- Criminology: study of crime, criminals and criminal justice
- Bases and implications of criminal laws: how they emerge, how they work, how they get
violated and what happens to violators
- Research methods: psychological testing to global crime statistics/ or from life-stories to
media analysis
- Epistemology: the ways in which we choose to find out about the world
- Sociology: the systematic study of human society
- Society: collections of people doing things together
- Sociology also a form of consciousness, way of thinking, critical way of seeing
- A sociological approach does not take for granted common sense ideas about crime, it
challenges the norms and asks questions about what we believe to be true about crime, why
we might believe this and and how crime and our view of it is shaped by wider social factors
- Charles Wright Mills: sociological imagination
o According to Mills the society is responsible for many of our problems
o Sociologists had a certain duty to play a public role by adressing and engaging with
the private troubles afflicting ordinary people
- Sociology’s focus on society as a social order means that it always had a corresponding focus
on social disorder
- Crime is a social construct, what is regarded as crime is not fixed but varies across time,
place and people
- Criminal is also socially constructed
- Crime control and punishement are also shaped by social influences that determine the
seriousness of acts defined as criminal and the forms and the priority with which those
crimes are to be addressed
- Divisions in sociology:
o Social & economic divisions
o Gender & sexuality divisions
o Ethnic and racialised divisions
o Age divisions
- Intersectionality: aims to make visible the multiple positioning that constitutes everyday life
and the power relations that are central to it
Chapter 11 Theft, Fraud and other property crimes
- Property crime: involves stealing and dishonestly obtaining or damaging another’s property,
whether tangible goods or intangible property
- 6 main types of crime:
o Offences against the person
o Offences against property (with violence)
o Offences against property (without violence)
o Malicious offences against property
o Offences against the currency
o Miscellaneous offences
,- Changing level of property crime due to
o social and economic life changes
o Developing struggle between capital and labour
o Changes in the administration of criminal justice
o War made it easier for people to steal (bombings)
o Consumer booms and technological revolution of the post-war decades put into
circulation a mass of portable, high-value goods that presented attractive new
targets and new opportunites for crime
- VIVA model (Cohen & Felson)
o Important aspects or a product ot become a target: value, inertia, visibility and
access
o Hot products
- CRAVED model (Ron Clarke)
o Hot products are:
Concealabe
Removable
Availabe
Valuable
Enjoyable
Disposable
- Thefts to order: well-organised and sophisticated operations
- CRPD : Crime Reduction through Product Technology
- Skimming: reading and copying coded details on cards
- Reasons for rise in criminology:
o Wilson: social democrtaic theorising are flawed
o Falling moral standards and weakening sources of social authority
o Jock Young: absolute increase of prosperity at a national level tells us little about
material inequality in society
o Relative deprivation thesis: people have different expectations depending on what
they feel they deserve from life
- Reasons reductions in crime:
- Tougher criminal justice policies, but not everywhere so not definite
- Hidden figure of property crime:
o The most commonly reported reason for not reporting a burglary was that the
incident seemed too trivial and thus was not considered serious enough to report to
the police
o Or because they think the police won't do anything about it
o Reporting needs to be done for insurance, when nothing is stolen people often do
not report
- Profile of property crime offenders:
o 18th and 19th century: young, male, poorly educated and employed in low-skilled,
low-paid jobs
o Low-level burglars: juveniles & young adults
o Middle-range burglars: older, more skillful and more experienced, access to external
resources
o High-level burglars: well connected, carefully planned and possess skills and
technical expertise to overcome complex security measures
, - Almost everybody has commited a crime, often not even realisting they are doing it
- Concept of neutralisation (Skyes and Matza’s): useful to identify the techniques that many
shoplifters use to deny or deflect blame for wrongdoing away from the perpetrator
- Workplace crime is very common
- Routine Activity Theory: property crimes occur when there is a covergence in time and space
of likely offenders aiming to commit crimes against suitable targers, in the absence of
capable guardians
- Repeat victimisation: occurs when the same location, person, household, business or vehicle
suffers more than one crime event over a specific perod of time
- People living in urban inner-city areas and in social housing are more vulnerable to crime
problems
- Ethnic minority groups are generally more at risk of household crimes than white
communities
- This is often because:
o Ethnic minorities experience more poverty
o Live in socially disadvantaged areas
o Subject to racial violence
- Typical offender: male and young (80%, 10-25)
- Taylor: levels of crime in different locations are related to their varied capacities for
responding to global economic competition, deindustrialisation,and post-industrial
restructuring
- Controlling property crime:
- Steven Box: there is considerable inconsistency in the way in which the criminal justice
system perceives and treats the crimes of the powerless as opposed to the crimes of the
powerful
- Routine Active theory: 3 key elements: offenders, targets and absence of guardians
- Other forms of property crime:
o Theft and illegal export of cultural property
o Theft of intellectual property
- Biopiracy: the practices of some companies that have asserted the right of ownership over
genetic materials taken from living organisms
- Cultural criminologists: criminology has traditionally underestimated the attractions in doing
wrong or living on the edge
- Edgework (Stephen Lyng) : a type of experiential anarchy in which the individual moves
beyond the realm of established social patterns to the very fringes of ordered reality
- Katz: shoplifting can be understood as a version of a thrilling and sensually gratifying game
Thursday
Chapter 2 Histories of crime
- Ruff: violence sanctioned by law reached its peak in the sixteenth century in Europe
- Elias: from the middle ages onwards, Europeans began to exercise new kinds of self-control
over their bodies and behavior
- Knafla: the civilising process is with us today and it is bringing to an end traditional forms of
social violence
- Eisner: long-term decline in homicide rates from 16th to 20th century
- Spierenburg: codes of honour became less violent
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