Control, punishment and victims

• Situational crime prevention (SCP)


  A pre-emptive approach that relies on reducing opportunities for crime. They target specific crimes by managing or altering the environment and aim at increasing the risks of committing crime and reducing the rewards.
• Situational crime prevention (SCP)


  • Target hardening measures include locking doors, security guards, re-shaping the environment to 'design crime out' of an area
  • Underlying SCP is rational choice theory: the idea that criminals act rationally, weighing up the risks and rewards of a crime opportunity
• SCP measures may simply displace crime, moving it to different places, times, victims, types of crime etc.
• The assumption that criminals make rational calculations may not be true of violent and drug-related crimes
• Environmental crime prevention

  The idea that 'broken windows' (signs of disorder, e.g. graffiti, begging, littering, vandalism) that are not dealt with send out a signal that no one cares, prompting a spiral of decline
• Social and community crime prevention

  Strategies that emphasise dealing with the social conditions that predispose some individuals to future crime
• Social and community crime prevention

  • Full employment policies are likely to reduce crime as a 'side effect'
  • The Perry pre-school project in Michigan gave an experimental group of disadvantaged 3-4 year olds a two-year intellectual enrichment programme, which showed far fewer arrests for violent crime, property crime and drugs compared with peers not in the project
• Surveillance


  Monitoring behaviour for the purpose of control: observing people to gather data about them and using this to regulate their behaviour
• Sovereign power


  In pre-modern society, the monarch exercised physical power over people's bodies and punishment was a visible spectacle, e.g. public execution
• Disciplinary power


  Becomes dominant from the 19th century and seeks to govern not just the body, but also the mind through surveillance
• Panopticon


  A prison design where prisoners' cells are visible to the guards, but the guards are not visible to the prisoners. Not knowing if they are being watched means the prisoners must constantly behave as if they are. Surveillance turns into self-surveillance, control becomes invisible, 'inside' the prisoner.
• Synoptic surveillance


  In late modernity, there is an increase in both the top-down surveillance that Foucault discusses, and in surveillance from below, where everybody watches everybody
• Surveillant assemblages


  Surveillance technology now involves manipulation of digital data, rather than physical bodies (such as prisoners in the Panopticon). Different technologies are combined into powerful 'surveillant assemblages'
• Actuarial justice and risk management


  Uses 'actuarial analysis' (statistical calculations of risk) to predict the likelihood of people offending. It focuses on groups, not individuals, and is not interested in rehabilitating offenders, but simply in preventing them from offending.
• Offender profiles are often compiled using official statistics, which show certain groups as more likely to offend (e.g. young Black males). Profiling leads to police targeting these groups, who are thus more likely to be caught and convicted.
• Labelling and surveillance


  CCTV operations target young black males based on racist stereotypes, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy where the criminalisation of Black youths is increased because their offences are revealed, while criminalisation of others is lessened because theirs are ignored
• Justifications for punishment


  • Deterrence
  • Rehabilitation
  • Incapacitation
  • Retribution
• Retributive justice


  Traditional society has a strong collective conscience, so punishment is severe and vengeful
• Restitutive justice


  In modern society, there is extensive interdependence between individuals. Crime damages this and the function of justice should be to repair the damage (e.g. through compensation)
• Marxism: capitalism and punishment


  Punishment is part of the 'repressive state apparatus' that defends ruling-class property against the lower classes. The form of punishment reflects the economic base of society. Under capitalism, imprisonment becomes the dominant punishment because, in the capitalist economy, time is money and offenders pay by doing time.
• Since the 1980s there has been a move towards 'populist punitiveness'. Politicians call for tougher sentences, leading to a rising prison population. The UK imprisons a higher proportion of people than almost any other country in Western Europe
• Most prisoners are young, male and poorly educated. Minority ethnic groups are over-represented.
• Transcarceration


  A trend towards moving people between different prison-like institutions, e.g. brought up in care, then a young offender's institution, then adult prison. There has been a blurring of boundaries between criminal justice and welfare agencies
• Alternatives to prison


  A growth in the range of community-based controls, e.g. curfews, community service orders, tagging. Cohen argues that this has simply cast the net of control over more people.
• Victimology


  The study of victims. There are two approaches: positivist victimology and critical victimology.
• Positivist victimology


  Focuses on interpersonal crimes of violence. It seeks patterns in victimisation and aims to identify the characteristics of victims that contribute to their victimisation, e.g. victim proneness and victim precipitation.
• Critical victimology


  Structural factors, e.g. patriarchy and poverty, place powerless groups such as women and the poor at greater risk of victimisation. The state applies the label of 'victim' to some but withholds it from others.
• A mere 4% of the population are victims of 44% of all crimes. Less powerful groups are more likely to be repeat victims.
• The poor are more likely to be victims, e.g. crime is highest in areas of high unemployment.
• The young are more vulnerable to assault, sexual harassment, theft, and abuse at home.
• Minority ethnic groups are at greater risk than White people of being victims of crime in general and of racially motivated crime.
• Males are at greater risk of violent attacks; females are more likely to be victims of domestic and sexual violence, stalking and harassment.
• Secondary victimisation


  In addition to the impact of the crime itself, individuals may suffer further victimisation in the criminal justice system, e.g. rape victims.
• Crime may create fear of becoming a victim even if such fears are irrational; e.g. women are more afraid of going out for fear of attack, yet young men are more likely to be victims of violence.