- Biological / psych
- Social
- Rational / personal chocie (routine action theory).
PRE- Enlightenment :
- Divine right of kings,
- Church and aristocracy
- Feudal society : no ind. Rational choice.
- Women and poor = disenfranchised
- Crime = demons take over body
- Crimes = loosely defined
- Punishment = inconsistent and arbitrary
- Bloody code = series of laws that invoke death penalty.
- Examples = poaching, steal horses/sheep, pick pocket items worth shilling (£30), unmarried mother.
high concentration of people in small area = more crime.
- Religion = no longer main source of morality.
- More awareness of inequality.
- MONTESQUIEU: ‘spirit of laws’ (1748).
- Separation of powers: legis, exec, judic.
- Social status and private property should Not be used to justify slavery,
- BECCARIA: rights of the accused: trial by representative jury, punishment reflect harm-done to society, punishment = certain and undelayed.
- Opposed death penalty (martyrdom), but executions should = public. Still = pro-corporal punishment (eg put in stocks).
- It =better to prevent crime than to punish/reform criminals.
- BENTHAM: free will of criminals.
- Pain of punishment should = worse than pleasure/gains from potentially committing crime. E.g. £50 fine for stealing £1000 jewellery means people will take the risk.
- Crime = edgework.
- Panopticon = Place in a densely populated urban area = a deterrent. Never Fully built in Eng/Wales, but there is ‘strange ways’ in Manchester.
- Panopticon = reform. Constant surveillance, and work ethic = reform (turn crank a number of times or walk up and down a jacobs ladder, to gain privilege of dinner).
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- Classical theories still influence western CJS. Focus on rationa choice overlooks mental illness, learning difficulties, and age (very young or old, so lessened mental capacity). ‘Neo classicists’ update classicist ideas, and so include these things.
- Classical thought overlooks that the ‘rich get richer and the poor get prison’ (Reiman).
- Classical thought = classical liberalism. The individual should be as free from state intervention as possible. Therefore criminal law should be minimal: Is this feasible?
POSITIVIST CRIMINOLOGY:
- Enlightenment: scientific views of the world. Modernity,
- COMTE: scientific study of society,
- Criminals = born. Bio determinism. Quant > qual.
- ‘facts’ = collected dispassionately, and distinguished from values. Queterlet and Guerry. Lombrosso and Fern.
- Early biological positivists: Giambattista della porta: phrenology and facial features.
- Joseph Gall: size and shape of brain space.
- LOMBROSO: crime = atavistic (= a ‘throwback; to an earlier form of men). Social darwinism. Excessive idleness, high cheekbones, tattooing.
- Later positivists:
- Enrico Ferri widened positivist territory to include social and environmental factors.
- Raffaele Garofolo: eliminate those unable to compete. Rejected classicist doctrine of free will.
- Francis Galton: ‘the science of improving stock’
- EUGENICS:
- Hooton: criminals = “organisclaly inferior”
- Kretschmer 1950s: physique classifications. The lanky asthenic type (schizophrenia), the more muscular athletic type (schizophrenia), and the rotund pyknic type (manic-depressive).
- Mental Deficiency Act 1913. Rather than waiting to execute criminals for their crimes, we should prevent the initial breeding of criminals.
- While Nazi extermination camps reduced in number by the end of WW2, they remained almost intact as genetics institutions. US allowed sterlisation till 1970s. 1972-1976: 3406 Native American women = sterilised in US.
- Critique bio explantions: deterministic (unrep samples, and difference between correlation and causation); differentiation (complex other factors).
More modern classical theory:
RATIONAL CHOICE THEORY:
- Cornish and Clarke (2006) crime is purposive and never senseless. The intention of the offender is to benefit themselves. They try to make the best decisions they can, given the risks.
- Continued: their involvement in decisions = 3 stages: 1) initiation. 2) habituation. 3) desistance. Event decisions have a series of choices: preparation, action, and escape.
ROUTINE ACTIVITY THEORY.
- The idea that after WW2, crim theory said: poverty, educational failute and unemployment have reduced, so there should be a reduction in crime, but there hasn’t been. They argued this is because there are more opportunities for crime (Cohen and Felson, 1979).
- E.G. more women in work, so houses = more frequently unoccupied.
- Target suitability: more portable goods like phones and flatscreen TVs makes pickpocketing and burglary more practically feasible and possible.
- More people living alone not in family networks. 1970S USA, a single person living alone was Twice as likely to be burgled/robbed than someone in a family.
POSITIVIST EXAMPLE IN THE MODERN WORLD/
- Wang and Kosinski (2018) pre-existing software technology to test whether AI could ‘detect’ homosexuality in white men and women. They put in images from dating sites. Their aim was to alert the public that this was a project within the technological capacity of states.
- Still there could be cultural / social factors in this eg wearing a baseball cap or growing a beard.
PERSONALITY THEORIES:
- Hans Jurgen Eysenk (check spelling)/ doctored some of his results. Based on self reports, which is reductionist and draws dichotomies (ignores the possibility for individuals to have multi faceted and mutable adaptable personality traits). between introverted and extroverted personalities. Reductionist: four quadrants: the Choleric, the melancholic., the phlegmatic, and the sanguine.
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