Control, Punishment and Victims

• In a nutshell


  Sociologists believe that the ability to control criminal behaviour takes several different measures - notably, it is targeted at situational crime prevention and environmental crime prevention. In addition, surveillance is another method used to control and punish criminals. Sociologists also focus on victimisation, in which positive victimology focuses on victim proneness or precipitation, whilst critical victimology emphasises structural factors such as poverty
• POSITIVE VICTIMOLOGY


  Miers argues that there are certain factors that lead to some individuals or groups being a more likely victim of crime (Eg. the homeless are statistically the most vulnerable victims of crime, due to lack of resources & power) Miers determines some victims provoke behaviour that would lead to their own victimisation. This can be applied to both ends: middle-class victims of crime have contributed to their own victimisation by ostentatiously displaying their wealth, therefore encouraging crimes such as theft, and the working class are more likely to provoke threats.
• CRITICAL VICTIMOLOGY - Mawby and Walklate


  Mawby and Walklate suggest victimisation is a form of structural powerlessness, thereby structural factors such as patriarchy and poverty place powerless groups such as women and the poor at greater risk of victimisation.
• CRITICAL VICTIMOLOGY - Tombs and Whyte 


  Tombs and Whyte believe a ‘victim’ is a social construct. Through the criminal justice system, the state applies the label of the victim to some but withholds it from others, and therefore have an ideological function of ‘failure to label’ or ‘de-labelling’. By concealing the true extent of victimisation and its real causes, it hides the crimes of the powerful.
• SITUATIONAL CRIME PREVENTION - Clarke


  Clarke believes that SCP is a pre-emptive approach, focused on reducing opportunities to commit crime, rather than improving society or institutions. 
• SITUATIONAL CRIME PREVENTION - MOVES CRIME 


  Spatial - moving elsewhere (eg. - if a house's doors are locked, criminals will move to a different house to see if that is unlocked)

  Temporal - Different time (eg. - doors are more likely to be unlocked in the daytime, not the night time)

  Target - Choosing different target (eg. - if criminals are looking to kidnap, they may choose another child if one is with their parents)

  Tactical - Different method (eg. - suicide is prevented by the fact you can only buy 2 packs of paracetamol at one time)

  Functional - Different type of crime
• ENVIRONMENTAL CRIME PREVENTION


  The Broken Windows thesis by Wilson & Kelling refers to disorderly neighbourhoods with an absence of formal social control (police) and informal control (community). Police are merely concerned with serious crime and turn a blind eye to nuisance behaviour.
• ZERO TOLERANCE POLICING


  As a method of environmental crime prevention, Wilson and Kelling advocate a ‘zero tolerance policing’ approach whereby the police crack down and tackle any form of disorder and repair any disorderly signs in neighbourhoods (eg. graffiti).
• SOCIAL AND COMMUNITY CRIME PREVENTION


  Shifts emphasis from policing, to potential offenders and their social context.  The perry preschool project attempted to do this with a group of young disadvantaged black children who were offered a two-year intellectual enrichment programme that aimed to reduce criminality in future. The longitudinal study showed significant differences with a control group who had not undergone an enrichment programme. By 40, they had fewer lifetime arrests for crimes and most were in a form of paid employment.
• SURVEILLANCE


  Surveillance is the monitoring of public behaviour for the purpose of crime control. In today's society, surveillance is carried out by the use of CCTV cameras, biometric scanning, information databases etc.
• FOUCAULT - TYPES OF POWER


  Sovereign power - the monarch had absolute power over people and their bodies. Control was asserted by inflicting visible punishment on the body. This was a brutal and emotional spectacle, such as a public execution.​

  Disciplinary power - became dominant from the 19th century, and involves a new system of discipline that seeks to govern the mind, soul and the body. It does this through surveillance.
• PUNISHMENT - REDUCTION


  One justification of punishment is that it prevents future crime: 

  Deterrence - punishing an individual discourages them from future offending.​

  Rehabilitation - punishment can be used to reform or change offenders so they no longer offend. This can be done so through providing education and anger management courses.
• PUNISHMENT - RETRIBUTION


  Based on the idea that offenders deserve to be punished and society is entitled to take revenge on the offender.
• Victim precipitation - POSITIVIST VICTIMOLOGY


  Wolfgang looked at murders in the USA.

  He found that 26% of 588 homicides in Philadelphia involved victim precipitation.

  This means that the victim triggered the events leading to the murder.
• Tombs and Whyte - CRITICAL/RADICAL


  Marxists, Tombs and Whyte argue employers tend to manipulate ‘safety crimes’ where injured workers are often blamed for their actions instead of the company taking responsibility for their negligence of health and safety procedure.

  This is referred to as the ‘hierarchy of victimisation’.   
• Role of prisons - GARLAND


  The role of prisons has changed over time.

  Garland discusses how prisons are being used as the main form of punishment in the USA and in the UK.

  Garland believes that prisons are now used by politicians to prove to the electorate that they are tough on crime, and as a result they will gain electoral popularity and win elections.   
• Situational crime prevention 


  Felson describes how situational crime prevention can ‘design crime out’ of a particular area.

  He uses the example of a restroom within a bus terminal in New York which was poorly designed and therefore provided opportunities for deviant and criminal behaviour.
• SCP Evluations - Chaiken

  However, Chaiken et al. argue that this method doesn’t always reduce crime, instead it moves it somewhere else.

  This is known as displacement
• FOCAULT Panopticon


  Foucault illustrates disciplinary power through his theory of ‘panopticon’ where inmates within a prison are led to believe they are constantly under the threat of surveillance in order to promote self-regulation of their own behaviour.

  Therefore surveillance becomes a tool of social control and is now used to monitor our behaviour.