Summary of the following articles:
- Rock, P. (2002). Sociological theories of crime. The Oxford handbook of criminology, 3, 51-82.
- Kleemans, E. R. (2014). Theoretical perspectives on organized crime. Oxford handbook of organized crime, 32-52.
- Hobbs, D., & Antonopoulos, G. A. (2014). How t...
Sociology is the study of social organization and institutions and of collective behaviour and
interaction, including the individual's relationship to the group
o Catholic definition, it involves almost every situation in which indivuals/groups
can influence each other
There is no one way to lay out the sociology of crime
Crime is centrally bound up with the state's attempts to impose its will through law
Some criminologists would like to be a correctionalist: to use knowledge about crime to
suppress it
Crime and control
Many theories argue that crime is a consequence of defective social regulation
o People are said to diviate because the disciplines and authority of society are so
flawed that they offer few limitations or moral direction
The formal birth into theory is linked indissolbubly with anomie + the French
sociologist Durkheim
Durkheim had two different types of solidarity
1. Mechanical solidarity:
o a society without an elaborate division of labour rested on the mechanical
solidarity of people who not only reacted much alike to problems, but who also
saw that everyone about them reacted alike to those problems, thereby lending
objectivity, scale and solidity to moral response and bringing a potential for
massive disapproval and repression to bear on the deviant
2. Organic solidarity:
o Sheerly economic regulations is not enough, there should be moral
regulation, moral rules which specify the rights and obligations of individuals in a
given occupation in relation to those in other occupations
People might no longer think in unison/their moral response might not
be unanimous, but they should be able to compose their differences
peacably by means of a system of restitutive justice that made amends for
losses suffered.
Anomic deregulations was a matter of crisis, innately unstable and
short-lived, for Durkheim. It could not be tolerated for very long before
society collapsed.
The first meaning that Durkheim gave to anomie is that moral regulation was relatively
deficient and people were correspondingly free to deviate
,The second meaning of anomie (Durkheim) thouched on moral regulation that was not so
much flawed as in a critical or chronic state of near collapse.
o People are not endowed at birth with fixed appetites and ambitions, on the
contrary, their purposes and aspirations are shaped by the generalized opinions
and reactions of others, by a collective conscience, that can appear through social
ritual and routine to be externally derived, solid, and objective .
Merton stated that anomie was a socially-fostered state of discontent and deregulation that
generated crime and deviance as part of the routinge functioning of a society which
promised much to everyone but actually denied them equal access to its attainment
Cohen stated that anomie is synthesized with the Freudian idea of reaction formation in an
effort to explain the maifestly espressive and non-rational nature of much deliquency
o The prospect of failure was depicted as bringing about a major psychological
rejection
o It was not generalizable to English people
Anomie or normlessness is the lack of the usual social or ethical standards in an individual or
group
The control theory centres loosely around the contenction that people seek to commit crime
because it is profitable, useful, or enjoyable for them to do so, and that they will almost
certainly break the law if they can
o Not 'why do they do it?' but 'why don't we do it'
o Early variants held four chief elements to induce people to comply with rules:
Attachment: a person's sensitivity to the opinions of others
Commitment: flowed form an investment of time, energy and reputation in
conformity
Involvement: stemmed form engrossment in conventional activity
Belief: a person's conviction that he should obey legal rules
o Gottfredson + Hirschi developed the control theory by turning to self-control and
impulsivity
Crime flows from low self-control
It provides a direct and simple gratification of desires that is attractive
to those who cannot postpone pleasure
It requires little skill/planning
o Matza would not have called himself a control theorist, but he did portray
delinquents in a manner that control theorists would find complementary
Delinquents are not very different from us
Techniques of neutralization can ease the process of disengagement
It enables people methodically to counter the guilt and offset the
censure they might experience when offending
o Box wanted to take the analysis further by compiling his own new alliterative list
of variables that were held to affect control:
Secrecy: the delinquent's chances of concealment
Skills: a mastery of knowledge and techniques needed for the deviant act
Supply: access to appropriate equipment
, Social support: the endorsement offered by peers and others
Symbolic support: the endorsement offered by accounts available in the wider
culture
The greater the access to these variables, the greater would be the
likelihood of offending
o Wilson may had one of the most telling and economical contributions to the
control theory
Exercise of chaperonage: parents who acted as chaperons effectively
prevented their children from offending
o Gender differences are a powerfully discrimination between offenders and non-
offenders
The basic premise of the rational choice theory is that aggregate social behavior results from
the behavior of individual actors, each of whom is making their individual decisions. The
theory also focuses on the determinants of the individual choices
o The 'economic man/everyman' --> he is very much alike any one of us
o He needs no complexity because what weights is the piecemeal thearetical
analysis of discrete instances of disembodied offending behavior conducted by
people making decisions about the issues of risk, effort, and reward in the
settings in which they may take place
o Clarke stated that the rate of crime was held to vary in response to three broad
configurations of factors
1. Increasing the effort of the everyman would have to expend in committing a
crime
Target hardening: defending objects and people by shields and other
devices
Access control: making it difficult for predators to approach targets
Deflecting offenders: encouraging them, for example, to act in a
legitimate rather than illegitimate manner through the provision of
graffiti boards
Controlling facilitators: gun control or checks on the sales of spray
cans
2. Increasing the risk of offending through the sreening of people (border
search), formal surveillance by police, security guards, surveillance by
employees (bus conductors), natural surveillance (street lighting)
3. Reducing the rewards of crime
Target removal (more electronic transactons instead of cash)
Property identification
Removal of inducements (rapid cleaning of graffiti)
Rule setting (income taks returns)
The routine activities theory adopted a series of presuppositions about basic human fraility,
the importance of temtation and provocation, and the part played by idleness
, o Crime occurs when three elements converge:
1. A motivated offender
2. A suitable target
3. The absence of a capable guardian
Crime, control and space
The Chicago school:
o As cities grow, it was held, so there would be a progressive and largely
spontaneous differentiations of space, population, and function that
concentrated different groupings in different areas.
The main organizing structure was the zone, and the Chicago sociologists
discovered five principal concentric zones shaping the city:
1. The central business district at the very core
2. An area of stable working-class housing
3. Middle-class housing
4. Outer suburbia
5. Zone in transition, about that centre
Greatest volatility of its residents
An area of comparatively cheap rents, weak social control,
internal social differentiation, rapid physical change
New immigrant groups came to this zone most frequently
Was found to be the area with the largest proportions of the
poor, illegitimate, illiterate, mentally ill, juvenile deliquents,
prositutes
o Social ecology: the study of the patterns formed by groups living together in the
same space, with the fieldwork methods of social anthropology, to explore the
traditions, customs, and practives of the residents of natural areas
o Delinquency was, in effect, not disorganized at all, but a stable attribute of social
life
Cultural transmission --> differential association, it was studied as a normal
process of learning motives, skills and meanings in the company of others
who bore criminal traditions
o Spatial analysis:
One's very address could become a constraining moral fact that affected not
only how one would be treated by others in and bout the criminal justice
system, but also how one would come to rate oneselfs as a potential
deviant or conformist
Crimes often happen in the same areas --> it has its maps
o Criminologist became more interested in how space, conduct and control
intersect
o Defensible space: leans on the psychological notion of territoriality, the sense of
attachment and symbolic investment that people can acquire in space
An imperative that leads people to wish to guard what is their own
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