Criminology Final Exam Notes PDF

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Criminology Final Exam Notes Chapter 1: The Problem of Crime 1.1 Images of Crime Crime as a social problem:  Crime exacts high price on federal, state and household budgets ($1700 billion annually in the US, including crime-induced production, opportunity costs of crime, value of risks to life and health, economic transfers)  A leading social problem, only because it is perceived as such by: o The power of claims makers and moral entrepreneurs o Pressure tactics of powerful private interest groups o Professional utterances of public officials, such as politicians, judges, etc.  Other factors decisive in determining meaning and seriousness of social problem: o Mass media o Fear of crime Crime and culture of fear:  Due to great fear of crime, National Commission on Causes and Prevention of Violence warns we are in danger of closeting ourselves in anticrime fortresses  Closed-circuit television (CCTV) has been extended to workplace, city streets, stores, etc. for crime surveillance  How much increased surveillance actually deters crime is unclear  Source of fear of crime: o “American exceptionalism”: crimes of violence, especially homicide, occur at higher rate in the United States than in other developed societies o Relatively powerless sections of community (least economic, political, cultural assets) experience greatest fear of crime  fear of crime associated with individual’s position in society and their lived experiences o Self-interested and distorted mass media: three studies on link between audience characteristics and fear of crime: 1. Eschholz 2002: study of TV content and audience in Southern state found that individuals who watched more TV were more fearful of crime. When analyzed by race, relationship applied mostly to minorities 2. Eschholz, Chiricos, Gertz 2003: research on TV viewers in Florida found strongest relationships between local news and tabloid TV programs and fear of crime, found among those who perceive themselves to be living in neighborhood with 25% or more black residents in it 3. J. Lane and Meeker 2003: study of residents in California found whites (who rely more on newspapers) have less fear of crime than Latinos (who rely more on TV for crime news). People probably fear crime more if news story is about crime in neighborhood, because perceived risk of crime increases  Triangular relationship among fear of crime, crime itself and images of crime by media. Fear of crime may be as costly as crime itself Crime in the mass media:  Mass media’s images of crime almost never objective, depend for financial existence; to maximize audience, media emphasize violence which feeds directly into viewers’ fear of crime  Project for Excellence in Journalism 2008: local TV practices “Hook and Hold” on audience by leaning heavily on stories about “public safety” at beginning of newscast

Some types of violence more likely to be reported in mass media than others, depending on identity of offenders and victims (Hispanic and black victims are least mentioned, homicides in idle-class neighborhoods most likely to be reported, and sexual homicide/homicides with clear motive most likely to be reported)  Three other studies of how racist ideologies easily masquerade as objective news: o Barlow 1998: Time & Newsweek misrepresent crime as primarily problem of urban African American o Lee & Gandy 2006: Americans overwhelmingly portrayed Africans as victims and whites as saviors during 2005 Hurricane Katrina in Florida o Deo, Chin, Lee, Milman, Yuen 2009: representation on TV of Asian/Pacific Islander Americans – stereotypes on TV shows as geeky, nerds, etc.  Besides bias in media content, bias also seen in important news events not reported by media: white collar crimes least likely to be reported, chemical spills not reported  low frequency reflected public’s low concern with environmental/corporate crimes  Media also distorts seriousness of violent crime: o Grauerholz and King 1997: 84% of prime-time TV shows contain at least one episode of sexual harassment, whose depiction tends to reflect myths, including view that it is not a serious offense and victims can remedy situation themselves  Study of media coverage on corporate scandals found that media did not so much underrepresent/distort crimes of powerful as put them in a different context. Media showed themselves to be business-friendly and allies of corporate interests  much common ground shared by publications of corporate scandals, including assertions that: 1. Market-based capitalism is preferred mode of economic organization 2. Laws are exogenous to markets and distort market efficiencies 3. Investor confidence is a natural barometer of health of market and essential benchmark for all policy moves  Occasionally mass media will channel viewer attention toward particular criminal behavior; causes moral panics. Examples: white slaver of the Progressive Era, communists in 1950s, etc. Features needed for emergence of moral panic: o Diversity of agencies and interest groups, from which media can draw and make rival claims. Each should have some degree of public prestige and access. Panics most likely to flourish when subject matter is contested between competing forces. o Story must be comprehensible to agencies and journalists before repackaged. o Issue must be sufficiently accessible that ordinary consumers will have some chance of encountering what they believe to be its manifestations. o Panic should offer narrative, with characters who are easily understood: heroes and villains. o Story should lend itself to visual portrayal; faces, setting used as stereotypical points of reference. o Narrative must have an outcome, in that solutions must be identifiable. o For consumers the narrative will have maximum impact if it meshes with previous expectations and knowledge, often because earlier movements and controversies have laid foundations for later explosions. Going public: newsmaking criminology and public criminology  One approach to replace media discourses of crime with better analysis: newsmaking criminology – “conscious efforts and activities of criminologists to interpret, influence, or shape the representation of “newsworthy” items about crime and justice… and to locate the mass

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media portrayals of incidences of “serious” crimes in context of all illegal and harmful activities” (Barak etc.) Public criminology: attempt to use academic criminology to influence social policy. Dilemmas include that going public requires great level of commitment; caught between being both objective and public intellectuals

1.2 Crime, Criminal Law, and Criminalization  Michael and Adler: most precise definition of crime is that which defines it as behavior prohibited by criminal code; criminal has behaved in way prohibited by criminal law.  Paul Tappan: crime is an intentional act in violation of criminal law committed without defense or excuse, and penalized by state as felony or misdemeanor. Crime as legal category:  Crime must be forbidden by criminal law and criminal law must provide punishment for crime. The formal purpose of criminal law is to protect members of public from wrongdoing of others> rules of criminal law can be found in statutory law (enacted by legislatures) or common law (judge-made decisions and opinions based on principle known as stare decisis).  Crimes are mala in se (acts that are evil in themselves) and mala prohibita (acts that are merely prohibited).  Felonies: punishable either by death or imprisonment in state penitentiary for not less than one year.  Misdemeanors: punishable by fine or imprisonment in local jail for less than one year.  Crime must be voluntary illegal act or omission (actus reus); no one can be prosecuted for bad thoughts, but failure to act (omission) can be criminal in situations where there is a legal duty to act  Culpability for a crime depends on defendant’s mental state known as criminal intent (mens rea) and its coincidence with the actus reus. Some categories of individuals are judged legally incapable of forming intent, e.g. juveniles under 14 and those certified insane. In cases of strict liability intent is not a necessary requirement of guilt; strict liability offenses include felony murder and statutory rape  Act/omission is not a crime if a defendant has socially legitimate justification or if person lacks criminal responsibility required by mens rea. Defense of justification can be raised in three instances: o Duress: typically limited to homicides; killing may be justified if individual reasonably believes they were about to be killed or seriously harmed by another o Necessity: available to defendants who are threatened by natural circumstances over which they have no control; but can be used only when there was no other reasonable course of action o Defense of duty: typically raised by public authorities such as police officers; killing by officers in line of duty are termed justifiable homicides  Act/omission may not be crime if one lacks necessary criminal responsibility, condition that negates mens rea and includes controversial pleas of entrapment and insanity. The defense of entrapment is intended to discourage state from creating crime where none would otherwise have existed. Entrapment occurs when police methods entice an average law-abiding citizen to commit a crime. Defense of insanity differs in that if plea is successful, in most jurisdictions the defendant is neither acquitted nor released but found “not guilty by reason of insanity”. In some states “guilty but mentally ill” = confined to mental instutions until “cured”, at which point they must finish sentences in prison. Majority of states base legal criteria of insanity on definition in Model Penal Code:

1. Person is not responsible for criminal conduct if at time, as a result of mental disease or defect, he lacks substantial capacity to appreciate the criminality (wrongfulness) of his conduct, or to conform his conduct to requirements of law. 2. Mental disease and defect do not include an abnormality manifested only by repeated criminal or otherwise antisocial conduct.  Key element of legalistic definition of crime (mens rea) is based on assumption that crime is behavior engaged in by individuals capable of exercising free will Law and state:  The state: central political institution of a given society, its major apparatuses are the government, legal system, military, and variety of public bureaucracies for collection of taxes, the management of public health, law, and order, etc. Form of social control; four basic styles of law corresponding to social control styles: penal, compensatory, therapeutic, conciliatory Law and criminalization:  Criminalization: process whereby criminal law is selectively applied to social behavior. Involves the enactment of legislation that outlaws certain behavior, surveillance and policing of that behavior, and if detected, punishment of that behavior.  Extreme ends of spectrum: criminalization has contributed to rise of modern society in rational humane ways versus criminalization has operated as instrument to defend interests of powerful new social classes and to undermine interests of powerless 1.3 Crime as a sociological problem:  Definitions of crime favored by sociologists: 1. Crime as a violation of conduct norms o Sellin argued scientists should study objective facts as they occur in natural rather than as seen by subjective concerns of public, government and criminal law. He urged that the basic units of criminological research be conducts norms. Forms of conduct depend on social values of group that formulates it. 2. Crime as a social harm and analogous social injury o Sutherland argued it is unfair that white-collar offenders are not stigmatized as criminals, although behavior meets two characteristic of his definition of crime: socially harmful and are punished for it. Suggests an expanded definition of crime based on behavior prohibited by either criminal or regulatory law. o Sutherland argues any illegalities causing social harm should be criminalized; others urge any behavior to be criminalized if it causes social harm. o Ray Michalowski defines analogous social injury as legally permissible acts/social conditions that result in: bodily illness, significant deprivations of food/clothing/shelter/medical care/education, and intentional/structural limitations on political and/or social participation. E.g. tobacco use, doctor negligence, and fatal work accidents. 3. Crime as a violation of rights o Crime as any behavior that violates human rights (life, liberty, happiness, etc.) o Schwendingers: two sorts of human rights – personal rights essential to life (e.g. good health) and rights essential to dignified human existence (e.g. freedom of movement, speech, etc.) Anything causing social injury (imperialism, sexism, racism, poverty) should be considered a crime, and the government is criminal if it does nothing to alleviate this. o However, definition of rights varies culturally; some countries/areas reject idea that human rights can or should be universal.

4. Crime as a form of deviance o Deviance: social behavior that departs from society’s conventional norms and standards for which the deviant is sanctioned. o Enormous variation in practices and social characteristics regarded as deviant, ranging among time and societies, and within those it varies by class, gender, race, and age. o Deviance is commonplace and potentially subject to sanction; positive or negative. o Norms and standards violated by deviant acts are diverse, can originate in religion, custom, politics, etc. Not all deviant acts are criminal acts and vice versa. o Deviance perspective implies that there is nothing in the nature of any act that makes it deviant.  Who defines behavior as deviant? 5. Crime as a violation of global conduct norms o Globalization: worldwide process whereby peoples, economies and nations become increasingly interconnected and interdependent, due to capital, credit, and cash movement. o One consequence of globalization is crime; it promotes a host of new opportunities for crime. o Globalization is accompanied by emergence of global conduct norms about certain sorts of serious crime; rules of conduct agreed on by international community, allowing for prosecution of certain coercive relationships between states and its citizenry and between one state and another. Chapter 2: The measurement of crime  Official sources of crime data: those collected by government and government agencies, such as the FBI and the Department of Justice.  Unofficial sources of crime data: nongovernmental data collected by private or independent agencies and researchers.  Caution: Data do not speak for themselves! They are objective facts and are dependent of the concepts and theories of those who observe them. Police-based data: Uniform Crime Reports (UCR)  UCR compiled each year by FBI statisticians; collect data for violent and property crimes.  Provides diverse statistical information for eight crimes in particular: four violent crimes (murder, forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault) and four property crimes (burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft, arson). UCR focuses on crime trends in these eight crimes. Crime trends include: o Number of crimes o Crime rate (number of crimes per 100,000 population) o Percentage change from previous year o Crime rate by region o Correlations of crime (age, gender, race of offenders and victims) o The arrest rates for crime o Homicide rate = (number of homicide in a year/number of persons in population) x 100,000 Police-based data: National Incident-based Reporting System (NIBRS)  FBI supplementary reporting system; more detailed than UCR, collecting details about time, data, place and circumstance of crime, information about offender and victim age, gender, race, relationship, etc. Criticisms of the UCR:

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“The dark figure of crime”: large amount of crime goes unreported to the police and thus never shows up in the UCR Police participation in the UCR is voluntary Federal crimes (such as blackmail) not included The hierarchy rule: in any criminal event, only most serious crime reported to the police is included in the UCR (e.g. if burglar robs a woman and then kills her, only murder is reported)  understates the volume of crime Measurement of seriousness: UCR records only legally defined categories of crime UCR: measuring crime or police activity? In order for a crime report to enter the UCR at least five things must happen: 1. Someone must perceive an event as a crime 2. The crime must come to the attention of the police 3. Police must agree that a crime has occurred 4. Police must code the crime on the proper UCR form and submit it to the FBI 5. FBI must include crime in the UCR Donald Black: study of members of public who report crimes to police. After complainant has reported crime to the police, five conditions influence whether crime is actually accepted and formally recorded as a crime by the police: 1. Legal seriousness of crime: police more likely to write crime report if crime is a felony rather than misdemeanor. 2. Complainant’s preferences: do they want police to take official action? 3. Relational distance between victim and offender: 1. Family members 2. Friends, neighbors, acquaintances 3. Strangers> Police more likely to give recognition to offenses involving strangers. 4. Complainant’s deference: police more likely to file report depending on politeness of complainant. 5. Complainant’s status: higher social status = police more likely to report crime.

Victimization data: National Crime Victimization Surveys (NCVS)  Victimization surveys examine representative samples of a general population to discover what crimes have been experienced in a given period. Entire sample is interviewed by rotation – advantage to UCR that it can detect unreported crimes too. Designed as substitute for UCR. Criticisms of the NCVS:  NCVS also understates crime rate, for example crimes can be forgotten/insignificant to victims and therefore not reported  Rate of underreporting is distributed unevenly throughout class structure (victimized whites more likely to report than blacks, graduates more likely than those without degree…)  NCVS respondents’ victimization rates sometimes decrease (perhaps due to lack of will to still cooperate, or more cautious, etc.) Neither the UCR nor the NCVS contain data about corporate, white-collar, and internet crime.

Unofficial sources of crime data: Self-report data:  Analysis of offenders’ responses to anonymous questionnaires/interviews

Self-report data has shown that official data seriously underestimates criminal activity of certain segments of population, and has found fewer differences among offenders, especially in terms of social class.  Defects: o Young males often exaggerate extent of their delinquency o Some respondents forget their delinquent acts o Until recently most items on self-reports concerned relatively minor offenses Life-course and life-history studies collect and interpret patterns of crime over the course of offenders’ entire lives. Criminal biographies are accounts of personal activities given by criminals to criminologists; can be fertile source for investigation but are notoriously resistant to generalization. Participant observation: form of field research to observe people in natural settings; but it is plagued with problem of where to place dividing line between appropriate data gathering about subjects and invasion of their right to privacy. Comparative data: derive from activities and reports of national governments and international agencies such as the United Nations; used to compare crime in two or more countries at a point in time. Historical data: derive from great diversity of sources, allow us to generalize about crime free from particularities of an era. 

Chapter 9: Inequality, crime, and victimization  Chief social factor underlying crime is structured social inequality. Four major forms of inequality influencing crime: class, gender, race, age. Social position refers to one’s individual location in society based on the social characterist...