CRIM 1650 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Critical Race Theory, Drug Possession, Social Constructionism

• School: York University
• Department: Criminology
• Course: CRIM 1650
• Professor: James Williams

Document Summary

Controversies over counting crime: coverage sources can be unreliable and invalid, police gather a vast amount of information on suspects, incidents, arrest, and charges. Murderers more likely than cooperate criminals: evident though statistical descriptions of the prison population proves this. Statistics on the criminal justice system: records concerned with individual cases and are intended primarily to help practitioners make decisions about individual cases, statistics are aggregated; they are concerned with what is common among individual cases. Meant to provide answers for large questions etc. In fact, the growth in the penitentiary population can be accounted for the growth rate of the canadian population: canada is seemed to be more punitive and more sensitive to crime compared to other. Consensus: criminal code provides a common set of definitions for counting crime, yet, there is discretion when a incident is truly an incident.