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GS22 Sociology of Crime, Deviance and Societal Response

Lecturer: Margie Hall.

Topic 1: Introduction to the Course, Classical Criminology and Positivism

Section 1: Introductions and Definitions

1.1 What is the course about? What are crime, deviance and societal response?

Ignoring for the moment the term sociology, we will start from what students know about crime, deviance and societal response. What are the every day meanings of crime? What are the sorts of behaviour that we might call deviance, and what everyday activity could be included in the term societal response to crime and deviance?

Crime: can be defined legalistically or morally.

Deviance can be defined in terms of not usual, not normal behaviour, but in terms of whose ideas of normality? (we will discuss this in topic 4.) For the initial purposes of this course, deviance can be considered as morally deviant behaviours such as certain aspects of sexual behaviour, prostitution, indecency, teenage playfulness, which are not actually criminalized (although in fact, in Singapore, most aspects have been criminalized).

Societal Response to crime and deviance refers to all the actions/activities that

people do because of the existence of, and their feelings about, crime and deviance.

These actions may be individual or organized: e.g.1.the legal system with laws and courts, the police, the prisons, probation officers2.crime prevention, security officers3.political speeches where politicians talk about law and order4.letters to the newspaper that complain about/discuss crimes.5.the security systems in buildings

How do we know about it: mass media as everyday source of knowledge

1.2What is sociology? Or What do sociologists study, apart from crime and

deviance, and the responses to crime and deviance?

If we asked some sociologists we would get various answers, such as sociology is the study of human societies, or sociology is the study of human social phenomena, or the study of human groups from the largest types of society (e.g. the Roman Empire) to the smallest types of human groups, (e.g. married couples, or two people having a drink). Another definition might be that sociology is the study of social behaviour of all types, e.g. from being Prime Minister to committing suicide. All these answers are acceptable.

I will quote from one particular textbook:

Sociology is the study of human social life, groups and societies. Antony Giddens,

Sociology (4th ed) (2001) p2.

Human social life, groups and societies obviously covers a wide field, and if you look at the chapter headings of this textbook you can see just how many topics can be part of sociology:

1. What is Sociology? 2. Culture and Society 3. A Changing World

4. Social Interaction and Everyday Life5. Gender and Sexuality6. Sociology of the Body: Health, Illness and Ageing

7. Families

8. Crime and Deviance9. Race, Ethnicity and Migration10. Class, Stratification and Inequality11. Poverty, Welfare and Social Exclusion12. Modern Organizations13. Work and Economic Life14. Government and Politics15. Mass Media and Communications16. Education17. Religion18. Cities and Urban Spaces19. Population Growth and Ecological Crisis

1.3.How are we studying crime, deviance and societal response?

This course is concerned with the way that there has been a historical sequence of ideas about crime and deviance, and will present the ideas in this sequence. We will not in fact cover nearly all the different ideas and theories, but will be concerned with the main ones.

In the first part of this course we are going to be focused mostly on crime, rather than deviance, because deviance is quite a recent concept in sociology. All the earlier studies were focused on crime, or on other very specific behaviours, like suicide, but did not use the idea of deviance. We will come to deviance in Lecture Four.

Looking at earlier studies of crime, the term criminology is used more than sociology of crime. Sometimes the two terms mean the same thing. Criminology means the study of crime, but any aspect of crime at all. So when a sociologist studies crime, he or she is doing criminology. However, crime can be studied from many points of view, so a legal expert looking specifically at sentencing policies for crime, could also be called a criminologist. A psychologist looking at individual characteristics of people convicted of crime could be termed a criminologist. Anyone studying crime from any angle can be termed a criminologist. So, to repeat. a sociologist studying crime can be called a criminologist, but a criminologist is not necessarily a sociologist.

Section 2: Early History of Criminology, Sociology and other Social Sciences

2.1 The Enlightenment and Classical Criminology

The Enlightenment in Europe, 1700 1800, was a time when ideas moved away from theological views (thinking and doing whatever was said by the Bible and priests of the Church) and monarchical views (thinking and doing whatever the King or powerful people said was correct) towards independent views, ideas based on principles developed and worked out by thinking people.

In Philosophy, the Enlightenment involved philosophers like Rousseau (1712-1778) and Hume (1711 1776) trying to develop and work out the principles of how relationships between rulers and ruled should be organized. They thought about who should be rulers, why they should be rulers, on what basis could they hold power, on what basis could they make laws, what were the limits of their jurisdiction/powers. It was no longer acceptable for monarchs to rule on the basis of religious ideas, for them to have arbitrary powers or for them to be justified in their actions on the basis of traditional ideas or even on the basis of mere whims. In terms of laws, crimes and punishments, it was not acceptable for rulers to just make up new laws from day to day, or for kings or judges to punish offenders in just whatever way they felt like that day, or to maintain cruel traditional forms of punishment. ( - can think about

examples of this type of king or emperor as depicted in films.)

In Science, the Enlightenment involved trying to understand and explain the physical world in terms of empirical measurement, connected to individual thinking by inductive and deductive logic, rather than just accepting what religious books said.

THE ENLIGHTENMENT

1700 - 1800

Political, Economic, Social World

Physical World

New Political Philosophies

Physical Sciencese.g. (Rousseau, writing 1750s,Hume, writing 1760s)

Classical Criminology - Beccaria

(writing 1760s)

Criminology dates back to an Italian writer, CesareBeccaria - and because his writing is considered the first systematic writing on crime, we refer to his ideas as classical criminology.

Cesare Beccarias ideas, originally written in Italian as Dei delitti e delle pene in 1764, were widely influential throughout Europe, and were eventually fully translated into various European languages. [e.g. into English, as Essays on Crimes and Punishments (1804)]

At the time of Beccarias writing, capital punishment was used widely for not only murders and assaults, but also for forgery and for many crimes of theft, often for thefts of relatively small sums of money. In Britain, women forgers were still burnt at the stake. Transportation to the colonies (America, until the war of Independence, and then Australia) was used for those whose thefts were not quite serious enough for the death penalty. Since not nearly everyone survived the voyages to the colonies, this was actually a death penalty for some, and a lottery for everyone. Some types of capital punishment were also very gruesome, and torture was still widely used to extract confessions. In other parts of Europe, prisoners were sent to work in mines or on ships, or to penal colonies in far-off regions of the country.

Beccaria, utilizing the idea of social contract that prevailed amongst many political philosophers, considered that laws were based on a social contract between independent citizens, creating the sovereign government that made laws. The basic premise of political philosophers at this time was that all men were born equal, and with equal rights to their own life, liberty and property. Individuals gave up part of their own liberty, the liberty to do exactly what they liked, in order to gain peace and security. But they only gave up the least amount possible. The sovereign government administered the agreed laws which curtailed the total liberty of individuals, but the sovereign government was bound to administer them equitably (equally/fairly). Power was not given up by individuals in order for injustice to exist.

The laws were to be limited to what was strictly necessary, and were to be clearly written and codified so that everyone knew them. Basically they protected life, well- being and property, e.g. people were protected from other people taking their life, hurting their body or taking away their property because of the existence of laws against killing another person, physically injuring another person or taking another persons property.

If everyone acted rationally at all times, understanding the necessity of the laws, no- one would break them. Nobody wants to be hurt, so nobody hurts anyone else. Each person wants to keep their own property, so nobody takes the property of anyone else.

However, at times passions might overwhelm rationality. There would be occasions when people would think about doing harm to another or his property, and might even act on the basis of strong emotions and break the law.

Punishments would be set and written down as a deterrent measure to remind people of the consequences of breaking the law, and would be imposed on individuals as a penalty for breaking the law. However, the punishments were to be carefully worked out and limited so that they were strictly proportionate to the harm done. They were not to be unnecessarily severe only severe enough that they would deter the rational man who was contemplating a crime. This means that use of the death penalty as a punishment would not exist at all. (Although other classical theorists thought it could exist on a very limited basis.) It also means that the certainty of punishment was more important than the severity, as was the promptness of punishment.

Torture to extract a confession was completely unacceptable, as it was punishment before the fact of the crime had been established. Imprisonment before trial was basically wrong, because it was punishment before trial, but was an unfortunate necessity. Hopefully it would be limited because promptness of punishment was in fact important in order for people to understand the connections of a crime and its punishment.

In order for there to be equality, the punishment for each crime would be based on the mere fact of committing the crime. The punishment would not be reduced or increased in relation to any circumstances of the committing of the crime, or any circumstances of the individual. Having been precisely set down in law, the punishments would be meted out without regard to specific motives or mitigating circumstances, and of course without regard to the status or social position of the person who had committed the crime.

Beccarias principles, which were consistent with political changes occurring throughout Europe, were the basis of the systematic codified criminal laws that we have today. Similarly, he influenced the systematic codification of punishments, and the sense of consistency or proportionality between seriousness of a crime and severity of a punishment.

For Beccaria, legal penalties were there to deter those who had not already committed an offence, and, in the case of prison, to temporarily incapacitate those who had already done so. Humans had rational free will, and chose their actions, which was why it was necessary to dissuade them from crime by the likely punishment.

2.2Neo-Classical Criminology

However, Beccarias ideas came up against several problems:

1. the problem of inequality amongst people. If you punish theft with a fine, what do you do about the thief who has no money or possessions and steals from a much richer person? Beccarias answer was that the thief gives his or her labour in prison for a certain amount of time. But obviously that is an admission of the breakdown of his system of strict proportionality.

2. the possibility that people cannot always see things rationally. There are people who are not totally rational at any time, e.g. the mentally defective, and those who have not reached an age of rationality, e.g. children. To take account of this, the criminal laws of most countries gradually moved towards setting age limits below which one could not be charged, and other age limits (e.g. 8 16 yrs) within which one was a juvenile, not fully adult, and treated differently (usually tried in different courts, and sent to juvenile detention centers of some type, rather than to prison with adults.)

3. another possibility was that certain circumstances might mitigate in terms of why the offence was committed, e.g. self-defence. Strictly speaking for Beccaria it was only the fact of the law-breaking that was important, but in fact mitigating circumstances such as the way the offence happened, (e.g. self-defence) have come to be taken into account in modern legal systems.

All this means that the legal systems we inherit are neo-classical laws and punishments are systematically codified and in general specified punishments are proportionate to the harm done, but yet they are not applied identically in all cases. We take account of age, motivation, state of mind and so on, both in determining guilt and also in imposing punishments. Some of these mitigating circumstances have been based on the work of social scientists.

Question:

For Beccaria, the purpose of punishment is deterrence, and so is its justification.

Punishments are written in order to deter rational people, and hopefully they do not need to be used often. When they have to be used, they hopefully deter the person being punished from doing it again, and deter others from committing the same offence. They are justified (in terms of the harm they inflict on the individual) by their reasonableness in relation to the offence, by the fact that the person knew he would be punished if he committed the action.

What other ideas are there about punishment its purpose and its justification?