New Right

• NR origins

  roots in traditional functionalist ideas about value consensus, community , social order, conformity and solidarity
• NR explanation of crime - BUSR

  • Biological - low intelligence of some groups - some groups just more likely to commit crime
  • Underclass - a mass of single parent families who create delinquents
  • socialisation - poor socialisation leads to kids not learning self control and internalise values of right and wrong - remain ' feral ' children
  • rational choice - crime is a cost and benefit analysis
• NR rational choice

  Meiselman and Tullock

  any person will work out the cost and benefits of any action and if the potential benefits outweigh the costs they will carry out the crime
• NR harsher penalties

  Clarke

  the only way to stop crime is to increase the costs through harsher penalties and making crime more difficult to do - rational choice model

  argues crime are usually the outcome of immediate choices arising from the opportunity to commit crime
• NR target hardening

  Clarke

  sees crime as opportunistic so he believes we should make targets more difficult to nick, the offence is unlikely to take place - situational crime prevention

  1. they should be directed at specific crimes
  2. involve managing or altering the immediate environment of the crime
• NR design out crime

  Felson

  the port authority bus terminal in New York City - poorly designed and provided opportunities for deviant conduct - reshaping the physical environments to design out crime - large sinks in which vagrants were bathing in and were replaced with small sinks
• NR displacement - criticism of situational crime prevention

  SCP does not reduce crime but simply displaces it - criminals will respond to target hardening by moving to areas where targets are softer

  SCP works to some extent in reducing certain types of crime - focuses on opportunistic petty street crime
• NR broken windows theory

  Wilson and Kelling

  ' Broken windows ' stand for all the various signs of disorder and lack of concern for a neighbourhood -argue by leaving broken windows unprepared this sends out the signal that no one cares

  this leads the neighbourhood in a spiral of decline - respectable people move out and the area becomes a magnet for deviants
• NR zero tolerance

  Wilson and Kelling

  their key idea is that the absence of control leads to crime

  solution is an environmental improvement strategy - any window must be repaired and abandoned cars towed away otherwise more will follow

  secondly the police must adopt a zero tolerance approach - instead of merely reacting to crime, they must tackle even the slightest sign of disorder

  between 1993 and 1996 there was a significant fall in crime in the city including a 50% reduction in murder
• NR criticism of zero tolerance

  • the NYPD benefitted from 7000 extra officers - perhaps this was the cause of reduced crime
  • there was a general fall in crime in major cities, even amongst those who did not introduce zero tolerance
• NR Paternalism

  Van Den Haag

  • inequality is inherent in capitalist society
  • the purpose of the law is and should be to prevent poorer sections of community from taking from the affluent or trying to bring revolutionary change
• NR collapse of nuclear family

  Murray

  underclass - welfare dependent , socialisation
• NR criticisms

  it is impossible to isolate lone parent families as the most significant factor

  post modernists challenge notion people commit crime based on rational choice - they suggest thrill seeking and risk is what is alluring about criminal activity