Control and prevention

• The different subject areas in this topic: situational, environmental + social/community prevention, punishment and marxist + functionalist views on punishment
• Sociologists for situational prevention: Clarke and Felson
• Clarke (situational prevention) argued that:

  • There is rational choice with crime
  • People weigh up the risks and rewards that come with committing that crime
  • To reduce crime rates we need to limit the access that criminals have to expensive goods (easy access)
  • We need to make it so that the risks outweigh any rewards
  • 'Target hardening'
• Felson (situational prevention) argued that there are three conditions needed for a crime to take place:

  • Opportunity
  • Target and access to them
  • Lack of a guardian like the police
• The weaknesses of situational prevention:

  • Some crimes like domestic abuse do not work like this
  • Garland argued that it ignores issues of crime in terms of the root cause of the crime eg. inequalities and deprivation
  • Leads to crime displacement as criminals aren't actually prevented, they just move to another place (no CCTV)
• Wilson and Keilman (environmental prevention) argue that:

  • The broken window theory
  • Any signs of deprivation or crime needs to be fixed immediately
  • Crime leads to more crime
  • We need to smarten up neighbourhoods and create orderliness
• Examples of environmental prevention:

  • Curfews and street drinking bans
  • In the US there is a policy that criminals have a 'three stikes' limit for serious crimes, if they go over this limit they are imprisoned so that they can't victimise the public. This removes crime and deviance from the environment
• West and Farrington (social + community prevention) compared the backgrounds of young male offenders with non-offenders:

  • low income
  • run down housing
  • parents who argued
  • low schooling achievement
• West and Farrington (social + community prevention) looked as 'risk focused prevention':

  • skills training
  • parental education
  • parental training
  • pre-school programmes to up educational achievement
• Social and community prevention looks at individual offenders and why they commit crimes. It focuses on how to integrate these people into society, aiming to reduce crime rates in this way
• Punishment:

  • Deterence - imprisonment
  • Incapacitation - completely unable to commit again eg. capital punishment or house arrest
  • Rehabilitation
  • Retribution
• Foucault (punishment) looked at the roles of prisons in the criminal justice system:

  • Before the 18th century, physical and extreme punishment was used
  • After this punishment was more focused on the punishment of the soul meaning imprisonment
  • He looked at Bentham's 'panopticon' prison where there were tower cells, prisoners were watched but didn't know when this was happening due to the lighting in there. This caused them to conform to behavioural expectations all of the time
  • This is relevant today as it happens in schools and with CCTV
• Functionalist views on punishment:

  • Durkheim
  • Society used to be based on social solidarity, if people broke out of this they were severely punished and everyone accepted this as criminal and just (retributive justice)
  • Society is now based on specialist roles, no collective conscious and we are now focused on returning society back to how it was before the crime was committed (restitutive justice)