Sociological Criminology: Social Disorganization

• Sociological criminologists focus on group traits like social class, gender, age, and culture to understand crime, rather than individual factors.

Emile Durkheim

• Studied suicide sociologically, which relates to strain theory.
• Social solidarity is strong in small villages, urbanization disrupts this.
• Urbanization leads to a breakdown in social cohesion due to diverse populations mixing

Anomie

• A feeling of aimlessness or despair, lacking grounding and a sense of morality.

The Chicago School/Disorganization Theory

• Proposed a concentric zone model, with zone 2 (transition zone) having immigrant families, poor housing, and high social disorganization.
• Social disorganization, due to lack of institutions, increases crime rates because of the mixing of cultures leading to a lack of collective efficacy.

Collective Efficacy

• Social organization, the ability of a community to unite and address challenges with community organization, moral support, and trust.

Strain Anomie Theory (Merton)

• Societies can put strain on individuals, leading to rule-breaking.
• Stems from the inability to achieve culturally defined goals, it is a gap between goals and available means to achieve the "American Dream".
• Achieving the "American Dream' should require hard work and education, but it often doesn't
• Criminals are "innovators" finding alternative paths to success.

Main Mistake with Strain Theory

• It is not just about money; norms like marriage, education, and family are also long-term goals.

Innovation to Explain Crime (Merton)

• Innovators accept cultural goals but reject legitimate ways to achieve them, and use crime to pursue the "American Dream".

Cohen's Strain Theory

• Crime comes from lower-class individuals, not just to meet cultural goals.

• Working-class youth struggle in the education system, so they turn to delinquent subcultures for status.

• Joining gangs provides status and success within the subculture, not the "American Dream".

• Reducing crime, according to strain theories, requires creating a more equal playing field, boosting opportunities, and re-evaluating societal goals and values.

Critiques of Strain Theory

• Doesn't explain why wealthy individuals commit crimes.
• Gender statistics in crime that show that women are less likely to commit crimes yet women are faced with comparatively more strain.

Social Control Theory

• People are inherently capable of wrongdoing, no specific reason is needed to explain deviance, conformity is what requires explanation
• Asks why people don't commit deviance.
• Focuses on what prevents deviance and what ties people to social order.

Hirschi's Social Bond Control Theory

• Weaker social bonds increase the likelihood of deviance.

• Bonds control rule-breaking:

  • Attachments: emotional ties and respect for opinions of friends/family.
  • Commitments: investments in conforming behaviors like school and work.
  • Involvement: being occupied with activities.
  • Beliefs: moral and spiritual convictions.

• Reducing crime from Hirschi's perspective is achieved through fostering safe home environments, eliminating social divisions, promoting involvement, and addressing inequalities.

Critiques of Hirschi's Social Control Theory

• Doesn't account for serious youth or adult crimes.
• Strong social bonds don't guarantee protection from all crime forms.
• Assumes the four components are always related to conforming behavior.

Differential Association Theory (Sutherland)

• Criminal behavior is learned, including techniques, motivations, and rationalizations

• Criminal behavior is more likely for individuals surrounded by it

• Learning criminal behavior is the same as learning any behavior.

• Criminal behavior responds to same cultural needs/values as non-criminal behavior.

• Frequency and intensity of interaction influence involvement in criminal activity.

• Consequences of being labeled a criminal include a criminal record, job difficulties, and limited life options, potentially leading to re-offending.

Labeling Theory (Constructivist Approach)

• Certain groups can label others as deviant.

• The label of deviance is more powerful than the act itself.

• Focuses on reactions of those in power and how crime/deviance are defined.

• An example of labeling theory: trials in Russia place defendants in cages, prejudicing juries, unlike defendants appearing in suits without restraints.

Primary Deviance (Labeling Theory)

• Early, infrequent deviant acts.

Secondary Deviance (Labeling Theory)

• Label is internalized following societal reaction.

Perp Walk

• Public display of an individual in a guilty manner, or re-enactment of a crime for the media, creates a presumption of guilt.
• Intended to humiliate and create preconceptions about someone's guilt.

Criticism of Labeling Theory

• Doesn't account for undetected illegal activity over time.
• Some individuals embrace the criminal label and continue offending regardless.

Critical Criminology (Conflict Theory)

• Considers who benefits from laws and the justice system, noting preferential treatment for certain crimes like white-collar offenses.
• Upper socio-economic classes are punished less than lower classes.
• Focuses on rule-makers as well as rule-breakers.

Feminism changes in the 70s:

• The promotion of women's rights and equality in social, political, and economic spheres along with recognizing the fundamental role of women in society.

Feminist Criminology

• Part of a social movement that shifted social attitudes and criminal justice responses to sexual assault and domestic violence.
• Prior to the 70s neglected explaining women's criminality; Freda Adler was a key originator.

Left Realism

• Uses victimization surveys to study crime among the working class, it aims to address the neglect of working-class crime and victimization.
• Most criminal code crimes affecting the working class are "street crimes" like muggings and break-ins.

Relative Deprivation (Left Realist)

• Crime stems from wanting what others have, not just poverty or survival, the basis is framing references from seeing others succeed.

The Police Response (Left Realism)

• Heavy policing in poor/minority areas creates distrust and lack of cooperation.
• The ruling class uses police to maintain unjust status quo.

Criticism of Left Realism

• More a political perspective than a theoretical explanation.

Patriarchy and Law

• Women were legally considered property of fathers and husbands in Canada

Liberation Emancipation Hypothesis

• Unequal power levels cause crime; men committed more due to higher status.
• The shift to equal roles was supposed, falsely, to increase female crime rates.
• Links criminality to social status, but crime is more related to marginalized backgrounds.

Gender Variation Through Patriarchy

• Power control theory addresses gender, unlike Hirschi.
• Deviance relates to levels of household control over teens.
• In patriarchal societies, girls are more controlled than boys.
• Equal households were thought to lead to girls deviating more, but findings are mixed.

Male Violence Against Women

• Historically a "conspiracy of silence" around rape and domestic violence in Canada.

• Rape laws were redefined as sexual assault statutes, including marital rape.

• Women needed extensive evidence to press charges, and their character was questioned.

• Rape/SA was viewed as personal, not assault.

• Before legal changes, police classified domestic calls as public intoxication

• Police charged them with being drunk and disorderly in the home.

The Concept of the Ideal Victim

• A stereotype of a person who might best benefit from the criminal justice.

• Criminal justice is less helpful to those unlike the ideal, such as incarcerated women facing SA and violence.

• Violence in the home/family is a major source (1/4) of police calls.

Response to Violence

• Domestic abuse survivor movements prioritized helping women leave violent situations, more so than police intervention.

Criminalizing Coercive Control

• Criminalizing abusive behaviors such as over-surveillance (location tracking, demanding passwords) is on its way to being fully codified

Pathways Research

• Analyzes the pathways women take to jail, viewing them as victims of abuse/violence before becoming offenders.

Victim Offender Overlap

• Offenders often come from troubled backgrounds of abuse, blurring the line between victim and offender.

Differential Association

• Sutherland held, like any other behavior, criminal behavior is learned, learning techniques, motivations, and rationalizations in small groups.

• Criminal behavior is a response to cultural needs/values such as wealth and status such as non-criminal behavior

• Drug dealing may be motivated more by social status and power, rather than money(irrational choice if they are in it for the money).

General Theory of Crime (Gottfredson & Hirschi)

• Low self-control, impulsivity, and short-term interests cause crime, deviance, and other undesirable behaviors.
• Starts with childhood behavior issues and progresses.
• Parenting is the most important factor in self-control.

Marshmallow Experiment

• Tested self-control in children by offering one marshmallow immediately or two if they waited.
• Unethical as children that were "unreliable" took one marshmallow because they learned not to trust adults.

How Marshmallow Experiment Relates to Criminal Behavior/Self-Control:

• Self-control is learned.
• Those growing up in unstable environments learn to be impulsive and take immediate rewards.

Criticisms of General Theory of Crime

• Places too much blame on the parents.

• Self-control can change over time, not fixed in childhood.

• Fails to explain white-collar crime.

• Ignores crime opportunities.

• Has mixed results when tested.

• Young people commit more crimes due to fewer social controls, a desire for identity, and older people having more to lose.

Life Course Perspective

• Asks why criminal offenders stop committing crimes.
• Adult roles like marriage, employment, and parenthood can act as turning points.
• Victimization early in life has long-term negative impacts, and that social support can prevent disadvantages.

General Strain Theory

• Strain can cause criminal behavior, more than just financial issues with youth.
• Youth face pressures in home life, acceptance, break-ups, and bullying, losing value or exposure to negativity creates deviants.
• Inability to achieve immediate goals like grades, popularity, and athletics can cause strain and/or stress as abuse or discrimination.

Three Types of Strain:

• Inability to achieve positively valued goals.
• Removal or threat to remove a positively valued stimuli.
• Actual/anticipated exposure to negative or harmful stimuli.

Rational Choice Theory

• Rooted in classical criminology (Beccaria, Bentham).
• Human behavior, including crime, results from conscious decision-making.
• Expected utility principle assumes crime is calculated and deliberate.
• Criminals are rational actors.
• Crime is influenced by opportunity, target, and detection risk.

White-Collar Crime Explained with Rational Choice Theory

• Businesses weigh risks/benefits when breaking rules, potentially factoring in penalties.

Instrumental Crimes

• Require planning, such as break-ins or embezzlement.

Expressive Crimes

• Impulsive and emotional, with little regard for consequences (easy to solve)

Routine Activity Theory

• Changes in crime are linked to lifestyle changes.
• Increased time in school, youth routines shifting from working full time to having afterschool time, mobility, and decreased parental supervision create more crime opportunities.

Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED)

• Aims to minimize crime and maximize visibility, using planters, gates, fences, physical barriers, and color changes.

Broken Windows Theory

• Unmaintained areas encourage more crime, keeping places orderly can decrease it.

Legitimate Versus Illegitimate Use

• Some designs discourage certain uses, legitimate versus illegitimate use.
• Anti-homeless architecture, with benches designed to prevent lying down.

Critical Criminology

• Addresses inequalities and questions how behaviors become criminal, called radical criminology.
• Forms subcultures from exclusion of the American dream, and that economic equality is a contributor of crime
• Inequalities of gender, race, and class drive crime.

Marxism and Critical Criminology

• Asks who benefits from maintaining order, class struggle and capitalism drive the mental state that causes crime.
• Capitalism requires disciplined workers, but desperation leads to crime. Capitalism relies on private property, which legal structures protect.

Prohibition Drinking

• Alcohol was blamed on lower classes and minorities, despite upper-class participation.
• Women's, religious, capitalist, socialist, racist, and political groups united to ban alcohol, they all had vested interests in the ban.
• The upper class continued drinking; prohibition stopped middle/working/lower classes.

Risk and Actuarial Criminology (Foucault)

• Addresses emerging social control forms and "governmentality," how people are governed by their own ways of thinking.
• 20th century focused on risk management: adjusting to avoid future bad outcomes.

Everyday Examples of Actuarial/Risk Criminology

• Credit card frozen due to suspicious charges, prioritizing the risk of fraud over inconvenience.

Police Examples of Actuarial/Risk Criminology

• Predictive policing uses crime hotspot data to prevent future crimes.

Zemiologists

• Seek to shift the study of crime with focusing on social harm.

Define Social Exclusion

• Social exclusion involves physical and non-physical exclusion from jobs, relationships, belonging, housing (denial of civil, political, and social rights of citizenship).

Foucault Video on Governmentality

• Explores the development of global norms and ideals through comparison to statistics and ideas.
• Creates the idea populations with its nuances, is the population healthy?

Actuarial Governmentality

• Governing through managing risk, which is an abstraction not a theory of crime causation.

• Social exclusion, puts blame on excluders not the excluded; it highlights societal responsibility for broader inclusion given agency, freedom, and other factors.

• An Indigenous person wrongly accused of fraud due to their race faced social exclusion.

• Exclusion from public restrooms aligns with ideas about legitimate users such as customers only.

• Homeless youth commit crimes for survival due to social exclusion being both victims and perpetrators

• The term "gang" is controversial, as community members define gang membership.

• Youth join gangs for power, money, respect, protection, social support, and a sense of belonging from a feeling of social exclusion usually stemming problems related to race

Theories that can be Applied to Youth Gangs:

• Strain Theory

• Differential Association Theory

• Chicago/Disorganization Theory

• Cohen's Strain Theory

• Indigenous people experience high rates of suicide, illness, homelessness, substance abuse, and over-representation in the criminal justice system due to social exclusion since colonization.

Two Ways to Reduce Over-Representation:

• Educating criminal justice professionals and broadening sentencing options.

• Reducing the flow of Indigenous people into the criminal justice system to begin with.

• National inquiries address significant social issues failed by policy, prompted by public outcry.

• The Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women inquiry addresses these issues.

• Violence against women stems from social exclusion, economic dependence, few options to leave abusive relationships, and men lashing out to regain control.

Gladue Reports

• The Gladue reports address Indigenous over-representation by detailing the offender's history and social factors, potentially leading to alternate sentencing.
• Non-Indigenous people sometimes falsely claim Indigenous ancestry to exploit this.
• Judges scrutinize the legitimacy of claims to Indigenous status.

Two Arguments for Classifying a Murder Motivated by Group Hatred:

• Motivation should not matter if there is mens rea
• Murder due to hate is worse and should be legally differentiated.

Hate Crimes

• Victims of hate crimes are strangers targeted for their perceived group membership, and who are seen as a threat.
• Attacks on Asian people during COVID are an example.

Two Reasons it is Hard to Measure Hate Crime in Canada:

• Varying police definitions.
• Lack of a general "hate crime" clause in the criminal code.

Becardi Article: Neighborhood Wisdom:

• Ethnographic study in Toronto's Lawrence Heights, the idea is that neighborhood insight includes physical geography understanding and localized threat awareness

• The Zero Tolerance movie shows differential treatment, community feeling versus strict rule enforcement.

White Collar Crime

• Crime committed by individuals of respectable status, usually at work.

White Collar Crime Versus Corporate Crime

• White collar benefits individuals; corporate benefits entire corporations.

Examples of White-Collar Crimes:

- Misrepresentation of financial statements
- Manipulation of stock exchange
- Commercial bribery
- Misrepresentation of advertising/sales
- Embezzlement

• Corporations cannot be jailed.

• Governments often extract large settlements from corporations instead of prosecuting.

Cost-Benefit Analysis

• Businesses calculate potential gains from breaking rules, factoring in the risk of penalties.
• Ford Pinto calculated that it was cheaper to compensate customers than do a recall.

Why is White Collar Crime Not Very Prosecuted?

• Public more concerned about street crime, a police culture oriented towards street crime, that WC crime is hard and costly to investigate, regulators have specialist skills and there is overlap with the administration.

Regulatory Capture

• Regulators with specialized skills, often with industry ties, may prioritize industry interests over government oversight.

Occupational Crime

• Crime committed on the job, such as theft from a till.

Financial Collapse of 2008

• US financial institutions resisted regulation and took excessive risks, leading to global economic collapse, yet no executive was punished.

Examples of the Public as Victims

• E. coli contamination due to water testing deregulation.
• Price-fixing, unsafe vehicles.

State Corporate Crimes

• Illegal/socially harmful actions result from cooperation between political governance institutions and economic production/distribution institutions.

• Example: migrant workers face substandard conditions and are mistreated since the Migrant Worker Program creates structures with abuse being unchecked.

• Deregulation creates crime opportunities and reduces control.

Enron:

• Took advantage of deregulation, close government ties, macho risk-taking culture, competitive environment, energy market turned into stocks.

Green Criminology

• Study of environmental damage from human activity, viewed through a criminological lens, related to corporate crime.

Political Crime

• Crimes against the state, such as terrorism.

Quebec FLQ

• A terrorist group that was committed to making Quebec sovereign, people were on board until they starting breaking / blowing things up.

Crime in Social Organizations

• Trust is broken within occupations like teachers, lawyers, doctors, and coaches.
• Total institutions (residential schools, psychiatric units) and trusted individuals abused power and abuse vulnerable individuals.