Intro to Criminology: Schools of Thought

Lecture One

• Criminology studies crime, deviance, criminals, and victims
• Edwin Sutherland defined criminology as the study of making laws, breaking laws, and society's reaction
• Raffaele Garofalo invented the term "criminology"
• There is no single dominant school of thought in criminology.
• Different schools of thought include Classical, Positivist, Sociological Criminology, Critical Perspectives, and Newer Approaches

Classical School

• Crime is a choice based on rational thinking (weighing benefits vs. costs)
• People commit crimes when rewards seem greater than the risks
• Cesare Beccaria (1764) believed that punishment should fit the crime (fair & proportional)
• Jeremy Bentham (1765) advocated for Utilitarianism, where laws should create the greatest good for the greatest number

Positivist School

• "Born criminal" theory aligns criminality with biology and defects

Sociological Criminology

• The Chicago School states crime is the product of a community's "disorganized" neighborhoods and weak social ties
• Location/neighborhood is a factor behind crime

Theories within Sociological Criminology

• Strain Theories: Crime happens when people lack the means to reach societal goals
• Social Learning Theories: Crime is learned from others through interaction
• Social Control Theories: Weak social bonds (family, school, community) lead to crime
• Labeling Theories: Society labels people as criminals, pushing them to offend more

Critical Perspectives

• Crime is linked to power, inequality, and oppression, not just individual choices
• Focuses on who makes the laws, who benefits, and how race, class, and gender shape crime and justice

Types of Critical Theories

• Conflict Theory: Crime comes from economic inequality (rich vs. poor)
• Feminist Theory: Crime is shaped by gender inequality
• Critical Race Theory: Crime stats & justice system reflect racial bias

Views of Crime Through Different Lenses

• Thomas Hobbes: Humans need rules to keep order in society
• Jean-Jacque Rousseau: Humans are naturally good, but society complicates things, making rules necessary
• Conformity: Following social rules (norms)
• Deviance: Breaking social rules
• Formal norms: like laws
• Informal norms: like customs or moral codes
• Mores: Very important norms with serious punishments
• Folkways: Less important norms with mild punishments
• Crimes: Breaking formal norms (laws) results in legal consequences

Ways to Think About Deviance

• Statistical rarity – if it's rare, it's deviant
• Social harm – if it harms society, it's deviant
• Societal reaction – if society reacts negatively, it's deviant
• Normative violation – if it breaks the norms, it's deviant

Process of Constructing Deviance (Becker, 1963)

• Create a label (with a negative judgement)
• Apply the label to a person or group
• Exert "justified" control over those who are labeled

Ways to Classify Crime

• Legal Classifications: Crime is categorized by its seriousness and harm, based on the law
• Target-Based Classifications: Focuses on who is harmed by the crime
• Other Classifications: Considers the context of the crime, motivations, or behavior involved

Legal Classifications

• Summary offense: Less serious criminal behaviour
• Indictable offense: More serious criminal behaviour

Types of Crimes

• Street Crime: Theft or assault in public places
• White-Collar Crime: Non-violent crimes, usually by professionals, for financial gain (e.g., fraud)
• Organized Crime: Illegal activities by criminal groups, like drug trafficking or smuggling
• Political Crime: Crimes committed to challenge or support a political system (e.g., terrorism)
• Cybercrime: Hacking

Lecture Two (Studying and Measuring Crime)

Sources of Crime Data

• Police data: Official police records for reported incidents
  • Advantages: Nationwide stats, easy to access, can link to other data
  • Limitations: Focuses on street crimes, many crimes go unreported, crime rates affected by police/laws
  • Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) = system used to collect official police data on reported crimes
  • Crime Severity Index (CSI): tracks changes in the severity of police-reported crime
• Victimization data: Talking to victims (surveys)
  • Canada (1988-): General Social Survey (GSS) – Canadians' Safety: Official Canadian survey run by Statistics Canada (every 5 years) Nationally representative sample of Canadian households
    • Advantages: Captures unreported crimes, gives victim perspective, large sample = reliable data
    • Limitations: People may lie or forget, some refuse to answer, misses homeless, limited info on criminals, changing surveys = hard to compare over time
• Offender data: Talking to offenders (surveys, interviews, field research)
  • Advantages: More honest answers (confidential), direct info from offenders, more details than police or victim data
  • Limitations: People may lie or forget, answers might be biased, limited info on victims

Lecture Three (Correlates of Crime)

Common Correlates of Crime

• Age
• Gender
• Socioeconomic status (SES)
• Race/ethnicity
• Location
• A correlate is a factor observed to associate with an outcome of interest

Age

• Participation in crime and frequency of delinquent behavior generally decline with age
• Criminal behavior declines after age 20
• There is likely an overrepresentation of young people in crime statistics
• Age-crime curve: Curvilinear relationship in which crime intensifies in adolescence, peaks in young adulthood, and then declines thereafter
  • Reasons: Decline in health and physical fitness, social changes that encourage conformity, fewer criminal opportunities for adults
• Adolescence is a transitional life period with more fluidity in one's sense of self

Gender

• Men commit more crimes than women ("gender gap" in offending)
• Biology: Higher testosterone in men may lead to more aggression and crime
• Gender Roles: Boys are taught to be tough; crime fits masculinity but not femininity
• State Paternalism: The system is more protective of women, affecting crime perceptions Why is the gender gap closing?
  • More Equality: Women have more opportunities, including in crime
  • Similar Roles: As women take on more jobs like men, they commit more crimes
  • Changing Trends: Men's crime rates drop, while women's rise

Socioeconomic Status

• Higher crime rates among those with low SES

Race

• Racial/ethnic differences in crime rates
  • Overrepresentation of Black and Latino/a/x Americans in U.S. criminal justice system (CJS)
  • Indigenous and Black Canadians in Canadian CJS
  • Reasons:Differential Offending Hypothesis - Racial groups commit crimes differently.
  • Differential Treatment Hypothesis - Racial groups treated unfairly by police & justice system
  • Historical Legacy - Past oppression influences current crime rates
  • Trauma Transmission Model - Intergenerational trauma contributes to crime
• Differential Offending: Real crime differences between racial groups
• Differential Treatment**:** Racial inequalities in police behavior, law enforcement, and sentencing

Historical Legacy

• Enforced Racial Hierarchies: History of slavery, Jim Crow laws, ghettos, and mass incarceration
• Institutional Racism: Racial inequalities are rooted in society's structures

Trauma Transmission Model

• Psychological Harm Across Generations: Colonialism & oppression lead to low self-esteem, PTSD, & self-blame
• Effects on Crime: May explain crimes like substance abuse

Location

• Crime rates differ by geographic regions
• UCR data indicates more crime in urban areas with rates increasing as the size of the community increases

Intersectionality

• Complex combinations of age, gender, SES, and race produce unique outcomes and experiences with crime and the CJS.

An overview of criminology, including its definition, key figures like Sutherland and Garofalo, and diverse schools of thought. It explores Classical (Beccaria, Bentham), Positivist, and Sociological perspectives on crime. The lecture also touches on the Chicago School.