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Summary CLB Criminology & Criminal Justice
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Week 2What is criminology? : the study of the nature, extent, causes and control of criminal behavior. (p. 8)
(p. 2) Criminology is a multidisciplinary social science which derives (afgeleid) its insights and theories
from a range of scientific disciplines:
-Law, economy, sociology, philosophy, biology, psychology, history, geography and political sciences.
Methodology is a key element.
Criminology explores the bases and implications of criminal laws – how they emerge, how they work,
how the get violated and what happens to violators.
-Broad definition: criminology does not just study crimes but also blameworthy harmful behavior.
There a 5 main questions: (p. 5 - 6)
1: definition: which types of harmful behavior are considered criminal and why?
2: Scope of crime problems: focus is on the size of a specific crime problem and how to measure the
problem, how crimes are committed: which skills, knowledge and tools are required.
3: Explanation: why and where crimes occur and how criminal behavior may be explained from a
theoretical perspective.
*Personal level: biological, psychological issues etc. → the characters of criminals: what makes them
tick. And (social) environment of people, family, neighborhood etc. but also: what has capitalism of
neoliberalism to do with criminal behavior?
*Social and institutional level: historical, cultural, economical, political etc.
4: Consequences of crime, perpetrators (daders), victims, societies, ecosystems.
5: Evaluation: how can crime be tackled of prevented and what the is the effect of punishment?
→ these questions are addressed at different levels:
- Individual level: of villains and victims
- Criminal process
- Structural perspective: looking at societal drivers.
How do societies determine which behavior should be criminalized?
-Basic premise: we cannot objectively determine what is crime of deviant behavior.
What we define as criminal behavior is the outcome of a process of social construction.
Only a few types of behavior are universally rejected as deviant across cultures:
*Indiscriminate lying, stealing, violence and causing harm, incest.
What is crime?: (p. 8)
-Mainstream approach: the object of study of criminology is limited to behavior which qualifies as
criminal and is codified as such in penal law. → focus: individual ‘street crimes’ homicide, rape,
assault, robbery, burglary (inbraak), larceny theft, vandalism, illicit (onwettig)drug us and illicit drug
,selling.
-Philosophical approach: aims to objectively define liberty limiting principles.
John Stuart Mill: Harm principle: that the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised
over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.
Additional liberty limiting principles (Feinberg):
-Paternalism: liberties may be limited to prevent individuals from causing harm to themselves.
→Wearing a helmet when you’re driving a motorcycle
-Moralism: liberties may ben limited when societies reject behavior, regardless whether the behavior
causes harm. → this is a product of social construction within societies. if the social group actually
thinks that certain behaviors should not be allowed, does this indeed objectively justify criminalization
of this behavior?
-Offense principle: liberties may be limited if behavior visibly offends other people, regardless of harm
being caused. → how objective is this? Example: make a lot of noise in a public train.
It is difficult to define deviant behavior and what behavior is the end to be criminalized. what we
define as crime is for a large part influenced by power differences between societal groups.
Symbolic interactionism: social construction is rooted in symbolic interactionism.
Social concepts cannot be defined exactly. → Blumer: we should sensitizing concepts of which there
might be quite a few to actually approach a specific problem from al sorts of different angles.
-interaction structures how people experience, interpret and attribute meaning to everyday reality
(Herbert Blumer, 1969). → what is real and what not?
Social construction
-Human social relations and behavior are regulated through social norms
-A social norm is ‘any standard rule that states what human beings should or should not think, say or
do under given circumstances.
-These norms are continuously defined and redefined by the members of a social group.
-Large communities cannot constantly (re)define norms in direct personal interactions.
-Instead, norms are informally codified in what we define as culture
-laws are formalized codifications of societal norms.
-Culture norms (and Laws) are necessarily simplified representations of the complexities of everyday
life → called frames
Definition setting
-Communities define their own norms
*Who: individuals, interest groups, institutions, political parties, religious actors, the media, science
*Where: local, national, international
-Definitions are not static, but change over time.
-The power of define is spread unevenly within societies.
-Increased complexity of definition setting:
*Increased complexity of societies, digitalization and bubbles, global interest vs national sovereignty
Importance of social construction of criminology: examples
-The problem of theorizing sensitizing concepts
-Responses to crime: why are some groups treated differently than others?
-The effect of definition power on the criminalization of harmful behavior
-Mass surveillance of ‘deviant’ behavior?
-The value of wildlife
-The framing of migrants
-Definition of a terrorist
,Tutorial 2
The crime vs harm debate (. P. 8 – 9)
-Harm may be physical harm, financial-economic harm, but also emotional and psychological harm
and harm to what is dubbed cultural safety, which encompasses things such as autonomy, the
resources, environmental harm etc
problems: (p. 9)
-We cannot include every imaginable hardship into criminology.
-It’s difficult to empirically assess whatever behavior is harmful.
-Criminalization is not just determined by harm: it may also include behavior that is rejected by a
majority of society, but not harmful.
Robert Agnew’s solution: focus only on blameworthy harms, which are purposively caused by other
individuals or legal entities.
Expands of studies:
-White collars crimes (p. 9 – 11): violations of law by persons in the upper socio-economic classes. A
crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation.
These crimes were not convicted in criminal courts. They were handled by administrative boards,
bureaus of commissions.
Types:
*Crimes committed by individual actors against random victims, not necessarily in the context of
occupation. Bijv. Online fraud.
*Crimes committed by an employee against his/ her employer. → occupational crime
*Crimes committed by corporations against its employees. Bijv. Exposing them to dangerous working
conditions.
*Crimes committed by corporations against customers and random victims. Bijv. Selling cars that are
inherently unsafe. → corporate crime: offenses committed by legal persons in the context of their
regular business activities.
-State crime (p. 12 -13): an act or omission of an action by actors within the state that results in
violations of domestic and international law, human rights, or systematic of institutionalized harm of
its or another state’s population.
-Green criminology (p. 14 - 15): refers to the study of environmental crimes and harms affecting
human and non- human life, ecosystems and the biosphere.
*Non-human life, ecosystems and biosphere are usually studied as victims. Flora and fauna may
however be perpetrators as well.
* the health, quality of life and even the existence of large groups of people and other living creatures
with high impact and over long periods of time.
-Criminology of the Global South: p. 15 – 18.
, Week 3
Criminological questions:
1: Does punishment ‘work’ as an effective response to crime?
*Which proportion of perpetrators is punished?
*Does it matter how many people we send to jail?
-Prison system is just 1 part of the criminal justice system, but it doesn’t have a large effect on crime
rates, depending on how many people we actually sent to jail.
*Does it matter which sentence we impose?
-It doesn’t really matter what type of sentence is actually being imposed.
2: Is the criminal justice system fair or biased?
*Bias between the rich and the poor
*Radical bias(vooroordeel).
Some general observations:
-In countries where levels of inequality are higher, governments tend to rely more on (harsh)
punishment.
-On average there’s little-to-no relationship between crime levels and incarceration (opsluiting) levels
-Legal sanctions either reduce, increase or have no effect on the commission of future crimes,
depending on a host of variables including the type of offender(overtreder), the nature of the offense
and the social setting.
-Sanctions are more effective when offenders view these as legitimate, when they have strong bonds
to the community and the sanctioning agent and when offenders accept their shame and are not
isolated from society.
Punishment:
-Backward-looking justification: referring to how the perpetrator deserves to be treated. → deserts
model: the actual crime and its seriousness are the overriding considerations for imposing sentence
and not issues relating to the consequences following the crime, such as the rehabilitation of the
criminal.
-Forward-looking justification: are considered utilitarian or consequentialist and typically also give
more weight to future states, such as deterring others from committing crime and the rehabilitation of
offenders.
Punishment was to be justified in terms of the consequences it had: retribution, deterrence,
rehabilitation, incapacitation and the satisfaction of grievances. → attention shifted to prevention of
future crimes, also known as the utilitarian approach: they are committed to doing whatever, in any
given situation, is likely to promote the happiness of the greatest number and, if it’s nit possible to
promote happiness, then to what which will cause least unhappiness.
-Retribution: focus on 1 offender
The Social Contract (Thomas Hobbes): the idea that the human being is by nature competitive,
distrustful and engaged in an endless search for his or her own personal glory. If this is the case, social
order can only exist if people sacrifice some of the free reign that they might allow their individual
natures in the interest of saving themselves.
*They do so by voluntarily joining in a social contract: it is a fictitious and abstract representation of
norms that people agree upon.
-Deterrence theory:
*Jeremy Bentham: rational actors who committed crimes because the gains were higher than the
costs. Therefore the costs in terms of punishment should equal the gains of the crime.
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