PICT103 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Positive Force, Criminology
5 Jun 2018
School
Course
Professor
PICT3
What is Crime?
What is crime?
• Determining what behaviours should/should not be considered crime
• conducting field research and collecting data about crime
How is it caused?
• Developing theories about crime causation- Various circumstances, social climates, etc
• Determining what makes crime better or worse
What can we do about it?
• Critiquing the role of the criminal justice system - the 3 C's (cops, courts and corrections)
• Developing policies to deal with crime
What is Crime?
Crime is always dependent on context
Legal Definitions
- Crime is "simply what the law says it is"
- Behaviour that violates criminal law as defined by the state
- Attracts state sanction (e.g. fines or prison)
- Enforced by state agencies (e.g. state police forces, federal agencies, etc)
ISSUES:
• Laws/Legal codes change over time
- E.g. Slaves were controlled by physical (and other kinds) of abuse. This was
legal/allowed by the law.
- The law is not always a positive force
• Laws vary between jurisdictions
- They reflect the concerns of different societies
- "No uniform or agreed approach to the types of behaviours identified as crime
either now or throughout modern history" - Warren 2012:5
• Law can sometimes ignore very serious, dangerous and harmful activities
• Law focuses on street-level crimes rather than corporate/white-collar offences which are
handled under civil (rather than criminal) law
- These crimes tend not to occur in public, making them messier and more difficult to
discern who is at fault
• Does no adequately address state-sanction cross (e.g. genocide, torture, war crimes, etc)
• There are many crime which are illegal and are not punished by the law
Harm Based Definitions
- Used by sociologist and criminologist as an alternative to legal definitions
- Involved assessing the harm or damage caused by different acts of behaviours
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