NOTES ON CRIMINOLOGY THEORIES
Thinking Criminology Chapter 8 notes
Can classify people as deviant according to:
1) Social identity: how we see ourselves and how others see us
- prescriptive and descriptive (ought to be and actually is)
- knowledge may not come from direct experience
- “social identity is imagined but not imaginary”
- factors of social inclusion and exclusion, distinguishes us and them
- primary and secondary identities
- collective – group membership and individual
- external and internal
- implicit and explicit
- boundaries are created: social groups create rules and breaking them creates deviance, i.e. deviance is the result of classification of behaviours, in turn stereotypes, prejudice are created as a result - simplified classification, they can shift and can be ambiguous thus symbols are used which are imaginary – who is in and who is out may be ambiguous as well as the actual behaviours
- Stereotypes: compression of information, part of whole, exaggeration, unifying different referents, polarization of meaning, results in habituation and institutionalization (diagram of circle of prejudice)
- diversity within unity, conformity but not consensus
- belonging: we conform to be right, to be accepted by others, compulsion (weak coercion), identification, internalization, rationalization
- KEY OBSERVATIONS: if identity secure, then nonconforming carries less cost than for those with insecure identities, insecure membership pressures conformity; strong pressures to conform with penalties for deviance may be experienced by those who with insecure membership and identity but they in turn produce such pressures, price of belonging may be suppression of the ambiguity in themselves and others and demand for predictability
Weber’s domination: conformity can be understood as product, object and expression of domination; power as the domination of others through coercion, is the pursuit of compliance, or power as legitimate domination, i.e. authority, the obedience of those who accept its demands as justified.
- predictability: uncertainty produces imitation and thus conformity
2) Morality
- concepts of “evil” and good, latter being more elusive, former better demarcated, more visible, quicker to judge bad then good
- evil and good are culturally relative/determined, not everything morally disapproved of is evil
- costs associated with ignoring evil higher than with good
- prescriptive, not descriptive
- morality and social identity connection: group identity implies claim to be judged by others and to judge oneself by moral standards (there is belief: internalizing moral rights and wrongs, and bad faith: conforming to belong)
- KEY OBSERVATIONS:
i) humans create unrealistic expectations thus things can and do go wrong in ourselves and others, tendency for people to attribute their own errors to situational factors but that of others to individual shortcomings – idea of blaming the victim, also reflected in idea that people believe the world to be fair and thus predictable in terms of moral principles, i.e. if people fail own fault;
ii) depending on strength of social control the classification of evil or what is bad may be more defined and rigid creating more deviance for some more than others, i.e. in ever increasing complex societies there is expansion in reach and scope and inflexibility of formal social control, thus leading to more authoritative and authoritarian moral categorizations, although concurrently areas of social life which are morality controlled declines.
iii) for those whose identity are insecure, ritualized stereotypes of evil and good are likely to more pronounced for them
3) Normality
- statistical normal, scientifically legitimated quantitative model of normality
- “normal” – common, usual, typical, average, routine, expected in terms of basic stats
- what is normal becomes what is right
- determines what are right and wrong social identities
- boundary between normal and not is arbitrary
- prescriptive and descriptive
- crime statistically normal, integral to all societies, universal
Provides reason for nationalism, language, literacy as a means of social control
Author’s conclusion is: WHY NOT RESEARCH THOSE WHO CONFORM
Radical Theory (aka as New Criminology or Critical Criminology from books about Rad. Crim. with these titles)
Paul Taylor, Ian Walton and Jock Young were key theorists behind this theory in the 1970s.
Rejects functionalism which neglects agency of those considered deviant, i.e. rejects determinism. Assumption is in this case that crime is a social problem and therefore provide solutions to institutions to help control it, thus over-identified with agencies of authority.
Rejects interactionism for opposite reasons. Assumption in this case is often that those who are considered deviant are passive victims of labelling.
Basic Radical Criminology position (simplistically stated): Cause of crime is the law.
Argues that criminalization of behaviour is not arbitrary; some groups in society are more criminalized than others.
Human behaviour must be located in a social context that takes account of such variables as:
· Structural inequality
· Power
· Authority
· Ideology
· Wealth, etc../
Conceptions of crime and law are based upon the ability of powerful classes in society to impose their definitions of normality and deviance on all other social classes, crime and deviancy had to be considered in terms of power relationships derived from ownership/non-ownership of means of production.
1. Firstly, the belief that (criminal) behaviour has a structural origin: That is, the idea that behaviour is rooted in the way in which societies are organised at the institutional level; concerned with the analysis of Capitalist social systems and the relationship between criminalized behaviour, the economic organisation of Capitalist society and inequalities of wealth, influence and power.
2. Secondly, Interactionist theories: In particular, the idea that people have an element of choice in relation to their behaviour - whether they choose to be deviant or non-deviant, for example.
Objective of Radical Criminology
Explain both the nature of the criminalization process in Capitalist society (the social structural aspect) and the specific reasons why people chose to deviate from social norms (the social action aspect). As with most forms of Marxism (or Structuralist sociology come to that), social action had to be explained within the framework of norms and values created at the structural level of any society. In this respect, Radical Criminology has two major dimensions:
1. Objective dimension: whereby in order to understand why people are criminalized we have to understand the origin and purpose of the creation of laws (legal norms). This analysis of law creation involved an understanding of the way in which a ruling class was seen to:
a. Create laws that served their basic interests.
b. IDEOLOGY: Exercise a dominating (or hegemonic) ideological influence over all classes in society, such that laws which Radical Criminologists considered to be "ruling class laws" (because they were created to serve and protect the interests of this powerful class) came to be seen as existing for the benefit of all (or at least that section of the population that is law abiding).
2. Subjective dimension that seeks to discover the precise social conditions under which people deviate from social norms. Radical Criminologists stress the idea that crime is something committed by all social classes and different social classes indulge in different forms of deviant behaviour. However, unlike Interactionism, deviants are not passive victims of labelling, since deviant activity is seen to involve a level of choice on the part of the deviant (in its simplest form, the choice of committing or not committing a deviant act), and power is seen to be a significant concept, especially in relation to why some activities (but not others) are labelled as deviant, why some groups in society are more-likely than others to be criminalized, the idea that some forms of deviance have an explicitly political dimension (for example, groups promoting gay rights, black power, etc.).
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