SOC 225 - Criminology Textbook Notes PDF

SOC 225 - Criminology Textbook Notes: Chapter 1 Crime & Society: Criminology - the scientific study of crime and criminals because crime is socially defined, the definition of crime can change over time Wide range of theories to explain crime - biological, psychological, s...

SOC 225 - Criminology Textbook Notes: Chapter 1 Crime & Society: Criminology - the scientific study of crime and criminals because crime is socially defined, the definition of crime can change over time Wide range of theories to explain crime - biological, psychological, sociological Two theories of crime causation do predict who will be involved in violent terrorism. Unstable employment + ties to radical peers are both correlated with acts of violence Criminology is the body of knowledge regarding crime as a social phenomenon. It includes within its scope the processes of making laws, of breaking laws, and of reacting to the breaking of laws.... The objective of criminology is the development of a body of general and verified principles and of other types of knowledge regarding this process of law, crime, and treatment implies that criminologists take a scientific approach to the study of crime Learning about criminal behaviour and society’s response to that behaviour. Learning about crime can tell us a lot about our society, differences highlight important value differences, (ex. Canada vs USA violent crime rates) need to understand crime before we can reduce it crime directly or indirectly affects all of us The picture of crime presented by the media is often inaccurate. For example, most crime is property crime, yet most media stories deal with violent crime. The media’s misrepresentation of crime has consequences. First, Canadians greatly overestimate the amount of violent crime and have a fear of crime that is higher than the actual risk of victimization. Second, the media provides a distorted stereotype of offenders. Violent crimes are most often committed by relatives, friends, and acquaintances—not by the anonymous stranger so many of us fear. The media also present distorted views of the racial dimensions of crime. Wortley found that while the crime rate is actually lower among immigrants than among those who are Canadian-born, the media perpetuate stereotypes Our fear of crime and our collective image of the criminal have an impact on government policy. Actual crime trends are irrelevant—when the public feels that crime is out of control, it expects the government to do something about it. Crime rates are declining, yet increasing media coverage of crime and pressure from a variety of interest groups have compelled the federal government to toughen many laws over the past two decades There is, though, a body of evidence concluding that children who are exposed to extensive television violence are more likely to be violent themselves The discipline of criminology has six main areas: the definition of crime and criminals, the origins and role of law, the social distribution of crime, the causation of crime, patterns of criminal behaviour, and societal reactions to crime. 1. Not all social harms are criminal, and not all criminal acts are harmful. Thus we must consider how societies decide which acts to define as crimes  2. Why are some acts defined as criminal, while others are dealt with under other types of legislation or are not sanctioned at all? 3. characteristics of people who commit crimes; trends in the occurrence of crime over time; and differences among cities, provinces, and countries regarding the rates and types of crime. 4. why some people commit crimes while others live more law-abiding lives 5. Who are the offenders? Who are the victims? Under what social circumstances are offences most likely to occur? What are the consequences for crime victims? How can particular types of crime be prevented? 6. In Canada, we normally process law violators through a criminal justice system that includes the police, the courts, and the corrections system The federal government has exclusive jurisdiction over criminal law and procedure. This means the provinces and territories cannot pass or amend the criminal law. However, the provinces are responsible for administering the justice system. Because of this division of powers, the Canadian criminal justice system is quite complex Norms - Established rules of behaviour or standards of conduct. most of us conform to the norms our group prescribes We follow most rules without consciously thinking about them, those norms have been internalized Following norms enhances our sense of belonging Legal definition of crime - A crime is an act or omission that violates the criminal law and is punishable with a jail term, a fine, and/or some other sanction. white-collar crime - Crime that is committed by people in the course of their legitimate business activities. Advocates for human rights violations as a crime - If an action violated the basic rights of humans to obtain the necessities of life and to be treated with respect and dignity, criminologists should consider it a crime a definition of crime must encompass not only violations of the criminal law but also a range of behaviors that for all practical purposes are treated as crimes (e.g., Sutherland’s white-collar crimes), as well as those behaviors that across time and place vary in their location in and outside the boundaries of criminal law. In other words, we need a definition that considers behaviors that are both actually and potentially liable to criminal law deviance and crime be considered on a continuum ranging from the least serious to the most serious acts Seriousness can be assessed on three dimensions: The degree of consensus that an act is wrong. Most people feel that mass murder is wrong, but there is much less agreement over 17-year-olds using cannabis. The severity of the society’s response to the act. Murder is punishable by death in some societies and by life imprisonment in others. On the other hand, minor drug offences may be ignored by the police. The assessment of the degree of harm of the act. Drug use and illegal gambling are often considered to be “victimless” crimes that harm only the offender, while serious crimes of violence are considered to be very harmful. the separation of crime from other kinds of deviance is a social and political phenomenon We must understand the act’s social context before we can determine whether it is deviant and how it should be classified. An act is deviant only in the context of a set of rules, and those rules vary widely from group to group. There are some broad similarities in acts that are defined as deviant. criminal and noncriminal are not two distinct categories. There is an overlap between the two, and the line between them can be ambiguous The issue of how rules are made and enforced is an important one. There have been two distinct approaches to this question—the consensus and conflict perspectives. Consensus theorists believe that law represents the consensus of the people. That is, the law reflects the values shared by most members of a society. (ex. Muslim countries + sharia law), The consensus view is also supported by the fact that there is broad agreement regarding many laws, particularly those dealing with murder, burglary, and street crimes such as robbery Conflict theorists do not believe that laws reflect a consensus of members of society. Class conflict theorists believe that laws are passed by members of the ruling class to maintain their privileged position by keeping the common people under control. Activities that threaten the powerful are defined as illegal, and the legal mechanism of the state is used to enforce the laws Group conflict theory is a perspective that recognizes that all laws are the result of a political process and that this process typically involves a conflict or a debate among various interest groups, (ex. Abortion, cannabis), A theory that attempts to explain certain types of criminal behaviour as resulting from a conflict between the interests of divergent groups. three of criminology’s newest branches: green criminology, terrorism studies, and surveillance studies. Speciesism - refers to discrimination against nonhuman animals. Green criminology encompasses a broad range of behaviours ranging from acts that are clearly harmful, such as dumping toxic waste in the ocean, to acts that many people consider to be acceptable, such as eating meat or wearing leather shoes. notions of morality and rights should be extended to “nonhuman nature” and that societies should adopt a notion of ecological citizenship that obliges them to recognize that the environment must be protected for future generations no universal agreement on the definition of terrorism—the argument is often made that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” terrorism is “the deliberate use or the threat to use violence against civilians in order to attain political, ideological and religious goals” “terrorism” is a socially constructed term - interpretation of events and their presumed causes, interpretations are not unbiased attempts to depict truth but rather conscious efforts to manipulate perceptions to promote certain interests at the expense of others (ex. 9/11 al-Qaeda attack on the United States is generally defined as terrorism by Western countries but is seen by some in other countries as martyrdom for a just cause) Surveillance - any systematic focus on personal information in order to influence, manage, entitle, or control those whose information is collected Governments are relying increasingly on information to govern us, and corporations use our information for their profit In this text the term criminology refers to the body of knowledge regarding crime as a social phenomenon. It includes within its scope the processes of making laws, breaking laws, and reacting to the breaking of laws. The objective of criminology is to develop a body of general and verified principles and of other types of knowledge regarding this process of law, crime, and treatment. Our behaviour is strongly influenced by norms, many of which we have internalized. Much of the time we don’t even consciously think about the rules that govern our behaviour. Most of the time, rules are enforced through informal means such as the disapproval of family and friends; however, in some cases the rules are formalized into laws Legally, crime is defined as an act that violates the criminal law and is punishable with jail terms, fines, and other sanctions. Criminologists have expanded on this definition. Discussing white-collar crime, Sutherland said that criminologists should also include violations of other types of laws in addition to criminal law. The Schwendingers proposed that crime be defined as a violation of human rights. Hagan felt that criminologists should consider deviance and crime as a continuum ranging from minor acts of deviance to serious crimes. Crime is socially defined. No behaviour is inherently good or evil, and we must understand the social context of an act before we can determine whether it is deviant and how it should be classified. Also, the form of laws and the specific behaviour that is prohibited vary greatly in different places and at different times. Consensus theorists believe that laws represent the will of most of the people in a particular society. By contrast, conflict theorists feel that law reflects power relationships in society, as those with power use the law to help maintain their position. Some laws fit each of these perspectives. Chapter 3 Criminal Law: Criminology - concerned with crimes and the individuals who commit them Criminal law - body of legal rules and principles that designates which types of behaviour should be prohibited and punished and whether those persons who are accused of committing crimes should be convicted and officially labelled as criminals. Legal definition of crime - the coupling of a prohibition against certain conduct with a penal sanction, Conduct that is prohibited by law and that is subject to a penal sanction, that a crime can normally be defined by two basic elements: (1) a prohibition against certain conduct, and (2) a penalty for violating that prohibition. In Canada, all crimes are the products of a legislative process and are contained in statutes such as the Criminal Code. Some crimes may reflect a social consensus that certain conduct is wrong and should be punished (for example, murder and sexual assault). Other crimes may not be based on such a consensus, and a significant proportion of Canadians may not consider them to be inherently wrong and deserving of punishment (for example, possession of small amounts of street drugs for private use) ongoing task of trying to bring the criminal law into line with emerging community notions of crime and justice, the police and the judiciary are required to enforce the existing criminal law, regardless of their own private views Criminal law - A body of jurisprudence that includes the definition of various crimes, the specification of various penalties, a set of general principles concerning criminal responsibility, and a series of defences to a criminal charge. There are two primary sources of Canadian criminal law: (1) legislation, and (2) judicial decisions that either interpret such legislation or state the “common law.” legislation may be enacted both by the Parliament of Canada and by the legislatures of the various provinces and territories. there is a distribution of specific legislative powers between the federal and provincial or territorial levels of government. the federal Parliament has the exclusive jurisdiction to enact “criminal law and the procedures relating to criminal matters.” when the courts are required to decide whether Parliament has enacted legislation that legitimately falls within the scope of its criminal law power, a third element must be added to the definition of a crime. More specifically, the Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that the prohibition and penalty must be directed against a “public evil” or some form of behaviour that is having an injurious effect on the Canadian public. If any of these three elements is missing, the legislation may not be considered to fall within the legitimate scope of the federal criminal law power; indeed, it may be ruled invalid insofar as it intrudes into areas of legislative authority that have been specifically allocated to the provincial and territorial legislatures. Canadian Environmental Protection Act, R.S.C. 1985, c. 16. In the words of Justice La Forest, “Pollution is an ‘evil’ that Parliament can legitimately seek to suppress.” Therefore, the Canadian Environmental Protection Act was considered to constitute “criminal law” because the Parliament of Canada was unequivocally concerned with the need to safeguard public health from the devastating consequences of toxic pollution. If the Supreme Court had ruled that this statute was not a genuine exercise of the Parliament of Canada’s criminal law power, the Court would have ruled that the Act was invalid. At the heart of s. 8 lies the fundamental importance that we ascribe to human autonomy. The combination of the embryo’s moral status and the individual’s interest in his or her own genetic material justify the incursion of the criminal law into the field of consent. There is a consensus in society that the consensual use of reproductive material implicates fundamental notions of morality. This confirms that s. 8 is valid criminal law. the most significant federal statute dealing with both the substantive criminal law and the procedural law relating to criminal matters is the Criminal Code, R.S.C. 1985, c. C-46 “Substantive criminal law” refers to legislation that defines various criminal offences (such as murder, manslaughter, and theft) and that specifies the various legal elements that must be present before a conviction can be entered against an accused person. The term also refers to the legislation that defines the nature and scope of such defences as provocation, duress, and self-defence. The term criminal procedure refers to legislation that specifies the procedures to be followed in the prosecution of a criminal case and that defines the nature and scope of the powers of criminal justice officials. A body of legislation that specifies the procedures to be followed in the prosecution of a criminal case and that defines the nature and scope of the powers of criminal justice officials. For example, the procedural provisions of the Criminal Code classify offences into three categories: (1) indictable offences, (2) offences punishable on summary conviction, and (3) “mixed” or “hybrid” offences, which may be tried either as indictable or as summary conviction offences they spell out whether these offences may be tried by a judge sitting alone or by a judge and jury, and indicate whether they may be tried before a judge of the Superior Court or by a judge of the Provincial Courts Indictable offences carry the most serious penalties upon conviction of the accused. The procedural provisions of the Criminal Code are also concerned with defining the nature and scope of the powers of such officials as police officers. For example, these provisions stipulate the nature and scope of the powers of the police in relation to the arrest and detention of suspects. Likewise, the Criminal Code articulates the powers of judges in relation to the important task of sentencing convicted offenders. the provincial and territorial legislatures have been granted exclusive jurisdiction to enact legislation in relation to such issues as health, education, highways, liquor control, and hunting and fishing. This legislation may be enforced through the imposition of “a fine, penalty or imprisonment.” However, such regulatory legislation does not constitute “real” criminal law for the purpose of the distribution of powers under the Constitution because such legislation lacks the necessary element of “public evil” that was discussed earlier. Indeed, regulatory legislation is concerned with the orderly regulation of activities that are inherently legitimate (such as driving a vehicle or operating a business). Criminal law is directed towards the control of behaviour that is considered inherently wrong (namely, “true crimes” such as theft, assault, sexual assault, and willful damage to property). Regulatory offences, therefore, are quite distinct from the “true crimes” that arise under the Criminal Code or the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, and they are, therefore, classified as quasi-criminal law (“quasi” means seeming, not real, or halfway). Regulatory offences are generally far less serious in nature than “true crimes.” Indeed, the maximum penalties that may be imposed for violation of regulatory offences are generally no more than a fine or a maximum term of imprisonment of six months, or both. A “true crime” occurs when an individual engages in conduct that is not only prohibited but also constitutes a serious breach of community values; as such, it is perceived by Canadians as inherently wrong and deserving of punishment. Only the Parliament of Canada, using its criminal law power under the Constitution Act, 1867, may enact a “true crime.” Regulatory offences arise under legislation (either federal, provincial, or territorial) that regulates inherently legitimate activities connected with trade, commerce, and industry or with everyday living (driving, fishing,etc.). These offences are not considered to be serious and usually carry a relatively minor penalty upon conviction. Indeed, many regulatory offences are sanctioned by means of a ticketing system, and the fines may often be paid online. The second major source of criminal law in Canada is the large body of judicial decisions that either interpret criminal legislation or expound the common law—a term that refers to that body of judge-made law that evolved in areas not covered by legislation. Parliament cannot provide for every possibility or provide comprehensive definitions of every term used in the legislation it enacts. Therefore, there is always great scope for judicial interpretation of the Criminal Code. As an entrenched bill of rights, the Charter empowers judges to declare any piece of legislation to be invalid— and of no force or effect—if the latter infringes on an individual’s Charter rights (such as the presumption of innocence [section 11(d)] or the right not to be deprived of the right to life, liberty, and security of the person except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice). The Supreme Court suspended the implementation of the ruling for one year in order to permit the Parliament of Canada to enact new legislation that would regulate prostitution in a manner that does not place the physical security of sex trade workers at risk. In response, Parliament enacted sections 286.1 to 286.5 of the Criminal Code, which essentially criminalize the purchase of sexual services, but not their sale MAID - medical assistance in dying act this provision requires Canadian courts to engage in a balancing act in which they must decide whether the infringement of an individual’s Charter rights can be justified in the name of some “higher good.”, ex. Child pornography A criminal conviction and imprisonment, with the attendant stigma that attaches, is the most serious sanction the law can impose on a person, and is generally reserved for conduct that is highly culpable—conduct that is viewed as harmful to society, reprehensible and unacceptable. It requires both a culpable act—actus reus—and a guilty mind—mens rea—the parameters of which should be clearly delineated by the law. Every criminal offence can be analyzed in terms of two major elements: namely, actus reus and mens rea. This principle means that an accused person may not be convicted of a criminal offence unless the prosecution can prove the following beyond a reasonable doubt: (a) that a particular event or state of affairs was “caused” by the accused person’s conduct (actus reus); and (b) that this conduct was simultaneously accompanied by a certain state of mind (mens rea). In essence, the concept of mens rea refers to the mental elements of an offence, while the term actus reus refers to all the other elements that must be proved by the Crown. the actus reus of a criminal offence includes an element of voluntariness. The term mens rea, properly understood, does not encompass all of the mental elements of crime. The actus reus has its own mental element; the act must be the voluntary act of the accused for the actus reus to exist. In general, it is possible to divide the actus reus into three separate components: (a) conduct (a voluntary act or omission constituting the central feature of the crime); (b) the surrounding or “material” circumstances; and (c) the consequences of the voluntary conduct. Ex. the accused applied force to the body of the victim (conduct); that the force was applied without the consent of the victim (circumstances); and that the application of force caused bodily harm (consequences). Bodily harm is defined in section 2 of the Criminal Code as meaning “any hurt or injury to a person that interferes with the health or comfort of the person and is more than merely transient or trifling in nature.” For example, a swollen face and bleeding nose have been considered to constitute “bodily harm,” and Canadian courts have also ruled that the term even includes psychological harm. An important question to address is whether a failure to act (an omission) can qualify as the conduct element of the actus reus of an offence. The answer is that a failure to act can constitute a crime only if the accused was under a pre-existing legal duty to act. A good illustration is the duty owed by a parent to a small child to provide the latter with the “necessaries of life”—for example, by feeding the child and providing him or her with necessary medical care the accused’s conduct be voluntary. If a driver is repeatedly stung by a swarm of bees and crashes his or her vehicle, the accident will be considered the consequence of a series of reflex actions that were beyond the driver’s control; clearly, they did not flow from the free exercise of his or her will. Similarly, if an accused person’s consciousness is impaired to such an extent that he or she is unable to control his or her actions, it may be concluded that there was no actus reus of any criminal offence because the accused acted involuntarily. Automatism is a rare defence and may be successfully raised only in a very limited number of situations. For example, if an individual is hit on the head and immediately thereafter enters a state of impaired consciousness and assaults another person, he or she may claim the benefit of the defence of automatism—provided it is established that the assault constituted an involuntary action. the burden of proving the defence is placed on the accused person who raises it (normally, the Crown is required to prove every element of the actus reus and mens rea components of an offence). A successful defence of automatism presupposes that accused persons are plunged into such a state of impaired consciousness that they are barely aware of what is happening around them. In Stone’s case, the accused responded directly to what he perceived to be insults, and the jury evidently believed that his actions were those of a man who knew where he was and what he was doing. mens rea refers to all the mental elements (other than voluntariness) that the Crown must prove (beyond a reasonable doubt) in order to obtain a conviction for a criminal offence. mens rea is not one mental state but rather a combination of mental states; indeed, it is necessary to analyze the mens rea required in relation to each of the three elements of the actus reus of any particular crime—that is, conduct, circumstances, and consequences. the mens rea requirement ensures that only those defendants who are morally blameworthy are convicted of “true crimes” under the Criminal Code. Mens rea [...] refers to the guilty mind, the wrongful intention, of the accused. Its function in the criminal law is to prevent the conviction of the morally innocent—those who do not understand or intend the consequences of their acts. There are two very distinct types of mens rea requirements in Canadian criminal law: (1) subjective and (2) objective. Subjective mens rea is based on the notion that accused persons may not be convicted of a criminal offence unless (a) they deliberately intended to bring about the consequences prohibited by the law, (b) subjectively realized that their conduct might bring about such prohibited consequences but recklessly continued with that conduct in spite of their knowledge of the risks involved, or (c) were willfully blind in that they deliberately closed their minds to the obvious criminality of their actions. Subjective mens rea, therefore, constitutes a requirement that the accused deliberately chose to do something wrong. The mens rea elements of a criminal offence are considered to be subjective if they are based on a determination of “what actually went on in the accused person’s mind.” The forms of subjective mens rea are intention and knowledge; recklessness; and willful blindness. Objective mens rea is predicated on the principle that accused persons should be convicted of certain offences, not because they intended to bring about the prohibited consequences or acted recklessly, but rather because reasonable people, in the same situation, would have appreciated that their conduct created a risk of causing harm and would have taken action to avoid doing so. Here the fault of the accused does not lie in deliberately choosing to do something wrong; instead, the culpability lies in the fact that the accused person had the capacity to live up to the standard of care expected of a reasonable person and failed to do so. “objective mens rea is based on the premise that a reasonable person in the accused’s position would have been aware of the risks arising from the conduct. The fault lies in the absence of the requisite mental state of care.” The mens rea elements of a criminal offence are considered to be objective if they are based on a determination of whether a reasonable person, in the same circumstances and with the same knowledge as the accused, would have appreciated the risk involved in the accused’s conduct and would have taken steps to avoid the commission of the actus reus elements of the crime in question. the most serious crimes, carrying the most severe penalties, should generally be based on a subjective mens rea requirement. the Crown first had to prove that he had intentionally committed an unlawful act that had resulted in death. The unlawful act was the offence of trafficking in narcotics (trafficking includes the act of administering a drug), and there was no doubt that the victim died as a direct consequence of the injection. The mens rea for so-called unlawful act manslaughter is objective in nature. Therefore, the second task confronting the Crown was to prove that any reasonable person would have foreseen the risk of nontrivial bodily harm as a consequence of committing the unlawful act. The Supreme Court of Canada had no doubt that Creighton was correctly convicted of manslaughter because any reasonable person who administered a dangerous drug intravenously would foresee the risk of some degree of bodily harm. There are three forms of subjective mens rea that the Crown may be required to prove in a criminal prosecution: (1) intention and knowledge, (2) recklessness, and (3) wilful blindness. provides a typical example of the subjective mens rea requirement of intention and knowledge; indeed, it provides that an individual commits incest if, knowing that another person is “by blood relationship his or her parent, child, brother, sister, grandparent or grandchild,” he or she intentionally has sexual intercourse with that person. Usually, the Criminal Code will require the Crown to prove a specific mental element in addition to intention and knowledge. Take, for example, the offence of first-degree murder. Section 231(2) of the Code states that this offence is committed when murder is both “planned and deliberate.” In order to convict an accused person of murder, the Crown must establish that this person either intended to kill or intended to inflict bodily harm that he or she knew was likely to cause death and was reckless (did not care) whether death ensued or not (section 229(a)). However, if the offender is to be convicted of first-degree murder rather than second-degree murder, then normally the Crown must also prove that the killing was planned and deliberate in the sense that the accused did not act impulsively. Intoxicated defendants who are found to have the necessary mens rea for murder will often be acquitted of first-degree murder because they acted on impulse or without thinking about what they were going to do ahead of time; these accused persons will instead be convicted of second-degree murder. Recklessness is a form of subjective mens rea where the accused knows that their conduct could cause certain prohibited consequences but deliberately proceeds with that conduct because they do not care one way or the other. Ex. arson, If Nero throws a lighted cigarette onto a haystack, realizing that there is a good chance the haystack will catch fire, he will be convicted of arson even if he can demonstrate that he did not start the fire deliberately and that, in fact, he hoped very sincerely that there would not be any blaze as a consequence of his actions. Nero is guilty of arson because his recklessness constitutes one of the forms of mens rea that is necessary for conviction under the terms of section 434. Willful blindness is the final form of subjective mens rea. It exists where accused persons have every reason to make some kind of inquiry as to whether there are circumstances that would render their conduct criminal but deliberately choose to shut their eyes to the obvious because they wish to avoid being convicted of an offence. “wilful blindness imputes knowledge to an accused whose suspicion is aroused to the point where he or she sees the need for further inquiries, but deliberately chooses not to make those inquiries.” Willful blindness is treated as being the same as actual knowledge of a circumstance that incriminates the accused person. the following offences have all been characterized by the courts as requiring proof only of objective, rather than subjective, mens rea: manslaughter, dangerous operation of a motor vehicle, assault causing bodily harm, and criminal negligence causing death or bodily harm. The judge or jury must then decide whether the accused’s behaviour constituted a marked departure from the standard of care expected of a reasonable person who faces the identical circumstances as the accused and who is armed with exactly the same knowledge of those circumstances. an accused person suffers a brain seizure while driving a vehicle and he or she crosses over the centre of the road and causes a fatal collision with a car that is travelling in the opposite direction. On the face of it, straying over the centre line and causing a collision constitutes a marked departure from the standard of care expected of a reasonable person. However, if the accused did not know that he or she was likely to suffer from a seizure, there would be no conviction on a charge of dangerous operation of a motor vehicle causing death. the courts have weakened the objective test of liability by requiring that the judge or jury take into account the subjective knowledge accused people have of the relevant circumstances surrounding their actions. Furthermore, if an accused person lacks the normal capacity of the reasonable person to appreciate that his or her conduct might create a risk of harm, that person may not be convicted of a crime, even if it is based on proof of objective mens rea. For example, suppose a 20-year-old man has a mental age of 10 Where “true crimes” are concerned, the Crown usually has to prove the required mens rea of the offence beyond a reasonable doubt. However, most regulatory offences are considered to be offences of strict liability. This means that the Crown only has to prove the actus reus elements of the offence; the onus is then on the accused to prove, on the balance of probabilities, that he or she was not negligent (or that he or she “acted with due diligence”). The rationale for strict liability is that it would be extremely difficult to conduct effective prosecutions of regulatory offences if the Crown were required to prove that accused persons were negligent. Individuals can be convicted of criminal offences even if they are not the persons who actually commit them. anyone is a party to a criminal offence who (1) actually commits it, (2) aids another person to commit it, or (3) abets (encourages) any person to commit it. a person who counsels (“procures,” “solicits,” or “incites”) another to commit a crime becomes a party to a crime even if “the offence was committed in a way different from that which was counselled”. The Criminal Code specifies that one is a party to—and liable to conviction of—a criminal offence if one actually commits it, aids and/or abets it, becomes a party to it by virtue of having formed a common intention with others to commit a crime, or counsels the commission of an offence that is actually committed by another person. An individual may withdraw from the common intention, but may do so effectively only when he or she gives unequivocal notice to the other party or parties of his or her wish to abandon the criminal enterprise. Once effective notice has been given, the individual is no longer liable for any subsequent crimes committed by the other party or parties in pursuit of the common intention. The defence will only be successful if the accused person demonstrates that a reasonable effort was made to neutralize the effects of her or his participation or to prevent the principal offender from committing the offence. The criminal law permits the police to intervene and arrest those who, in some way, demonstrate that they are about to embark upon the commission of a serious crime. Conspiracy is an inchoate crime (literally, a crime “in embryo”); once their agreement to commit a crime has been reached, the accused may be convicted of the crime of conspiracy even though the offence they originally planned to commit was never brought to fruition. Other inchoate crimes are criminal attempt and counselling an offence that is not committed. A criminal offence that is committed when the accused person seeks to bring about the commission of a particular crime but is not successful in doing so. The three inchoate offences in the Criminal Code are attempt, conspiracy, and counselling. it is a crime to counsel another person to commit an offence that is not ultimately brought to fruition. Since the main focus of the offence is on the accused person’s intentions, it does not matter that no one is actually influenced by the accused person’s efforts to procure, solicit, or incite someone to commit a crime. Counselling = Procuring, soliciting, or inciting another person to commit a crime. the offence of criminal attempt is focused on an accused person’s intention to commit a crime that is never realized. A criminal attempt occurs when an individual does—or omits to do—anything for the purpose of carrying out a previously formed intention to commit a crime. The conduct in question must constitute a substantial step towards the completion of the crime that is intended. the mens rea of criminal attempt is nothing short of an actual intent to commit an offence. the actus reus of attempt is any step taken by the accused towards the completion of the offence, provided that this step goes beyond “mere preparation” and is not considered to be “too remote” from the completed offence. For example, buying a train ticket with a view to travelling to another city in order to rob a bank would be considered “mere preparation” and “too remote” from the completed robbery to justify convicting the accused of a criminal attempt. However, if the accused person actually reaches the front doors of the bank before being arrested by the police, it is clear that the actus reus of the offence of attempted robbery has been established. The crime of conspiracy is established when two or more individuals form a common intention to commit a crime. The Crown must also prove that each individual charged with conspiracy actually intended to put the common design into effect. The actus reus of conspiracy is the agreement to engage in criminal conduct, while the mens rea component consists of the intent not only to enter into this agreement but also to implement it. NCRMD - The special verdict of “not criminally responsible on account of mental disorder.” In order to be found NCRMD, it must be proved on the balance of probabilities that, because of mental disorder, the accused lacked the capacity to appreciate the nature and quality of the act or omission in question or to know it would be considered morally wrong by the average Canadian. No person is criminally responsible for an act committed or an omission made while suffering from a mental disorder that renders the person incapable of appreciating the nature and quality of the act or omission or of knowing that it was wrong. The first requirement of the NCRMD defence is that the accused was suffering from a “mental disorder” at the time of the alleged offence(s). The very narrow scope of the NCRMD defence ensures that relatively few accused persons may raise it successfully at their trial. “the accused committed the act or omission that formed the basis of the offence with which the accused is charged but is not criminally responsible on account of mental disorder.” NCR accused may be granted (1) an absolute discharge, (2) a conditional discharge, or (3) an order holding them in custody in a psychiatric facility. unless a court or review board determines that an NCR accused person constitutes a “significant threat to the safety of the public,” then it must order an absolute discharge. A “significant threat to the safety of the public” means a real risk of physical or psychological harm to members of the public that is serious in the sense of going beyond the merely trivial or annoying. The conduct giving rise to the harm must be criminal in nature. The Not Criminally Responsible Reform Act (S.C. 2014, c. 6) was designed to make it more difficult for some NCR accused persons to be given their freedom and also to give a greater voice to victims in the decision-making process that determines the release of these individuals. The pivotal amendment in this legislation empowers the trial court, following a finding of NCRMD, to designate the NCR accused person a “high-risk accused,” if they committed a serious personal injury offence and: (a) the court is satisfied that there is a substantial likelihood that the accused will use violence that could endanger the life or safety of another person; or (b) the court is of the opinion that the acts that constitute the offence were of such a brutal nature as to indicate a risk of grave physical or psychological harm to another person. Mistake of fact may constitute a defence to a criminal charge if it causes the accused to erroneously believe that the circumstances facing him or her did not render his or her actions criminal. Ex. if a woman participates in a marriage ceremony with a man, erroneously believing that her first husband is dead, she is not guilty of the crime of bigamy. Mistake of fact may be a defence where the accused person acts under the influence of an honest mistake in relation to any of the elements of the actus reus of the offence charged. When the accused operates under a mistake of fact, he or she is really stating that the Crown has failed to prove the necessary mens rea of the offence. One of the most controversial uses of the defence of mistake of fact used to occur when an accused person who was charged with sexual assault claimed that he honestly believed he had the complainant’s consent, even though he was mistaken. mistaken belief in consent will not be a valid defence to a charge of sexual assault unless the accused took “reasonable steps, in the circumstances known to the accused at the time, to ascertain that the complainant was consenting.” While honest mistake of fact constitutes a valid defence to a criminal charge, a mistake concerning the nature or scope of the criminal law does not absolve an accused person of criminal liability. ignorance of the law is no excuse. Intoxication is a complex and highly problematic defence. Intoxication caused by alcohol and/or other drugs may be a defence if it prevents the accused from forming the intent required for a specific intent offence, such as murder or robbery. One of the main effects of alcohol (and some other drugs) is to cause disinhibition—a condition in which the accused may be rendered less able to control his or her conduct. the intoxication defence focuses on whether the accused’s state of intoxication (from alcohol and/or other drugs) prevented him or her from forming the necessary mens rea for the crime in question. assaulting someone with the specific intent to kill (murder) or forcefully taking something from another individual with the specific intent to steal (robbery) are acts that require a considerably more complex pattern of thought, and intoxication may well prevent the accused from forming the necessary specific intent that is required for conviction of these serious crimes. The defences of necessity and duress are based on the notion that it would be unfair to convict individuals of a criminal offence if they did not have a genuine choice at the time they committed it. individuals who act under the constraints of duress or necessity do not so voluntarily, and hence, the defences of duress and necessity are said to be based on “moral involuntariness.” “An ‘excuse’ concedes the wrongfulness of the action but asserts that the circumstances under which it was done are such that it ought not to be attributed to the actor.” Self-defence, by way of contrast, is considered to be an action that is justified. Necessity may be a defence to a criminal charge when the accused person commits the lesser evil of a crime in order to avoid the occurrence of a greater evil. that arises when the accused person can avoid some disaster or calamity only by breaking the law. Duress may be a defence to a criminal charge when the accused was forced to commit a crime as a consequence of threats of death or serious bodily harm made by another person. limb. Where the defence of duress is raised, defendants are asserting that their power of choice is being overborne by another human being. that the threat that is at the core of the defence of duress must be one that is specifically made in order to coerce the accused person into committing a crime. Duress cannot be raised as a defence in situations where the real issue is self-defence. Provocation is just a partial defence and may be raised only when the accused is charged with murder. If provocation is raised successfully by the accused, they will be convicted of manslaughter rather than murder. manslaughter). The required elements of provocation are (1) that the accused responded to the commission of a serious crime by the victim against the accused in circumstances that were of such a nature that an ordinary person would have been likely to lose the power of self-control, and (2) that the accused acted “on the sudden and before there was time for his (or her) passion to cool.” the only conduct that will be permitted to trigger the defence of provocation is “conduct of the the victim that would constitute an indictable offence under this Act (the Criminal Code) that is punishable by five or more years of imprisonment” In order to meet the Criminal Code requirements for provocation, the accused person will generally have to demonstrate that there were aggravating circumstances surrounding the assault or other serious crime being committed by the deceased victim. The victim may have uttered provocative words or made insulting gestures while assaulting the accused. the alleged provocative criminal behaviour of the victim must have been “of such a nature as to be sufficient to deprive an ordinary person of the power of self-control.” requires the accused person raising the defence to establish that they acted on the alleged provocation “on the sudden and before there was time for their passion to cool.” This prerequisite excludes individuals who coldly plan to take their revenge outside the immediate time frame in which the alleged provocation occurred. Self-defence is frequently raised as a defence to charges of assault or homicide. Section 34 of the Criminal Code states that a person may use a reasonable amount of force in self-defence if she or he reasonably believes that they or another individual are the target of actual force or that a threat of force is being made against them. the nature of the force or threat; the extent to which the use of force was imminent and whether there were other means available to respond to the potential use of force; the person’s role in the incident; whether any party to the incident used or threatened to use a weapon; the size, age, gender, and physical capabilities of the parties to the incident; the nature, duration, and history of any relationship between the parties to the incident, including any prior use or threat of force and the nature of that force or threat; any history of interaction or communication between the parties to the incident; the nature and proportionality of the person’s response to the use or threat of force; and whether the act committed was in response to a use or threat of force that the person knew was lawful. Chapter 4 Counting Crime: Over the past century, those who have tried to understand crime have relied heavily on statistical descriptions of criminal behaviour, criminals, and criminal justice responses. What we know about crime depends on the quality, coverage, reliability, and validity of our measures of crime How can we obtain data about the amount and nature of crime in a society? As the number of official sources of statistics have increased, and as creative methodologies for data collection have advanced, reliability and validity have become the most pressing concerns. Are the methods and techniques involved in gathering statistics strong enough that anyone following the procedures would produce the same counts (reliability)? And do the statistics collected count what they purport to count (validity)? Methodology - Refers to the study or critique of methods. Reliability - Identifies one of the standards (another being validity) against which the tools used to measure concepts are judged. Reliability refers to consistency of results over time. Validity - The extent to which a tool or instrument (questionnaire, experiment) actually measures the concept the researcher claims to be interested in and not something else. Criminologists calculate crime rates (or rates of incarceration, conviction, or recidivism) by dividing the amount of crime by the population size and multiplying by 100,000. This produces the standard rate per 100,000; occasionally it is useful to calculate a rate per million or some other figure when looking at less frequently occurring offences. Police gather vast amounts of information on suspects, incidents, arrests, and charges. Criminologists often use these data to test their ideas. However, there have always been problems with police statistics. When police officers are dispatched to a call, each officer must use his or her own judgment to decide whether a crime has been committed or whether the call is unfounded. If the officer determines that there has been an offence, a report will be filled out by the officer and processed by police department staff. Most police departments then send the data from each incident to the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics (CCJS), a division of Statistics Canada. Police are supposed to follow a uniform set of rules (the Uniform Crime Reporting Rules) in recording criminal incidents or calls for service. Yet it has been discovered that different police departments often use different rules for recording their information. In fact, individual police officers exercise a good deal of discretion in what they decide to record and how they record it. There may be doubts, then, about the reliability of the statistics derived from police records. There is perhaps an even more fundamental problem: Are suspects criminals? Are those arrested and charged criminals? Are all incidents that are recorded actual crimes, and are these incidents a complete count of crimes? Do the data provide a valid count of crime A particular difficulty arises in crime counts because as the reliability of a statistical measure increases, its validity as a count of crime often decreases. Thus, even though the police certainly never detect or become aware of all crimes, and despite enormous problems of reliability, their counts of crime are likely to be a far more valid reflection of the amount of criminal behaviour than are counts of convictions or counts of prisoners. The criminal justice system operates as a funnel: only some fraction of incidents result in a police record of a criminal incident, only a portion of recorded incidents result in suspects identified, only a portion of suspects are arrested or charged, only a portion of charges result in conviction, and only a portion of convictions result in incarceration The farther you go into the system, the more confident you can be that the count is accurate and reliable and that it is a decreasingly valid representation of all criminal behaviour. Also, there are built-in biases because some crimes (and some criminals) are more likely than others to be reported and to result in arrest, charge, conviction, and incarceration. For example murderers are more likely to be arrested and to go to jail than are corporate criminals or shoplifters. The farther you go into the system, the more obvious it becomes that you are counting something about how the system itself operates; you are counting official decisions about crime and criminals.Statistical descriptions of the prison population may provide valid indicators of one way that a society responds to crime. These descriptions, however, do not provide a valid measure of the amount and the nature of crime. Theories about crime and facts about crime are built simultaneously, are mutually dependent, and shape one another. Theory without facts is indistinguishable from ideology; facts without theory are often implicit ideology; statistical facts without theory are numerology, often bent to ideological ends. Fifty years ago the American sociologist Ned Polsky (1967) argued that our understanding of crime would never be significantly advanced if we relied on statistical data. He advocated field research in the course of which social scientists would live among, and learn from, the criminals themselves One can distinguish three broad types of criminal justice statistics: statistics about crime and criminals, statistics about the criminal justice system and its response to crime, and statistics about perceptions of crime and criminal justice. Theory and policy require statistics about the decisions of those who break the law, about the decisions of those who maintain it, and about what people think of all of this. The criminal justice system produces an enormous amount of raw data in the form of police reports and records, the recorded decisions of prosecutors and judges, the administrative records of prisons and penitentiaries, and the recorded decisions of parole boards and probation and parole services. From these administrative records the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics (CCJS) has developed a sophisticated system of statistics on the criminal justice system. Administrative records are not statistics. Records are concerned with individual cases and are intended primarily to help practitioners make decisions about these individual cases. Statistics are aggregated; they are concerned with what is common among individual cases. Statistics are meant to provide information - about larger questions: planning and evaluation, policy and program develop ment, and theory building and testing the following issues must be addressed before records can be converted into statistics: unit of count, counting procedures, definitions, levels of aggregation, and data elements levels of aggregation - Refers to how data are to be combined. Do we want city-level, provincial, or national data? criminologists have warned that the further you move from those who produce the data and the more you try to combine data from different sources, the more questionable the result. They prefer the richer and more detailed information available from local police to the abstracted, less complete data available about national policing. data element- Specification about what exactly is to be collected. it is extremely difficult to build aggregated statistics out of different types of records that may be incompatible. counting procedure - A consensus on how to count units and data elements. If an offender goes on a break-and-enter spree and hits six houses in an evening, how many offences should be counted—six (one offence per house) or one (a singular spree) The unit we wish to count in a statistical system, Some units of count are specific to a particular sector. For example, the prison sector can count inmates; the court sector, convictions; and the police, suspects Common definitions are essential. Depending on how the terms are defined, you can inflate or deflate the statistics; you can make it appear that crime is higher or lower, or that there are more or fewer prisoners. Correctional statistics are the most accurate because we can count the number of prisoners in Canada and provide some information on their social characteristics. This can be quite useful for projecting future inmate populations and for planning future facilities and services Data on prisoners, however, do not tell us much about crime and criminal behaviours. They tell us about the criminal justice system the growth in the number of adults incarcerated in Canada between 1978–79 and 2015–16. In this period, the adult inmate population increased from 21,834 to 39,679. Do these figures tell us something about growing crime in Canada? No. Do they tell us something about harsher or more punitive sentencing practices? No. In fact, if we look at the rate of incarceration (per 100,000 adult Canadians), we see that much of the growth in the penitentiary population can be accounted for by the growth of the Canadian population criminologists have had difficulty counting crime. Crime is typically a secretive activity. When people commit crimes, they try to avoid becoming part of the count of criminals. Some crimes are harder to detect than others, and some criminals are harder to apprehend and convict. Criminologists have long recognized that the major problem of counting crime is the so-called dark figure of crime—that is, crime that remains unreported, unrecorded, and largely unknown. Canada has had in place a system called the Canadian Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), which is designed to provide uniform and comparable national statistics. based on a standardized set of procedures for collecting and reporting crime information. “seriousness rule,” which holds that only the most serious crime is to be scored in an incident involving several crimes. The concerns this rule creates are threefold: first, it deflates the total crime count, since less serious crimes are not counted separately; second, it inflates serious crimes as a proportion of the total; and third, the way in which seriousness is scored is problematic because not enough qualitative data about the crimes are recorded to use a sophisticated scale of seriousness. Concerns have also been expressed that the crime categories used are too general, allowing too many different kinds of acts to be recorded in the same way. For example, thefts and attempted thefts are recorded under the same category gross counts of crime - A count of the total amount of crime in a given community, making no distinction between crime categories.may be very misleading. The police depend on the accounts of victims and witnesses. In other words, victims and witnesses must recognize an act as a criminal justice matter, must believe it to be of sufficient seriousness to warrant a report to the police, and must believe that reporting the act is worthwhile—all this before the police make their decisions about how to respond to and record an act Crime has been declining in recent years. The crime rate rose from 1962 to 1991 but has generally declined since then To address the matter of the crime rate being driven by high volumes of less serious offences, the CCJS developed crime severity indexes (CSI). The crime severity index is calculated by assigning each offence a weight derived from actual sentences given by the criminal courts. The more serious the average sentence, the greater the weight. Thus, more serious offences have a greater impact on the severity index. Dramatic increases in cybercrime have led criminologists to question the police-reported crime statistics showing that crime rates have been dropping over the past two decades. Online crimes can be very difficult to detect, and the vast majority are not reflected in our official crime statistics because they are not reported. Cyber crimes may be known only to the victims or to private organizations such as credit card companies and cybersecurity companies, which often do not report them to the police. crime rates have actually not declined if we include cybercrimes. official statistics seriously underreport the actual numbers of crimes and that the trend of declining crime rates shown by police-reported crime statistics does not present an accurate picture of the degree to which citizens are being victimized victimization survey - A survey of a random sample of the population in which people are asked to recall and describe their own experience of being a victim of crime. ask people whether they have been victims of acts that the Criminal Code defines as criminal. They are asked to describe the nature and consequences of their victimization experiences; to describe the criminal justice response; to indicate whether victims or others brought the incidents to official attention, and if not, why not; and to indicate their perceptions of and attitudes toward crime and criminal justice in Canada Not all crimes can be captured through this survey method. One need not be a methodologist to recognize that murder cannot be included in such a survey. Nor can consensual crimes for which there are no direct victims—drug use, gambling, and the like. These consensual crimes are not captured very well through official data or through victimization surveys. Similarly, those crimes designed to keep victims unaware that they have been victimized cannot be captured accurately in victimization surveys (or official data sources). Fraud, embezzlement, employee pilferage, price fixing, and the wide range of consumer, corporate, and white-collar crimes were not included in the survey. The eight categories of crime included were sexual assault, robbery, assault, break and enter, motor vehicle theft, theft of household property, theft of personal property, and vandalism. Note that of the incidents identified, just under one-third (31 percent) had been reported to the police or had otherwise come to police attention. Allowing that the victimization survey cannot capture the entire “dark” figure missed by the UCR, the survey data do reveal that many more Canadians are victimized by crime than is revealed by official statistics Where incidents produced great financial loss to the victim, reporting was far more likely, even more likely than for those incidents that resulted in pain or injury but no loss. Reporting property crimes, particularly when the loss was over $1,000, is less an act of justice (or even revenge) than a far more utilitarian act—seeking redress, recompense, or recovery. Among all measured offences, sexual assault was the least likely to be reported to police, with just one in 20 being brought to the attention of the police The survey data confirm many of the concerns about official sources of crime data. Some crimes are more likely to come to police attention than others. Some categories of victims are more likely to report their victimization, and some categories of offenders (e.g., family members) are less likely to be reported. Victimization surveys show that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the risk of victimization is lowest for older Canadians, especially those 65 years of age or older (see Figure 4.8). In fact, the victimization data provide a profile of crime victims that explodes many popular myths. The typical victim of crime is young, single, male, not employed full-time, and living an active social life. The number of evenings spent outside is one of the best predictors of whether a person has been victimized Victimization surveys are dependent on respondents’ ability not only to recall incidents and their details, but also to place the incidents correctly in time. well-educated, articulate respondents are more likely than others to talk to interviewers and to give rich and full accounts of their victimization experiences, thus perhaps biasing the data. There is reason as well to be cautious about interpreting data on domestic and sexual assaults that have been collected through surveys. Respondents may well be reluctant to discuss such experiences with an interviewer. self-report study -A method for measuring crime involving the distribution of a detailed questionnaire to a sample of people, asking them whether they have committed a crime in a particular period of time. This has been a good method for criminologists to determine the social characteristics of offenders. most commonly through questionnaires given to students in junior and senior high schools Because self-report studies supposedly avoid these biases, they have been particularly important in research and theory on the causes of crime and delinquency, especially the relationship between social class and crime A difficulty arises in that it appears that different populations answer self-report questions in different ways. Lower-class males and black males in the US study are more likely to underreport their own criminal behaviour than are middle-class white males. it would appear that those who are typically law-abiding are more likely to report completely their occasional infractions than are the more committed delinquents to report their more serious and frequent infractions. differences between official statistics of delinquent behaviour and self-report data may reflect not simply biases in official data, but biases in the self-report method as well. The official data are likely to include more serious offences, and self-report data are more likely to include more minor infractions lower-class crime is typically more serious and persistent Chapter 5 Correlates of Criminal Behaviour: Correlates of crime are variables that are connected with crime. A correlate is “a phenomenon that accompanies another phenomenon and is related in some way to it”. These include offenders’ age, gender, ethno-racial background, and socioeconomic status, as well as the spatial location of offences. The aim is to answer questions such as these: Who is likely to be involved in crime? How is crime gendered? What does age have to do with criminality? Does race have any relationship with crime? correlation is not the same as causation. Thus, while the correlates we will be examining are in some ways connected with criminal behaviour, they do not necessarily cause crime. No single factor explains any particular crime. Each correlate should be viewed as one of a much more complex assortment of factors that contribute to criminal acts. Thus, a change in a correlate of crime may not necessarily lead to a change in crime. Young people are disproportionately represented in crime generally and in violent crime in particular. criminal activity intensifies in adolescence and young adulthood and declines thereafter. The exceptions are political crimes, corruption, and other white-collar crimes; all of these require structural opportunities and employment opportunities that are not yet available to young people. persons aged 18 to 34 were involved in 58 percent of all cases Most crimes committed by Canadian youth are nonviolent. Theft under $5,000 is the most common offence committed by youth. The most common violent crime among Canadian youth is level 1 assault. Level 1 assaults are assaultive acts that do not cause any physical harm to victims. Other violent crimes frequently committed by youth in 2012 were uttering threats, assault level 2, and robbery. Assault level 2 is the category of assaults that involve carrying, using, or threatening to use an imitation or real weapon. Canadian youth were heavily involved in crimes such as cannabis possession, administration-of-justice violations, and mischief. Administration-of-justice violations include failure to report to court, while mischief is the crime of vandalism. It involves unlawful interference with somebody else’s property, thereby causing damage. Most serious youth crimes were down in 2014: there was a 38 percent decrease in youth-perpetrated homicides in 2014, and mischief (–13%) and theft under $5,000 (–4%) also declined. Only 45 percent of youth accused were formally charged in 2014, a continuation of a trend towards diversion that began in 2003, when the Youth Criminal Justice Act was introduced. Persons aged 12 to 24 committed 32 percent of all homicides in Canada in 2016 and 36 percent of homicides in 1991. In contrast, only 13 percent (2016) and 8 percent (1991) were committed by people aged 50 and above. Persons aged 12 to 24 made up only 16 percent of the Canadian population in 2016 and 14 percent in 1991, while persons aged 50 and above constituted 38 percent of the population in 2016 and 30 percent in 1991. (27% 18-24, 5% 12-17) youth homicide offenders were more likely than adults to victimize strangers. They also found that youth are more likely than adults to commit homicides as a group rather than as lone individuals. This suggests that peer influence is a critical factor in youth violence. The rate of violent youth crime in Canada is two to three times lower than the rate among American youth maturational reform—that there is a reduction in criminal offending as individuals get older. The fact that people are less likely to commit crime as they grow older. The basic explanation for maturational reform is that adolescence is a period of transition marked by ambiguity. Young people at this stage are neither children nor adults and may not be fully committed to conventional values. The confusion, marginality, and “in-between-ness” of adolescents’ social position may be conducive to criminal behaviour, for these provide little incentive for noncriminal lifestyles; adults, by contrast, enjoy greater incentives to conform, such as jobs and marriage. Young people may shoplift or steal if their parents are unable or unwilling to pay for the latest phones and tablets. Hartnagel also suggests that older people may have become more skilled at avoiding detection, and that as they age, they may be physically unable to engage in certain kinds of criminal behaviour. The notion of maturational reform encompasses three factors that may cause crime to decline. First, aging brings physiological limitations. Second, the formation of various types of social bonds, such as work, marriage, and children, means that individuals have other people who depend on them to make the “right” choices. Third, maturational reform involves a more socially responsible trajectory of human agency. A relatively simple example of this is that beyond a certain age, “getting wasted” on weekends may no longer sound as attractive a course of individual or group action as it is for younger people. The notion of maturational reform is intertwined with life course theory. Life course theory is concerned with the “role of age-graded transitions and social controls”. Life course theorists articulate how social bonds (Chapter 14) such as attachment to a spouse, pursuit of education, and the onset of major life events or turning points such as having children or stable employment help reduce the likelihood of involvement in crime. For most individuals, many of these watershed moments take place in adulthood, and they are believed to contribute to reduced criminal offending Nonmarital romantic relationship breakups of young people aged 27-21, male offending increases after the breakup of a nonmarital romantic relationship, but that breakup is not associated with female offending. Also, young people who enter into a new relationship after a breakup avoid engaging in criminal activities but increase their alcohol consumption and illicit drug use four key questions in the gender distribution of police-reported crime. First, what is the proportion of females accused of crime compared to males? Second, what are the percentages of females and males under the supervision of correctional services at the provincial and federal levels? Third, what is the gender distribution of convicted persons who have been designated “dangerous offenders” in Canada? And fourth, is there evidence supporting the notion of role convergence between males and females as regards crime? Females are less likely to be charged with criminal offences. That said, the past three decades have seen an increase in the number of females charged with criminal involvement—21 percent of adults charged with a Criminal Code offence in 2009 versus 15 percent in 1979. Despite the increase, males are still greatly overrepresented in crime. The level of involvement of males and females varies by type of crime. In 2014–15, for instance, males made up 80 percent of all accused persons in adult criminal courts. Males were generally more likely than females to be involved in violent and serious offenses. Males made up 98 percent of the accused in sexual assault cases, 89 percent of robbery cases, 86 percent of homicide cases, and 77 percent of major assault cases. Females were most commonly accused of theft (35%) and fraud (33%). Female youth had higher rates of police-reported crimes than did their older counterparts. Most homicide victims are male. Women's imprisonment has not increased in the past few decades in Canada despite significant media attention to female crime and a perceived increase in incarceration rates of women. females made up 25 percent of all admissions to youth correctional services in 2015–16. The pattern is similar among adults. Females made up 8 percent of inmates in sentenced custody at the federal level (which indicates sentences of at least two years), and 7 percent of those admitted to community supervision. Women constituted only 16 percent of adults admitted to provincial and territorial prisons in 2015–16. Adult female sentences were generally shorter than those given to male counterparts. Why do women receive more lenient treatment in the courts? The main reason is that males commit more serious crimes, especially more violent offences. A second factor that influences court decisions is female offenders’ responsibility for young children Of nearly 500 persons held in 2013 under the “dangerous offender” law, only one was a woman. Both males and females are more likely to be killed by males. Females are more than twice as likely as males to be killed by their spouse. When a woman commits a violent crime, it is often against someone closely related to her. Victims of female acts of violence in 2015 were the spouse or some other intimate partner (36%), an acquaintance (35%), a stranger (12%), or a family member (17%). Males are more likely to direct their violence at acquaintances, especially when the crime is homicide Violent delinquency is a function of the social learning of violent definitions of appropriate behaviour by both males and females.2. There are gender differences in the process of learning violent definitions. Direct parental controls such as aggressive discipline influence violent definitions for males to a greater degree than for females, while indirect parental controls, such as emotional attachment to family, influence girls’ learning of violent definitions but not boys’.3. Direct parental controls such as supervision of the youth’s friendships help reduce violent delinquency in boys but have no importance for violence committed by girls.4. Girls who accept traditional gender definitions have lower rates of violence; such ideational notions have no influence on violence by boys.5. Violence by boys and girls is shaped by position in the social structure, but the influence of position in the social structure over criminal behaviour in boys and girls differs.6. Boys have higher rates of violent delinquency partly because they tend to learn more violent definitions and gender definitions and have greater experience with violent crime than girls.7. Boys tend to learn more violent definitions than girls because of their experience with violence and lower levels of emotional attachment to their families. Studies of structural disadvantage factors, such as poverty, on male violent crime have produced fairly consistent results. The most violent males are those who are the most disadvantaged. structural disadvantage variables (poverty, income inequality, a female-headed home, etc.) were also associated with female violent crimes. More specifically, they found that structural disadvantage had “significant effects” on robbery and homicide and modest effects on the rates of larceny, burglary, and aggravated assault committed by women. Even so, structural disadvantage has a greater impact on male than on female criminal behaviour. Marriage has been found to attenuate criminal behaviour in men. For disadvantaged women, motherhood is the primary factor reducing drug use and delinquent behaviour The pathway to criminality is fundamentally gendered, five pathways for women’s involvement in crime. 1. “Harmed and harming women”: These women have endured abuse and have had a difficult family life. The abuse was likely perpetrated by an adult male, and they may have been abandoned or abused by their mother. They suffered the loss of loved ones when they were young, and they are regarded as “out of control” by family members. They resorted to substance abuse, particularly in their early teens. Daly argues that such women commit crimes when intoxicated or because they are unable to control their anger. 2. “Battered women”: These women’s criminal activities are precipitated by an abusive partner. Relationships with violent men are the defining factor in the criminal activity of such women. 3. “Street women”: These women suffered serious levels of abuse in childhood or in present relationships. What distinguishes “street women” from “harmed and harming women” is street involvement. Street women are street-involved and engage in various survival mechanisms, such as prostitution, drug selling, and theft. Such women tend to have longer criminal histories and are more likely to have spent time behind bars.4. “Drug-connected women”: These women have engaged in illicit drug use and sale in part because of their relationships with people, usually family and partners, who were involved in drugs. Such women are not necessarily drug addicted, nor do they have long criminal histories (see also Kruttschnitt, 2013). 5. “Other women”: This category refers to persons with no history of unfavourable family life, who have not suffered abuse, and who are not street entrenched, but who are engaged in crime for economic gain. biological theories have been challenged. Criminologists have shown that explanations for gender differences in criminal behaviour are embedded in social structure, particularly in patriarchal traditions and the attendant gender roles. Those roles are well-defined so that males and females are held to widely divergent standards and expectations with regard to what constitutes appropriate behaviour. The home in particular is a site of acculturation and gender contestation. It is in the home that boys and girls learn appropriate behaviours. girls are subjected to greater control than their male siblings in the same household. Daughters are objects of control, and the main instrument of control is the mother, who is assigned that role by her husband. This cuts across social classes, albeit with varying intensity (1987). Male children from the employer class are more delinquent than their female counterparts in part because they are not as tightly controlled by the mother and are not deterred by the risk of punishment. It follows that gender equality has begun to bridge sex differences in crime, for it is freeing females from excessive control: “When daughters are freed from patriarchal family relations, they too become delinquent”. The influence of societal standards and gender roles can be expected to extend to delinquent or criminal behaviour. when there is a convergence of the roles and duties of the sexes, a decline in gender differences in crime should also occur. This role convergence hypothesis posits that as women leave the domestic sphere for the world of wage labour, there should be an increase in female crime. Some have suggested that the expansion of employment opportunities for women should lead to an increase in female property crime. role convergence hypothesis = The hypothesis that as the work roles of women become similar to those of men, so will their involvement in crime. The gender gap in crime has declined, but much depends on the time period we are considering and on the offences being considered Overall, women were only involved in petty corporate crime; men were involved in both petty and major corporate crime. Race is not as strongly related to crime as age and sex. Police in Canada rarely report information on race. The exception is information about Indigenous offenders.An attempt in 1990 by Statistics Canada to collect data on the race of offenders was rejected because of lack of cooperation from most police organizations and because of broad criticism of the police. Opponents of race-based crime statistics believe that the idea should be abandoned because of the poor quality of police-reported crime statistics, the difficulties inherent in measuring race, and the possibility that such statistics might be used to justify racist theories of crime and, consequently, discriminatory treatment of minorities. supporters of these statistics argue that race-based data are required to verify the accuracy of claims that certain groups are receiving differential treatment in the criminal justice system; that such statistics may provide tools to challenge biological theories and other ideas about the race–crime relationship; and that banning the collection of race-based, police-reported data will not prevent the spread of racist ideology. Support for the collection of race-based crime statistics has continued in more recent times on similar premises The evidence that does exist suggests that some minority groups are overrepresented in police-reported crime statistics. This overrepresentation is believed to be present in all Western societies. though the specific groups that are overrepresented vary by jurisdiction. In Canada and Australia, for instance, Indigenous people are overrepresented. In the United States, New Zealand, Germany, and Turkey, African Americans, Maoris, and Turks and Kurds, respectively, are overrepresented. In Canada, the minority groups that are overrepresented vary by location. In Greater Toronto, for example, blacks are overrepresented, while Indigenous people are overrepresented on the Prairies. Blacks are 6.5 times more likely than whites to state that they know a friend or family member who has been racially profiled by the police. “black racial background appears to be a master status that attracts police attention and significantly contributes to police decisions to conduct street interrogations”. blacks are more likely to perceive police stops as unfair, and this may have an impact on their demeanour in encounters with the police. The least delinquent minority youth had the greatest contact with police, so delinquency involvement does not explain why they were stopped and/or searched by police. Although youth who were involved in violent delinquency had a higher probability of contact with the police, this variable did not reduce the effect of race on contact with police.black inmates were concerned about “prejudicial attitudes by some corrections staff ” who assumed they were gang members. According to Barrett (2013), this assumption may be contributing to the disproportionate number of black prisoners in maximum security facilities, as well as to segregation placements, use of force by prison staff, more charges while in prison, and a lower likelihood of being paroled despite lower rates of recidivism. Canadians of African descent comprise 8.6 percent of the federal inmate population although they are less than 3 percent of the general Canadian population. However, this represents a 9 percent decrease in the federal black inmate population since 2013. There are two competing explanations for the overrepresentation of minorities in the criminal justice system: the differential offending hypothesis and the differential treatment hypothesis. The differential offending hypothesis states that there are actual differences between racial groups in terms of the incidence, level of seriousness, and persistence of offending patterns. The differential treatment hypothesis states that structural inequality in the administration of justice, from police patrols to courtrooms to correctional services, is responsible for the overrepresentation of minority groups in the criminal justice process. three parts: 1. The police often give closer attention to people who meet certain social criteria (young lower-class males), and minority group members may disproportionately be included in these groups. 2. Certain social spaces tend to experience greater police surveillance than others—for example, areas with concentrated social disadvantage marked by relatively high levels of unemployment, poverty, and social disorder—and these areas are often inhabited by newer immigrant groups and poor minorities 3. The police may be influenced by race or ethnicity in the exercise of their discretion and authority. This includes decisions about whether or not to stop, search, or arrest a suspect. Contact with police is typically the first step in the criminal justice process. Indigenous people are overrepresented in the criminal justice process. They are 4.9 percent of the Canadian population (2016 Census) and 7 percent of the Canadian youth population, but they make up a much higher proportion of the prison population. Indigenous female youth are more highly overrepresented in youth custody. In 2015–16, 31 percent of the male youth population in custody and community services were Indigenous males; Indigenous females represented 44 percent of female youth admitted to custody and community services. Indigenous adults are also greatly overrepresented in the prison population. Although Indigenous adults made up 3 percent of the Canadian adult population, they comprised 26 percent of those admitted to provincial and territorial services and 28 percent in federal custody in 2015–16. Indigenous persons constituted 38 percent of female admissions to provincial and territorial sentenced custody and 31 percent of admissions to federal sentenced custody. The figures for Indigenous males were 26 percent and 23 percent, respectively. 1. Indigenous accused are more likely to be denied bail. 2. More time is spent in pretrial detention by Indigenous people. 3. Indigenous accused are more likely to be charged with multiple offences and often for crimes against the system (failing to appear). 4. Indigenous people are more likely not to have representation at court proceedings. 5. Indigenous clients, especially in northern communities where the court party flies in on the day of the hearing, spend less time with their lawyers. 6. Indigenous offenders are more than twice as likely to be incarcerated than non-Indigenous offenders. 7. Indigenous Elders, who are spiritual leaders, are not given the same status as prison priests and chaplains in all institutions. 8. Indigenous people often plead guilty because they are intimidated by the court and simply want to get the proceedings over with. Indigenous inmates were: 1. Released later in their sentence. 2. Disproportionately overrepresented in segregation placements, use-of-force interventions, maximum security institutions, and self-injurious incidents. 3. More likely to be returned to prison due to suspension or revocation of parole. between 2007 and 2016, the federal inmate population grew by less than 5 percent while the number of Indigenous persons in federal prisons increased by 39 percent. The number of Indigenous persons in federal prisons has grown “every single year” over the last 30 years (2017, 48). The result is that 26.4 percent of all federal inmates are Indigenous (2017). These statistics are alarming, given the proportion of Indigenous persons in the general population. Cultural theories of crime examine the traits, characteristics, or way of life of an identifiable group to explain the involvement of members of that group in the criminal justice process. Such theories analyze the development of a subculture (or counterculture) that runs contrary to the dominant culture. Cultural theories of Indigenous overrepresentation in the criminal justice process come close to cultural conflict theory. Indigenous cultures are viewed as different from the dominant Euro-Canadian culture in content and/or manner of expression. Indigenous cultures’ emphasis on sharing, and their traditional approaches to dispute resolution—which emphasize meditation and healing—are viewed as unsuited to the adversarial system imported from Europe. The common law system’s norms, values, and procedures are alien to Indigenous people and predispose them to conflict with the law. Cultural explanations for the overrepresentation of Indigenous people in the criminal justice system are problematic for several reasons. First, they presuppose a monolithic Indigenous culture when in fact, Indigenous peoples and their cultures are diverse. Second, a static Indigenous culture is assumed; Indigenous culture is presented as a calcified relic of the past and hence as uninfluenced by the dominant culture in which it is embedded. Third, there seems to be an assumption that there is a particular kind of behaviour that constitutes Indigenous behaviour. Fourth, cultural explanations inadvertently pathologize Indigenous peoples’ cultures. Underlying that is a presumption that there is an objective standard that makes Indigenous cultures delinquent. Such explanations are simplistic and do not fully engage with a bidimensional phenomenon: the process of incorporating Indigenous cultures without allowing them access to legitimate opportunity structures in Canadian society. Indigenous people, like all Canadians, are inundated with the prevailing ideas and ideals about socially desirable material goods in our consumerist culture. Indigenous unemployment numbers are higher than for other Canadians. This suggests several factors are involved: deculturalization from Indigenous ways of life; acculturation or assimilation into Euro-Canadian ways of life; and structural exclusion. scholars are increasingly giving attention to structural explanations of Indigenous overrepresentation in crime statistics. Structural theories situate the locus of criminality in the historical context and prevailing structures of society rather than in individual or group pathology. The key argument is that institutional arrangements — particularly the distribution of socially valuable resources such as education and jobs — and the routine functioning of the criminal justice system are major explanatory factors for ethno-racial profile of crime statistics. The background factors which figure prominently in the causation of crime by aboriginal offenders are by now well known. Years of dislocation and economic development have translated, for many aboriginal peoples, into low incomes, high unemployment, lack of opportunities and options, lack or irrelevance of education, substance abuse, loneliness, and community fragmentation. These and other factors contribute to a higher incidence of crime and incarceration.This statement is sociological rather than legalistic. The Supreme Court notes the “unique systemic or background factors which may have played a part in bringing the particular aboriginal offender before the courts.” Three structural explanations are examined here: the colonial model, historic trauma transmission model, and critical race theory. The colonial model takes a socio-psychological perspective. It focuses on the intersection of “structural oppression, alienation and three adaptive forms of behaviour—assimilation, crime or deviance, and protest”. four stages of colonization. In the first, the territory of one racial group is invaded by another. The goal in this phase is to acquire valuable resources such as gold or furs. In the second stage, a colonial society is formed. At this stage, processes of cultural imposition, cultural disintegration, and cultural re-creation occur. Cultural imposition means that the Native populations are forced to adopt the values and ways of life of the colonial power. This leads to the collapse or decentring of the norms and values of the colonized group. As a consequence, a society develops in which the old norms and values have given way to different values that inferiorize the Native population. In Canada, this stage of Indigenous colonization was carried out by residential schools. The residential schools made systematic efforts “to assimilate Aboriginal children into mainstream society by removing the ‘Indian within them’” through a process of “aggressive civilization”. In the third stage, Native peoples find themselves governed by representatives of the colonizer’s power, such as the police and the military. In Canada, the North-West Mounted Police (later renamed the RCMP) set out to pacify the Indigenous population so that the West could be settled. That forceful effort has strongly shaped the relationship between law enforcement agencies and Native populations. During this third stage, minor infractions by the dominated group are likely to come to the attention of law enforcement, given that the latter’s mission is to pacify the group. This reduces the likelihood that colonized populations will cooperate with the police and perceive them as fair, which has implications for whether or not people obey the law. Fourth, the colonial society develops a caste system based on race. As a result, access to socially valuable resources such as land, jobs, and education is shaped by racial considerations. This provides opportunities for settler populations as well as an economy of disadvantage for natives. Concentrated disadvantage increases the likelihood of criminal behaviour. mentacide—the “deliberate and systematic destruction of a group’s minds with the ultimate objective being the extirpation of the group.” Each member of the colonized group bears the burden of proving that he or she is not inferior to the dominant group and is a well-adapted member of the colonial society. “cultural limbo,” or double alienation. A colonized population is routinely and forcefully expected to shed its Native identity, language, and customs. The Native people are thus neither fully themselves nor part of the colonizer’s racial group. They occupy an in-between state that is both confused and confusing. The resulting alienation and ambiguity may manifest itself in crime, particularly through self-hate. Self-hate may be evident in the desire of the colonized not to identify with their traditional customs, which have been discursively rendered primitive. The self-hate may also be projected onto the group: “The alienation can result in attacks against the people that the colonized now hate the most: themselves”. When people are alienated from their group, the consequence may be horizontal violence in the dominated community. Horizontal violence refers to violent acts by a person within his or her social class. Overtly violent crimes are rarely between classes. Scholars have only recently begun to focus on the physical and sexual abuse between students (in addition to abuse by staff against students, which had been the subject of earlier studies) in the residential school system. Most of the violent acts reported to police, including homicides, are intra-class—usually, committed by people of lower socioeconomic status on members of their own social category. This is partly a result of internalized anger caused by blocked opportunity and of self-destructive coping mechanisms such as alcoholism and drug abuse. High rates of psychiatric disorders, hypertension, and various serious crimes, particularly homicide, are common in oppressed communities. The colonial model of crime focuses on how the conditions fostered by colonialist expansion generate particular institutional arrangements that produce a kind of subject who is susceptible to committing (violent) crimes. While the colonial model seems rather deterministic, it does not necessarily negate human agency. Rather, it demonstrates that colonialism has consequences for human psyche and actions, such as criminal behaviour. It also indicates that historical context matters when we examine criminal statistics. Historic Trauma Transmission Model. This model is closely related to the colonial model in that it emphasizes the social and psychological consequences of colonialism. The focus is on how historic trauma manifests itself socially and psychologically. In particular, this model demonstrates how “acculturation (and a loss of the social self) is often associated with alcoholism, drug addiction, family disintegration and suicide”. This model argues that when a group of people experience physical extermination, cultural genocide, and colonial subjugation, members of the group develop “learned helplessness”. This is a shared form of fatalism in which members of a group believe that no action on their part can alter the course of their lives. “Such a person or group becomes passive, inactive and hostile, ascribing social failures to personal, internal causes and blaming themselves for their helplessness (internal attribution). This internal attribution of failure results in decreased sense of self and social esteem”. Traumatic memories are passed from one generation to the next down four main avenues (76). First, through biological channels, which include inherited predispositions to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD). These conditions have been linked to some Indigenous youths’ inability to articulate thoughts, and also to their confusion with adjudication processes. Second, traumatic memories are passed on through storytelling and other culturally sanctioned behaviours. Third, historic trauma is passed on as a direct result of violence, deficient parenting, the acting out of abuse, and other social ills. Fourth, there are psychological avenues involving memory and individual recollections of pain, suffering, and debilitating social conditions. Qualitative studies have consistently linked the residential school system to abuse and suicidal thoughts in Indigenous communities. This supports the notion of trauma transmission. Critical race theory emerged in the 1980s as a counter hegemonic strategy. It challenges the policies and dynamics and taken-for-granted assumptions of institutional power. It adopts a social constructionist approach to race, the law, and justice. A social constructionist approach questions the idea that there is a social reality that is observable or measurable, positing instead that multiple realities pervade the social world. In other words, crime is what a society defines it to be and is not an objective fact. The notion of ?