SOC212H1 Study Guide - Midterm Guide: Victimology, Atavism, White-Collar Crime
Reading notes Soc212:
Chapter 1:
- Common sense is particularly active in debates about crime and criminals, and
participants will, of course, insist that theirs is the ‘no nonsense’ rather than the
‘delusion’ variety.
- One of the tasks of criminology is to unravel, or deconstruct, the concept of crime and in
the process challenge common-sense understandings that are taken for granted.
- Critically questioning what is meant by ‘crime’ opens up a whole range of questions
lying at the heart of the criminological enterprise
-Criminology The study of crime, of attempts to control it, and attitudes to it. Crime is
interpreted in its widest sense, so as to include minor as well as major law-breaking, and
also conduct which, but for the special status or role of those involved, would be
regarded as law- breaking; e.g. excessive punishment of children by parents, antisocial
practices of commercial undertakings.
- Criminologists continue to debate whether the proper focus of criminological study
should be the offender, the offence, reactions to offending, the victim, or various
combinations.
-Reiner: deviance is created by society . . . social groups create deviance by making the
rules whose infraction constitutes deviance’. In the passage quoted by Reiner, Becker is
looking at the relative nature of deviance from a different point of view to this. In the
earlier passage the focus is on specific acts which are labelled as ‘deviant’, not because
they are inherently deviant, but because of a process of interaction between the
‘deviant’ and those in a position to apply the label.
- Becker directs attention to the actual processes of criminalization and deviantisation:
that is, to how the law or norms operates in practice.
- The problem, though, is that ‘crime’ embraces an enormous range of acts and
omissions, and it would be equally difficult to argue with any certainty that all of these
acts and omissions are disapproved of at the level of a consensus, in other words, that
the criminal law in its entirety reflects the ‘will of the people
- Victim surveys as reflecting new study of criminology which is Victimology,
- One of the aims of a victim survey is to gather supplementary or alternative information
to that provided by official statistics and, in particular, to obtain some idea of the
number of offences that are not reported to the police by the public, and therefore not
recorded.
- scussing the measurement of crime in society, some criminologists have used the
iceberg analogy, in which recorded crime is seen as merely the tip of the iceberg.
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- the notion of a ‘crime rise’ can mean a number of things: new laws that were not
previously criminal, more criminal acts are discovered, there is more mass media
coverage.
- Sociological definitions of deviance generally contain two elements: non-conforming
behaviour with respect to accepted norms, and strong disapproval of such behaviour.
Deviance can therefore be criminal or non-criminal.
- A crucially important point to make is that because a criminologist describes some act
they are studying as ‘deviant’ does not mean that they personally consider the act to be
‘bad’, ‘immoral’ etc. They are merely recognising, or assuming, that within soci- ety, or
some section of society, the act is strongly disapproved of, because it is judged to have
violated certain norms and values.
Class 2: Tierney chapter 3:
- Marx takes on the part of a bourgeois apologist and, in the manner of a devil’s advocate,
argues that the activities of the despised low-life criminal are somehow ‘productive’. In
this way he hoped to hold up for ridicule understandings of productive labour current in
bourgeois polit- ical economy. Second, he uses irony in the sense of a perverse
conjunction between the desirable and the undesirable: specifically, between crime and
such things as job opportunities, increased national wealth, inventions, novels and,
significantly, knowledge
- the entire history of the world, criminals and their crimes have stimulated the
production of knowledge on a number of fronts, including more recently a
criminological one. And in the contemporary world what is called the ‘fight against
crime’ is very big business indeed
- what is recognised today as criminology did not appear overnight as a fully grown ‘tree
of knowledge’. The problem that historians have had is in identifying a recognis- able
early criminology and then tracing its subsequent development
- beginning of criminology lies in the classical criminology of the eight- tenth century.
However, it was not until the latter part of the nineteenth century that attempts were
made to develop an explicit, recognisable ‘science’ of criminology. This is normally given
the general label of positivist criminology.
-Positivism represented a quite different agenda to that of the earlier classical school
-Classical criminology was centrally concerned with the establishment of a reformed,
equitable and efficient system of justice. Classical writers concerned themselves with
the creation of, they believed, a fairer, better regulated social order.
- Pleasure–pain principle, the aim was to create a system where punishment proportional
to the crime would act to deter would-be offenders, under rational and codified legal
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order.
- Garland’s main argument is that modern criminology grew out of a convergence
between the ‘governmental project’ of classicism, covering a period from the late
eighteenth century to the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and the ‘Lombrosian
project’ associated with late nineteenth-century positivism.
-Cesare Lombroso, a criminological positivist par excellence. It was he who popularised
the notion of genetically determined, distinct criminal types. Via a crude physiognomy,
he argued that criminals were atavistic beings, that is, throwbacks to an earlier stage of
human evolution, who were physically different from non-criminals.
- What are the implications of this for a specifically criminological positivism? Three
central questions are associated with this type of criminology, if and when such a
creature can be identified: Why do some individuals break the law? How can criminals
be reformed?
-Determinism means that factors outside of the individual’s control – be they biological,
psychological, sociological, or some combination – push that individual into criminal
behaviour. From this perspective, crime does not result from choice, or rational decision
making, but rather from force of circumstance.
- The second assumption made by positivist criminology, according to, is differentiation.
What this means is that criminals are differentiated in kind from non-criminals.
Depending on the type of criminology involved, criminals have been viewed as different
because of their biological constitutions, because they pos- sess certain abnormal or
negative psychological traits,
- third assumption, pathology, follows on from differentiation, in that criminals are seen
as being different to non-criminals because of something going ‘wrong’ at a biological,
psychological or sociological level.
- The second issue featuring prominently in positivist criminology is that of heredity
versus the environment. Some positivists concentrated on what they saw as genetically
determined predispositions to criminality, whilst others focused on environmental
factors, and the effect of these on the individual.
RCT Handbook chapter:
- Routine activities theory and rational choice theory are complementary explanations for
the occurrence and distribution of crime and deviance.
-Routine activities theory describes the necessary elements of crime and those who
have the potential to prevent it, while rational choice theory articulates the process by
which offenders make decisions.
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Document Summary
Common sense is particularly active in debates about crime and criminals, and participants will, of course, insist that theirs is the no nonsense" rather than the. One of the tasks of criminology is to unravel, or deconstruct, the concept of crime and in the process challenge common-sense understandings that are taken for granted. Critically questioning what is meant by crime" opens up a whole range of questions lying at the heart of the criminological enterprise. Criminology the study of crime, of attempts to control it, and attitudes to it. Criminologists continue to debate whether the proper focus of criminological study should be the offender, the offence, reactions to offending, the victim, or various combinations. Reiner: deviance is created by society . social groups create deviance by making the rules whose infraction constitutes deviance". In the passage quoted by reiner, becker is looking at the relative nature of deviance from a different point of view to this.
