Midterm - Facing Crime Flashcards
(8 cards)
How do mainstream bureaucracy and social science employ a common set of presuppositions in trying to understand and control crime?
What are the relative strengths and weaknesses of these presuppositions?
What do these presuppositions reveal about the nature of crime, and what do they leave hidden, distorted, or unspoken?
They assume that issues of crime must be handled as numbers or other easily measured things. They want to make things less complex. They use problematization.
Well, it’s efficient but also violent.
They reveal the
Discuss the reading by Jonathan Wender on “the policing of childhood”
Examples of effacement
Examples, using literature, of existential angst and desire to own oneself
What happens when you try to describe crime? Is there a perfect way to describe crime?
you can’t describe it perfectly
there’s no perfect way to analyze or interpret crime
obvs, there’s a better way and that way is to get as close as poss to the ACTUAL, lived reality of crime
BECAUSE
if you don’t describe it properly, it leads to miscalculation and misperception which leads to inaccuracy and injustice
(So if you’re quantifying it and not remembering that these numbers are people and are effacing them, it’s gonna lead to a bad outcome for the people)
What is effacement?
erasing, concealing, or removing from memory. Literally “removing the face
Problematization????!
What’s wrong with it
Problematization is when you make it so that a problem can be dealt with in a measurable way.
“The technical translation of people into measurable, manageable bureaucratic or scientific problems”
EVeryone (modern bureaucracy, social science) loves the idea of problematization because it gives a nice, numbers, cut-and-dry way to deal with complex issues.
THIS IS VIOLENT - IT REDUCES AND ABSTRACTS PEOPLE. IT IGNORES THE PEOPLE BEHIND THE NUMBRS.
IT is efficient BUT violent.
Solution to problematization?
a form of phenomenology. use aesthetic forms to reveal what might otherwise be effaced. so use words and images to bring the reality to the fore.
what is phenomenology?
Phenomenology: tries to get “to the things themselves” by asking what underlies phenomena beyond our thoughts and perceptions.
(the study of how we experience things - like how does our lived reality/first person view temper the things we perceive?)
what is the challenge effacement, problematization, etc pose?
WE need to reconcile and balance the desire for efficiency and the need to be ethical, compassionate, and deliver justice and holistic understanding
WE MUST BE OPEN TO THE HUMAN FACE OF CRIME - WE MUST RESIST SEDUCTIVE EASE OF ABSTRACTION!!!
