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Crime prevention and control - Coggle Diagram
Crime prevention and control
Crime prevention
Left realism
Social and Community based Prevention
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Left Realists
Believe the best way to prevent crime is tackle social conditions and predispose future crime rather than enhance policing. Those with highest levels of marginality and social exclusion are mostly victims but also offenders.
Left Realists support policies that focus on building strong communities and creating social cohesion like multi agency working, Police and community together groups and ASBOs. They also support more democratic and community controlled policing to win public confidence and tackle causes of crime. More time spent by police investigating crime is tackling social deprivation and other risk factors improves community facilities - reduces unemployment. Also advocate intensive parenting like 'sure start'.
Ex,
Perry Preschool Project
- provided high quality education to 3-4 y/os who were African American children living in poverty and assessed to be at high risk of school failure. 58 were part of project and 65 were part of control group. They found crime decreased by 50% and that the kids part of the project were:
Less likely to be held back
Less likely to need SEN
More likely to have better literacy skills
More likely to graduate
More likely to be an active citizen
More likely to have a family
They're soft on crime as they focus too much on the social causes of crime, downplaying the role of offender in choosing to commit crime. The offender almost becomes a victim him/herself.
Explanations are inadequate, as the majority of those in deprived communities don't turn to crime. Social deprivation and other risk factors don't apply equally to all those in similar circumstances
Deflect attention away from more practical crime-prevention measures, like the tighter social control and situational crime prevention measures advocated by Right Realism
Right Realism
Environmental Crime prevention
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Wilson and Kelling
believe solution is to crackdown on any disorder using an environmentalist improvement strategy by the adopting a zero tolerance policy strategy, tackling the slightest sign of disorder even if it isn't criminal.
Approach is based on 'Broken Windows Thesis' which argues that leaving broken windows unrepaired, tolerating aggressive begging etc. sends out a signal that no one cares. This prompts spiral decline due to absence of both formal social control and informal control means members of community feel intimidated and powerless.
Situational Crime prevention
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Clarke
argues SCP strategies rely on not improving society or its institutions, but simply reducing opportunities for crime. Crime is less likely when there's no 'capable guardian' of victim like neighbour, police, CCTV or surveillance. Support 'target hardening' measures include locking doors/windows increase the effort a burglar needs to make, while surveillance increases likelihood of shoplifter being caught. Underlying SCP is rational choice - criminals act rationally weighing up risks and rewards of a crime opportunity. Focus is tighter control and socialisation by strengthening social institutions like traditional family, religion and community and constraining and isolating deviant individuals through community pressure. Cracking down on antisocial behaviour.
Port Authority Bus Terminal CPS
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Felson
argues bus terminal was designed so provided opportunity for deviant conduct. Ex, toilets were a setting for luggage thefts, rough sleeping and drug dealing. Re-shaping the environmental reduced such activity. Ex, large sinks in which homeless people were bathing were replaced with small basins.
Don't address the wider social causes of crime that the Left Realists do. They don't allow that some people may be targeted unfairly by police
Assumes that offenders act rationally in choosing crime and derive some benefits from it, but some crimes are impulsive of irrational and don't have any obvious gain
SCP tends to be geographically limited and only prevents crime in particular locations
SCP removes the focus from other forms of crime prevention such as wider economic and social policies which causes crime. SCP doesn't pay enough attention to catching criminals or punishments to deter offenders; it doesn't prevent crime overall, but simply displaces crime to softer targets in other areas.
Surveillance
Foucault
, 2 forms of punishment. Argues disciplinary power replaced sovereign power because surveillance is a more efficient 'technology of power'. He illustrates disciplinary power with the panopticon. The panopticon became the basis of prison design whereby prisoner' cells are visible to guards but guards not visible to prisoners. Prisoners don't know if they're being watched so must behave all the time - surveillance becomes self-surveillance. Other institutions followed this pattern with disciplinary power infiltrating every part of society and affecting human soul itself. Disciplinary power involves intensively monitoring the individual with a view to rehabilitating them.
Disciplinary Power
- Dominant from 19th century and seeks to govern body and mind through
Sovereign Power
- Pre-modern society had monarchy that exercised physical power over bodies and punishment was visible spectacle. Control was asserted by inflicting disfiguring visible punishment
Mathiesen
argues while panopticon allows the few to monitor the many, the media enable the many to see the few. Argues that we now have a 'synopticon', where everybody watches everybody.
Thompson
argues that powerful groups such as politicians fear the media's surveillance of them and what this might reveal about their own activities, potentially uncovering damaging information about individual widespread camera ownership also means citizens may now be to 'control the controllers'.
Feely and Simon
argue new 'technology of power' is emerging in the CJS to focus on groups rather than individuals its not interested on rehabilitating offender but simply preventing offending and it used calculations of risk. This can be applied to surveillance and crime control. Ex, airport security have screening checks based on known offender 'risk factors' unlike disciplinary, the aim of surveillance is not to correct, treat or rehabilitate. It seeks to predict and prevent future offending.
Labelling and Surveillance
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Cicourel
argues surveillance leads to judgements by operators who will interpret the data collected. One result can be the application of 'typifications' and self-fulfilling prophecy in which the criminalisation of some groups such as young black males are targeted whilst others are ignored
Punishment
Two justifications for punishment:
Reduction (prevents future crime)
Deterrence - Punishment may prevent future crime from fear of further
Rehabilitation - Reforming/Re-educating offenders so they no longer offend
Incapacitation - Removing offenders capacity to re-offend (execution/imprisonment)
Retribution
'Paying back' - idea that society is entitled to take revenge for offender having breached moral code
Durkheim
believes the function of punishment is to uphold social solidarity and reinforced shared values by expressing society's moral outrage at the criminal offence. Discusses 2 types of justice corresponding to 2 types of society:
Retributive Justice
- Traditional society with strong collective conscience making punishment severe. Its motivation is purely expressive
Restitutive Justice
- Modern society has extensive interdependence between individuals and crime damages this so the function of justice should be to repair damage (compensation). Aims to restore things to how they were before the offence
Marxist View
Believes punishment is part of the RSA, defending bourgeoisie property against lower classes. Different forms of punishment reflect the economic base of society - under capitalism, imprisonment is the dominant punishment as time is money and offenders 'pay' by 'doing time' in capitalist society.
Garland
argues the UK is moving to an era of mass incarceration and that the reason for this is due to the growing of politicisation of crime control. Since 70s there's been a move towards a new consensus based on more punitive and exclusionary 'tough on crime' policies.
Downes
argues mass incarceration has an ideological function - as the US prison system soaks up about 30%-40% of the unemployed thereby making capitalism look more successful. There's also a trend towards transcarceration where individuals become locked into a cycle of control - moving people between different prison like institutions.
Ex, Care->Young offenders->Adult prison. Some sociologists argue that transcarceration is a product of the blurring of boundaries between criminal justice and welfare agencies.