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Control, punishment and victims - Coggle Diagram
Control, punishment and victims
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Surveillance
Foucault: birth of the prison:
- Sovereign power - typical of the period before 19th century, monarch has absolute power over people and their bodies. Control was asserted by inflicting disfiguring, visible punishment on the body. Punishment was brutal, emotional spectacle
- Disciplinary power - dominant from 19th century. A new system of discipline seeks to govern not just the body but the mind/soul. Does so through surveillance
- Claims disciplinary punishment replaced sovereign power because surveillance is more efficient 'technology of power' - more effective way of controlling people
- The Panopticon - design for prison which each prisoner in his own cell is visible to the guards from a central watchtower but the guards aren't visible to the prisoners - don't know if they're being watched so on best behaviour all the time - self-surveillance and seld-discipline
- Disciplinary power involves intensely monitoring individual with view to rehabilitate them - F sees experts as having important role in applying specialised knowledge to correcting individual's deviant beahviour
- Argues social sciences, and professions such as psychology, were born at the same time as the modern prison
The 'dispersal of discipline':
- F argues the prison is just one of a range of institutions that, from 19th century, increasingly began to subject individuals to disciplinary power to induce conformity through self-surveillance - mental asylums, barracks, factories, workhouses, schools
- Non-prison based social control practices, such as community service orders, form part of a carceral archipelago - a series of prison islands spreading into other institutions and wider society, where professionals, such as teachers, social workers, psychiatrists, exercise surveillance over the population
- Disciplinary power now dispersed throughout society, penetrating every social institution to reach every individual. Form of surveillance in the Panpticon is model of how power operates in society as a whole
Criticisms:
- Stimulated research into surveillance and disciplinary power - idea of electronic Panopticon uses modern technology to monitor us
- Shift between powers is less clear than he suggests, wrongly assume expressive aspects of punishments disappear in modern society
- Exaggerates extent of control. Goffman (1982) - some inmates are able to resist controls. F overestimates power of surveillance to change behaviour
- CCTV cameras new forms of panopticism - unsure whether recording us, not necessarily effective preventing crime. Norris (2012) review dozens studies worldwide found while CCTV reduced crime in car parks, little to no effect on other crime - displacement
- CCTV assumes criminals know being watched so deters them - Gill and Loveday (2003) few robbers, burglars, shoplifters, fraudsters put off by CCTV. Real function may be ideological, falsely reassuring public about security though it makes little difference to their risk of victimisation
- Feminists - Koskela (2012) criticise CCTV as extension of male gaze - renders women more visible to they voyeurism of the male camera operator, not making them more secure
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Punishment
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Durkheim: functionalist perspective:
- Function of punishment is to uphold social solidarity and reinforce shared values
- Punishment is primarily expressive - expresses society's emotions of moral outrage at the offence
- Through rituals of order, such as public trial and punishment, society's shared values are reaffirmed and its members come to feel sense of moral unity
Two types of justice:
- Retributive justice: in traditional society there is little specialisation and solidarity between individuals is based on their similarity to one another. Produces a strong collective conscience, when offended responds with vengeful passion to repress the wrongdoer. Punishment is severe and cruel, its motivation is purely expressive
- Restitutive justice: in modern society there is extensive specialisation and solidarity is based on the resulting interdependence between individuals. Crime damages this interdependence so necessary to repair the damage. Aims to make restitution - restore things to how they were before the offence. Its motivation is instrumental, to restore society's equilibrium. Punishment still has expressive element as it expresses collective emotions
- Reality, traditional societies have restituative rather than retributive justice
Marxism: capitalism and punishment:
- Interested in how punishment is related to the nature of class society and how it serves ruling-class interests
- Function of punishment is to maintain the existing social order. As part of the repressive state apparatus it is a means of defending ruling class property against lower classes. Thompson (1977) describes how in 18th century punishments such as hanging for theft were part of a rule of terror by the landed aristocracy over the poor
- Form of punishment reflects the economic base of society. Rusche and Kirchheimer (1939) each type of economy has its own corresponding penal system - money fines are impossible without a money economy - under capitalism, imprisonment becomes the dominant form of punishment
- Melossi and Pavarini (1981) imprisonment as reflecting capitalist relations of production E.g.:
- capitalism puts a price on the worker's time; so too prisoners do time to pay for their crime
- prison and capitalist factory both have similar strict disciplinary styles, involving subordination and loss of liberty
Changing role of prisons:
- Pre-industrial Europe had wide range of punishments, including warnings, banishment, transportation, corporal punishment and execution. Until 18th century, prison mainly used for holding offenders prior to their punishment
- Following Enlightenment that imprisonment began to be seen as a form of punishment itself, offenders would be reformed through hard labour, religious instruction and surveillance
Imprisonment today:
- In liberal democracies they don;t have death penalty, imprisonment regarded more severe form of punishment. It has not proved an effective method of rehabilitation - about 2/3 of prisoners commit further crimes on release. Many critics regard prisons as simply an expensive way of making bad people worse
- Since 80s move towards populist punitiveness, where politicians have sought electoral popularity by calling for tougher sentences - New Labour govs after 1997 took view that prison should be used not just for serious offenders but also as deterrent for persistent petty offenders - prison population swollen to record size: between 1993 and 2016, number of prisoners in England and Wales almost doubled to reach total 85,000 - overcrowding, added to existing problems of poor sanitation, barely edible food, clothing shortages, lack of educational and work opportunities, inadequate family visits (Carrabine et al 2014)
- England imprisons higher proportion of people than almost every other country in Western Europe - England and Wales 147 out of every 100,000 people are in prison, France = 100, Germany = 76, Ireland - 80, Sweden = 55, Iceland = 45. World leaders are Russia = 447 and USA = 698
- Prison population is largely male (only about 5% female), young and poorly educated. Black and ethnic minorities are over-represented
The era of mass incarceration:
- Garland (2001) the USA, and to a lesser extent the UK, is moving into an era of mass incarceration - for most of the last century, the American prison population was stable at around 100-120 per 100,000, in 1972 there were about 200,000 inmates in state and federal prisons
- From 70s, numbers began to rise rapidly - now 1.5 million state and federal prisoners in prisons like Rikers Island, plus 700,000 in local jails. Further 5 million under supervision of the CJS - in total over 3% of the adult population - this is over 3 times the European rate of imprisonment, despite the fact rates of victimisation in USA are about the same as those in Europe
- Garland once figures reach these proportions - 'it ceases to be the incarceration of individual offenders and becomes the systematic imprisonment of whole groups of the population'
- While black Americans are only 13% of the US population they make up 37% of the prison population - 6x more likely than white males to be in prison
- Downes (2001) - the US prison system soaks up about 30-40% of the unemployed, thereby making capitalism look more successful
- Garland - reason for mass incarceration is the growing politicisation of crime control. For most of the last century there was a consensus - penal welfarism - the idea punishment should reintegrate offenders into society
- Since 70s move towards new consensus based on more punitive and exclusionary tough on crime policies leading to rising numbers in prison
- Use of prison to wage America's war on drugs - Simon (2001) because drug use is so widespread, this has produced an almost limitless supply of arrestable and imprisonable offenders
Transcarceration:
- The idea that individuals become locked into a cycle of control, shifting between different carceral agencies during their lives
- Might be brought up in care, sent to young offenders institution, adult prison, bouts in mental hospitals in between
- Some sociologists see this as a product of the blurring boundaries between criminal justice and welfare agencies - health, housing and social services are increasingly being given a crime control role, and they often engage in multi-agency working with the police, sharing data on the same individual
Alternatives to prison:
- Past major goal in dealing with young offenders was diversion - diverting them away from contact with the CJS to avoid risk of a SFP turning them into serious criminals - focus on welfare and treatment, using non-custodial, community-based controls such as probation
- Recent growth in range of community-based controls - curfews, community service orders, treatment orders, electronic tagging. But numbers in custody have been rising steadily, especially among the young
- Cohen - growth of community controls cast a net of control over more people. Increased range of sanctions available simply enables control to penetrate even deeper into society
- Community controls may divert people into the CJS - police have used ASBOs as a way of fast-tracking young offenders into custodial sentences
The victims of crime
- The United Nations defines victims as those who have suffered harm through acts or omissions that violate the laws of the state
- Christie (1986) highlights notion that 'victim' is socially constructed. The stereotype of the ideal victim favoured by the media, public and CJS is a weak, innocent and blameless individual who is the target of a stranger's attack
Positivist victimology:
- Miera (1989) defines positivist victimology as having three features:
- aims to identify the factors that produce patterns in victimisation - especially those that make some individuals or groups more likely to be victims
- focuses on interpersonal crimes of violence
- aims to identify victims who have contributed to their own victimisation
- Earliest positivist studies focused on idea of victim proneness - sought to identify the social and psychological characteristics of victims that make them different from and more vulnerable than non-victims
- Hans Von Hentif (1948) idetified 13 characteristics of victims (female, elderly or mentally subnormal)
- Implication is that victims invite victimisation by being the kind of person that they are - can also include lifestyle factors
- Wolfganf (1958) study of 588 homicides in Philadelphia - found 26% involved victim precipitation, the victim triggered the events leading to the homicide
Evaluation:
- Brookman (2005) - Wolfgang shows the importance of victim-offender relationship and the fact in many homicides it is a matter of chance which party becomes victim
- Approach identifies certain patterns of interpersonal victimisation but ignores wider structural factors influencing victimisation - poverty and patriarchy
- Can easily tip into victim blaming - Amir (1971) claim 1/5 rapes are victim precipitated not very different from saying victims asked for it
- Ignores situations where victims are unaware of their victimisation, crimes against the environments and where harm is done but no law is broken
Critical victimology:
- Based on conflict theories (marxism, feminism) and shares same approach as critical criminology. Focuses on two elements:
- Structural factors (patriarchy and poverty) which place powerless groups at greater risk of victimisation. Mawby and Walklate (1994) victimisation is a form of structural powerlessness
- The state's power to apply or deny the label of victim - victim is a social construct, state applies label to some but not others
- Tombs and Whyte (2007) 'safety crimes', where employers' violations of the law lead to death or injury to workers are often explained away as the fault of accident prone workers. As with many rape cases, this both denies the victim official victim status and blames them for their fate
- Note ideological function of this failure to label or de-labelling - by concealing true extent of victimisation and its real causes, hides crimes of the powerful and denies the powerless victims any redress. In the hierarchy of victimisation the powerless are more likely to be victimised and least likely to have this acknowledged by the state
Evaluation:
- Disregards role victims may play in bringing victimisation on themselves through their own choices or their own offending
- Valuable in drawing attention to the way that 'victim' status is constructed by power and how this benefits the powerful at the expense of the powerless
Patterns of victimisation:
- Class: Poorest groups are more likely victimised. Crime rates typically highest in areas of high unemployment and deprivation. Marginalised groups most likely to become victims - survey 300 homeless people (Newburn and Rock 2006) found they were 12x more likely to have experienced violence than the general population. 1/10 had been urinated on while sleeping rough
- Age: Younger people more at risk of victimisation. More at risk of being murdered are infants under one, teens more vulnerable than adults to offences including assault, sexual harassment, theft and abuse at home. Old risk of abuse, in nursing homes, victimisation less visible but in general victimisation declines with age
- Ethnicity: Minority ethnic groups greater risk than whites of being victims of crime in general as well as racially motivated crimes. Ethnic minorities, young and homeless more likely to report feeling under-protected yet over-controlled
- Gender: Males greater risk of becoming victims of violent attacks especially by strangers, about 70% homicide victims are male. Women more likely victims of DV, sexual violence, stalking and harassment, people trafficking
- Repeat victimisation - if you have been victim once you are likely to be one again. British Crime Survey about 60% of population haven't been victim to any crime in a given year, 4% of the population are victims of 44% of all crime in that period
Impact of victimisation:
- Crime may have serious physical and emotional impacts on victims - research found a variety of effects including disrupted sleep, feelings of helplessness, increased security-consciousness and difficulties in social functioning
- Crime may also create 'indirect' victims - Pynoos et al (1987) found that child witnesses of a sniper attack continued to have grief-related dreams and altered behaviour a year after the event
- Hate crimes against minorities may create waves of harm that radiate out to affect others. These are message crimes aimed at intimidating whole communities, such crimes may also challenge value system of whole society
- Secondary victimisation - in addition to impact of crime itself, individuals may suffer further victimisation at hands of CJS. Feminists argues rape victims often so poorly treated bu police and courts in amounts to a double violation
- Fear of victimisation - crime may create fear of becoming victim. Some sociologists argue surveys show this fear to be often irrational - women more afraid of going out for fear of attack, yet it is young men who are the main victims of violence from strangers. Feminists attacked the emphasis on fear of crime - it focuses on women's passivity and their psychological state, when we should be focusing on their safety