NET- Widening - Lecture notes 1 PDF

Preview

Summary

NET- Widening, criminology, crm...

Description

Criminology NET-WIDENING. offences were now subject to criminal justice sanctions so that the ‘mesh’ of the nets had become progressively smaller. Finally, the range and kind of intervention had intensified – including more individualised and longer-term treatment regimes, and greater use of indeterminate sentences or sentence ‘packages’ made up of a number of components, meaning that the criminal justice system’s nets had been strengthened. So, far from diverting individuals away from criminal justice sanctions, Cohen argued, the diversionary welfare-oriented programmes of the 1970s had provided the system with wider and stronger nets consisting of a thinner mesh and led to an increase in the rate and variety of behaviours that were criminalised and subject to social control. See also: surveillance Further reading: Cohen (1985); Lemert (1981) NEW MEDIA A term used to denote the recent development of media that mobilise electronic and computer technologies to enable communication in digital form. The most notable such medium is the internet, a pub licly accessible network of computers that emerged in the 1970s and came to span the globe by the late 1990s. New media differ from established mass media in a number of significant ways.

First, while mass media such as television and radio only permit one-way com munication between a single speaker and a large audience (one-to many), new media enable two-way communication between large numbers of people (many-tomany). Second, digitisation has enabled words, sound and images to be flexibly manipulated and combined using powerful yet relatively inexpensive devices such as home computers. Third, media like the internet span geographical and political boundaries, enabling communication on a global scale. Taken together, it is suggested that these developments have democratised communication by allowing ordinary people to become the producers and not just consumers of media messages. However, criminological interest has focused upon the more negative aspects of these developments. In particular, the internet has seen the growth of a wide range of crime problems (socalled cybercrimes), such as computer hacking, child pornography, identity theft and fraud. NEW MEDIA See also: cybercrime; mass media Further reading: Lister et al. (2003) NORMS Norms are the shared rules that regulate behaviour in various social settings. Norms provide a set of guidelines and expectations about what is and is not acceptable or appropriate conduct. They are inculcated and reinforced through an on-going process of socialisation. For sociologists such as Durkheim, all societies are bound together by a normative structure that is essential for their continued existence, and the failure of normative regulation is closely linked to crime and social conflict.

The role of norms in inhibiting criminality has been explored from a wide range of criminological perspectives, including Chicago School criminology and social control theories. Criminologists have also examined the ways in which norms at odds with those of mainstream society can support rule-breaking, especially in the context of deviant subcultures. See also: Chicago School criminology; community; crime and deviance; cultural transmission;

differential

association;

Durkheimian

perspectives; socialisation; subcultural criminologies

criminology;

social

control...