Sociological Criminology & Anomie

Sociological Criminology

• Sociological criminologists examine group characteristics like social class, gender, age, and culture.
• This approach contrasts with focusing on individual factors in criminal behavior.

Emile Durkheim and Social Solidarity

• Emile Durkheim's sociological approach to suicide is relevant to strain theory.
• Small villages exhibit social solidarity, or a sense of togetherness.
• Urbanization caused upheaval and broke down social cohesion due to the mixing of people.

Anomie

• Anomie is a sense of aimlessness or despair.
• It represents a lack of grounding or a lack of a sense of right and wrong.

The Chicago School/Disorganization Theory

• This theory uses a concentric zone/ring model.
• Ring number 2, the transition zone, is characterized by immigrant families, deteriorated housing, and abandoned buildings.
• The transition zone was considered highly socially disorganized.
• Disorganization, stemming from a lack of established institutions, increases crime rates due to immigrant communities mixing cultures that leads to a lack of collective efficacy.

Collective Efficacy

• Collective efficacy is the opposite of social disorganization.
• It reflects how well a community unites to address challenges through organization, moral support, and trust.

Strain Anomie Theory (Merton)

• Merton adapted Durkheim's concept of anomie.
• Societal organization can strain individuals, leading to rule-breaking behavior.
• Strain arises from the inability to meet goals, specifically the gap between culturally defined goals and available means to achieve the "American Dream."
• Hard work and education are supposed to be the means to reach these goals, but this is not always the case.
• Criminals in this model are considered "innovators" who find clever paths to achieve goals.

Main Mistake with Strain Theory

• Strain theory is not just about money for goals.
• It encompasses country norms and expectations like marriage, university, and children, focusing on long-term objectives.

Innovation to Explain Crime (Merton's Strain Theory)

• Innovators believe in society's culturally defined goals.
• Innovators reject the legitimate means to achieve those goals.
• Innovators use the proceeds from crime to access the "American Dream".

Cohen's Strain Theory

• Cohen agrees that crime originates from lower-class citizens.
• It is not solely about innovation to meet cultural goals.
• Working-class youth don't fit the educational system, are judged by teachers, and turn to delinquent subcultures for status.
• Some youth join gangs to gain status and achieve success within the subculture, abandoning attempts at the "American Dream".

Reducing Crime Based on Strain Theories

• Reduce crime by creating a more equal playing field and increasing opportunities.
• Reconsider the goals and values that society deems important.

Critiques of Strain Theory

• Strain theory cannot explain why rich and powerful individuals commit crimes.
• Gender statistics reveal that women, despite facing more strain, are less likely to commit crimes.

Social Control Theory

• Takes a reverse approach to other theories.
• Assumes people are inherently capable of wrongdoing, with no special motivation needed for deviance.
• It posits that conformity, not deviance, requires explanation.
• Focuses on why people refrain from deviance and the processes that bind individuals to social order.

Hirschi's Social Bond Control Theory

• Individuals with weaker social bonds are more prone to deviance.
• Attachments and bonds serve to control rule-breaking behavior.
• Attachments involve emotional ties and respect for others' opinions, i.e. family and friends.
• Commitments include school, work, and investment in conforming behavior.
• Involvement entails being busy with activities.
• Beliefs encompass moral or spiritual convictions.

Reducing Crime From Hirschi's Social Control Standpoint

• Foster safe home environments and eliminate social divisions.
• Promote involvement in attachments and bonds.
• Address root inequalities to create better conditions for children.

Critiques of Hirschi's Social Control Theory

• Doesn't account for more serious youth or adult crimes.
• Strong bonds to conventional society don't guarantee protection from all forms of crime and deviance.
• Assumes the four components inherently relate to conforming behavior.

Differential Association Theory (Sutherland)

• Criminal behavior is learned, including techniques, motivations, and rationalizations.
• Association with criminal behavior increases the likelihood of engaging in it.
• Learning criminal behavior is the same as learning any behavior.
• Criminal behavior responds to the same cultural needs and values as non-criminal behavior.
• Frequency and intensity affect the degree of involvement in criminal activity.

Consequences of Being Labeled a Criminal

• Having a criminal record leads to difficulty in getting jobs.
• Can lead to a return to criminal behavior.
• Options in life become limited.

Labeling Theory (Constructivist Approach)

• Certain groups have the power to label others as deviant.
• The label of being deviant is more powerful than the act itself.
• Focuses on defining crime and deviance and the reaction of those in power.

Example of Labeling Theory

• In Russia, defendants in trials are put in cages, making them appear guilty.
• This contrasts with someone appearing in court in a suit and tie without restraints.

Primary Deviance (Labeling Theory)

• Early in the career, the offender commits deviant acts infrequently.

Secondary Deviance (Labeling Theory)

• The label of deviant is internalized following societal reaction.

Perp Walk

• A perp walk involves presenting someone in public view dressed in a way that suggests guilt.
• The crime is sometimes recreated on camera to create a narrative that the person is already guilty.
• It's an intentional form of humiliation to create an impression of someone's guilt.

Criticism of Labeling Theory

• It does not consider that illegal activity can occur over a long time without others knowing or reacting.
• Some people don't feel ashamed of being labeled a criminal and continue to commit crimes.

Critical Criminology (Relates to Conflict Theory)

• Considers who benefits from laws and criminal justice.
• Favors some types of crime, such as white-collar crimes.
• Upper socio-economic classes receive lower penalties than lower classes.
• Focus on rule-breakers and rule-makers.

Feminism Changes in the 70s

• Advocacy for the rights and equality of women in social, political, and economic spheres.
• Recognition of women's fundamental role in society.

Feminist Criminology

• Part of a social movement helps to change social attitudes and criminal justice system responses to issues such as sexual assault and domestic violence.
• Prior to the 70s, criminologists tended to ignore explaining women's criminality.
• Freda Adler was one of the originators of feminist criminology.

Left Realism

• Employs victimization surveys to examine the problem of crime for the working class.
• Aims to address the neglect and lack of seriousness given to crime and victimization of the working class.
• "Street crimes" that fall onto the working class are usually "street crimes" like muggings and break and enters.

Relative Deprivation (Left Realist)

• Crime stems from wanting what someone else has, rather than poverty.
• The idea centers around the frame of reference for what someone wants.

The Police Response (Left Realism)

• Saturated policing in high-poverty and minority neighborhoods create a distrusting public unwilling to cooperate with police investigations.
• The ruling class uses the police to maintain the injustices of the status quo.

Criticism of Left Realism

• It is more of a political perspective than a theoretical explanation for why crime occurs.

Patriarchy and Law

• In the past, women had been codified to belong to their fathers and husbands.
• This was written into Canada's legislation.

Liberation Emancipation Hypothesis

• Links the differences to the unequal levels of power.
• Men were committing more crimes because of their higher status in social order.
• Equalizing the roles of men and women was thought to increase crime rates of women, but it has proven to be untrue.
• This links criminality to social status, untrue hypothesis is: as women's status changes, they will commit more crimes.
• The women that were actually committing crimes came from marginalized backgrounds.

Gender Variation Through Patriarchy

• Proposes power control theory and does not ignore gender with control over teenage children.
• Deviance relates to the degree of control in a household, over teenage children.
• In patriarchal societies, conduct of girls is more tightly controlled and teenaged boys are more free to deviate.
• In households of more equal treatment of sons and daughters, it was thought the girls would be more likely to deviate.
• Results have been mixed.

Male Violence Against Women

• There was a virtual conspiracy of silence around rape and domestic violence in Canada.
• Rape laws were renamed and redefined to sexual assault statutes, including marital rape (consent was previously irrelevant for sex in marriage).
• Women needed tons of evidence to lay rape charges, and the moral character of the woman was questioned regarding whether she gave consent.
• Rape and SA was previously treated as a personal matter, and they didn't press assault charges

Before Legal Changes About Male Violence and SA Against Women

• Police would classify domestic calls as being drunk and disorderly in the home.

The Concept of the Ideal Victim

• It's a stereotype of a person who might best benefit from the criminal justice system.
• The more different you are from the ideals the more difficult to get help from the police and criminal justice system.
• When women face SA and violence in jail, they are so far from the "ideal victim" that they are unlikely to get help.

Major Source of Calls for the Police 1/4 of Calls

• Violence in the home and family.

Response to Violence

• The movement for women who are survivors for domestic abuse has been more focused on helping women leave violent relationships than police intervention.

Criminalizing Coercive Control

• On its way to being fully codified but it is to criminalize abusive and coercive behaviour such as over surveillance (location, demanding passwords)

Pathways Research

• Aims to narratively and chronologically analyze why women end up in jail.
• Disrupts the distinction between victims and offenders.
• Prior to being criminalized, women are usually victims first of physical or sexual abuse and violence.
• Explores the pathway to becoming a criminal.

Victim Offender Overlap

• Offenders often come from troubled backgrounds of abuse.
• The line between victim and offender is blurred.

Differential Association

• Like any other behavior, criminal behavior is learned.
• People learn the techniques of crime from those they associate with.
• Learning occurs in small groups through frequent and intense interactions.
• They learn the motivations and rationalizations as well.
• Criminal behavior responds to the same cultural needs and values (wealth and status) as non-criminal behavior

Why Would Someone Want to Be a Drug Dealer

• Social status and power outweigh financial motivations.
• Being a drug dealer isn't a great way to make money, which is an irrational choice

General Theory of Crime (Gottfredson and Hirschi)

• Crime, deviance, and other bad behaviors result from low self-control, impulsive behavior, and short-term interests.
• Begins in childhood with behavior issues, progressing to juvenile delinquency and adult offenses.
• Parenting is the most important factor in determining children's level of self-control.

Marshmallow Experiment

• An experiment of self-control that presented children with one marshmallow, with the option to wait for two.
• The children that were "unreliable" took the one marshmallow option because they hard learned not to trust adults to follow through with their words, they knew that long-term gain is rare.

How Does the Marshmallow Experiment Relate to Criminal Behavior and Self-Control

• Self-control is a learned behavior.
• People that grow up in unstable and unreliable and chaotic households where they dont trust the parents for longterm stability learn to be more impulsive and take whats in front of them

Criticisms of General Theory of Crime

• Too much blame on the parents.
• Self-control may shift over time and is not fixed in childhood.
• Fails to explain white-collar crime.
• Ignores the role of crime opportunity.
• Mixed results when tested.

Why Do Young People Commit More Crimes

• Less social controls and attachments (no career, kids).
• Teens want to see where they stand as they aren't adults nor children.
• Older people have more difficulty physically committing crimes and have more to lose.

Life Course Perspective

• Asks why criminal offenders stop committing crimes.
• Individuals refrain from crime and deviance as they enter stages of life where adult roles act as turning points.
• Shows that victimization during early years carries negative repercussions later in life.
• If social supports are provided to crime victims, long-term disadvantages may be prevented.

General Strain Theory

• Strain can lead to criminal and deviant behavior.
• Cohen and Merton's version was too narrow, focusing on financial strain, it doesn't apply to youth.
• Youth face pressures such as home life, loss, acceptance, breakups, and bullying.
• Losing something valued or being exposed to harm creates deviants.
• Inability to achieve immediate goals important to youth (good grades, popularity and athletic achievement) can lead to strain/stress as abuse of discrimination

Three Types of Strain

• Inability to achieve positively valued goals (similar to innovators).
• Removal or threat to remove a positively valued stimuli (getting suspended, loss of a significant other, divorce of parents).
• Actual/anticipated exposure to negative or harmful stimuli.

Rational Choice Theory

• Rooted in the classical school of criminology (Beccaria and Bentham).
• Human behavior, including criminal behavior, results from conscious decision-making.
• Crime is assumed to be calculated and deliberate.
• Criminals are rational actors, crime is influenced by variations in the opportunity environment, target, and risk of detection.

White Collar Crime and Rational Choice Theory

• Considers the risks, exposures, and regulatory actions.
• Businesses analyze risks and benefits to committing shady actions because, from an economic standpoint, it could be beneficial.

Instrumental Crimes Versus Expressive Crimes

• Instrumental crimes require planning like break-ins or embezzlement.
• Expressive crimes are impulsive and emotional, and people are not likely to be concerned with the implications of their actions.

Routine Activity Theory

• Changes in the level of crime are associated with changing lifestyles.
• The lives of people change the possibilities of crime.
• In the 50s, children stayed in school more, and young people shift their routines from working full time to having after-school time.
• Increased mobility (cars) and decreased parental supervision created more opportunities for crime.

Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED)

• Maximizes visibility for user safety.
• Using planters to discourage panhandling.
• Gates and fences to mark public and private property.
• Physical barriers or changes in colors.

Broken Windows Theory

• Places that showed signs of vandalism encourages future crime.
• Keeping places clean and orderly is thought to decrease bad activities.

Legitimate Versus Illegitimate Use

• Certain types of people that are deemed "ideal" for using the space.
• Park benches have spikes or dividers so people can only sit down and not lie down, as it is seen as an illegitimate use.

Critical Criminology

• Draws off of strain and labeling theory.
• Adresses inequalities, we dont presume behaviours as criminal, need to understand how things become criminal and why, this work was called radical criminology.
• Focuses on economic equality as a contributor of crime and how subcultures form from the exclusion of the American dream.
• Inequalities of gender, race, and class create crime.

Marxism and Critical Criminology

• Asks, who benefits from keeping people in line.
• Class struggle and capitalism create the mental state that leads to crime.
• Capitalism requires docile workers, but when people are desperate, they commit crime.
• Capitalism is based off of private property, and the legal infrastructure protects this capitalist society.

Prohibition Drinking Video

• The issue of alcohol was blamed on lower-class and racialized parts of society even though the rich were also partaking.
• Different actors had different reasons to ban alcohol.
• Women, religious groups, capitalist companies, socialists, racists, and politicians had vested interests in the ban.
• The upper class kept drinking, while the prohibition stopped middle/working and lower class from drinking.

Risk and Actuarial Criminology (Foucault)

• Informed by critical criminology focused on understanding emerging forms of social control.
• His work on "governmentality" asks about the techniques of governing people and the ways of thinking that go with them.
• How do people think about and approach the issue of crime.
• The 20th century introduced the idea of risk, such as risk management, which is the ideal to adjust to avoid the probability of bad things happening in the future

Example of Actuarial/Risk Criminology

• Credit card being frozen due to suspicious charges.
• Taking the idea of risk and stopping use, instead of taking the chance that it is you, ,making different purchases.

Example of Actuarial Risk Criminology

• Predictive policing gathers data on crime hotspots where they try to prevent future crimes.

Zemiologists

• Seek to replace the study of crime with an emphasis on social harm.

Define Social Exclusion

• Social exclusion is related to income equality and poverty.
• Can involve physical / non-physical exclusion from jobs, relationships, belonging, housing etc.
• Encompasses the denial, non-realization of civil, political and social rights of citizenship.

Foucault Video on Governmentality

• Unpacking and tracing the development of norms and ideals.
• Norms are created by comparing ourselves to ideas we created through statistics.
• The ideal of population was created with nuances - is the population healthy.

Actuarial Governmentality

• Governing through the notion of risk.
• Risk is an abstraction (something that hasn't happened yet).
• It is not a theory of what causes crimes but an approach to dealing with crime.

Why Call It Social Exclusion Rather Than Poverty or Income Inequality

• The language of social exclusion shifts the blame more onto the people doing the excluding, rather than the disadvantaged.
• The broader inclusion is up to society, not all up to them.
• We have agency and freedom, but factors make it hard to belong or be included.

Indigenous Person Targeted for Race

• They were wrongly accused of fraud because of their race.
• They were excluded and not welcomed.

Bathrooms and Power Struggle

• People can be excluded from washrooms, which aligns with the idea of legitimate users, such as customers only.

Homeless Youth

• They are excluded from other opportunities, so they commit crimes, often out of survival.
• They are often both perpetrators and victims of crime.

The Word "Gang"

• Controversial and hard to use because other members of the community identify these youth gangs.
• They choose who is or isn't considered a gang member.

Why Be in a Youth Gang

• To get power, money, respect, protection and social support.
• Gangs can provide belonging, because they often form gangs as they have been socially excluded.

Theories That Can Be Applied to Youth Gangs

• Strain theory, differential association theory, chicago/disorganization theory, cohens strain theory.

Indigenous People and Their Experience With the Criminal Justice System

• Indigenous people have been socially excluded since colonization.
• Leads to higher rates of suicide, illness, homelessness, substance abuse, and over-representation in the criminal justice system.

Two Ways to Reduce Over-Representation

• Educate criminal justice professionals, such as judges, on the severity of the issue.
• Reduce the numbers of Indigenous peoples being brought to the criminal justice in the first place

National Inquiry and MMIW

• They are launched to deal with social issues that have been failed by policy or systemic constructs.
• They are usually triggered by public social outcry.
• The missing and murdered indigenous women of Canada is a national inqiry as they are much more likely to be victims of crime compared to non indigenous people.

Why is There So Much Violence Against Women?

• Social exclusion, economic dependence.
• Few options to leave an abuse relationship.
• When men feel out of control, they lash out physically in a way they can find control.

Gladue Reports

• To deal with indigenous over-representation in jails, report is a right of indg people to explain how they found themselves in this position of committing the crime.
• Takes social exclusion, social structures, and history into account
• This can lead to a lesser sentence or alternative sentencing.
• It is up to judges scrutiny to decide who is legitimate.

Two Arguments for Classifying a Murder That Was Motivated by Hatred

• We shouldn't be getting into someone's head too much and their motivations, if there is mens rea that is sufficient to establish they intended to kill someone.
• A murder due to hate crime is worse and we need to some legal way to differentiate.

Hate Crimes

• The victims are usually strangers because they are perceived as their "group."
• They usually see the group as a "threat" that needs to be dealt with.

Two Reasons That It Is Hard to Measure Hate Crime in Canada

• Police departments use different definitions of hate crime such as hate incidents.
• The criminal code does not really have a general clause of "hate crime" so there can be issues identifying it as its own issue.

Becardi Article "Neighborhood Wisdom"

• Ethnographic study in Toronto on Lawrence Heights housing project.
• Understanding of the physical geography of the location and knowledge of localized threats.
• Practical street knowledge for the area.

Zero Tolerance Movie Examples of Social Exclusion

• Police came to Jean Batiste day engaging with community with their "hats off" and turning a blind eye to quasi legal behaviour.
• They feel a part of the celebration, in comparison to how they came in with "hats on" and strict fearful vibes to the Caribbean parade.

White Collar Crime

• Crime that is committed by someone of respectable status and usually at work.

White Collar Crime Versus Corporate Crime

• Harm benefits to an individual vs the whole corporation.

Examples of White Collar Crimes

• Misrepresentations of financial statements, manipulation of stock exchange, commercial bribery.

Whats the Difference Between Corporations and People

• Corporations cannot be put in jail.

How Do Governments Usually Handle White Collar Crime

• They often dont do much or turn blind eyes.
• they usually extract a large settlement and collect a lot of money in exchange to let the company off.

Cost Benefit Analysis

• Ford pinto's cheaper to pay out the customers than do a recall, so they allowed faulty and unsafe cars to keep circulating the market.
• Businesses can calculate how much they stand to gain from breaking a rule and almost expect to pay the penalty if they are caught.

Why Is White Collar Crime Not Prosecuted

• Public is more concerned about street crime, violent crime.
• Police culture is oriented towards street crime.
• WC Crime is hard to investigate and costly, needs special skills to trace the crime.
• Overlap between regulators and the admin.

Regulatory Capture

• The regulators work for the government, go to companies to make sure what they are doing is ok or up to standard.
• The people in these positions need to have specialized skills (aircraft check) so they have roots in the industry and government.
• It starts to feel more of a company alliance and become "captured".

Occupational Crime

• A crime committed on the job such as a low-level clerk stealing from a till.

Financial Collapse of 2008

• US financial institutions resisted regulation and took excessive risks.
• Global economy collapsed, but no corporate executive was punished.

Examples of the Public as Victims

• E. coli contaminated water because of water testing deregulation.
• Price fixing such as bread gate, Ford pinto unsafe vehicle.

State Corporate Crimes

• Illegal or socially injurious actions when institutions of political governance pursue a goal with cooperation of more institutions.
• Example migrant workers: they have to live in subpar conditions and are mistreated by the company, but it is also the MWP of Canada that creates the structures where abuse of power can happen and go unchecked.

Deregulation

• Allows for new opportunities for crime, and reduces control.

Enron Video

• Took advantage of deregulation and had close government ties to the Bush family.
• Macho masculinity risk-taking culture that was highly competitive.
• Rewards were for competing with others, energy market turned into stocks.

Green Criminology

• The study of environmental damage caused by human activity through a criminological lens.
• This is related to the study of corporate crime.

Political Crime

• Crimes committed against the state, such as terrorism (committed for a political reason).