Topic 9 - Control, Punishments and Victims

Crime prevention and control - 

• Situational crime prevention (SCP) - 
  • RON CLARKE (1992) - SCPs are pre-emptive approaches that relies on reducing opportunities for crime before they happen.
  • They target specific crimes by managing or altering the environment and aim at increasing the risks of commiting crime and reducing the rewards.
  • Target hardening measures =  
    • locking doors 
    • security guards
    • re-shaping the environment to 'design crime out' of an area.
  • Underlying SCP is rational choice theory
  • Displacement = SCP meaures may simply displace crime by:
    • Spatial = moving it to different places
    • Temporal = times
    • Target = victims
    • Tactical = using a different method
    • Functional = types of crime etc.
  • This opproach may explain opportunistic petty street crime but not white collar, corporate and state crime. The assumption that criminals make rational calculations may not be true of violent and drug-related crime.
• Environmental crime revention -
  • WILSON AND KELLING argue 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.
    • An absence of both social control (police) and informal control (community) means members of the community feel intimidated and powerless.
    • the solution = to crackdown on any disorder through an environmental improvement strategy (e.g. abadoned cars promptly towed away) and a zero tolerence policing strategy. This will hault neighbourhood decline and prevent serous crime taking root.
• Social and community crime prevention -
  • These strategies emphasise dealing with the social conditions predispose some individuals to furure crime.
    • because poverty is a cause of crime, general social policies may have a crime prevention role; e.g. full employment policies are likely to reduce crime as a side effect.
  • The Perry Pre- School Project (Michigan) - 
    • experimental group of disadvantaged 3-4 year olds
    • gave them a 2 year intellectual programme
    • The longitudinal study following their progress into adulthood
    • showed far fewer arrests for violent crime, property crime and drugs compared with peers not in the project.

Punishments -

• Reduction -
  • preventing furture crimes:
    • Deterrence = Punishments may prevent future crime for fear of further punishment (making an example to deter the public)
    • Rehabilitation = reforming/ re-educating offenders so they no longer offend
    • Incapacitation = removing the offenders capacity to re-offend, e.g. by exectution, imprisonment
    • Retribution = the idea that society is entitled to take revenge for the offenderhaving breached its moral code.
• DURKHEIM: a Functionalist perspective -
  • durkeheim argues that the function of punishment is to uphold social solidarity and reinforce shared values by expressing societys moral outrage at the offence. 
  • he identifies 2 types of justice, corresponding to 2 types of society;
    • Retributive justice = traditional society has a long collective conscience, so punishment is severe and vengeful.
    • Restitutive justice = in odern 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: Capitaism and punishment - 
  • Punishment is part of the represive state apparatus that defends ruling class property against…