⚫Left and Right Realist perspective of crime and deviance in sociology broken down into easy and digestible chunks.
Studies, Sociologists, Ideologies, Questions, Examples and Keywords included. ⚫ 1 page PDF document.
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Left Realists:
Crime Prevention:
- Remove economic & social conditions that motivate groups to commit crime
- Government needs to improve social conditions Young -
- Government social policy should - reduce inequalities in wealth & income believe in gradual social change rather than violent overthrow of capitalism as the
- LF recommend - police to regain the trust of local communities who believe the police to way to achieve greater equality.
be biased against them.
- Lea & Young: - areas with high numbers of ethnic minorities, policing resembles a military
occupation.
- Police - should work harder to reform & improve Police community relations by
eradicating institutionally racist police practices.
Restorative justice:
- Braithwaite (1989) [disintegrative (removed from society) & re-integrative shaming Causes of crime
(avoids stigmatising or negatively labelling offenders as 'evil' or 'bad')] Relative deprivation
- Common type = 'disintegrative shaming' - offender negatively labelled that he/or is - Subculture - materials & consumerism.
effectively excluded from society - Marginalisation -
- Interactionalists: this stigmatisation means - societal members reluctant to trust people lack clear goals and organisation to represent their
who have been criminal offenders. interest
○ They may end up socialising with people of similar ex-criminal status & consequently - Unemployed youths have no clear goals and have no
the temptation to re-offend may be high. organisation to represent them and express their
- Braithwaite - replace disintegrative shaming by a form of restorative justice - 're- frustration through criminal means such as violence
integrative shaming' and rioting.
○ ^- avoids stigmatising or negatively labelling offenders as 'evil' or 'bad
○ Makes them aware of the negative impact of their actions
○ Avoids punishing wrongdoers into more deviance
E.G. - Community Justice Court - New York - reduced crimes by 75% - use of Evaluation
community mediation sessions Considers victims of offenders and offers practical solutions.
- Structural changes in society:
- Functionalist, Marxist and Left Realist -> crime caused by problems in the way the Highlights the problem of street crime and has influenced government
Western Societies are organised. policies.
- Strain between cultural goals and how to actually achieve them
- Marxists - cultural value underpinning the system encourages criminal behaviour Marxists argue that it fails to explain corporate crime, which is more
- Deprivation caused by inequalities in income & wealth. harmful.
- CRITICS: those with vested interests in the way society is currently structured = likely to
resist attempts at such revolutionary change. Relative deprivation cannot fully explain crime because not all those who
- experience it commit crime.
It focus on high crime inner city areas gives and unrepresentative view
and makes crime appear a greater problem than it is .
They ignore female criminals.
Containment & punishment
Right Realist
Situational crime prevention: Evaluation
- Crime - Opportunistic - relatively risk-free opportunities to profit from crime Offers practical solutions to crime and deviance and has since influenced
government policies since 1997 eg asbos and zero tolerance
Environmental crime prevention: They focus on only minor working class crime and ignore white collar crime which
- Community-based approach argues - high levels of crime occur in may be more costly and harmful to the public.
neighbourhoods where there has previously been a loss of formal and
informal social control over minor acts of antisocial behaviour It ignores wider structural causes such as poverty.
- crime as a real and growing problem which destroys communities.
- Murray - young males inadequate socialisation. Absent fathers It overstates offenders rationality and how far they make cost benefit calculations
- Cost of crime = low = little risk of being caught & the punishment is lenient. before committing s crime. While it may explain some utilitarian crime, it may not
explain much violent crime.
-
- Wilson & Keeling
○ 'broken window' theory - low level antisocial behaviour can be
prevented then the escalation to more serious criminal acts can be closely linked to new right
stopped. - believe crime is mostly associated with
○ Abandoned building - if one window gets broken, then all the windows dysfunctional groups in society from the lowest class
soon get smashed. backgrounds (eg, working class)
○ If minor crimes (littering, noise - asbo) are prevented, the major ones - agree with functionalists that social order is based
are much less likely to happen. on value consensus but disagree that crime is
- Criticism of the ECP : Left Realists & Marxists : ECP is doomed to fail as it functional
treats the symptoms rather than the cause of the social disease of crime.
What are the four key explanations by right Realists for why
- Argue: politicians need to address the economic & social conditions -
people are more prone to crime ?
poverty, unemployment poor housing, poor education
1) biological theory
- Limited evidence to the broken glass theory
2) control theory
3) rational choice theory
4) underclass theory
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