theory that states that individuals act in their own best interest.
• Transgressive criminology: Understand the harm that crime does to people even if it isn't illegal
• Edgework: The excitement or exhilaration of successfully executing illegal activities in dangerous situations.
• CSEW

  Crime Survey of England and Wales