Social Harm in Criminology PDF

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Summary

Outlines social harm.
Discusses white collar crime.
Discuses constitutive criminology.
Discusses zemiology.
Discusses types of harm.
Outlines the harms of criminalisation and punishmnet.
Uses homelessness, austerity, trafigura, the war on drugs and standing roc...

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13th December 2018- Foundations in Criminology and Criminal Justice

Social Harm: Social Harm: - “A social harm perspective is based on the premise that notions of ‘crime’ offer a particularly narrow version of the range of misfortunes, dangers, harms, risks and injuries that are a part of everyday life. A concept of social harm enables criminology to move beyond legal definitions of ‘crime’ and acknowledge a wide range of immoral, wrongful and injurious acts that may or may not be deemed illegal but are arguably more profoundly damaging. In doing so, a social harm perspective may require the abandonment of criminology (as it has been conceived)” (Muncie, 2013, p.430) Crime and Harm- Edwin Sutherland (1949) - White Collar Crime (1949) - Focus on business crimes: not dealt with by criminal law but by regulatory and civil law - Business crimes are harmful to society - Need to expand understanding of crime to include ANY act of harm prohibited by law (not only criminal law) - Innocent until proven guilty? – Paul Toppen (1947) Michaelowski (1985) - Order, Law and Crime (1985) - Any act should be considered criminal if it causes EQUIVALENT SOCIAL INJURY Henry and Milovanovic (1994) - Constitutive Criminology  Crime = the power to deny others  There are two forms: 1. Harms of Reduction 2. Harms of Repression - Hidden and legitimised crimes revealed Hillyard and Tombs (2004; 2007) 1. Crime has no ontological reality 2. Criminology perpetuates the myth of crime 3. Crime consists of many petty events 4. Crime excludes many serious harms 5. Constructing ‘crimes’ 6. Criminalisation and punishment inflict pain 7. Crime control is ineffective 8. Crime gives legitimacy to the expansion of crime control 9. Crime serves to maintain power relations Zemiology (Hillyard et al., 2004) - Zemiology is the study of social harm rather than crime and gets its name from the Greek work zemia, meaning harm. It originated as a critique of criminology and the nation of crime. In contrast with ‘individual-based harms’ such as theft, the nation of social harm or social injury incorporates harms caused by nation states and corporations (Treadwell, 2013, p.13) Against Criminology? - ‘All too often, criminological reasoning has been used to bolster states, providing rationales for the extensions of state activities in the name of more effective criminal justice. Since the 1

13th December 2018- Foundations in Criminology and Criminal Justice

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products of research around social harm are likely to implicate states, then the relationship with states will be quite different – there is likely to be less symbiosis in terms of activity and interests’ (Hillyard and Tombs, 2005, p.20). ‘An obvious advantage of the social harm perspective’s decoupling from the criminal justice system is a more balanced notion of responsibility’ (Pemberton, 2007, p.38).

Defining Social Harm: - Defining what constitutes harm is in fact a far more productive and positive process than simply pointing to a field of inquiry defined by an existent body of (criminal) law. Indeed, a social harm approach is partially to be defined in its very efforts to measure social harms. If we are attempting to measure both the nature and the relative impact of harms which people bear, it is at least reasonable to take some account of people’s own expressions, and perceptions, of what those harms are! Thus a field of inquiry is (partially) defined by peoples’ understandings, attitudes, perceptions and experiences rather than pre-ordained by a state. (Hillyard and Tombs, 2005, p.16) - ‘Only a tiny proportion of deaths that result from social harm are legally labelled murder’ (Dorling, 2005, p.28). Types of Harm: - Physical - Mental health - Financial/economic - Emotional/psychological - Sexual - Cultural safety (Alvesalo, 1999) - State - Corporate - Iatrogenic (Scott, 2016) - Capitalist harm (Pemberton, 2015) - ‘an emphasis upon social harm would also help to focus upon harms caused by chronic conditions or states of affairs, such as exposure to airborne pollutants, poor diet, institutionalised racism and homophobia, as opposed to the discrete events which tend to provide the remit of criminology and the criminal law’ (Hillyard and Tombs, 2005, p.17) A Work in Progress: - A social harm approach is very much a work in progress. There remain key issues with the definition of ‘social harm’, its theoretical justification, its ontological bases and its operationalisation (Tombs, 2016, p.220). The Harms of Criminalisation and Punishment: CJS - Defining - Classifying - Broadcasting - Disposing - Punishing - ‘These processes create wider social problems and social harms, which can bear little or no relationship to the initial crime and cause excessive social harm and suffering disproportionate to the original harm that was caused by the crime’ (Treadwell, 2013, p.14).

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‘This deepening of the criminological agenda inevitably forces a re-conceptualisation of the constitution of a ‘crime’, a querying of the purpose and function of criminal justice, and thereby a radical reassessment of the proper domain of criminology’ (Muncie, 2009, p.431).

Case Study 1: Homelessness: - Simon Pemberton: skid row on doorstep of criminology conference… - The harms of the criminalising process - ‘Sadistic street environments’ (Davis, 1990) - Broken windows theory (Wilson and Kelling, 1982) and zero-tolerance policing = ‘the annihilation of people by law’ (Mitchell, 2003). Case Study 2: Austerity: *there’s a link on the powerpoint slide to look at for this* - Danny Dorling: Murder and geographic/demographic trends - ‘a slow and early non-violent death from poverty is no less painful and no less harmful than murder, suicide and accident. The legacy of mass early unemployment, mass tobacco poisoning and mass neglect for over a generation are amongst the key explanations for why life expectancies stubbornly stagnate in the poorest parts of the UK, whilst they soar ahead in the richest places’ (Dorling, 2005, p.28). Case Study 3: Trafigura: *there’s a link on the powerpoint slide to look at for this* - Ship: The Probo Koala - Dumping of toxic waste in the Cote D’Ivorie - = corporate crime - = eco-crime - “The fact that the UK authorities do not have the tools, expertise or resources to investigate the case is truly shocking,” said Amnesty legal adviser Lucy Graham. “This is tantamount to giving multinational companies carte blanche to commit corporate crimes abroad” (Ball and Davies, 2015) Case Study 4: Flint Water Crisis: *links on powerpoint slide for this* Case Study 5: The War on Drugs: *link on powerpoint slide* - The US war on drugs as itself causing harm - Criminalisation and incarceration as harm - The prison industrial complex - ‘The New Jim Crow’ (Michelle Alexander, 2011). - Counter-intuitive to harm-reduction - Documentary: The House I Live In Case Study 6: Standing Rock: *links on powerpoint slide* - Protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline, jeopardising the drinking water of the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation - Eco-crime - Police brutality - Human rights breach - Media-suppression; no fly zone 3

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State crime ‘Civil rights issue of our time’ WATER IS LIFE “The sight of native people shivering in a blizzard, while government authorities threaten to starve them out or forcefully remove them, is a living diorama of so much awful history between the First Americans and those who took everything from them.” (Egan, 2016)

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