Ch 5 AI quiz

• Being a drug dealer often doesn't make financial sense due to low wages, other motivations include status and fueling personal drug addiction.

Gottfredson and Hirschi's General Theory of Crime

• Crime, deviance, and reckless behaviors result from low self-control.
• Crime stems from impulsivity and short-term focus, disregarding long-term consequences.
• Poor childhood self-control development leads to impulsivity, insensitivity, and potential criminal behavior.
• The definition of lack of self-control is similar to descriptions of criminal delinquency, creating a circular argument.

Walter Michelle Marshmallow Experiment

• Children could eat one marshmallow immediately or wait for two.
• Children in the "unreliable group" waited approximately 3 minutes, while others waited around 12 minutes.
• Children's worldviews influence their decisions; those in unstable environments prioritize immediate rewards.
• Self-control is a learned behavior influenced by environment and trust.
• Children from chaotic homes may prioritize immediate gains due to lack of trust in long-term stability.
• Rational choice plays a role as children take advantage of immediate opportunities.

Criticisms of General Theory of Crime

• Places too much blame on parents.
• It suggests self-control is fixed in childhood, failing to acknowledge it can shift over time.
• Fails to explain white-collar crime.

Crime Rates by Age

• Crime rates peak in teenage years and decline from the 30s onward.
• Young people commit more crimes due to fewer controls and a desire to establish themselves.
• Young adults have university, jobs, family, and friends as controls.
• Older adults have physical limitations and commitments that deter crime.

Life Course Perspective

• Longitudinal analysis examines individuals' lives over time.
• Interviews at different life stages gather data on convictions, marriage, children, etc.
• Turning points such as marriage or parenthood can change a criminal path.
• Negative turning points like trauma can lead to a life of crime.
• Victimization in early years has long-lasting negative effects.

General Strain Theory (Agnew)

• Focuses on various strains and stresses experienced by young people, not just financial.
• Young people face pressures related to home life, loss, acceptance, breakups, and bullying.
• Loss of valued things or exposure to harm are key factors.
• Many youths in the criminal justice system have experienced trauma and difficult issues.
• Young people require supports like counseling and positive stimuli.
• It is easy to apply since it's a general theory.

Rational Choice Theory

• Rooted in classical criminology and economics (Beccaria and Bentham).
• Emphasizes cost-benefit analysis and rational thinking.
• Criminals are viewed as rational actors making conscious decisions.
• Crime is influenced by opportunity, environment, target, and risk of detection.
• Can explain white collar crime when businesses examine risk and exposure.
• Expected utility principles assume crime is calculated and deliberate.
• People behave rationally, but circumstances exist where this does not apply

Instrumental Crimes Versus Expressive Crimes

• Instrumental crimes involve planning and risk assessment (e.g., break and enter, embezzlement).
• Expressive crimes are impulsive and emotional, with little regard for consequences (e.g., non-premeditated murder, assault).

Routine Activity Theory (Cohen and Felson)

• Changes in crime levels are associated with changing lifestyles.
• Shifts in youth crimes in the 1950s involved changes in social patterns.
• Increased school attendance, after-school free time, mobility, and decreased parental supervision created more opportunities for crime.
• Crime occurs when a motivated offender and suitable victim come together without protection.
• Policy implications focus on target hardening and active surveillance.
• Target hardening involves locks, secure entry points, and visible alarm systems.
• Active surveillance and patrols by police and private security in public areas.

Criticisms of Routine Activity Theory

• Opportunities to commit crime do not necessarily lead to crime even when controls are absent.
• Crime displacement occurs when offenders move to areas with less protection.

Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED)

• First introduced by Ray Jeffrey in 1971.
• Aims to reduce crime by altering the physical environment.
• Example: Planters on the street that block panhandling.

Natural Surveillance

• Normal behavior to observe the space around them.
• Maximizes visibility for legitimate users.
• Discourages illegitimate use through visible surveillance.

Access Control

• Gates and fences restrict car access.
• Signs define public, private, and semi-public spaces.
• Physical barriers or changes in pavement delineate areas.

Maintenance

• Early CPTED included broken windows theory, where signs of vandalism encourage more crime.
• Keeping places clean, updated, and orderly decreases bad activities.
• Positive gathering spaces, such as parks, are encouraged.

Four Main Ideas of СPTED

• Natural surveillance: Maximizes visibility to deter crime.
• Natural access control: Creates the perception of risk for offenders.
• Territorial reinforcement: Expresses ownership through physical attributes.
• Maintenance: Creates the appearance of diligent ownership.
• Criminals may be displaced or deterred by addressing the natural environment.
• Redesigning spaces can be costly.

Legitimate Versus Illegitimate Use

• Focuses on who is intended to use spaces.
• Benches with spikes discourage lying down (anti-homeless architecture).
• Redesigning spaces can be costly.

Rational Choice, Routine Activity, and CPTED

• Share common themes and threads.

Critical Criminology

• Strain theory and labeling theory were forerunners.
• Addresses inequalities in gender, race, class that create crime.
• Examines how behaviors are criminalized and why.
• Analyzes how power structures define who is criminal/deviant.
• Questions why governments target some groups more than others.

Marxist Approach to Critical Criminology

• Examines who benefits from keeping people in line.
• Class struggle and capitalism create mental states that lead to crime.
• Capitalism relies on docile workers, yet also creates desperate individuals who commit crime.
• Laws protect private property and uphold the capitalist system.

Marxist Perspective on University

• System benefits the bourgeoisie as individuals get skills and credentials to generate more profits for those at the top.

Prohibition

• Targeted specific groups.
• Women's and religious groups pushed for prohibition due to concerns about morality and domestic safety.
• The ratification of an income tax in 1913 meant the government could use this, over alcohol taxes. The anti-alcohol movement.
• The anti saloon league wanted an amendment to the constitution and saw it as American to ban alcohol. Bigger cities more wet than dry.
• Ford supported prohibition as he felt it lowered his workers output. White people and socialists wanted alcohol to be banned. Socialist saw it as an opiate for the masses.
• Vilified minority groups using dry rhetoric. Breweries were anti-german
• Propaganda was created to associate with them with alcohol.
• 1917 president wilson wanted a declaration of war against Germany, german submarines had been sinking american vessels.
• Dry was voted in and ratified the prohibition amendment. Ended up with rich still drinking. People banned alcohol, now they are doing it illegally, People then started drinking moonshine.

During Prohibition

• Various groups with differing views converged to ban alcohol to target other groups.
• Politicians supported it for political advantage, even if they didn't believe in it.
• The rich continued to drink, leading to illegal activities and the rise of mobs.

Critical Criminology Discussion

• Ranking harms is complex.
• Examples: wealthy people hiding money, prisoners being tortured, protesters blocking logging, bribery of foreign dictatorships, and underfunding of Indigenous schools.
• Focus is needed on both street crimes and government crimes.

Institutional Racism

• Treating people on reserves as inferior by providing fewer resources.

Zemiology

• Replaces the study of crime with an emphasis on social harm.

Left Realism

• Focuses on the concerns of working-class people about theft and crime.

Risk and Actuarial Criminology

• Rooted in postmodern risk theory and critical criminology.
• Focuses on understanding emerging forms of social control.
• Informed by Michel Foucault's work on "governmentality."

Foucault

• Emphasizes unpacking and tracing the development of ideals of the world.
• Norms are created through statistics. The idea of the population was developed and they started to asks quesitons about it, where is it going, is it healthy?
• Risk was invented and created alongside forms of measuring and quantifying it.

Governmentality

• Encompasses ways of thinking about governance and how to govern as well as ideas and practices. Is linked to what has been created around populations. For example eugenics
• Created to manage, mitigate, and deal with risks.
• Can encompass different ways of governing, rationality's and logics.
• Popular examples are liberal governmentality and neoliberalism.
• Neoliberalism govern people and encourage them to govern themselves and take responsibility for their own welfare and risks.

Actuarial Governmentality

• Governs through the notion of risk.
• Risk is an abstraction quantified using specialized techniques.
• It becomes a common way to approach and govern around crime-related issues because it can influence what would happen in the future.

Credit Card Suspensions

• Suspicious activity triggers a lock on their account due to statistical patterns.
• This is probabilistic and based on cost-benefit risk analysis.

Risk-Based Policing

• Uses predictive policing and crime prevention strategies.
• Maps identify areas with high crime rates.

Risk-Need-Responsivity Model

• An approach to dealing with crime by quantifying risk, predicting something that hasn’t happened yet and then intervening to do something to manage that risk