Week 1 Flashcards
(19 cards)
What is criminology
Processes of making laws - Includes the sociology of law, study of how and why societies define certain behaviors or activities as criminal, and study of the effects of these in people’s lives
Breaking laws - Includes the study of why people break laws (theories of crime causation)
Reacting toward the breaking of laws - Includes the study of social responses to crime police, the courts and corrections, but also other peripheral responses such as treatment, etc.
Role of theory in criminology
The purpose of much of criminology is not just to describe phenomena, but to explain them
“A theory is a set of interrelated constructs(concepts), definitions, and propositions that present a systematic view of phenomena by specifying relations among variables, with the purpose of explaining and predicting phenomena
Formal / legal definition of crime
Crime is breaking the law
- Crime defined by legislative codes that identify certain behaviours as punishable by the state
- This is the most common definition, and also the most problematic one for criminologists
Problems with this
- Crime becomes whatever the state says it is
- State definitions may fail to capture or address serious harms
- State definitions may be beholden to specific political or social interests
Crime as social harm
Focus on what Sutherland (1949) called actions that go against the “common welfare of society.”
- Crime as “analogous to social injury”
- White Collar Crime
- Professional Crime
Seeks to find a broader definition of crime less wedded to state definitions and more inclusive of actions that cause social injury
Contemporary Examples:
- Green Criminology
- Corporate Crimes
Crime as deviance/norm violations
Functionalist - Durkheim
- Sought to define crime as a part of the “natural” deviance inherent to all societies with a focus on its social functions
Sellin
- Sought a means by which to analyse and identify a typology of conduct norm violations that could be scientifically verified
Crime as human rights violations
Emerges out of the problems of statelessness, genocide, and gross human rights violations in the 20th century
- Forged in the problem of post-WWII in terms of prosecuting crimes against stateless people (Jewish people and other stripped of citizenship) and crimes against groups of people (i.e. genocide)
- Expands Sutheland’s notion of social harms to focus on cases and crimes where the state itself is the offender
Aetiologies of crime
- crime as sin
- classical criminology
- medical model
- rational choice
- sociology
Crime as sin
- The oldest perspective, at least in the West (but still very much present in the modern world)
- Roots in the Judeo-Christian histories that
eventually overtook pagan Europe after
the fall of Rome - Crime is equated with sin or transgression; in the west specifically, it is equated with evil, temptation, and the devil
The demonic perspective
Body and Soul
In the demonic perspective the body and the soul are seen as fundamentally distinct, or even at odds, with one another
As Pfohl (25) notes, in this perspective, there is “nothing particularly sacred about the body. In a world which gave primacy to supernatural imagery there was little profit in preserving the body at the expense of the soul.”
Classical criminology explanations - Beccaria
Cesare Beccaria
- Main theoretical premise of Beccaria’s work (Crime and Punishments, 1764) followed the arguments of Hobbes, Rousseau, etc. in arguing for the desirability of a social contract between people and their governors
- Beccaria’s work, however was primarily concerned with what happens when people break this contract.
- For a punishment to be just it should consist of only such gradations of intensity as suffice to deter men from committing crimes
Classical criminology explanations
- Argued that the most effective response to violations of the social contract was punishment
- The beginning of modern deterrence theory
- Assumes that most people seek to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, and that crime can be best reduced through:
- > Certainty of being caught for criminal acts
- > Swiftness of punishment
- > Severity of punishment
Pathological explanations - Lombroso
- Late 19th century sees a shift from classical explanations to biological (and later psychological) explanations of deviance
- Cesare Lombroso publishes The Criminal Man in 1876
- Lombroso studied the cadavers of executed criminals, as well as spent time researching prisoners, and determined that serious criminal activity was probably an inherited trait
Lombroso theories of crime
Lombroso’s work is often called atavistic theory or simply atavism, for the notion that criminals could be identified by physical traits that in part explained their life of crime
Lombroso’s work is classified as a form of biological determinism, an approach that eventually fell out of favour, but has recently again made some headway with the study of genetics.
Sociological explanations
Three major sociological paradigms:
- Functionalism (sometimes called structural functionalism)
- Social Conflict
- Symbolic Interactionism
The fist two are considered “macro” paradigms while the latter is considered a “micro” paradigm”
Functionalism
The structural-functional paradigm is a framework for building theory that sees society as a complex system whose parts work together to promote solidarity and stability
It asserts that our lives are guided by social structures (relatively stable patterns of social behavior over time).
Society is thought of as a system or a whole
Conflict theory
The social-conflict paradigm is a framework for building theory that sees society as an arena of inequality that generates conflict and change.
It conceives of society less as a single whole or system, and more as the outcome of social conflict and inequality
SI
The symbolic-interaction paradigm is a framework for building theory that sees society as the product of the everyday interactions of individuals.
The structural-functional and the social-conflict paradigms share a macro-level orientation, meaning that they focus on broad social structures that shape society as a whole.
In contrast, symbolic-interactionism has a micro-level orientation; it focuses on patterns of social interaction in specific settings
Ritzer’s integrative (micro-macro) theory of social analysis
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Weber/Marx/Durkheim theories
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