Control, punishment and victims

• Prevention - situational crime prevention (Clarke)


  • Approach that focuses on reducing opportunities for crimes to be committed rather than improving society as a whole
  • Aims at increasing the effort and risks for committing, like increasing locks or CCTV
  • Felson - New York bus terminal redesigned its toilets to prevent drug dealing and prostitution
  • Counter - simply displaces crime elsewhere
• Prevention - displacement

  • Counter to situational crime prevention
  • Chaiken - crackdown on New York subway robberies simply displaced the act to the streets
  • Forms:
  • Spatial - different place
  • Temporal - different time
  • Target - different victim
  • Tactical - different method
  • Functional - different crime
• Prevention - situational crime prevention criticisms

  • Displacement
  • Focuses on petty street crime, ignores the elite and state
  • Assumes criminals make rational calculations
  • Ignores the root causes of crime
• Prevention - environmental crime prevention (Wilson and Kelling)


  • 'Leaving windows unrepaired' sends out a signal that no one cares
  • In some neighbourhoods they lack formal and informal social control which deteriorates the area and attracts deviance
  • Believe any 'broken window' should be fixed immediately
  • Believe police should take a zero tolerance approach to prevent the area slipping into a decline
• Prevention - environmental crime prevention criticisms

  • Between 1993-1996, crime declined in New York, but it is unclear if zero tolerance was the cause, other factors:
  • NYPD gained 7000 extra officers
  • From 1994 new jobs were being created
  • Crack cocaine availability decreased
  • Improved medical services
• Prevention - social crime prevention

  • Aim is to remove conditions that may lead individuals to a life of crime
  • Long term strategies as they aim to tackle the root of the cause
  • More general social policies may contribute as crime is interlinked with unemployment and housing
  • Counter - ignores crimes of the powerful
• Prevention - social prevention and the Perry pre-school project

  • Project for disadvantaged Black children in Michigan
  • Group of 3-4 year olds were offered a 2 year intellectual enrichment programme and weekly home visits
  • By age 40, they had significantly fewer lifetime arrests for violent crime, property crime and drugs
  • Estimated that for every $1 spent on the programme, $17 was saved on welfare or prison
• Surveillance - prisons changing (Foucault)


  • Sovereign power - control was asserted by inflicting disfiguring, visible punishment of the body, under the command of the Monarch
  • Disciplinary power - seeks to govern not just the body but the mind, through surveillance
  • Counter - shift isn't clear and ignores emotional punishments
• Surveillance - the Panopticon (Foucault)


  • Guards can see the prisoners but the prisoners can't see the guards, example of disciplinary power
  • Prisoners therefore behave at all times as they don't know when they are being watched
  • Counter - Goffman says some inmates are able to resist control, as convicts become self-discipling
• Surveillance - the dispersal of discipline (Foucault)


  • Prison's disciplinary structure has spread to wider society, like factories and schools
  • Teachers and social works monitor society
• Surveillance - criticisms of Foucault

  • Norris - found that CCTV only reduced crimes in car parks and only caused crime displacement, meaning Foucault's theory isn't widespread
  • Koskela - calls CCTV an extension of the male gaze and that their only purpose is for male operators to watch women
• Surveillance - synoptic surveillance (Mathiesen)


  • Media has allowed for everyone to watch everyone
  • Thompson - elite fear this as it uncovers damaging things about them and is an act of social control over their activities
  • Mann - people using mobile phones has created surveillance from bellow
  • Counter - law enforcement still has control over this, anti-terrorism laws gives police power to confiscate phones
• Surveillance - surveillant assemblages (Haggerty and Ericson)


  • We are moving towards a world in which data from different technologies can be combined to create a sort of 'double data' of an individual
  • CCTV + facial recognition software
• Surveillance - actuarial justice and risk management (Feeley and Simon) 


  • Focuses on groups rather than individuals
  • Seeks to predict and prevent future offending
  • Achieved by classifying groups by levels of dangerousness with statistical information
  • Counter - generates self-fulfilling prophecy
• Surveillance - labelling

  • CCTV operators make discriminatory judgements about who among the thousands of potential suspects appearing on their screens they should focus on
  • Norris and Armstrong - many operators look straight to young black males
  • Leads to self-fulfilling prophecy
• Punishment - two types of justice (Durkheim)


  • Retributive justice - punishment is severe and cruel with a purely expressive motivation
  • Restitutive justice - aims to restore things to how they were before the offence
  • Counter - traditional societies only really use restitutive justice
• Punishment - effect of capitalism (Melossi and Pavarini)


  • Function of punishment is to maintain the existing social order
  • Capitalism puts a price on the worker's time just like how prisoners do time to repay their debt to society
  • Also argue that prison and the capitalist factory both have a similar strict disciplinary style, involving subordination and loss of liberty
• Punishment - imprisonment today

  • New Labour governments after 1997 took the view that prison should be used not just for serious offenders, but also as a deterrent for petty offenders
  • Led to total prison population in England and Wales to reach 80,000 by 2021
  • Largely poorly educated young males, black people are over-represented
• Punishment - mass incarceration (Garland)


  • Uk and USA moving towards it
  • 1.4 million US prisoners and 750,000 in local jails
  • Reason is the growing politicisation of crime control
  • Downes - US prison system soaks up about 30-40% of the unemployed, making capitalism look more successful
  • Simon - 'war on drugs' has produced an almost limitless supply of arrestable offenders
• Punishment - transcarceration

  • The idea that individuals become locked into a cycle of control, shifting between different carceral agencies during their lives
  • Someone might be brought up in care, then sent to young offenders, then adult prison, then mental hospital
  • Happens because boundaries between criminal justice and welfare systems are blurring
• Punishment - alternatives to prison

  • Diversion - welfare and treatment diverting young offenders away from criminal justice system
  • Community based controls - methods like curfew and electronic tagging
  • Cohen - argues CBC has led to the net of control being thrown over more people, penetrating society deeper
• Victims - positive victimology (Miers)


  • Aims to identify patterns in victimisation
  • Focuses on interpersonal crimes of violence
  • Aims to identify victims who led to their own victimisation
  • Wolfgang - 26% of the 588 homicides studied had the victim trigger the events themselves
• Victims - positive victimisation counters (Brookman)


  • Ignores wider structural factors like poverty or patriarchy
  • Victim blaming
  • Ignores situations where victims are unaware of their own victimisation
• Victims - critical victimisation

  • Structural factors - patriarchy and poverty place some groups at greater risk of victimisation
  • State's label of a 'victim' - victims are a social construct determined by elite, seen with some men guilty of violence not being charged
  • Tombs and Whyte - the powerless are most likely to be victimised, yet least likely to have this acknowledged by the state
• Victims - critical victimisation counters

  • Disregards the role the victim may play
• Victims - class

  • Poor more likely to be victimised
  • Crime rates higher in areas of unemployment
  • Newburn and Rock - surveyed 300 homeless people and found they were 12x more likely to be victims of violence
• Victims - age

  • Younger people at higher risk of victimisation
  • Infants under 1 more likely to be murdered
  • Teenagers more vulnerable to theft, sexual assault and violence
  • Old people at risk of abuse in care homes
• Victims - ethnicity

  • Minority groups at higher risk
  • More likely to report feeling under-protected but over-controlled
• Victims - gender

  • Males more likely to be victims of violent attacks by strangers
  • Females more likely to be victims of domestic violence, sexual assault , stalking and harassment
• Victims - repeat victimisation

  • If you've been a victim once, likely you will be one again
  • British Crime Survey - 4% of the population are victim to 44% of the crime
• Victims - impact

  • Serious physical and emotional impacts
  • Creates 'indirect' victims
  • Crimes against minorities create 'waves of harm'
  • Fear of victimisation - women are more afraid to go out than men
  • Secondary victimisation - victims may face more trouble when trying to chase the crime up with the justice system, rape victims are often poorly treated