Important pages
- P. 60 Reasoning Criminal – Cornish & Clarke
- P.102 Psychological theories compared
- P. 132 Sutherland’s nine testable propositions
- P. 142 Justifications/ techniques of neutralization
- P. 185 Concentric Zone Theory
Chapter 1
Six fundamental changes that can demonstrate the changed nature of our world:
1. Globalization
2. Communications revolution
3. Privatization and individualization
4. Global spread of disease
5. Changing perceptions of conflict and national security
6. The internationalization of terrorism
Globalization relates to the way people in different societies identify with values that cut
across nations and cultures, but it also relates to the recognition of different cultures’
diversity of experience and the formation of new identities. As globalization integrates us,
these new identities and our sense of belonging to differentiated cultures are also driving
many of us apart.
Globalization + global unemployment -> a decline in collective social action and increased
economic polarization.
What is criminology?
1. The definition and nature of crime as harm-causing behavior
2. Different types of criminal activity, ranging from individual spontaneous offending to
collective organized criminal enterprises
3. Profiles of typical offender and victims
4. Statistical analysis of the extent, incidence, patterning, and cost of crimes, including
the dark figures
5. Analysis of crime causation
Chapter 3
Classical Theory
Did not strive to explain why people commit crime, but rather a strategy for administering
justice according to rational principles. During the enlightment, people in Europe began to
reject the traditional idea that people were born in into social types with different rights and
privileges. Classical thinkers saw people as individuals with equal rights.
People were reinvented as rational and reasoning beings.
Classical theory was a radical concept because it opposed traditional ways,
challenged the power of the state, deviated from the orthodoxies of the Catholic
Church, and glorified the common people.
, Also conservative: wanting to expand the scope of disciplinary punishment (not its
severity), having it apply to everyone, while ignoring the social conditions of the
crime problem.
Preclassical era: Distinction in ‘deserving and undeserving poor’, difference in treatment.
Help or punishment
Classical era stems from middle class: they wanted a new legal concept of humans that
would limit the power of the old, aristocratically run state and liberate the freedom, safety,
and security of the individual to create and keep wealth -> universal rights to liberty and
freedom, equally for all.
Methods: aligning the law and its enforcement and administration with logical and rational
principles.
Beccaria
- Challenged the prevailing idea that humans are predestined to fill particular social
statuses. Instead, they were born as free, equal, and rational individuals having both
natural rights.
- Government was not the automatic right of the rich, but created through a social
contract in which free, rational individuals sacrificed part of their freedom to the
state to maintain peace and security on behalf of the common good.
Individual sovereignty = individual rights have priority over the interests of society or the
state.
- Lawmaking and resolving legal ambiguities should be the exclusive domain of elected
legislators who represented the people.
- Crimes are not offenses against the powerful, but wrongdoings against fellow
humans and thus against society itself (breaking the social contract).
- Laws, the courts and judges must protect the innocent from conviction and to convict
the guilty, regardless of their status. -> presumption of innocence.
- Crime prevention based on rational cost-benefit analysis. Proportionate
punishments.
- “Specific deterrence” = encourages each individual to calculate the costs of
committing the crime.
o Certainty, severity and celerity (swiftly after apprehension)
Bentham
- “Hedonistic, or felicity, calculus” = people act to increase positive results through
their pursuit of pleasure and to reduce negative outcomes through the avoidance of
pain.
- Increase the total happiness of the community by excluding mischief and promoting
pleasure and security
- Scaled punishments -> through rational choice offenders choose a lesser crime
- Repeat offenders: necessary to increase the punishment to outweigh the profit form
the offenses.
Limitations
1. Equality is impossible
, 2. Inequality in wealth, some people are allowed to create more wealth than others by
the system
3. Why do some people reoffend, when they are ‘all equally equipped to make rational
decisions?
Neoclassical revisions
French Code of 1791 treated all offenders equally regardless of individual circumstances, but
the French soon realized that justice required some discretion and latitude. Classicism took
no account of individual differences -> Code of 1819, some discretion.
Criminal Justice Implications: The Move to “Justice” Theory
Because of a reliance on the scientific method, diagnosis, and rehabilitation, the emphasis
shifted from deterrence to treatment under what was termed “rehabilitative justice”.
The outcome, however, was the same as before -> no uniformity in punishments and
different treatments depending on the diagnosis of cause.
Critique on rehabilitative justice: 1. Does not prevent reoffending 2. It was unfair (discretion
and inconsistency)
Reaction: “just deserts”
1. Limited discretion at all procedural stages of the criminal justice system
2. Greater openness and accountability
3. Punishment justified by the last crime or series of crimes
4. Punishment commensurate with the seriousness of the crime
The move from rehabilitation back to justice gave priority to punishment.
- Crime is freely chosen and rewarding, and, therefore, it demands both deterrent and
retributive responses (law-and-order element).
Questions on effectiveness of:
- Determinate sentencing, incapacitation, three-strike laws and death penalty
Routine-Activities Theory
1960: interest in classical economic ideas of rational choice.
Rational choice theories explain how some people consciously and rationally choose to
commit criminal acts. Potential offenders consider the net benefits gained from committing
crimes. They use free will and weigh the perceived costs against the potential benefits =
choice structuring.
Contemporary rational choice theory differs from classical ideas in the degree of rationality
attributed to offenders -> emphasize the limits of rational thought in the decision to commit
crime. -> limited or bounded rationality.
Rational choice theorists: crime is the outcome of choices and decisions made within a
context of situational constraints and opportunities.
Make criminal behavior less rewarding, more risky and more difficult. (Target
hardening, potential victim is more active in the process of crime control)
Limitations
- Questionable assumptions of rational- or situational choice and routine-activities
theories.
