Criminology
LESM A305
Unit 1
The focus of criminology
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Course team Developer: Designer: Coordinator: Members: Prof. R J Harris, University of Hull Cliff Hall, OUHK Dr Garland Liu, OUHK Dr Raymond Lau, OUHK Kwan Ming Tak, Kalwan, Consultant
External Course Assessor Dr Dennis S W Wong, City University of Hong Kong Production ETPU Publishing Team
Copyright The Open University of Hong Kong, 2003, 2011. Reprinted 2013. All rights reserved. No part of this material may be reproduced in any form by any means without permission in writing from the President, The Open University of Hong Kong. Sale of this material is prohibited. The Open University of Hong Kong 30 Good Shepherd Street Ho Man Tin, Kowloon Hong Kong
This course material is printed on environmentally friendly paper.
Contents
Introduction Structure of the unit What is criminology? Criminology as theory: identifying the ‘causes’ of crime Criminology as hard science The politics of crime and punishment: meeting public demands Feedback on activities 1 3 7 24 31 38 48
Unit 1
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Introduction
First of all, it is my very great pleasure to welcome you to the course. It has been very carefully prepared with your interests in mind — as an adult professional person, based in Hong Kong and interested in learning more about criminology and penology. Although ultimately it is your commitment and ability that will (we hope) get you through, my job is to try to be as helpful to you as if we were sitting down in the same room discussing these fascinating topics together. This may seem a difficult thing to do: After all we have never met, and how, you might ask, can I possibly anticipate the problems you will have, the interests you want to pursue and the points at which you will need particular help? Well that’s a very fair question; but fortunately for both of us I have taught most (if not all) of these topics in face-to-face classroom situations over the years, and you would be surprised how often the same questions crop up and the same special interests emerge. So in writing this course, I am drawing on this experience. I am also drawing on the times I have written units just like this at my own university and supported students who have found bits of them difficult. So although I can’t hope to be sensitive to any personal ‘highs and lows’ you may have, I will do my best to steer you through the tricky bits. And I am going to try to do this in a way that makes the course interesting and stimulating while ensuring that the level of difficulty is one you can manage. I can’t promise to make everything that follows easy, but I can try to help you rise to the challenge and, above all, be successful. I hope that before too long we shall have become firm friends, because the trip we are about to make together is quite long. Sometimes in the course the terrain will be rough, and sometimes you will need a compass if you are not to get lost. My job is to be your guide — and I have a very reliable compass in my pocket. To begin your study, this unit: • • explains the problem in defining and measuring crime; examines the causation of crime and discusses the multidisciplinary nature of criminology; discusses the history and the use of science to the study of crime; analyses the politics of crime and punishment and considers critically the themes and debates in the field; and evaluates the contribution of criminology to the control and management of crime and criminals.
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To prepare you for what is to come, I would like you to attempt the first activity which is about the ‘multidisciplinary nature of criminology’.
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Activity 1.1
Please spend up to ten minutes on the following activity. 1 This unit aims to help you demonstrate that you understand the ‘multidisciplinary’ nature of criminology. Three disciplines involved in criminology are sociology, philosophy and politics. Can you think of at least three other disciplines that might be relevant to the study of criminology? Write down briefly why an understanding of these disciplines might help you with the study of criminology. Do you consider anyone of these disciplines more important than the others? Do you think these disciplines are equally applicable to Hong Kong?
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I hope you found this activity helpful. It is the first of a number of activities in which I will invite you to take part. As we proceed, I shall try to engage your interest and encourage you to check out your developing knowledge with some more. But don’t worry if you don’t get the same answers as I have, because sometimes — and Activity 1.1 is an example — there are many possible answers and they can all be right! When this is not the so, though, I will make it clear and suggest you go back over your learning to make sure you understood it properly.
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Structure of the unit
This unit is in four sections, as follows:
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What is criminology?
This section explains and discusses: • some of the main definitions of crime that scholars have suggested; this will help us appreciate the range of contributory disciplines we may encounter; and some of the measurement problems criminologists face when addressing such matters as the amount of crime that is committed and the nature and apparent effects of punishment. We also look at some of the ways researchers have tried to solve them.
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2 Criminology as theory: identifying the causes of crime
This section introduces you to the more detailed work we will do in later units. Here, I do not go into detail but give you a broad overview of the range of contributions to criminology. Try and think of this as a route map that tells you how to get to a city. The later units are the detailed street maps you will need to get to a specific address once you have arrived in the city. I also introduce a critical edge, however, for the very fact that criminology contains so many competing ideas and beliefs should show us that there might be a problem. As you will see from the references for this section, Jock Young very rudely (but also amusingly) calls arguments about this kind of thing ‘incessant chatter’ (Young 1994). Of course if every discipline could make an agreed contribution to explaining different crimes, all would be well. But we shall see that it is not always like that. And there’s a further point. Have you noticed that although there are lots of criminologists studying crime, there’s an awful lot of crime still about? Have you ever asked yourself what they are all doing? For example, if we compare the success of criminology with that of, say, public health medicine over the last 100 years or so, we cannot really claim that criminology has done too well. We are going to think about why this is: Is it that criminologists are less good at their job than public health scientists are? Or is there something different about what those jobs are? Read on, and you will find out!
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Criminology as hard science
In this section, we look at the history and current practice of using hard science to the study of crime. (We do not look at topics like the developing role of DNA in crime detection and prosecution because, interesting and exciting though these are, this course is not about policing.) We consider historically attempts to apply hard science to
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explaining and predicting crime as well as a number of recent and current developments in forensic criminology.
4
The politics of crime and punishment: meeting public demands
I shall begin by reminding you that everyone — even scholars like you and me — have irrational prejudices and incorrect beliefs about crime. It is very important indeed for all of us to try to set these prejudices to one side and look rationally and ‘scientifically’ at crime and punishment. But this is only half the story, because in many countries crime and punishment are politically very sensitive (think about the politics behind the ‘licensing of authorized soccer betting’ and ‘Implement Article 23 of the Basic Law’ in Hong Kong), and (in democratic societies) governments have to respond to public pressure which precisely reflects the irrational prejudices and incorrect beliefs of others. Although it would be wrong to claim that public policy is driven by prejudice and error, it is certainly influenced by them. And if knowledge fails to change popular errors, public policy cannot be wholly scientific. In this section I introduce you to the politics of crime and punishment, including populist politics, public opinion, pressure groups and the role of the media. In addition, as with all areas of public policy, criminal legislation is politically determined and legally implemented.
Reading
In this introductory unit, you do not have to do very much additional reading, because I would like you to spend most of your time studying the material that follows. Some of it is background information, which you need to understand before you move on to more detailed study; other parts of it we look at later in greater detail. • The one book (below) that I ask you to look at is Coleman and Moynihan. This is a very straightforward and clearly written book about different kinds of criminal statistics. This is an important area to which I introduce you only briefly. I deal in some detail with the paper by Schwendinger and Schwendinger. Although it would be useful for you to read it, you will be able to follow the argument well enough from the information I provide. Third, I should like to draw your attention to the important book by Wilson and Herrnstein. It is long but clearly written. It has been controversial because the authors are more conservative in their approach than many criminologists and are especially influenced by both empirical studies and psychological research. You do not need to read any of it in detail for this unit, though you may enjoy looking at the book as a whole and browsing through any chapters that interest you.
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Finally, I should like to mention Vold, Bernard and Snipes. This is an excellent textbook. If there is one book you should consider buying for the first few units of this course, it is this. I refer to it repeatedly in later units.
I have listed below seven books, which you will meet again later. With the exception of Coleman and Moynihan, I have deliberately not given you chapters or pages to read. If you learn what follows thoroughly and look at the pages of Coleman and Moynihan that I introduce later, you will have done everything required of you for this unit. Beirne, P (1993) Inventing Criminology: Essays on the Rise of ‘Homo Criminalis’, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (This is an absolutely fascinating book. It is quite detailed, and occasionally difficult, but interesting for anyone interested in the history of scientific criminology. I tell you more about it in Unit 3.) Coleman, C and Moynihan, J (1996) Understanding Crime Data: Haunted by the Dark Figure, Buckingham: Open University Press. (A good basic text. I shall be directing you to some pages from this book later in this unit. It is worth considering for purchase.) Fink, A E (1938) The Causes of Crime: Biological Theories in the United States, 1800–1915, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. (An extraordinary account of some early biological approaches to crime.) Schwendinger, H and Schwendinger, J (1970) ‘Defenders of order or guardians of human rights?’ in Taylor, I Walton, P and Young, J (eds) (1995) Critical Criminology Issues in Criminology, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 5, 123–57. (I give you a short summary of this paper in this unit. You also have an activity related to it. It is a very left-wing approach to criminal law, and it will be helpful for you to form a view on whether you agree or disagree with the line they take.) Bernard, T, Snipes, J and Gerould, A (2010) Vold’s Theoretical Criminology, 6th edn, New York: Oxford University Press. (This an excellent textbook, which is recommended for purchase. Even though I am not going to require you to read the introductory Chapter 1 for this unit, it will be useful if you want some more basic theoretical discussion on criminology. It tells you in a rather systematic and yet straightforward way the major types of explanation for crimes, what it is in criminology that is scientific, interdisciplinary and what causation means. A good basic text to begin this course with.) Wilson, J Q and Herrnstein, R (1985) Crime and Human Nature: The Definitive Study of the Causes of Crime, New York: Simon and Schuster (See above. I mention this excellent book in future
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units. If you can get hold of it, you may enjoy browsing through parts of it, but you are not required to do so for this unit.) Young, J (1994) ‘Incessant chatter: recent paradigms in criminology’ in Maguire, M, Morgan, R and Reiner, R (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Criminology, 1st edn, Oxford: The Clarendon Press. (An interesting paper, to which I refer several times. You do not have to read it, but if your English is quite good you may enjoy doing so.)
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What is criminology?
In this first section we examine and discuss: • • different definitions of crime and some measurement problems in crime and punishment — the socalled statistics of crime — and how and to what extent criminologists have managed to solve them.
What is crime?
In one sense, crime and punishment are the easiest things in the world to define. I will make an attempt to set down what you know — and everyone else knows — to be the correct definitions of crime and punishment. A crime is an act which was deliberately committed and which was at the time contrary to the law. Punishment is a legally sanctioned penalty for crime, imposed, in accordance with the law, on someone convicted of having committed such a crime.
Activity 1.2 How do I define crime and punishment?
Before reading on please spend ten minutes thinking very hard about these definitions and whether you agree with them. If you have any doubts or disagreements about either of them, write down what they are. If you think they are absolutely correct, write that down too. Spend a further ten minutes more or so thinking even harder along the other direction of the definition of crime. Is it possible to regard a crime as an act that was deliberately omitted? Try to name some crimes along the following matrix. (a) Crimes that are intentionally performed (c) Crimes that are intentionally omitted (b) Crimes that are unintentionally performed (d) Crimes that are unintentionally omitted
There are some examples at the end of the unit to see if you have recognized any of them. You will start to realize the different dimensions involved in defining what crime is. When you have completed this section, I shall remind you to look again at what you have written and identify any changes. This will help you identify what you have learned.
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The problem is that these definitions do not take us very far in understanding what either crime or punishment is. Let’s just deal with crime and try to find some problems with the definition I have just given you. We begin by introducing you to an important distinction.
Necessity and sufficiency
One possible way of proceeding is to distinguish between necessity and sufficiency. In other words, it may be necessary for the conditions in our definition of crime to be met, but those conditions may not be sufficient to make our definition satisfactory. Spend a moment thinking about these ideas before proceeding, because if you are not clear what they mean you will not understand what follows. If you are still not sure, ask a friend or look the words up in a good dictionary. Now that you know what necessity and sufficiency mean, let us turn again to our definition of crime (focus on the given definition), in order to decide whether its conditions are necessary for an act to be considered a crime. You will have noticed that our definition contains two main points: • • The act must have been committed deliberately. It must have been against the law at the time.
For an act to be a crime it must have been deliberate. This means an accidental act cannot be a crime. But is this true? Let’s take two scenarios: Scenario 1: You go into a shop, pick up an item and walk out of the shop holding it — quite openly — because you have genuinely forgotten to pay. You have forgotten because you have been distracted by a friend who has just called your mobile to say a family member had been badly hurt in an accident. Scenario 2: That same mobile phone call came when you were driving your car. In a panic, you drove at great speed towards the hospital where your injured relative had been taken. You were desperate to get there quickly, and you accidentally swerved the car into a pedestrian, whom you hit head-on. The pedestrian died instantly. In either of these situations you could reasonably argue that your action was not deliberate: You didn’t intend to steal the item, and you certainly didn’t intend to kill anyone. So are you, or are you not, a criminal? Well, the answer to this lies in good part in the wording of the law in the country where you committed the crime. It also lies in how that law is interpreted by significant decision-makers including (in particular) the police or whichever organization decides on whether to prosecute in the country in question. So, the word ‘deliberate’ is beginning to look a bit trickier than we expected, and certainly these matters are not always very consistently
Unit 1
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applied. In Scenario 1, there is a reasonable chance that if you could prove you had had the distressing phone call, the shop might decide not to take action. But there is no guarantee of this. For example, the more valuable the item you had taken the less likely it is that the shop would take that line. So if you walked out of (say) Bossini with a $50 pair of jeans, you might get away with it; but if you took a $50,000 work of art from an expensive gallery in Central or Mid-Levels, you might not be so lucky! But even if you took only the jeans, if Bossini had had a recent increase in shoplifting rates the company might have decided, as a matter of policy, to take a hard line and prosecute everyone. So, by walking out of the shop with an unpaid-for item, you have put yourself in the hands of other people and they will make a human decision about what to do with you. In Scenario 2, the fact that you caused death by dangerous driving would mean that you would almost certainly be prosecuted and almost certainly convicted. Any discretion exercised there would be with what, exactly, you would be charged. But from what we have seen you would, at the very least, be guilty of recklessness. After all, if you were not in a fit state to drive you should have taken a cab, and the fact you were in a distressed state will not bring your victim back to life. So, public and victim pressure would be immense if you were not prosecuted or acquitted on the ground that your action was not ‘deliberate’. So, perhaps acting deliberately isn’t after all a necessary precondition for a crime to have been committed. Let us look at this a little further.
The meaning of ‘deliberate’
You will have noticed that the issue underlying Scenarios 1 and 2 is identical, but because Scenario 2 is much more serious you are almost certain to be taken to court. In Scenario 1, there is a chance you might not be. This is the first clue that the law does not always operate rationally or consistently. So although our definition looked simple, when we turn to possible ‘real-life’ scenarios, things start to get complicated. The reason is that a number of new factors come into play, for which a simple definition cannot allow. In particular: • Our apparently simple criterion — deliberate — is actually not so simple after all. Let me explain why. To understand this you need to appreciate the difference between absolute and relative concepts: An absolute concept is an ‘either-or’ situation. Things are black or white, guilty or not guilty, they go forward or backward, and there is nothing in between — you cannot be a bit guilty or a bit white — you are either guilty (or white) or you are not! A relative concept, by contrast, allows for variations of degree. So with a relative concept you can be half-right and half-wrong; you can be a bit silly, or half mad and even fairly intelligent. So a relative concept lets us judge the amount of something — and that amount doesn’t have to be 100%.
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•
So if we look at our definition of a crime, we will see that for an act to be a crime it must have been ‘deliberate’. This probably makes us think of an absolute concept, as though when we do something it must be either deliberate or an accident, and no space is allowed for anything else between the two. But when we look at the scenarios, we discover that this may not be true: Perhaps we were distracted, emotional, angry, drunk, drugged or just forgetful. This would suggest that our actions were ‘a bit deliberate’, but not completely so. And we have learned that if this is so, it does not exempt us from the law. This gives us another problem. Once we see something as being only partly ‘deliberate’, we need someone to decide how deliberate the crime was, because this affects both the charge and the sentence. Making this decision is called using discretion: For example, if you are a police officer and you see a man hit another man, you have to decide whether what he did was serious enough for you to arrest him. If you later describe this to a friend or colleague you could say, ‘I used my discretion and decided not to do anything about it’; or (of course) ‘I used my discretion and decided to arrest him. Can you think of another situation in which you could use this expression?
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Discretion is exercised at different points in the criminal justice process. If you are leaving Bossini with the unpaid-for jeans and are seen by a staff member, that staff member will use his or her discretion about whether or not to stop you. This decision may be influenced by personal as well as professional considerations. Some of the factors that may influence how the staff member uses his or her discretion are: Do you look as though you might be aggressive? Has the worker had a bad day? Does he or she feel loyalty to the company? If the worker does stop you, the store manager will use his or her discretion about whether to call the police. This decision is likely to depend on factors such as: store policy and how convincingly you argue that you did not mean to steal the jeans. That is a second level of discretion even before then police know anything about the incident! Then, third, if the police are called, they in turn must decide whether to prosecute you and if so what charge to lay (there are often several
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charges that can be made). And so it goes on right through to the sentence you receive and, if you go to prison, when you are released. • We have learned that discretion is often not used in an entirely consistent or rational way. For example, when thinking about whether to prosecute or not the police will reflect on the political consequences of their decision. So, Bossini can better afford to lose a pair of jeans than the family of a road death victim can afford to lose a loved one. As a result, the likely consequences of a decision being made in respect of the same problem but in different circumstances will be entirely different. Many factors like sympathy for you; the likelihood of gaining a conviction; how sorry, upset and ashamed you seem to be; and whether you have a criminal record will affect the use of discretion. The law does not operate as simply as the definition suggests. But what we can say is that the minute you walked out of that shop with unpaid-for goods, you put your future reputation in the hands of others; you cannot be sure they will make a rational or consistent decision about what to do with you. • There is one further point. Many people believe that because discretion is not always exercised fairly, systematic discrimination operates in the criminal justice system against some categories of offender. Discrimination is a situation in which an unfair decision is made on the basis of prejudice or dislike and not because of something relevant to the case. Suppose you were a police officer and you very much disliked illegal immigrants (IIs). You arrested two people for the same offence: One was an II and one was a Hong Kong citizen. But you acted unfairly towards the II simply because he was an II and not because of what he had done. That would be discrimination. Systematic discrimination is many other people in the police force doing the same thing, so that statistically it can be shown that IIs (or any other group — for example the homeless, drug addicts, women) can be shown to be treated more harshly than others for reasons not connected with their crime. This goes against what many people think is a basic principle of justice, examined in Unit 2 — that the same crime should attract the same punishment. Rethink (c) and (d) in Activity 1.2. Apart from the meaning of ‘deliberate’, the meaning of ‘act’ can be equally absolute or relative. It may be an overt and observable behaviour or a covert act of failing to
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perform a lawful behaviour, the omission of which is an offence. Let’s deal with the issue of ‘deliberate’ further.
Contrary to the law?
Even if the word ‘deliberate’ presents a problem, surely there can be no doubt that a crime must be against the law. How can you have a crime that is not against the law? Surely any such idea would be ridiculous. On the whole I happen to think it is ridiculous, but not all criminologists agree with me — and perhaps you won’t either when I have explained why they think the way they do. Then you can make up your mind: After all, I don’t mind if you disagree with me as long as your arguments are sound; and you might even be able to persuade me that I am wrong. As you will see, there are some very good arguments against my position. For example, think of the situation in countries: • where the ‘rule of law’ is weak or non-existent, and judges — who should ideally be able to make their decisions free of political pressure — are subject to strong political pressure to deal severely with some criminals and leniently with others. In some rural parts of China, where judges often have low social status and few educational qualifications, there have been many cases of criminals avoiding prosecution by sheltering under the guanxi umbrella of Beijing officials. In some African countries, judges are political appointees who stand to lose their jobs if they produce politically inconvenient decisions; and where the state itself acts not as protector of the people but as their oppressor. In some countries, corruption is rife and laws are intended not to deal with everyone equally, but to protect the powerful from prosecution or enable them to build up large fortunes at the expense of the people. In one famous example, President Trujillo, who ran the Dominican Republic until the early 1960s, took over the country’s only shoe factory and immediately passed a law forbidding anyone in the capital from going barefoot!
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This extreme example reminds us that ‘the law’ is not divinely given but created by powerful people with their own interests to protect. This has led many criminologists, particularly those with a sociological (especially a Marxist) background, to attack the belief that a ‘crime’ must be against the law and to say that the law itself is designed by the ruling élite to maintain their power and status. When the law is not ‘just’ — when, say, it punishes poor people stealing to live and ignores rich people stealing to get even richer — we might say that ‘crime’ has less to do with ‘breaking the law’ than with ‘making the law’. When environmental degradation is legal (because big business wants it to be), and when presidents put billions of dollars into foreign bank accounts (because they ensure that no law exists to stop them or because they can prevent a law being enforced) some criminologists get angry when people say all crime involves law-breaking. To Marxists in particular, the maintenance of the capitalist system is dependent on encouraging a
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competitive acquisitiveness among ordinary people. If consumers do not consume, workers do not work, and we all lurch into economic depression. Hence marketing and advertising strategies are all geared to persuading people that they really need the latest designer labels, perfumes or cars; so is it, such criminologists ask, any surprise that when people cannot afford these luxury items they steal them? The sociological criminologists give us the valuable insight that we should examine law’s intentions and remind ourselves that all laws are created by politicians and that they may, therefore, have a political purpose. But whether we agree with this Marxist analysis is very much a matter of personal choice: As it happens, I do not; but I don’t at all mind if you do! In my own view, if we say that some ‘crimes’ are not against the law and that some things that are against the law are not crimes because the law is unjust, we end up getting very muddled indeed. I think it is simpler to accept that some countries are fundamentally corrupt and unjust according to international standards than to say that some parts of some laws are not valid. And it is not a good idea to confuse acts that are crimes with acts that we happen to believe ought to be crimes but are not. The motives of criminologists who develop this kind of argument are themselves political. We shall see later that many sociological criminologists in particular believe that because laws are political, so is crime; and so, therefore, should be the analysis of crime — or criminology. To such writers, criminologists cannot be neutral observers, but are unavoidably participants in a political battle between an oppressive state and poor and marginal people whose crimes reflect not individual misbehaviour but their oppressed class position. Such criminologists will judge each other not only — and perhaps not even especially — by the scientific quality or analytic rigour of their work, but by whether they side with the oppressors or the oppressed. Once again I am afraid, my own position is much more conservative than this. I do believe we can exercise sensible judgement about crime in a fair and reasoned way; and — even if we are not perfect and sometimes get it wrong — it is better to try to be balanced than not to try. But again, you may or may not agree with me. Well, I expect that by now you are surprised that from such a simple definition of crime (an act deliberately committed and which was at the time contrary to the law) we have ended up having such a complicated discussion. I think it is time to recap what we have said, so that you can follow the argument clearly. But before I do, you might like to hear from one pair of radical criminologists, in their own words. After all, I have already told you I do not really agree with them, so you may be worried that my version of what they say is likely to be unfair. And, you may well be right. So, why not read them for yourself and decide for yourself whom to believe? Have a look at Schwendinger and Schwendinger (1970), a famous paper that argues for a human rights-based definition of crime. Do you find this a convincing line of argument? Here are the main points they make:
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•
In the 1930s, the criminologist Thorsten Sellin argued that for the scientific study of crime to be possible, it was necessary for criminologists themselves, not politicians, to define the meaning of crime (at least for scientific study). He felt this should be done in relation to ‘conduct norms’ (i.e. people’s behaviour towards each other) which are fairly constant across time and place, and not by laws, which vary widely. In the 1940s, another criminologist, Edwin Sutherland, did a famous study of ‘white-collar crime’ (crimes committed by professional people). He found that many of the ‘crimes’ he investigated were not classified as crimes at all, because they were committed by powerful people. Whereas Sellin put forward scientific reasons for criminologists to determine what was criminal, Sutherland put forward moral ones — the crimes of the powerful hurt people, but the law failed to acknowledge this. A third criminologist, Paul Tappan, disputed both arguments and claimed that criminals were not criminals unless they had broken the law. The authors attack his position strongly, by saying that it leaves out criminals who have not been adjudicated and includes the victims of miscarriages of justice. The authors admit, grudgingly, that Tappan has ‘won the day’ and that as a result ‘the science of criminology . . . [is] determined by agents of the political State because legalistic definitions of crime are formulated by these agents’. There is then quite a long theoretical debate about these opposing approaches, which you do not need to study in full for the purposes of this course. The authors then say they do not have enough space to offer their own alternative but will outline some principles behind it, which will stimulate debate. They believe ‘human rights’ could be a criterion: ‘To defend human rights, criminologists must be able to sufficiently identify the violations of these rights . . . If the right to be secure in one’s own person is to have greater value than social inequalities based on the ownership of property, for example, then one should be prepared to define the use of deadly force on the part of police officers as unjustifiable homicide when this force is used in defence of property . . . many forms of behaviour, including those now defined as crimes without victims or crimes of consumption, would not be defined as crimes within this new perspective’. They also believe that ‘social systems’ should be able to be considered criminal, as well as individuals. They are vague
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about what they mean, but probably they have in mind poorquality services for the poor and oppressive structures like the very limited schemes of income support available to them: ‘. . . the science of crime has gone beyond the centuries-old notion that crime can be conceived as a function of the properties of atomistic individuals alone . . . the social conditions must become the object of social policy . . . it is not an individual or a loose collection of atomistic individuals which is to be controlled, but rather the social relationships between individuals which give rise to criminal behaviour’. • They conclude with an impassioned comment on the criminality of nations, suggesting that the people we normally consider criminals are in fact victims of injustice and oppression: ‘. . . hundreds of thousands of Indo-Chinese persons are being denied their right to live; millions of black people are subjected to inhuman conditions which, on the average, deny them ten years of life . . . Is there any wonder why we have raised questions about the legalistic definitions of crime when the magnitude of ‘social injury’ caused by imperialism, racism, sexism and poverty is compared to that wrought by individual acts which the State legally defines as crimes?’
Well, what do you think? Do you find this kind of impassioned argument convincing? Do you believe they are right to equate one kind of political behaviour criminal? Though their attack is on social conditions in the US, you can assume that if they were writing about Hong Kong today they would make some rather similar comments. Do you think that would be justified? Is the Hong Kong Government criminal? The choice is yours! This dispute is important enough for you to express a view. There is no ‘right answer’ though, so think hard and decide on how to answer the following question — and remember, you will get no extra marks for agreeing with me! In fact, the arguments on the other side are so strong that sometimes I don’t even agree with myself.
Activity 1.3 Criminology and politics
Spend 15 minutes summarizing the arguments for and against the position that criminologists should be actively politically engaged in studying crime. Please add any thoughts you have had that have not been included in the unit. Which of the arguments do you agree with so far? Why?
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Conclusion
My own argument in this first part of Section 1 goes as follows: • We began with a simple definition of crime: It is an act which was deliberately committed and which was at the time contrary to the law. The first limb of this definition is that it was deliberate. This presented us with our first problem, because we discovered that ‘deliberation’ is a relative not an absolute concept: Often we are not either wholly rational or wholly irrational but somewhere between the two. As a result, many people exercise human judgement about specific acts. These judgements may not always be rational, but they are important because they help determine whether an ‘act’ (including both acting out behaviour and omission of the performance of a behaviour) is classified as a ‘crime’. Hence it is wrong to regard such a classification as purely objective. The necessity of discretion often leads to suggestions of systematic discrimination against certain categories of offender, in respect of whom, it is claimed, decision-makers are consistently tougher (or more lenient) than they are to others. The second limb of our definition is that a crime must be against the law. This also proved more contentious than we might have expected; many criminologists point out that the law may be unfair, corrupt, non-existent or oppressive. So if we follow a legally based definition of ‘crime’, we may have to call someone a ‘criminal’ when in fact he or she simply has powerful enemies and has not committed any ‘crime’ at all. In such a situation, the law itself may be ‘criminal’ in the sense that it has been created to protect powerful vested interests. It may be unjust in its construction (the ‘crimes’ of the powerful are not against the law) or in its execution (the law is not enforced against the powerful). Powerful people may range from politicians to major corporations guilty of social irresponsibility in environmental or health and safety matters.
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Unit 1
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The line of argument that crimes are not against the law can only be coherent if there is assumed to exist some natural law overriding state law. So we may believe that human beings have certain inalienable rights, even if those rights are not really enforced. Radical criminologists often believe that because law and crime are political, they, too, have a responsibility to be political, standing up for the interests of the poor. Schwendinger and Schwendinger were given as an example of this approach. Others (and I am one) think this confuses two issues, the analytic and the political, and that though, as private citizens, criminologists can lobby all they like for what they believe in, as professional criminologists they should do their best to be dispassionate and fair.
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Some measurement problems with crimes
A crucial part of understanding crime is knowing how it is measured and the problems that arise in trying to measure it. You will already have learned that this is not as simple a process as you might think. I have broken the news to you that if you have accidentally killed someone by driving your car dangerously, you will be very likely to be taken to court and convicted. But I have also said that if you have removed an inexpensive item of clothing from a shop in a fit of absent-mindedness, you might just get away with it (though please do not try!). Of course there are many reasons why what I call probably criminal acts do not end up as convictions. Here are the main ones and some of the reasons why such a passage of an act through the criminal justice process stops at a particular point. If you think carefully, you will probably be able to identify many more. No one knows the act happened Many crimes remain entirely secret. Shops do not know of every incident of shoplifting, nor do employers know if their employees have been stealing from work. In many minor assaults, the victim is unaware that he or she is, technically, possibly a crime victim. Insurance frauds, pickpocketing, many motoring offences and so on are entirely unknown to anyone except the criminal. Sometimes, the victim may be a young child; sometimes even the criminal doesn’t know he or she has committed a crime. No one reports it to the police I wonder if you have ever been a victim of a crime and decided not to tell the police? Many people have, and for minor crimes this is often perfectly sensible (if not very public-spirited). The police lack the human resources to hunt down every petty thief, the act of reporting a crime and having to make a statement is inconvenient, and if you are not covered by
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insurance (and do not have a monetary motive) you may simply decide not to bother. But there are other more serious reasons why victims might not report a crime. These range from blackmail to fear of reprisals, from trauma to fear of arrest or mistrust of the police. As you will see in Unit 9, a surprisingly high proportion of victims are themselves offenders; and contrary to popular belief, unprovoked attacks on old ladies are the exception not the rule. Nonetheless, this is not to be critical of most victims. For example, it has been estimated that in the United Kingdom less than 1% of all rape leads to a conviction (though we should, for reasons that will become clear in Unit 6 and which you may anyway be able to guess, be cautious about this figure). Rape that is not reported to the police is frequently what is called ‘intimate rape’ rather than ‘stranger rape’ — the victim and the offender know each other (either socially or through work) and may have been dating or cohabiting. The police decide not to take any further action There are many reasons why the police might decide not to record a crime that has been reported to them. Sometimes (in English slang) they ‘cuff’ it (meaning write it on the cuff of their sleeve but not in the official record). They might think the complainant is lying or exaggerating. They might know from past experience that the person is likely to retract his or her statement or refuse to attend court. They might be too busy to take action. They might be under political pressure to show reduced crime figures. They might be lazy or corrupt (though syndicate corruption is, fortunately, now rare among police in Hong Kong and the United Kingdom). The police record the incident but no prosecution follows The most obvious reason for this is that the police don’t catch the criminal, but there are other factors too. For example, the police may know very well who committed the crime, but witnesses have been bribed or are too scared to testify (recently it has become clear that intimidation of witnesses is a very serious problem in the UK). Or they [or the organization that decides whether to charge someone when it is not the police — in the UK it is a separate Crown Prosecution Service (CPS)] may simply rate the chances of a conviction as too low. Occasionally (and sometimes mysteriously) it is announced that to prosecute someone would not be ‘in the public interest’. The defendant is acquitted This is fairly self-explanatory.
Unit 1
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Official Statistics
Reading 1.1
Coleman and Moynihan’s Understanding Crime Data is a very clear introductory book which sets out in greater detail some of the important things you need to know about crime measurement. Originally, you are required to read the section entitled ‘The social construction of crime statistics’, from pp. 32–39. However, because of copyright restriction, we are not able to print all the above pages for you. Instead, we make pp. 34–39 as Reading 1.1 for you. A copy of the full article from pp. 32–39 is placed in the Reserve Section of the Library. Anyway, this section begins by covering some of the same materials we have discussed above, though in a slightly different way. Let me briefly summarize the ‘missing’ pages’ for you here. What the authors mean by the social construction of official statistics is that: the ‘very definitions of crime are themselves the result of wider social processes, sometimes ancient, sometimes recent, which reflect religious, political and other considerations, and which provide the framework in which the statistics of crime are created’. Therefore, the production of official statistics shall be examined as a social process. They then divide the compilation of official statistics into 4 stages: discovery, reporting, recording and ‘clearing up’. With regard to the stage of ‘discovery’, the authors thought that it is misleading to think that ‘all crimes are ‘out there’ and easily recognizable to anyone.’ There are occasions when there are no victims or the victims are unaware that crimes have been committed. Studies from Britain reveal that about 77% to 96% of official statistics were discovered by the public in various guises such as victims, witnesses, representatives of victimized organizations and the police. The police role in discovery is much more prominent in many ‘non-notifiable’ victimless offences relating to drugs, prostitution, drunkenness and public order. With regard to reporting, those who initially discover crimes are likely also the ones who report them to the police, Therefore, we have to take into account the role played by such agents as victims, witnesses, store detectives, caretakers, security staff………in the production of crime statistics. It should be noticed that the proportion of different offences reported varied widely. For example, vandalism is far less likely to be reported than motor vehicle theft. There are different reasons: the offence was too trivial, the police could not do anything, or that it was dealt with privately. However, the authors remind us that crime is such a varied category with a range of reasons for reporting or not. We have to seek to understand the particular circumstances (social context), sets of relationships (nature of relationship between the offenders, victims or the ‘discoverers’),
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associated experiences of harm and assessments of what can be done about the crime (expectations of police reaction or performance, insurance policies held), embarrassment or fear about any possible consequences of reporting (such as reprisal ………..). Now, I shall leave you to go through the remaining part of the reading from pp. 34–39 starting with the ‘recording’ stage. Before you start reading, I would like to mention that the authors keep referring to ‘BCS’. This is short for the British Crime Survey, a very big survey of victims of crime held periodically. As you read, please pay particular attention to pp. 35–36, where the authors discuss three reasons why crimes that have been reported might not be recorded. This is much more detailed than the account I gave, but is there anything in my account that they do not mention?
Crime data generated from situations like this are called official statistics. In other words, the figures come from official sources and reflect the crimes that the criminal justice agencies know (or are told) about. But criminologists have long been aware that the gap between crimes committed and data of this kind is immense. In particular, the random and patterned irregularities that occur, combined with changes over time in agency recording and public reporting, render many of these data of very limited use. Accordingly, for many years, criminologists have experimented with ways of collecting information about crimes that have been committed, not about those that have been reported or recorded. This is not easy to do. How would you go about it?
Self-report studies
One idea has been to ask criminals what crimes they have committed but ‘got away with’. Of course there is an obvious problem with this: You are asking dishonest people to be honest! Criminals who don’t trust researchers (I expect many of them fall into this category) would say they hadn’t committed offences that they had. Conversely, those who did trust the researcher and wanted to show off (especially likely if the offender is a young man and the researcher an attractive girl!) might say they had committed offences that they hadn’t. Researchers are, however, aware of this kind of methodological problem and have tried lots of ways of making responses anonymous, for example by having subjects drop their answers into a box. Tactics like this do not, however, solve the third problem: Many offenders, who almost certainly do not keep a diary, will simply have forgotten. This makes the self-help method very tricky, because we know (though the figures vary) that a very small number of repeat offenders commit a very high proportion of crimes. Some youngsters have committed hundreds of them! So the most prolific offenders, because they have the most to forget, will be the least reliable.
Unit 1
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Reading 1.2
Coleman and Moynihan also discuss self-report studies in their book. They first make it clear that self report studies involve asking people directly about their involvement in criminal and other forms of rulebreaking behaviour by means of a self-completed questionnaire or an interview. They then maintain that different objectives have different implication for the design of self-report studies, the instruments employed and the use of the findings. They then go ahead to give three examples of objectives. Now, you shall read pp. 47–48. After the examples of objectives, you shall read pp. 60–68 on methodological problems followed by the conclusion. For this part, they first define the two issues for consideration: ‘validity’ and ‘reliability’. For validity, they use the definition by Huizinga and Elliot (1986: 308): ‘the evidence that the test measures what it was intended to measure or that it represents what it appears to represents’. From p. 60 onwards, you will find further elaboration on ‘validity’ and the definition for ‘reliability’ and you shall just go ahead to read for yourself. As you read, make a careful note of why you think self-report studies can be useful and what you think their main limitations are. Notice also that in the Conclusion the authors refer to Steven Box. Box is another radical criminologist and you will see that he is arguing, just as Schwendinger and Schwendinger did in the last section, to get away from a legal definition of crime. I don’t think, though, that his views as reported here add anything to those we have already discussed. Do you?
Victimization surveys
Because of the problems with self-report studies, they have declined in popularity in the United Kingdom (though they continue to be quite popular in the United States) and have been mainly replaced by victim studies. You are far more likely to remember (and to be honest about it) if you have been a crime victim than if you have been a multiple offender, whether or not you reported your victimization. Accordingly, both in the UK and (rather earlier) in the US, governments commissioned large household surveys of victims. The data from these studies [especially the British Crime Survey (BCS), which has been repeated regularly and has, since 2001, been an annual event] have been very helpful to criminologists as well as absolutely fascinating. BCS, now based on a huge ‘sweep’ of some 40,000 respondents, does not just ‘count’ crimes, enabling statisticians to work out with greater reliability than before the proportion of probably criminal acts reported to the police (which varies both by crime and by victim type) but offers an indepth picture of victimization and victim behaviour.
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LESM A305 Major Issues in Criminology and Penology
Reading 1.3
Once again, Coleman and Moynihan provide more detailed information than I can here. If you can read all of Chapter 4, you will be the better for it. If you would like to concentrate on the most important parts of the chapter, though, please read at least pp. 74–82 (‘Methodological issues’) and pp. 86–88 (‘Local surveys’). These can be very valuable means of gaining good information about criminal patterns in unusual areas that might be lost by the huge sweeps of national surveys such as BCS. Local surveys answer quite different questions from national surveys. Can you think of a situation in which using a local survey would be a good idea? Do please pay particular attention to the danger of these surveys being misused by local activists who prepare bad questions designed to produce the answers they want! Note: Due to copyright restriction, we are not able to give you the proposed reading. A copy of it is kept in the Library (Reserve Section) for your reference. A substitute article by Williams is given. Now read pp. 84–91 of Williams’ book entitled Textbook on Criminology. Though the discussion in the substitute article is not as thorough and sophisticated, it includes most of the points made by Coleman and Moynihan.
You have come to know something about the BCS, which is a model of official statistics with a lot of international recognition. Now it is time for your last activity in this section. You have to look a little more closely at how official statistics are being recorded in Hong Kong.
Activity 1.4 How the ‘addict population’ is measured in Hong Kong
Find a copy of the half-yearly report published by the Central Registry of Drug Abuse, Narcotics Division, Government Secretariat, HKSAR. Find out how the addict population is being counted. Do you think it really records the number of drug abusers?
Unit 1
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Conclusion
In this second part of Section 1, I hope you have learned the following main points: • From the moment a crime is committed, the criminal justice process filters it in such a way that only a tiny proportion of crimes committed ever come to official notice. Some crimes are completely unknown to everyone — sometimes even to the criminal. Some are known about but not reported to the police. Some are reported but not recorded by the police. Some are recorded by the police but do not proceed to trial. Some proceed to trial but result in an acquittal. This shows us that the system is not a very effective way of dealing with crime: In some offences, an absolutely tiny proportion lead to a conviction. In rape, for example, it has been estimated that less than one in 100 results in a conviction — and although this figure should not be regarded as reliable, it certainly indicates that a problem exists. It also shows us that a problem exists with official statistics too: They only reveal the ‘tip of the iceberg’. As a result of this, criminologists have developed two main tools of measurement: self-report studies and victimization studies. These methods of measurement have different advantages and limitations; today, most experts in the UK prefer victimization studies. The BCS provides a fascinating and important insight into people’s experiences of crime across the nation as a whole, and its results are available for criminologists to analyse further. In fact, BCS is probably one of the major achievements in crime measurement of the last 20 years. There is always a danger, though, that national surveys will lead to local differences being submerged — lost. Because of this danger, the use of local crime surveys has increased. These can provide very sensitive localized data in specific areas, but because many of them are run on an amateur basis and with very low budgets, we have to look at them with great care, as some may not be either valid or reliable.
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LESM A305 Major Issues in Criminology and Penology
Criminology as theory: identifying the ‘causes’ of crime
Ever since criminology became established as an area of study, criminologists have tried to find the ‘causes of crime’ as a step along the road to reducing it, or even getting rid of it entirely. After all, if crime has an identifiable cause — or even a cluster of related causes — then by attacking those causes we attack crime. It’s really very simple isn’t it? Well, actually — no it isn’t! But before I tell you why, I thought we would try a little experiment together. Everyone has his or her own ideas about what causes crime, so I am going to ask you to write down what you think causes crime. Then, when you have finished the unit, you can do the exercise again and see whether your new knowledge will cause you to write something different. That way, you will be able to identify what you have learned! Are you ready? Here we go!
Activity 1.5 The ‘causes’ of crime
This activity is to help you develop a critical awareness of specified themes and controversies within criminology and from an initial view on your own position in relation to them. I should like you, please, to complete the following two sentences completely honestly, remembering that no one else is going to see them: 1 I think that when we catch a teenage car thief we should
2
I think the main causes of crime are
I have not provided an answer for this exercise, but instead I should like you, please, to do two things. First, look at the relationship between these two answers and identify whether your answer to the second is in any way related to your answer to the first. Second, put this activity away in a safe place and don’t look at it again until you have completed the unit. When you have, I should like you to do the exercise again and then compare your two sets of answers. The difference between them will give you a snapshot of what you have learned. Good luck!
In this section and the next you, learn a bit more about what criminologists over the years have thought might have been the causes of crime and how far it is wise to believe them.
Unit 1
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The nature of causation
Before we do this we need a little bit of theory — this time from both philosophy and sociology. I have used the word ‘cause(s)’ several times as a kind of shorthand, because you know roughly what I mean if I say ‘poverty causes crime’ or ‘family breakdown causes crime’. But if you think for a moment, you will notice that the word ‘cause’ is borrowed from the ‘hard sciences’ like physics and chemistry. I could as well have said that ‘dipping a piece of litmus paper in an alkaline solution causes it to turn blue’. Now obviously there are a number of differences between saying ‘alkaline causes litmus paper to turn blue’ and ‘poverty causes crime’. The main one is that (a) every time we dip a piece of litmus paper in an alkaline solution it will turn blue and (b) every time we dip it in a nonalkaline solution it will not turn blue. Logicians express this in the form ‘if x then y’ — where x is the act of dipping and y is turning blue. If one day we dipped our litmus paper into an alkaline solution and it turned red, it would be just as surprising as if we threw a ball into the air and it didn’t come down again! It just couldn’t happen. But if we apply this formula to poverty and crime, so that x becomes a poor person and y a criminal, if we followed the logic of ‘if x then y’ we should have to conclude that (a) every poor person is a criminal, and (b) no rich person is a criminal. The ‘answer’ to crime would therefore be to abolish poverty, because if we did that there would be no poor people left and, therefore, no crime (and, we might add, no further need for criminologists!). This is obviously absurd, and sometimes criminologists call this kind of approach the ‘hunt for the magic bullet’ — that there is, somewhere, an ‘answer’ and that it is the job of criminologists to find it, just like it is the job of oncologists to find the cure for cancer. This teaches us two things: • The scientific method does not translate simply from the laboratory to the social world. The hunt for the causes of crime is unlikely to follow the same methodology as the hunt for the causes of cancer. We cannot look at social causation from an individual perspective. This means that because everyone is different and has what we normally term ‘human agency’ (freedom to act as he or she will), two people may respond quite differently to the same stimulus. So, one poor person may become a thief; a second may become an alcoholic vagrant (who does not commit crimes but relies on begging). A third may become a respectable worker, and a fourth may go on to become a billionaire entrepreneur — think how little money Li Ka Shing had when he arrived here from mainland China in 1939!
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So, you see, using the word ‘cause’ in respect of crime is a bit tricky. For that reason, when I use it in future, I put it in inverted commas (‘cause’) to remind you that I am not entirely happy with the word but that sometimes I am going to use it anyway.
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The next point is an important one, because it is about research in criminology. I am going over it to help you understand the uses and limitations of this kind of criminological research. Although it is not my aim to turn you into a researcher, it is important for you to be able to look critically at other people’s research and to draw sensible conclusions from it. So take the next example carefully, and keep studying it until you understand it properly. We have seen that the word ‘cause’ is a problem in criminology because the formula ‘if x then y’ does not work. But we can use the word (in inverted commas!) in a softer sense that is usually called associational. ‘Associational’ means that poverty may be linked to crime but may not directly cause it. The following example explains what I mean: Imagine we have (sitting in one big auditorium) 1,000 randomly chosen poor people (defined as, say, those with no savings and an income of no more than HK$2,000 per month). And (in another auditorium) we have 1,000 rich people (defined as, say, having a minimum of HK$200,000 savings and an income of not less than HK$75,000 a month), also randomly chosen. We can be almost certain of three things: 1 2 Some people in each sample will be criminals. More people among the poor people will be criminals than in the rich sample. The kinds of offence committed by members of the two samples will be very different.
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This finding would allow us to conclude that poverty is associated with higher than average levels of crime in a general sense. It would not, though, justify the conclusion that poverty caused any one individual in the poor sample to be a criminal. The reason is that this approach is a sociological observation of a particular kind, and we could only say (sociologically) that poverty caused crime if everyone in the poor sample was a criminal (so ‘if x then y’ would apply). This kind of sociological observation lets us draw fairly general conclusions only. A psychological or a micro-sociological observation, however, would be more interested in finding out why the man three seats from the aisle in the front row was a criminal but the man on his right was not. This would be a different way of trying to check out whether ‘if x then y’ applied in specific instances: • A psychological criminologist might create a subsample of the criminal members of the poor sample and another subsample of non-criminals from the same sample. (There are various methods the psychologist could use to try to ensure the two subsamples were matched, or comparable, in key
Unit 1
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respects. There are also research conventions, or rules of enquiry which he would follow, but I am not going to go into these here, as this is not a methodology course.) He or she might, then, look at whether the poor criminals had anything in common — neurologically, educationally, in family, personality and so on — in order to isolate the variable which caused crime. • A micro-sociologist might study friendship patterns, educational achievement, employment patterns and so on for the same reason. In neither instance would the criminologist find anything justifying an ‘if x then y’ conclusion, but he or she would be able to narrow the odds, thus increasing the probability of an association between specific factors and crime. Perhaps he or she would find lower educational attainment among the criminals, or that more came from a broken home, or were unemployed, or only children, or left-handed . . . The list of possibilities is endless. But none of them (I assure you!) would be 100% accurate as a predictor. Human behaviour just doesn’t work that way.
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Another possibility is that although I have been describing the samples as ‘poor’ and ‘rich’, that difference isn’t especially relevant. For example: • If the poor group contained more women and the rich group contained more alcoholics than the other group, the differences in criminal behaviour between the two groups might be reduced considerably. Men commit many more offences than women (although the gap is closing nowadays, it’s still usually 6–7 times as many), and a high proportion of crimes are committed under the influence of alcohol. So it is by no means certain that 1,000 poor women would, between them, commit more offences than 1,000 alcoholic rich men. This would reduce the strength of the association between poverty and crime, and we should have to do some ‘mixing and matching’ among men, women, rich, poor, alcoholics and non-alcoholics to find out what the facts were. Again because this is not a research methods course, you do not need to learn how to go about that! If, however, this experiment told us that there was (say) a greater offending gap between the alcoholic poor and the non-alcoholic poor than between the (whole) poor sample and the (whole) rich sample, we might want to test whether alcoholism was more criminogenic (‘causing’ crime) than poverty. If we found a higher proportion of the poor sample than the rich sample were alcoholics, we might want to investigate
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LESM A305 Major Issues in Criminology and Penology
whether poverty ‘caused’ alcoholism and alcoholism ‘caused’ crime, or whether, conversely, alcoholism ‘caused’ poverty, which means that poverty might be a symptom of alcoholism. In short, if we did not do this experiment thoroughly, we should be getting it completely wrong; and if we were simply reading the research report and misunderstood it, we should be making an equally big mistake. Studying the ‘causes’ of crime is quite complicated, but it is really important that you understand everything in the box. If you do not, you could easily misunderstand the implications of any research you read. You might even walk into the famous trap that caught one 19th-century researcher when he was studying a sample of imprisoned male murderers. He concluded that the murderer sample contained a disproportionate number of widowers. Can you work out why that might have been? In a nutshell: • • Association is a much safer concept than causation. Poverty does not cause crime in the sense that alkaline causes litmus paper to turn blue, but if more poor people than the average are criminals, then it is probably associated with it. But before we decide why that is so, we have to look in great depth at research studies to understand properly what the research tells us.
If we find, having done that, that poverty is indeed associated with crime, it is still useful to know if we are planning crime prevention policies of the kind you learn about in Unit 9. The reason is that such knowledge helps us target resources in areas where crime is (for whatever reason) high — we can do that without being too concerned about what causes crime: We just need to know where it happens. This in turn gives us what Americans call ‘more bang for our buck’ — or better value for money. So: • for many policymakers, probability is a more valuable concept than causation, because what ‘causes’ crime may be largely irrelevant to preventing it.
Certainly you should now begin to understand some of the problems of the criminological method, or social enquiry. I have a bit more to say about this kind of problem in Units 3 and 4, when we look at positivism and sociological approaches. But there is one further point I want you to think about here, because you should already be able to work out the answer from something I told you in Section 1. This means that it is now time for another activity. My aim in asking you to try the following activity is twofold. I want you to check both that you: • have remembered some of the key learning in Section 1 and
Unit 1
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•
have developed the skill of applying it to the research methods teaching in Section 2.
It is always an important part of learning to be able to transfer knowledge from one situation, but it is especially important for a professional person like you to be able to do so. We should be very unhappy, for example, if a graduate of this university wasn’t able to apply his or her learning about being a critical reader of research to other pieces of research he or she might come across in the future. In this exercise, I am not asking you to comment directly on a piece of research; that would mean you had to spend longer reading the research than I want you to do for this exercise. So we are going to take a shortcut. I am asking you instead to do two things: • • to ‘role-play’ Schwendinger and Schwendinger and to comment from your own perspective on what you think they would have said.
Activity 1.6 Radical criminologists and crime causation
Looking over Section 1 as necessary, write down briefly the reasons that you think Schwendinger and Schwendinger might give by way of explanation if they found more criminals among the poor than among the rich sample. How comfortable are you with this explanation. What (if any) better explanations do you think there might be?
Conclusion
Here are the main points we have covered in Section 2. Do please go back over the text if there are any points there you do not quite remember or understand. • • Criminologists often talk about the ‘causes’ of crime. The word ‘cause’ is borrowed from the laboratory sciences and is better suited to a situation in which one variable — or a combination of them — can be said to lead directly to a consequence that can be repeated experimentally with the same results. We expressed this in the form ‘if x then y’. Crime does not work like that, and if there is any interaction of variables that really does cause crime, we are a very long way indeed from finding out what it is.
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LESM A305 Major Issues in Criminology and Penology
•
A more optimistic line of research is to identify factors associated with crime. The difference between cause and association is that association is not expressed in the form ‘if x then y’ but as a probability. We examined the idea of association in an imaginary experiment that compared 1,000 poor people with 1,000 rich people. We concluded that it was almost certain that poverty would be associated with crime, because there would be more convicted criminals in the poor sample than in the rich sample. When, however, we began to ask more questions about the samples, we made the picture more complicated. For example, we know from research that two other factors associated with crime are high levels of alcohol consumption and the male gender. So, we examined how we might experimentally try to isolate these variables and decide whether (say) a poor non-alcoholic woman was more or less likely to be a criminal than a rich alcoholic man. This led us into a discussion about how complicated it was to analyse other people’s research professionally and well but how important it was to try. You then did an activity designed to test your skills at developing the ‘radical’ approach to crime we discussed in the previous section and at developing an alternative perspective yourself. We also need to remember that the kind of research we have been looking at deals only with probabilities of crime being committed within large samples (or cohorts) of people. If we want to learn why it is that some particular members of that sample are criminals and others are not, we need to undertake a very different kind of study. We should do this by identifying a subsample of both criminal and non-criminal members of the same sample in order to study them in much greater detail. This might involve looking at a range of psychological characteristics (personality type, hobbies, interests, fears etc.) or sociological ones (educational level, friendship networks, parental criminality and so on). We learned from this that it is very important indeed not to make claims for any piece of research that the methodology of the research cannot justify. Last, we learned that for some purposes we do not need to know why crimes happen — we just need the basic facts on where they happen (a geography of crime), when they happen and what kinds of crime they are, and then we can take preventive measures.
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Criminology as hard science
Now we turn to criminologists of a very different kind. Having just (I hope) persuaded you that the word ‘cause’ is not a very good one to use in relation to crime (although I also told you I was going to continue to use it in inverted commas!) I am now going to go back on myself and tell you about some criminologists who think the word ‘cause’ isn’t problematic at all. Just suppose for a moment that everything I have said so far about the sociology and philosophy of crime is wrong. And by ‘wrong’ I really mean wrong: not just contentious and controversial, not just disputed by criminologists with different political views, but actually and demonstrably wrong. For this to be possible, it follows that some other approach must be ‘right’; otherwise, how could we know that what we have been talking about is wrong? This is quite a disturbing thought, because it implies that someone, somewhere, may have the key to this aspect of human behaviour — has ‘cracked the code’ of crime, if you like. That person can very reasonably laugh at our opinions because he or she has knowledge of a different and superior order, and only by following knowledge and rejecting opinion can we access the truth. In the West (and I see signs of the same thing in Hong Kong), we have become very cautious about accepting ‘truth claims’ of this kind. But just imagine for a moment that it is actually possible to make a clear and objective distinction between knowledge and opinion. This would mean that our ‘opinions’ about crime send us off on what in England we call a wild goose chase — or a hopeless quest — because they are simply wrong. It would be like maintaining the opinion that the earth is flat (or the moon is made of green cheese) when scientists actually know otherwise. Such opinions would make us (at best) silly and (at worst) dangerous — because we might try and spread false ideas as though they were fact. • In criminology, if knowledge of this kind did in fact exist, the discipline would become a hard science. This would mean that criminologists would have to tackle their subject much as public health scientists have had to tackle diphtheria and typhoid.
•
Ideas along these lines, based on research into whether criminals have different shaped brains or particular physiques, a tendency to be tattooed, extravert personalities, poor ego control, a faulty chromosome make-up or some other genetic deficiency go back to the 19th century. Earlier explanations tended to be theological, and criminals — who may have been implanted with a ‘bad seed’ — were generally thought to be carrying out the work of the Devil.
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So whereas public health and other scientists undertake their research on the basis of a broadly shared set of beliefs about the nature of science, in criminology, as we have seen, this is not really so. This difference is important to understand: • All professionals argue among themselves about particular techniques, the implications of research, or diagnoses and so on. Public health scientists are no exception to this rule. Criminologists, however, argue about the very basis of their knowledge in a way that public health scientists and most other professionals do not. These arguments among criminologists of different schools are a little bit like a disagreement between a Western doctor and a Chinese herbalist about whether a cancerous growth is better treated by surgery or herbal remedies. The reason is that a disagreement of this kind is not about what surgical technique to use or what medicine to prescribe but reflects a fundamental dispute about the nature of the complaint itself and, as a result, the proper approach to it (that is, understanding precedes intervention!). When one professional thinks you should cut out a cancerous growth and another thinks it should be treated with herbs as a part of one’s entire mental and physical functioning, this is a very basic disagreement. This is where criminology is today (different understanding of the ‘causes’ of crime).
•
Jock Young, a well-known criminologist who has moved from the radical left to the more pragmatic central left, has described this argument among criminologists as ‘incessant chatter’ of criminologists’ ‘recent paradigms’ (Young 1994). A paradigm, by the way, is a framework within which we collect our ideas. The Western doctor in the example above has a surgical paradigm because he believes a damaged part of the body should be cut out. The herbalist, on the other hand, has a holistic paradigm because she believes the diseased part of the body should be treated in the context of the patient’s whole bodily, mental and spiritual health. In this section, I introduce you very briefly to the ideas of some people who believe criminology is a ‘hard science’. By this I mean: a form of behaviour which can be tested by scientific method in a laboratory. You will see later that this approach is called positivism. I am not saying very much about these scientists here, because we meet them again in Unit 3, when we come to understand much more about where they came from and why they thought what they did. But I would like you to know something about them at this stage and that other criminologists believe passionately that their whole approach to crime is wrong. Just imagine, for example, what the Schwendingers would say to someone who argued that crime could be understood by dissecting criminals in a laboratory or by analysing their personalities or body shapes or family background!
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Criminology as science: the origins of the approach
The great social, demographic, political and economic changes that began in Europe about 300 years ago led to the development of the science of statistics. Without this development there could have been no criminology as we know it today. If you are interested in learning more about this you should have a look at Beirne 1993 (especially Chapter 3). It is a very interesting book but quite difficult, and though it would be useful for you to read it you do not need to do so for this course. I say a lot more about it in Unit 3, when I will help you through some of the most important bits of it. The scientist whom most people think was the founder of the hard scientific approach to crime (usually, for reasons explained in Unit 3, referred to as biological positivism) is a 19th-century Italian physician and psychiatrist called Cesare Lombroso. Lombroso’s book L’Uomo Delinquente (The Criminal Man), published in 1876, applied Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, which had become very popular since the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859, to the study of criminal behaviour. Lombroso believed: • Criminals were measurably different from non-criminals because they existed at an earlier stage of development than the rest of humanity: Physically they were more like apes, and their behaviour reflected this.
This is called a theory of atavism (atavism means reverting to a primitive state) — so criminals were a kind of throwback to an earlier stage of human evolution; as such they were, to be honest, pretty freakish. Lombroso reached these views by studying prisoners’ skulls. He describes in the book a moment when the truth (as he saw it) suddenly hit him in a blinding flash: At the sight of that skull, I seemed to see . . . the problem of the nature of the criminal — an atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animals. Thus were explained anatomically the enormous jaws, high cheek bones, prominent superciliary arches, solitary lines in the palms, extreme size of the orbits, handle-shaped or sensile ears found in criminals, savages and apes, insensibility to pain, extremely acute sight, tattooing, excessive idleness, love of orgies, and the irresistible craving for evil for its own sake . . . Lombroso also believed that: • In any population there would be a small number of evolutionary throwbacks of this kind, with attributes which would have fitted them for survival in primitive society. But as society advanced, attributes like a strong hunting instinct would be criminogenic.
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•
Such people would not die out through natural selection but would be very fertile in urban slums, producing large numbers of children who would also be likely to become criminals.
In fact, Lombroso modified his views after further thought and much theoretical debate. He came to believe: • Other biological factors, including epilepsy and insanity, would also be present in some criminals. Many occasional criminals were only slightly atavistic, and for them, social factors also had a part to play. Only about 40% of criminals were prisoners of their biological inheritance.
•
•
This is another example of the relativization of an absolute concept of the kind we saw earlier when we discussed deliberation. Do you remember what relativization means? If you are not sure, please look at pages 9–11 to remind yourself. In this context, however, it means that whereas Lombroso initially believed that all crime was caused by atavism (i.e. biology), he later came to believe that only some of it was and that other, social ‘causes’ were also relevant. You do not need to know much more about Lombroso than this. In fact, it would be a waste of time to discuss his ideas in detail, because: • • the statistical basis of his work has been shown to be faulty, and subsequent genetic research has proved that his theory of atavism is wrong.
As a result, his importance to us is purely historical. So although it is true that not all criminals are very pretty, nor are all non-criminals; and there is no reason to believe that either group is more ape-like than the other. But to learn more anyway, have a look at . Nonetheless, Lombroso was not alone in his interest in phrenology (the study of the skull). Quite a number of other scientists, many of them in the US, conducted related studies on the skulls of living and dead prisoners. If you are interested in this topic, Fink (1938) gives a fascinating account of this kind of hard science. In fact, as Fink shows, and as we shall see in Unit 7, prisoners generally at this time were fair game for researchers, because scientific study was not restricted to the ‘causes’ of crime but extended to the comparative effectiveness of different kinds of prison regime. Again, however, I am not going into detail about the findings of these studies because they have all been, to a greater or lesser degree, discredited. But if you would like to know more, look at Fink. What looked like a more promising line of enquiry pursued was the relationship between criminality and body type. According to classifications constructed by early 20th-century scientists (the key
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names are Kretschmer and Sheldon, though you do not need to look them up unless you want to) all of us are one of three body types: • • Endomorphs are soft and round (in other words a bit fat, or ‘tubby’). Mesomorphs are hard and round (in other words of sturdy, muscular build). Ectomorphs are thin and angular (this is obvious!).
•
Before you read on, two questions: • People with one of these three body types are more likely to be criminal than the other two. Which do you guess it is? Which body type are you?!
•
In fact, a famous husband and wife team of criminologists in the US, Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck, produced elaborate data which showed that criminals are most likely to be mesomorphs and least likely to be ectomorphs. Endomorphs were somewhere in the middle. Of course this doesn’t mean that if you are a mesomorph you need to start feeling guilty or that you need to start being suspicious of any mesomorphs among your family or workmates. The statistical differences are not sufficient to be a very useful predictive tool: After all, although mesomorphs are much more likely to be criminals than are ectomorphs, most mesomorphs are not criminals! As a result, any attempt to target crime prevention or detection resources at them would be expensive and inefficient. Many sociologists have ridiculed these findings (or at least the biologically deterministic explanations of them), but my own view is they should certainly not be dismissed. They do, however, require much more analysis, in particular around the relationship between body type and personality and whether these findings apply to women as well as to men and across cultures. After all, it is possible that mesomorphs are more common in cultures where street crime in particular is more common (in the West and among Afro-Caribbeans) than where it is less common (among Chinese and Indians). And I suppose there is also the very obvious thought that mesomorphs are built to fight harder and run faster than ectomorphs and endomorphs: Does that make them more bold, do you think? More likely to take the risks that are associated with any form of crime? We do not know the answer to this kind of question, but it would be interesting to explore it further one day (from biological determinism to social determinism!). If you are interested in evaluating the work of the Gluecks for yourself, have a look at their most famous books Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1950), Physique and Delinquency (New York: Harper and Row 1956). They are not on your reading list, however, and I give you the details only if you are interested in pursuing this line of enquiry further. There is no need to do so for this course.
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More recently — around the 1960s and 1970s — another line of enquiry among hard scientists was chromosome abnormality. This began when disproportionately high levels of delinquency were noted among male mental patients who, instead of exhibiting the normal male chromosome pattern of XY had an additional Y chromosome, making them exceptionally tall and a little odd looking. This finding, though, is of fairly limited interest to us for two main reasons: • True or not, it can explain the delinquency of only a tiny proportion of offenders. The theory has been to a very large extent discredited anyway.
•
As I mentioned earlier, we return to look at approaches of this kind more broadly and in greater detail in Unit 3. My aim in introducing you to the idea of criminology as hard science early has simply been to demonstrate that: • Biology and genetics are among the disciplines that have a contribution to make to the study of crime. Their contribution is unlikely to be a determining one.
•
If you read some older books about criminology — for example those written in the 1960s and 1970s — you will learn that in those days the battle lines were drawn up between the biological and social theorists. Today that is no longer the situation. Most criminologists today think that the most likely ‘explanation’ of crime lies in a series of interactions among biological, environmental, psychological and sociological variables contributing to creating a criminogenic type. But though this may shorten the odds in helping us identify who is likely to be a criminal, we still await the breakthrough research that will transform our understanding in this way. I have a slight suspicion that it will be a long time coming. Unfortunately, criminology has yet to produce its Newton, Darwin, Einstein or Hawking. And, a final thought for you to ponder: If we did find the magic bullet so that we could spot a ‘criminal type’ with a high degree of certainty, what do you think we should do with this information?
Conclusion
I hope that in Section 3 you have learned the following: • In at least one criminological tradition, the ‘science’ of crime is rather like a laboratory science. This approach (called positivism — studied further in Unit 3) — takes different forms and goes back to the 19th century. It is based on the assumption that there is hard knowledge about crime that we can gain and that, when it has been
•
•
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gained, we shall know everything about it, including possibly to predict or control it! • Other criminologists dispute that this is ever going to be possible and so deny that there is any point in studying crime in this way. The result is a paradigmatic conflict between criminologists that does not exist in many other professions. We compared it to an argument between Western surgeons and Chinese herbalists about the best way to treat a cancerous growth. A paradigm is a framework within which we collect our ideas and make them consistent and coherent: The conflict might be between a scientific and a sociological (or psychological) paradigm. We saw some examples of different kinds of hard scientist, none of whose work we need to study in detail, because their findings have all been challenged, either wholly or partly: Lombroso (who was influenced by Darwin, believed criminals were atavists, that their numbers would increase in city slums, but who afterwards softened his approach). The science of phrenology (studying skull shapes) was immensely popular in the US in particular, where many studies were made of the skull shapes of prisoners, particularly murderers. This study followed, but was distinct from, the work of Lombroso. Chromosome abnormality (XYY) — popular in the mid-20th century, but relevant only in a minute proportion of cases and now found to be statistically unreliable. Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck, whose meticulous studies of body shapes from the mid-20th century still justify close analysis. • Few people today believe that hard science can on its own be helpful in the study of crime. Nonetheless, there is today a much greater willingness among criminologists than there was in the 1960s–70s (when radical sociologists were centre stage) to accept that some form of biological (possibly genetic) predisposition may interact with particular social or environmental circumstances (including opportunity) to increase significantly the likelihood of someone committing a crime. If, however, there is a single formula that will unlock the mysteries of criminal behaviour in the way that natural scientists have unlocked the mysteries of the universe, it is yet to be found.
•
•
•
•
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The politics of crime and punishment: meeting public demands
Jock Young, in the Paradigms paper mentioned earlier (Young 1994), believes criminology must be understood not mainly scientifically, that is to say in the way we were looking at it in the last section, but within a political, economic and social context. Look carefully at the following quotation: Social theory does not emerge out of the blue: it develops in distinct social and economic situations and is influenced by specific material problems, in the context of a particular array of ideas and socially defined problems . . . Exterior problems of crime, of law making, of political options and current ideas, all profoundly shape the theories emanating from the interior world of academic criminology and legal scholarship (Young 1994, 71). Among the things Young is saying or implying in this quotation are: • It is not a matter of chance that at some periods ‘hard’ scientific theories of crime are influential and that at other times there is more support for, say, sociological explanations. There is a political dimension to all science not funded by the market in the way that Bayer and Roche, for example, fund pharmaceutical research. Today at least, criminologists rely on governments for much of their funding, and governments make political decisions about what kind of research to fund. So, we must look to politics to understand why one set of ideas in criminology is dominant at any moment in history.
•
•
•
Young believes politics and economics stand above all the ‘incessant chatter’ he writes about in his long paper. Funding preferences and job opportunities in criminology reflect political decisions. So, ‘what kind of science’ is dominant in criminology is a secondary question to what questions politicians and other opinion formers (such as the media) want answered by it. This is a very sobering thought, because criminologists like to think that policy is research-led. Young’s argument suggests that it would be more accurate to say that research is policy-led. Do you think this is true? Probably very few professions, certainly those attracting public funding, can claim to have a purely scientific base, since they have also to address public concerns and wishes. As such, they are also political. This applies nowhere more than in relation to crime and punishment, particularly in countries where crime rates or the public fear of crime are high. Probably this is still more so in the UK than in Hong Kong, though my impression
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is that the Hong Kong situation is changing for the worse. Is that your view too, or have I got it wrong? Try to look around: Who funds crimerelated research in Hong Kong? As far as crime and punishment are concerned, this means that criminology’s scientific discourse (in which experts argue about the best theories of crime and punishment) takes place only in the context of a political discourse (in which elected politicians decide what is acceptable and will win them popularity). These two discourses by no means always coincide. Criminal policy is not in fact research-led — or at least not purely research-led — but a part of the world of politics, in which policies can gain or lose political popularity for governments. Accordingly, often to the frustration of the experts, focus groups can have more influence on policy than the best research efforts of criminologists. Those of us whose research has occasionally led to changes in legislation know well that it is more that our findings have (by chance) been what government wanted than because they changed government minds. Hence any study of crime and punishment must look not only at criminology and penology but also, if only briefly and at an introductory level, at politics. In England and Wales (Scotland and Northern Ireland have slightly different legal systems and political arrangements) there are several main players in the politics of crime and punishment. These are: • Central government (both politicians, especially in the Home Office, and civil servants) Local government (responsible for dealing with much youth crime and crime prevention and very involved in influencing local policing priorities) Criminal justice professionals (particularly police, prison and probation staff, as well as many private sector employees in the security industry) Trade unions (these are much more powerful in UK than in Hong Kong: the Prison Officers’ Association and the Police Federation often embarrass the Home Secretary, the senior Government Minister responsible for law and order) Pressure groups of different kinds (some advocating more liberal treatment, others wanting tougher penalties, some concentrating on victim rights or community safety, or on a specific kind of offence) Mass media (increasing people’s fear of crime and expressing disgust with some kinds of criminal sell many newspapers!).
•
•
•
•
•
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Activity 1.7 The politics of crime and punishment in Hong Kong
In every country there is a politics of crime and punishment, though it takes different forms. For this activity I should like you, please, to pretend you are writing this unit about Hong Kong for an English audience. Your task is to rewrite the above paragraph, beginning ‘In Hong Kong the main players in the politics of crime and punishment are…’. Write it at slightly greater length, explaining in more detail what the functions of the different players are, giving examples of who the professionals are, of the names of the pressure groups (if any exist), and a little bit more about the mass media — newspapers and TV mainly. Include those you think are the most important, and say why. Try to write 80–100 words total. Allow yourself 30 minutes for the exercise, plus time spent researching the answer. The aim of the exercise is to invite you to be sure you have an overall grasp of the political context of crime and punishment in Hong Kong.
In England and Wales, these ‘actors’ behave in different ways and attract different levels of support over time, based probably, on a range of factors. These include: • the economic climate (it has been suggested, though not proved, that during economic downturns, public attitudes towards criminals tend to harden) a forthcoming general election (when politicians aim to demonstrate they are ‘tough’ on crime) a recent dramatic (and thus atypical) criminal incident a media campaign.
•
• •
What do we know about public attitudes to crime and punishment?
According to opinion polls, public attitudes to crime and punishment are inconsistent in two ways: • • the importance people give them in relation to other topics of concern opinions on what the policy response to crime should be.
For example, monthly MORI Polls on political attitudes in the UK conducted between January and September 2002 (the most recent ones available as I write) asked respondents to identify: • • what they considered the most important issue facing Britain today and other important issues.
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When people were asked to rank-order several topics in order of the seriousness with which they viewed it, the relevant category (‘crime/law & order/violence/vandalism’) always came second, third or fourth out of a long list. It was consistently rated less important than health/hospitals but scored consistently higher than any other single category, falling behind a range of different categories in different months. Between 6% and 18% of respondents identified it as their most important concern, and 23–34% listed it as an ‘other’ important issue. This suggests that though crime is second only to health in the consistency of public concern (so is bound to be a sensitive subject with politicians), the extent of that concern is variable. This poll, however, is very interesting but of limited use for our purposes, because it does not let us probe the answers further. And you have learned already that this kind of research often raises more questions than it answers. For example, it is possible to conclude from these data that: • Most people’s concerns about crime are ‘soft’ (that is, although many people are quite concerned about it, their concern shifts quickly to another topic that happens to be in the news at the time). Hence it would be a rational political response to give criminal policy fairly low priority, concentrating resources instead on health (which scores consistently highly) or even possibly education (which sometimes attracts high levels of support, overtaking crime as a cause for concern). Or, Crime is a major and consistent preoccupation of almost one in ten electors — more than enough to be critical to election victory — plus an unknown but variable level of ‘softer’ support. This would suggest that crime policy should be given high priority. But if this is so, we do not know who these hard-core people are or what the nature of their concern is. Perhaps many have been crime victims and fear repetition. Perhaps they are old and vulnerable. Perhaps their views about crime are actually second-order concerns to worries about (say) race relations or drugs or about sex and violence on television or the breakdown of family life. Perhaps they are clustered in a small number of locations where specific criminal incidents have occurred and received widespread local publicity. In Hong Kong, concerns may not go to race relations, drugs, or about sex and violence, but perhaps economy, estate market, domestic violence, change of political leaders in China, etc. (You may find it difficult to identify any opinion survey about public attitudes on crime and punishment in Hong Kong! Why?)
•
•
So again, whether we are scholars or politicians, we need to understand the reasons for these responses in order to know what (if anything) can be done about them: • If the preoccupation is experience-based with a high statistical correlation between a preoccupation with crime and the experience of
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victimization, a rational policy response might be to invest further in victim support, Neighbourhood Watch schemes and so on. • If the preoccupation is vulnerability-based, involving, say, elderly people and those with disabilities, whose risk of victimization is actually very low, a rational response might be to invest in practical information-giving and to probe more precisely why they feel unsafe when in fact they are not. People vote on the basis not of the latest research findings but on what they believe; so even erroneous beliefs, when they cannot be corrected, have to be responded to by politicians.
The limitations of general polls lead concerned groups and organizations to commission specialized polls (and political parties to conduct their own secret ones). The findings of such polls seldom paint a consistent picture, since because different customers commission the polls for different purposes, different questions are asked and hence strict comparisons are impossible. Public views on the death penalty are especially interesting. In the summer of 2002, there was extensive UK media coverage of the abduction and murder of two schoolgirls, Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman. One would anticipate that such crimes would lead to renewed pressure for the return of capital punishment. MORI had at the time conducted four polls about attitudes to capital punishment in the previous 24 years. Fairly consistently, around 75% of respondents said the death penalty was sometimes justified (though there was one exception in 1990, when the figure fell to 63%). If, however, the question is rephrased so that respondents are asked to choose among life in prison, a long prison sentence and the death penalty, less than half the public favour execution. Immediately following another very high profile and distressing child murder in 2000, that of Sarah Payne, 58% of respondents expressed the view that death was the most appropriate punishment for child killers, and 33% favoured life imprisonment. By December 2001, however, following the sentencing of Sarah’s killer, Roy Whiting, to life in prison with no prospect of release — the toughest available sentence — the view that the death penalty was sometimes justified had fallen from 58% to 49%. MORI asks: Had the British public's views shifted? Or simply, is the immediate aftermath of a terrible murder like this a time when feelings will be running high? Perhaps when the public take a more considered view, their feelings are more equivocal, and less markedly detached from those of MPs who have consistently voted against reintroducing the death penalty repeatedly over the last 30 years. You need to draw your own conclusions from this kind of data. My own are that it is reasonable to detect an overall softening of public opinion towards the death penalty. Like MORI, I can only speculate on the reasons for this, but the strongest evidence in support of this view is that support for the death penalty declines with age. In 1995, 80% of respondents aged over 55 thought the death penalty was sometimes
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justified, but this figure fell to 68% among the 18–24 age range. The 2000 finding that even in the wake of a particularly shocking murder only 58% thought death the most appropriate sentence for child killers when other options were floated suggests a further shift in opinion between 1995 and 2000. It is possible that the 2001 finding (following the guaranteed removal for life of the murderer, Whiting) may indicate that about half the public are satisfied with permanent protection. It may also indicate that execution in the abstract is more acceptable to people than the execution of a named individual, irrespective of the nature of his crime. Such interpretations would suggest that at least part of public support for execution is extrinsic (that it achieves the goal of incapacitation) rather than intrinsic (that execution is desirable in itself). As the more hard-line older generation dies out we should, subject to one key condition, expect this trend to continue. This expectation would not, however, be correct if the pro-capital punishment view were a general product of attitudes hardening with age and not symptomatic of a specific generation. In this instance, support for the death penalty would continue to exist, because as later generations approached old age and experienced an increasing sense of personal vulnerability, their attitudes towards punishment in general (and the death penalty in particular) would begin to harden. It is now time for the final activity of this unit. Its aim is to invite you to examine critically the results of an opinion poll. Some clues exist in what I have said already; others you may be able to work out for yourself. Please look critically at this report, trying to read it not as a layperson but as the scholar and expert you are becoming.
Activity 1.8 Drawing conclusions from poll data
Please read the following summary account of an opinion poll. When you have done so, write down three main thoughts arising from it. You should spend about 20 minutes on this activity. A poll conducted for the Mail on Sunday newspaper in 2000 revealed that 71% of respondents thought crime had increased ‘in the past few years’ but that only 30% had themselves been a victim of crime over the previous year. Of those 30%, 73% had been a victim of either theft (including of a car) or threatening and abusive behaviour; only a minute proportion had been victims of violence. Sixty-eight percent had reported the crime to the police, but in 79% of those cases the police had not, as far as they knew, caught the criminal. The whole sample was asked whether, if they were victims of a violent crime, they were very or fairly confident that the police would/would not catch the criminal. Thirty-two percent were very/fairly confident that they would, and 68% were very/fairly confident that they would not. When we examine the confident/not confident groups further, we find that only 3% of respondents were very confident that the criminal would be caught, and
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20% were very confident that he would not. When asked about the best solutions, there was overwhelming support for the view that more police foot patrols (‘bobbies on the beat’) would reduce crime. Asked in particular if muggings, criminal damage and car thefts would decrease if the police had a stronger presence on the streets, 93% agreed and only 2% disagreed. There was no consensus on who was to blame for apparent increases in crime (though the highest scores — 15% each — went to the government and parents).
It is hard for politicians to benefit from policy changes in criminal policy. They can, though, be punished if voters believe they have responded inadequately to a perceived major crime problem. This is so, even if the ‘problem’ is not a serious one at all but a ‘moral panic’ fanned by the media and which everyone gets out of proportion. The characteristic political response to such a ‘moral panic’ is to take hasty and ill-thoughtout remedial action, not because they believe such action will be helpful but because they simply have to be seen to be doing something. When governments start panicking, the best that can be hoped for is that anything they do will not make things worse: Such an expectation seems a reasonable ‘bottom line’ position for the expert to take. In this regard, it is notable that pressure to put ‘bobbies back on the beat’ has been generally resisted, except in particular areas and for particular reasons. But knee-jerk reactions are common in politics. In Scotland in 1996, in a terrible incident in a primary school in a small town in Scotland, Dunblane, Thomas Hamilton, a 43-year-old loner armed with a handgun (which he owned legally) bizarrely shot dead 16 children and their teacher before turning the gun on himself. Hamilton was one of 32,000 people in Scotland permitted to own a firearm, most of which were used for sporting (shooting is a very popular sport there). It became clear at the later public inquiry that Hamilton, who was known to be a very odd chap (he had been rejected for membership by a local shooting club) had ‘slipped through the net’ in being issued a gun permit. Basically, someone made a bad decision, an unstable individual was permitted to own a gun and this had tragic consequences. It was also obvious, however, that such an extraordinary event was highly unlikely to be repeated. The outgoing Conservative government made a reasonably measured response to the tragedy, enacting legislation that restricted the ownership of large handguns. But a year later, the incoming Labour government passed legislation banning small-bore pistols and rifles used by target shooters as well. In doing so, it did nothing to reduce the likelihood of a repetition (if a maniac decides to massacre little children, he does not need a handgun to do so). But the prohibition did achieve four political objectives: • It gave the government ‘cover’ in the event, however unlikely, of a copycat attack — without such cover it would have faced a major political crisis. It enabled the government to respond to strong pressure from an articulate victim lobby in Dunblane itself, one that had shown skilful
•
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media management, and at least one of whose members had described the previous government’s refusal to legislate comprehensively as ‘an insult to the victims’. • It enabled the government to be seen to have responded to the widespread shock and distress felt throughout the country at such a senseless and evil act, feelings that had led to overwhelming opinion poll support for a ban on all handguns It enabled the government to achieve all these goals while doing minimal damage to its own supporters, because most of the sporting activities prohibited by the new legislation were strongly associated with the Conservative Party. Accordingly, decisive action enabled it to achieve favourable comparison with the outgoing government among the non-shooting majority, at the small cost of causing irritation to a minority of handgun owners, most of whom would anyway be Conservative voters.
•
Intellectual (or scientific) logic and political logic are often divergent, but they have to co-exist. In this instance, political logic prevailed. This is reasonable in a democratic society where opportunities exist to protest against legislation and lobby for change; but we should not make the mistake of assuming that the legislation has any serious foundation in science or research. The issue, therefore, as so often in democratic politics, has less to do with developing and maintaining a coherent philosophy than with aiming to judge and then meet the demands of the voting public. To specialists in the field, the main problem faced by politicians is that, because the strategies they follow may bear little relation to research findings, it is unlikely that they will have more than a very marginal effect on the crime rate. A subsidiary problem is that even if they did have such an effect, it would probably be no greater than about 10%. (We return to this 10% figure in Unit 8, when we consider the effectiveness of rehabilitation.) And though a 10% reduction in crime is better than nothing, it is insufficient to make people feel safer or to have as big an effect on the crime statistics as much more important factors: • The most important of these factors is demography (the science of population study). The reason is that most crime is committed by males aged below 25, so the proportion of the population below the age of 25 at any time will have a greater effect on the crime rate than any policies or laws passed by government. It follows that the gap between what governments can actually do to reduce crime and make people feel safe and what they are virtually forced to claim they can do is considerable. That problem lies at the heart of the political problem all governments face.
•
Given politicians’ need to be seen to be solving problems that are in truth beyond them, the role of experts is always likely to be relatively modest. Nor is their political influence increased by the ‘incessant chatter’ of experts who cannot agree even on the scientific basis of their activity.
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LESM A305 Major Issues in Criminology and Penology
The subject you are studying in this course is a fairly young one, but I hope that by the time you have completed the course you will consider it valuable and important for all that.
Conclusion
The main learning points covered in this unit so far are: • Though criminology is a scientific activity, because its area of enquiry is politically sensitive, and because much of its work is government funded, what criminologists study is subject to strong political influence. This means that rather than (or as well as) policies being research-led, research is policy-led. This helps us understand why different criminological theories are dominant at different times: It is not simply a result of scientific progress but also of political preferences. The evidence of opinion polls is that crime seems to be of consistently high concern to UK voters — second only to health. But (as we saw in the last section) we have to examine the data carefully, because they are open to at least two interpretations. The first possible interpretation is that it is a ‘soft’ concern for a lot of people — something they mention but don’t in fact feel too strongly about. The second possible interpretation is that it is of very high concern to up to about 10% of voters. It is also possible that both are true. Because we do not know which of these possibilities is correct, we need more information. Political parties commission private studies to help them answer this kind of problem. These polls will tell them whether the concerns are hard or soft, experience-based or vulnerability-based. Information of this kind is vital when governments are formulating policy. As a concrete example of just how complicated it can be to assess public opinion, we considered public attitudes to the death penalty. It is possible that support for the death penalty is declining and will continue to decline as the (older) procapital punishment supporters die out, or that it is not declining but that attitudes to capital punishment will continue to harden with age. It is also possible that supporters of capital punishment are divided between those who support it for its own sake and those who simply want to be protected against murderers (and who would be satisfied by a promise that they will never be released from prison).
•
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•
Last, we looked at the ‘Dunblane Massacre’ as an example of a politically-inspired crime policy: The prohibition of hand guns did little or nothing to reduce the likelihood of the massacre being repeated, but it did meet a number of quite separate political objectives.
Thank you for the attention you have paid to this unit. I hope you have found it interesting. I look forward to working with you in Unit 2.
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Feedback on activities
Activity 1.1
In your answer, you may have mentioned the disciplines of law, psychology and psychiatry as closely related to the study of criminology. If you did, well done! Other disciplines that you might have noted could include mathematics (or statistics), neurology and history. Some writers even relate the disciplines of geography and linguistics closely to the study of criminology. All of these disciplines might help in the study of criminology, because there are so many ways of understanding crime and criminals — and very little agreement on which is the most important, or the most useful, in a particular situation. Perhaps it depends on how you define crime, e.g. a matter of individual pathology, a symptom of social disorganization, an issue of the suppression of the weak by the powerful, etc. There is no absolute right or wrong answer. It matters more which explanation is more empirically based. I trust you, as an experienced practitioner in Hong Kong, have your own view on the major disciplines involved in defining what is a crime in your particular situation. For the most part we concentrate on the main disciplines — so don’t worry, you won’t have to be an expert in neurology or linguistics to follow the course!
Activity 1.2
Some possible answers are: 1 2 murder, assault occasioning actual bodily harm, robbery careless driving causing death of a pedestrian, fallen objects leading to injuries or damage of property criminal negligence, failing to produce proof of identity, leaving a child alone at place of residence failing to display warning notice against possible danger (breach of duty of care), failing to purchase third-party insurance for vehicle, failing to insure employees against accidents.
3
4
The more you think of, the more you are aware of the complication of what a crime is. It is not only a deliberate act and one that was at the time contrary to the law; it may well be an intentional omission of the performance of an act. Moreover, what is called a crime depends in large part on the culture considered. A crime of failing to insure employees against accidents is a crime in Hong Kong but not in many Asian countries. It reflects the value we put on employees, and on people. Crime is related to morality and ethics.
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Activity 1.3
Once again there are no ‘right’ answers to this question, but some of the points you might have made are as follows: In favour of the radical approach: • It is impossible to measure crime as behaviour using a purely legalistic definition, because that stops us from doing proper comparisons among countries (where different laws may apply). It is wrong for scientists like criminologists to have their areas of enquiry decided for them by politicians and lawyers. No other scientist would tolerate that, so why should we? It is quite wrong to assume that the law is implemented fairly: In fact, it works heavily to the disadvantage of people who are already poor and powerless. So many acts committed by the poor are considered ‘crimes’, but bad acts committed by the rich are not. It is much fairer and more scientific, therefore, to agree on a universal definition of ‘crime’ for research purposes, just as we have universal declarations of human rights, rights of children and so on. And one thing on which nearly everyone agrees is that crimes are actions that do harm to other people. Criminologists should be able to agree on consistent definitions of harm and so move to a proper definition of ‘crime’ that frees it from the politics of different countries and prevents the powerful from concealing their crimes.
•
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Against the radical approach: • A crime is, quite simply, an act that is against the criminal law. This is a matter of fact not opinion, and it is ridiculous to deny it. It is the fact of breaking the law that defines a criminal. This itself is a valuable insight, and something that makes all criminals worthy of study. It is also wrong to suggest that we can reach an agreed international definition of crime. First of all, criminologists would never agree on it in practice. Second, different cultures view the same act quite differently. For example, execution is very common in China and illegal in the UK, because different assessments are made of the value of human life and of human rights. The same applies to petty corruption, police violence and many other things. Trying to compare the same actions in different countries would be quite pointless.
•
If the law works unfairly, that is itself a very good topic for academic study; but such a statement should be the starting point of a research project, not the end point.
Activity 1.4
• The introductory chapters explain to you that only a known or suspected drug abuser who came into contact with a reporting agency
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will be recorded. It is not possible to ascertain the exact size of the drug abuser population in Hong Kong. The statistics only serve as indicators of the trends in drug abuse over time rather than a finite definition of the situation. • You may imagine the vast numbers of unreported drug abusers, in particular occasional users who have never been arrested or contacted by any law enforcement agencies. These individuals have not been recorded in the database of the addict population.
Go back to the section on reasons why probably criminal acts do not end up as convictions, and see whether they are equally applicable to the measurement problems identified in defining the actual size of the addict population in Hong Kong.
Activity 1.6
From the summary of their article you have read, I think you could reasonably conclude that Schwendinger and Schwendinger might think: 1 that the poor people have been driven to crime by poverty, and that they are, therefore, victims of an unfair system first, and only incidentally criminals; that they have been subjected to unfair propaganda persuading them to want expensive goods they do not need; and, in the absence of the money to obtain them legitimately, they stole them (or, of course, robbed someone else, or sold drugs, in order to obtain the money to buy them); and that the law itself is more geared towards punishing the crimes of the poor than those of the rich: more concerned, for example, about petty theft than (say) medical negligence, architectural mistakes leading to building collapse or river pollution by petrochemical companies (differential scope of the law). This simply shows how biased the law is and how false it is to believe that the poor group is really more criminal than the rich group. As a result, there are actually no more criminals among the poor group than among the rich group, but the police have concentrated their efforts on them, ignoring the crimes of the rich such as contracting fraud, or professors who take bribes to pass their students. This differential enforcement means that the poor, in addition to the pain and distress they suffer daily have to cope with the stigma of being considered criminals. This is a classic case of ‘blaming the victim’.
2
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From a different perspective, among the comments you might make are: 1 It is wrong to argue that the poor have been ‘driven to’ anything: Only a small minority of poor people commit crimes, and they are not the poorest. They have chosen to offend and should be punished.
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2
The crimes committed by the poor have real victims and damage people’s lives and safety: Just look at how much more it costs to insure your house contents or your car in a poor area than in a wealthy one. The victims of the poor are often poor themselves, because people often commit offences very close to where they live. If it is true that the crimes of the rich are not taken to court, that certainly needs to be addressed by both politicians and lawyers. But the Schwendingers do not make any attempt to calculate what proportion of rich people are committing these serious crimes. Probably it is a tiny proportion, and for them to argue that the rich are generally criminal is just an unproven assertion and almost certainly wrong. In addition, we know from the official statistics that only a tiny proportion of the crimes of the poor ever result in a conviction, so if the crimes of the rich are under-reported so are those of the poor, and probably much more so. We should also ask why the poor are poor. The Schwendingers seem to think it’s not their fault. But perhaps they — or some of them — are people who have been lazy at school, or disobedient from an early age, or are simply not very clever. Why should we be surprised that such a group would be more likely to turn to crime than successful people with a stake in society? In addition, if a rich person turns to crime and is caught, he or she has much more to lose than a poor person: It could mean professional ruin! Thus, there is every reason for people who are successful not to gamble with their future when even a minor offence could mean dismissal. For the poor, the occasional conviction does not have such bad implications.
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I should stress that these possibilities are not ones I am necessarily supporting myself — so you do not have to believe any or all of them! Indeed I have no problem what you think: My only concern is that you have reached your own opinions by a process of very careful thought and are not just being emotional or angry.
Activity 1.7
As an experienced practitioner in the field of criminal justice in Hong Kong, you may well have come up with the following answers, in descending order of significance suggested: 1 Central government (policy bureaus, especially in the Security Bureau, and Judiciary, Department of Justice that set the parameters and direction) Influential figures and celebrities (think of Mr Martin Hong and Mr Stanley Ho on licensing of soccer betting)
2
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LESM A305 Major Issues in Criminology and Penology
3
Criminal justice system (law enforcement departments such as courts, police, customs & excise, immigration, correctional services, social welfare, etc.) Political structures (Executive and Legislative Councils, statutory boards) Political parties Academia and legal professions Pressure groups Mass media Non-governmental organizations (victims groups).
4 5 6 7 8 9
The order of significance is not ‘absolute’. It varies across policy areas, in particular whether interested groups are involved; say, Hong Kong Jockey Club and Football Association in the ‘decriminalization’ of soccer betting outlets. Victims of crimes are usually the least heard. The suggested answer only gives you an example of an analysis of the political context composing the major players. You will find different orders when you analyse different situations, for example, switching to cross-border crimes; then the China factor enters into the arena.
Activity 1.8
The following considerations, though they are not ‘answers’ are factors you might have considered in identifying and clarifying your thoughts: • What is the political stance of the customer newspaper? (Answer: it is a middle-of-the-road newspaper with a predominantly middle-aged to elderly readership, predominantly Conservative voting and probably with a more moralistic and punitive approach to crime than the average.) Though polls almost always show that people think crime is getting worse, this is not necessarily true. In 2000, crime had in fact reached a plateau and in some areas a decline was notable. Some scholars believe that in every generation people compare today unfavourably with a ‘golden age’ of the past (usually about 30 years earlier), which, in fact, never existed. That 79% of the minority who had been victimized did not know whether the criminal had been caught may have meant either that the criminal had not been caught or that he had, but the police had not told them. It would be helpful to know which is which. If the police do not routinely notify victims of the outcome of their cases, their confidence in the system is likely to be unjustifiably low. This appears to extend to the ‘prospective’ question that indicates that a large majority of respondents did not believe that if they became a victim of a violent crime the police would catch their assailant. The problem of low levels of confidence in the police was answered by the suggestion of putting more police ‘on the beat’. There is,
•
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unfortunately, no reason to believe that such a tactic would have any effect on the crime rate except, possibly, to make it worse by reducing the numbers of officers more effectively used. The likelihood of a walking police officer stopping crime is almost absurd, but the response, though completely wrong, was widespread and passionately felt. What should the police and political response to this problem of misperception be, do you think? That 15% of respondents blame the government for a (probably nonexistent) increase in crime and that over 90% propose a solution to the problem that will probably make the situation worse presents a serious political problem.
Unit 1
The focus of criminology
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Course team Developer: Designer: Coordinator: Members: Prof. R J Harris, University of Hull Cliff Hall, OUHK Dr Garland Liu, OUHK Dr Raymond Lau, OUHK Kwan Ming Tak, Kalwan, Consultant
External Course Assessor Dr Dennis S W Wong, City University of Hong Kong Production ETPU Publishing Team
Copyright The Open University of Hong Kong, 2003, 2011. Reprinted 2013. All rights reserved. No part of this material may be reproduced in any form by any means without permission in writing from the President, The Open University of Hong Kong. Sale of this material is prohibited. The Open University of Hong Kong 30 Good Shepherd Street Ho Man Tin, Kowloon Hong Kong
This course material is printed on environmentally friendly paper.
Contents
Introduction Structure of the unit What is criminology? Criminology as theory: identifying the ‘causes’ of crime Criminology as hard science The politics of crime and punishment: meeting public demands Feedback on activities 1 3 7 24 31 38 48
Unit 1
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Introduction
First of all, it is my very great pleasure to welcome you to the course. It has been very carefully prepared with your interests in mind — as an adult professional person, based in Hong Kong and interested in learning more about criminology and penology. Although ultimately it is your commitment and ability that will (we hope) get you through, my job is to try to be as helpful to you as if we were sitting down in the same room discussing these fascinating topics together. This may seem a difficult thing to do: After all we have never met, and how, you might ask, can I possibly anticipate the problems you will have, the interests you want to pursue and the points at which you will need particular help? Well that’s a very fair question; but fortunately for both of us I have taught most (if not all) of these topics in face-to-face classroom situations over the years, and you would be surprised how often the same questions crop up and the same special interests emerge. So in writing this course, I am drawing on this experience. I am also drawing on the times I have written units just like this at my own university and supported students who have found bits of them difficult. So although I can’t hope to be sensitive to any personal ‘highs and lows’ you may have, I will do my best to steer you through the tricky bits. And I am going to try to do this in a way that makes the course interesting and stimulating while ensuring that the level of difficulty is one you can manage. I can’t promise to make everything that follows easy, but I can try to help you rise to the challenge and, above all, be successful. I hope that before too long we shall have become firm friends, because the trip we are about to make together is quite long. Sometimes in the course the terrain will be rough, and sometimes you will need a compass if you are not to get lost. My job is to be your guide — and I have a very reliable compass in my pocket. To begin your study, this unit: • • explains the problem in defining and measuring crime; examines the causation of crime and discusses the multidisciplinary nature of criminology; discusses the history and the use of science to the study of crime; analyses the politics of crime and punishment and considers critically the themes and debates in the field; and evaluates the contribution of criminology to the control and management of crime and criminals.
• •
•
To prepare you for what is to come, I would like you to attempt the first activity which is about the ‘multidisciplinary nature of criminology’.
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Activity 1.1
Please spend up to ten minutes on the following activity. 1 This unit aims to help you demonstrate that you understand the ‘multidisciplinary’ nature of criminology. Three disciplines involved in criminology are sociology, philosophy and politics. Can you think of at least three other disciplines that might be relevant to the study of criminology? Write down briefly why an understanding of these disciplines might help you with the study of criminology. Do you consider anyone of these disciplines more important than the others? Do you think these disciplines are equally applicable to Hong Kong?
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I hope you found this activity helpful. It is the first of a number of activities in which I will invite you to take part. As we proceed, I shall try to engage your interest and encourage you to check out your developing knowledge with some more. But don’t worry if you don’t get the same answers as I have, because sometimes — and Activity 1.1 is an example — there are many possible answers and they can all be right! When this is not the so, though, I will make it clear and suggest you go back over your learning to make sure you understood it properly.
Unit 1
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Structure of the unit
This unit is in four sections, as follows:
1
What is criminology?
This section explains and discusses: • some of the main definitions of crime that scholars have suggested; this will help us appreciate the range of contributory disciplines we may encounter; and some of the measurement problems criminologists face when addressing such matters as the amount of crime that is committed and the nature and apparent effects of punishment. We also look at some of the ways researchers have tried to solve them.
•
2 Criminology as theory: identifying the causes of crime
This section introduces you to the more detailed work we will do in later units. Here, I do not go into detail but give you a broad overview of the range of contributions to criminology. Try and think of this as a route map that tells you how to get to a city. The later units are the detailed street maps you will need to get to a specific address once you have arrived in the city. I also introduce a critical edge, however, for the very fact that criminology contains so many competing ideas and beliefs should show us that there might be a problem. As you will see from the references for this section, Jock Young very rudely (but also amusingly) calls arguments about this kind of thing ‘incessant chatter’ (Young 1994). Of course if every discipline could make an agreed contribution to explaining different crimes, all would be well. But we shall see that it is not always like that. And there’s a further point. Have you noticed that although there are lots of criminologists studying crime, there’s an awful lot of crime still about? Have you ever asked yourself what they are all doing? For example, if we compare the success of criminology with that of, say, public health medicine over the last 100 years or so, we cannot really claim that criminology has done too well. We are going to think about why this is: Is it that criminologists are less good at their job than public health scientists are? Or is there something different about what those jobs are? Read on, and you will find out!
3
Criminology as hard science
In this section, we look at the history and current practice of using hard science to the study of crime. (We do not look at topics like the developing role of DNA in crime detection and prosecution because, interesting and exciting though these are, this course is not about policing.) We consider historically attempts to apply hard science to
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explaining and predicting crime as well as a number of recent and current developments in forensic criminology.
4
The politics of crime and punishment: meeting public demands
I shall begin by reminding you that everyone — even scholars like you and me — have irrational prejudices and incorrect beliefs about crime. It is very important indeed for all of us to try to set these prejudices to one side and look rationally and ‘scientifically’ at crime and punishment. But this is only half the story, because in many countries crime and punishment are politically very sensitive (think about the politics behind the ‘licensing of authorized soccer betting’ and ‘Implement Article 23 of the Basic Law’ in Hong Kong), and (in democratic societies) governments have to respond to public pressure which precisely reflects the irrational prejudices and incorrect beliefs of others. Although it would be wrong to claim that public policy is driven by prejudice and error, it is certainly influenced by them. And if knowledge fails to change popular errors, public policy cannot be wholly scientific. In this section I introduce you to the politics of crime and punishment, including populist politics, public opinion, pressure groups and the role of the media. In addition, as with all areas of public policy, criminal legislation is politically determined and legally implemented.
Reading
In this introductory unit, you do not have to do very much additional reading, because I would like you to spend most of your time studying the material that follows. Some of it is background information, which you need to understand before you move on to more detailed study; other parts of it we look at later in greater detail. • The one book (below) that I ask you to look at is Coleman and Moynihan. This is a very straightforward and clearly written book about different kinds of criminal statistics. This is an important area to which I introduce you only briefly. I deal in some detail with the paper by Schwendinger and Schwendinger. Although it would be useful for you to read it, you will be able to follow the argument well enough from the information I provide. Third, I should like to draw your attention to the important book by Wilson and Herrnstein. It is long but clearly written. It has been controversial because the authors are more conservative in their approach than many criminologists and are especially influenced by both empirical studies and psychological research. You do not need to read any of it in detail for this unit, though you may enjoy looking at the book as a whole and browsing through any chapters that interest you.
•
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•
Finally, I should like to mention Vold, Bernard and Snipes. This is an excellent textbook. If there is one book you should consider buying for the first few units of this course, it is this. I refer to it repeatedly in later units.
I have listed below seven books, which you will meet again later. With the exception of Coleman and Moynihan, I have deliberately not given you chapters or pages to read. If you learn what follows thoroughly and look at the pages of Coleman and Moynihan that I introduce later, you will have done everything required of you for this unit. Beirne, P (1993) Inventing Criminology: Essays on the Rise of ‘Homo Criminalis’, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (This is an absolutely fascinating book. It is quite detailed, and occasionally difficult, but interesting for anyone interested in the history of scientific criminology. I tell you more about it in Unit 3.) Coleman, C and Moynihan, J (1996) Understanding Crime Data: Haunted by the Dark Figure, Buckingham: Open University Press. (A good basic text. I shall be directing you to some pages from this book later in this unit. It is worth considering for purchase.) Fink, A E (1938) The Causes of Crime: Biological Theories in the United States, 1800–1915, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. (An extraordinary account of some early biological approaches to crime.) Schwendinger, H and Schwendinger, J (1970) ‘Defenders of order or guardians of human rights?’ in Taylor, I Walton, P and Young, J (eds) (1995) Critical Criminology Issues in Criminology, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 5, 123–57. (I give you a short summary of this paper in this unit. You also have an activity related to it. It is a very left-wing approach to criminal law, and it will be helpful for you to form a view on whether you agree or disagree with the line they take.) Bernard, T, Snipes, J and Gerould, A (2010) Vold’s Theoretical Criminology, 6th edn, New York: Oxford University Press. (This an excellent textbook, which is recommended for purchase. Even though I am not going to require you to read the introductory Chapter 1 for this unit, it will be useful if you want some more basic theoretical discussion on criminology. It tells you in a rather systematic and yet straightforward way the major types of explanation for crimes, what it is in criminology that is scientific, interdisciplinary and what causation means. A good basic text to begin this course with.) Wilson, J Q and Herrnstein, R (1985) Crime and Human Nature: The Definitive Study of the Causes of Crime, New York: Simon and Schuster (See above. I mention this excellent book in future
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units. If you can get hold of it, you may enjoy browsing through parts of it, but you are not required to do so for this unit.) Young, J (1994) ‘Incessant chatter: recent paradigms in criminology’ in Maguire, M, Morgan, R and Reiner, R (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Criminology, 1st edn, Oxford: The Clarendon Press. (An interesting paper, to which I refer several times. You do not have to read it, but if your English is quite good you may enjoy doing so.)
Unit 1
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What is criminology?
In this first section we examine and discuss: • • different definitions of crime and some measurement problems in crime and punishment — the socalled statistics of crime — and how and to what extent criminologists have managed to solve them.
What is crime?
In one sense, crime and punishment are the easiest things in the world to define. I will make an attempt to set down what you know — and everyone else knows — to be the correct definitions of crime and punishment. A crime is an act which was deliberately committed and which was at the time contrary to the law. Punishment is a legally sanctioned penalty for crime, imposed, in accordance with the law, on someone convicted of having committed such a crime.
Activity 1.2 How do I define crime and punishment?
Before reading on please spend ten minutes thinking very hard about these definitions and whether you agree with them. If you have any doubts or disagreements about either of them, write down what they are. If you think they are absolutely correct, write that down too. Spend a further ten minutes more or so thinking even harder along the other direction of the definition of crime. Is it possible to regard a crime as an act that was deliberately omitted? Try to name some crimes along the following matrix. (a) Crimes that are intentionally performed (c) Crimes that are intentionally omitted (b) Crimes that are unintentionally performed (d) Crimes that are unintentionally omitted
There are some examples at the end of the unit to see if you have recognized any of them. You will start to realize the different dimensions involved in defining what crime is. When you have completed this section, I shall remind you to look again at what you have written and identify any changes. This will help you identify what you have learned.
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LESM A305 Major Issues in Criminology and Penology
The problem is that these definitions do not take us very far in understanding what either crime or punishment is. Let’s just deal with crime and try to find some problems with the definition I have just given you. We begin by introducing you to an important distinction.
Necessity and sufficiency
One possible way of proceeding is to distinguish between necessity and sufficiency. In other words, it may be necessary for the conditions in our definition of crime to be met, but those conditions may not be sufficient to make our definition satisfactory. Spend a moment thinking about these ideas before proceeding, because if you are not clear what they mean you will not understand what follows. If you are still not sure, ask a friend or look the words up in a good dictionary. Now that you know what necessity and sufficiency mean, let us turn again to our definition of crime (focus on the given definition), in order to decide whether its conditions are necessary for an act to be considered a crime. You will have noticed that our definition contains two main points: • • The act must have been committed deliberately. It must have been against the law at the time.
For an act to be a crime it must have been deliberate. This means an accidental act cannot be a crime. But is this true? Let’s take two scenarios: Scenario 1: You go into a shop, pick up an item and walk out of the shop holding it — quite openly — because you have genuinely forgotten to pay. You have forgotten because you have been distracted by a friend who has just called your mobile to say a family member had been badly hurt in an accident. Scenario 2: That same mobile phone call came when you were driving your car. In a panic, you drove at great speed towards the hospital where your injured relative had been taken. You were desperate to get there quickly, and you accidentally swerved the car into a pedestrian, whom you hit head-on. The pedestrian died instantly. In either of these situations you could reasonably argue that your action was not deliberate: You didn’t intend to steal the item, and you certainly didn’t intend to kill anyone. So are you, or are you not, a criminal? Well, the answer to this lies in good part in the wording of the law in the country where you committed the crime. It also lies in how that law is interpreted by significant decision-makers including (in particular) the police or whichever organization decides on whether to prosecute in the country in question. So, the word ‘deliberate’ is beginning to look a bit trickier than we expected, and certainly these matters are not always very consistently
Unit 1
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applied. In Scenario 1, there is a reasonable chance that if you could prove you had had the distressing phone call, the shop might decide not to take action. But there is no guarantee of this. For example, the more valuable the item you had taken the less likely it is that the shop would take that line. So if you walked out of (say) Bossini with a $50 pair of jeans, you might get away with it; but if you took a $50,000 work of art from an expensive gallery in Central or Mid-Levels, you might not be so lucky! But even if you took only the jeans, if Bossini had had a recent increase in shoplifting rates the company might have decided, as a matter of policy, to take a hard line and prosecute everyone. So, by walking out of the shop with an unpaid-for item, you have put yourself in the hands of other people and they will make a human decision about what to do with you. In Scenario 2, the fact that you caused death by dangerous driving would mean that you would almost certainly be prosecuted and almost certainly convicted. Any discretion exercised there would be with what, exactly, you would be charged. But from what we have seen you would, at the very least, be guilty of recklessness. After all, if you were not in a fit state to drive you should have taken a cab, and the fact you were in a distressed state will not bring your victim back to life. So, public and victim pressure would be immense if you were not prosecuted or acquitted on the ground that your action was not ‘deliberate’. So, perhaps acting deliberately isn’t after all a necessary precondition for a crime to have been committed. Let us look at this a little further.
The meaning of ‘deliberate’
You will have noticed that the issue underlying Scenarios 1 and 2 is identical, but because Scenario 2 is much more serious you are almost certain to be taken to court. In Scenario 1, there is a chance you might not be. This is the first clue that the law does not always operate rationally or consistently. So although our definition looked simple, when we turn to possible ‘real-life’ scenarios, things start to get complicated. The reason is that a number of new factors come into play, for which a simple definition cannot allow. In particular: • Our apparently simple criterion — deliberate — is actually not so simple after all. Let me explain why. To understand this you need to appreciate the difference between absolute and relative concepts: An absolute concept is an ‘either-or’ situation. Things are black or white, guilty or not guilty, they go forward or backward, and there is nothing in between — you cannot be a bit guilty or a bit white — you are either guilty (or white) or you are not! A relative concept, by contrast, allows for variations of degree. So with a relative concept you can be half-right and half-wrong; you can be a bit silly, or half mad and even fairly intelligent. So a relative concept lets us judge the amount of something — and that amount doesn’t have to be 100%.
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•
So if we look at our definition of a crime, we will see that for an act to be a crime it must have been ‘deliberate’. This probably makes us think of an absolute concept, as though when we do something it must be either deliberate or an accident, and no space is allowed for anything else between the two. But when we look at the scenarios, we discover that this may not be true: Perhaps we were distracted, emotional, angry, drunk, drugged or just forgetful. This would suggest that our actions were ‘a bit deliberate’, but not completely so. And we have learned that if this is so, it does not exempt us from the law. This gives us another problem. Once we see something as being only partly ‘deliberate’, we need someone to decide how deliberate the crime was, because this affects both the charge and the sentence. Making this decision is called using discretion: For example, if you are a police officer and you see a man hit another man, you have to decide whether what he did was serious enough for you to arrest him. If you later describe this to a friend or colleague you could say, ‘I used my discretion and decided not to do anything about it’; or (of course) ‘I used my discretion and decided to arrest him. Can you think of another situation in which you could use this expression?
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Discretion is exercised at different points in the criminal justice process. If you are leaving Bossini with the unpaid-for jeans and are seen by a staff member, that staff member will use his or her discretion about whether or not to stop you. This decision may be influenced by personal as well as professional considerations. Some of the factors that may influence how the staff member uses his or her discretion are: Do you look as though you might be aggressive? Has the worker had a bad day? Does he or she feel loyalty to the company? If the worker does stop you, the store manager will use his or her discretion about whether to call the police. This decision is likely to depend on factors such as: store policy and how convincingly you argue that you did not mean to steal the jeans. That is a second level of discretion even before then police know anything about the incident! Then, third, if the police are called, they in turn must decide whether to prosecute you and if so what charge to lay (there are often several
Unit 1
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charges that can be made). And so it goes on right through to the sentence you receive and, if you go to prison, when you are released. • We have learned that discretion is often not used in an entirely consistent or rational way. For example, when thinking about whether to prosecute or not the police will reflect on the political consequences of their decision. So, Bossini can better afford to lose a pair of jeans than the family of a road death victim can afford to lose a loved one. As a result, the likely consequences of a decision being made in respect of the same problem but in different circumstances will be entirely different. Many factors like sympathy for you; the likelihood of gaining a conviction; how sorry, upset and ashamed you seem to be; and whether you have a criminal record will affect the use of discretion. The law does not operate as simply as the definition suggests. But what we can say is that the minute you walked out of that shop with unpaid-for goods, you put your future reputation in the hands of others; you cannot be sure they will make a rational or consistent decision about what to do with you. • There is one further point. Many people believe that because discretion is not always exercised fairly, systematic discrimination operates in the criminal justice system against some categories of offender. Discrimination is a situation in which an unfair decision is made on the basis of prejudice or dislike and not because of something relevant to the case. Suppose you were a police officer and you very much disliked illegal immigrants (IIs). You arrested two people for the same offence: One was an II and one was a Hong Kong citizen. But you acted unfairly towards the II simply because he was an II and not because of what he had done. That would be discrimination. Systematic discrimination is many other people in the police force doing the same thing, so that statistically it can be shown that IIs (or any other group — for example the homeless, drug addicts, women) can be shown to be treated more harshly than others for reasons not connected with their crime. This goes against what many people think is a basic principle of justice, examined in Unit 2 — that the same crime should attract the same punishment. Rethink (c) and (d) in Activity 1.2. Apart from the meaning of ‘deliberate’, the meaning of ‘act’ can be equally absolute or relative. It may be an overt and observable behaviour or a covert act of failing to
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perform a lawful behaviour, the omission of which is an offence. Let’s deal with the issue of ‘deliberate’ further.
Contrary to the law?
Even if the word ‘deliberate’ presents a problem, surely there can be no doubt that a crime must be against the law. How can you have a crime that is not against the law? Surely any such idea would be ridiculous. On the whole I happen to think it is ridiculous, but not all criminologists agree with me — and perhaps you won’t either when I have explained why they think the way they do. Then you can make up your mind: After all, I don’t mind if you disagree with me as long as your arguments are sound; and you might even be able to persuade me that I am wrong. As you will see, there are some very good arguments against my position. For example, think of the situation in countries: • where the ‘rule of law’ is weak or non-existent, and judges — who should ideally be able to make their decisions free of political pressure — are subject to strong political pressure to deal severely with some criminals and leniently with others. In some rural parts of China, where judges often have low social status and few educational qualifications, there have been many cases of criminals avoiding prosecution by sheltering under the guanxi umbrella of Beijing officials. In some African countries, judges are political appointees who stand to lose their jobs if they produce politically inconvenient decisions; and where the state itself acts not as protector of the people but as their oppressor. In some countries, corruption is rife and laws are intended not to deal with everyone equally, but to protect the powerful from prosecution or enable them to build up large fortunes at the expense of the people. In one famous example, President Trujillo, who ran the Dominican Republic until the early 1960s, took over the country’s only shoe factory and immediately passed a law forbidding anyone in the capital from going barefoot!
•
This extreme example reminds us that ‘the law’ is not divinely given but created by powerful people with their own interests to protect. This has led many criminologists, particularly those with a sociological (especially a Marxist) background, to attack the belief that a ‘crime’ must be against the law and to say that the law itself is designed by the ruling élite to maintain their power and status. When the law is not ‘just’ — when, say, it punishes poor people stealing to live and ignores rich people stealing to get even richer — we might say that ‘crime’ has less to do with ‘breaking the law’ than with ‘making the law’. When environmental degradation is legal (because big business wants it to be), and when presidents put billions of dollars into foreign bank accounts (because they ensure that no law exists to stop them or because they can prevent a law being enforced) some criminologists get angry when people say all crime involves law-breaking. To Marxists in particular, the maintenance of the capitalist system is dependent on encouraging a
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competitive acquisitiveness among ordinary people. If consumers do not consume, workers do not work, and we all lurch into economic depression. Hence marketing and advertising strategies are all geared to persuading people that they really need the latest designer labels, perfumes or cars; so is it, such criminologists ask, any surprise that when people cannot afford these luxury items they steal them? The sociological criminologists give us the valuable insight that we should examine law’s intentions and remind ourselves that all laws are created by politicians and that they may, therefore, have a political purpose. But whether we agree with this Marxist analysis is very much a matter of personal choice: As it happens, I do not; but I don’t at all mind if you do! In my own view, if we say that some ‘crimes’ are not against the law and that some things that are against the law are not crimes because the law is unjust, we end up getting very muddled indeed. I think it is simpler to accept that some countries are fundamentally corrupt and unjust according to international standards than to say that some parts of some laws are not valid. And it is not a good idea to confuse acts that are crimes with acts that we happen to believe ought to be crimes but are not. The motives of criminologists who develop this kind of argument are themselves political. We shall see later that many sociological criminologists in particular believe that because laws are political, so is crime; and so, therefore, should be the analysis of crime — or criminology. To such writers, criminologists cannot be neutral observers, but are unavoidably participants in a political battle between an oppressive state and poor and marginal people whose crimes reflect not individual misbehaviour but their oppressed class position. Such criminologists will judge each other not only — and perhaps not even especially — by the scientific quality or analytic rigour of their work, but by whether they side with the oppressors or the oppressed. Once again I am afraid, my own position is much more conservative than this. I do believe we can exercise sensible judgement about crime in a fair and reasoned way; and — even if we are not perfect and sometimes get it wrong — it is better to try to be balanced than not to try. But again, you may or may not agree with me. Well, I expect that by now you are surprised that from such a simple definition of crime (an act deliberately committed and which was at the time contrary to the law) we have ended up having such a complicated discussion. I think it is time to recap what we have said, so that you can follow the argument clearly. But before I do, you might like to hear from one pair of radical criminologists, in their own words. After all, I have already told you I do not really agree with them, so you may be worried that my version of what they say is likely to be unfair. And, you may well be right. So, why not read them for yourself and decide for yourself whom to believe? Have a look at Schwendinger and Schwendinger (1970), a famous paper that argues for a human rights-based definition of crime. Do you find this a convincing line of argument? Here are the main points they make:
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•
In the 1930s, the criminologist Thorsten Sellin argued that for the scientific study of crime to be possible, it was necessary for criminologists themselves, not politicians, to define the meaning of crime (at least for scientific study). He felt this should be done in relation to ‘conduct norms’ (i.e. people’s behaviour towards each other) which are fairly constant across time and place, and not by laws, which vary widely. In the 1940s, another criminologist, Edwin Sutherland, did a famous study of ‘white-collar crime’ (crimes committed by professional people). He found that many of the ‘crimes’ he investigated were not classified as crimes at all, because they were committed by powerful people. Whereas Sellin put forward scientific reasons for criminologists to determine what was criminal, Sutherland put forward moral ones — the crimes of the powerful hurt people, but the law failed to acknowledge this. A third criminologist, Paul Tappan, disputed both arguments and claimed that criminals were not criminals unless they had broken the law. The authors attack his position strongly, by saying that it leaves out criminals who have not been adjudicated and includes the victims of miscarriages of justice. The authors admit, grudgingly, that Tappan has ‘won the day’ and that as a result ‘the science of criminology . . . [is] determined by agents of the political State because legalistic definitions of crime are formulated by these agents’. There is then quite a long theoretical debate about these opposing approaches, which you do not need to study in full for the purposes of this course. The authors then say they do not have enough space to offer their own alternative but will outline some principles behind it, which will stimulate debate. They believe ‘human rights’ could be a criterion: ‘To defend human rights, criminologists must be able to sufficiently identify the violations of these rights . . . If the right to be secure in one’s own person is to have greater value than social inequalities based on the ownership of property, for example, then one should be prepared to define the use of deadly force on the part of police officers as unjustifiable homicide when this force is used in defence of property . . . many forms of behaviour, including those now defined as crimes without victims or crimes of consumption, would not be defined as crimes within this new perspective’. They also believe that ‘social systems’ should be able to be considered criminal, as well as individuals. They are vague
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about what they mean, but probably they have in mind poorquality services for the poor and oppressive structures like the very limited schemes of income support available to them: ‘. . . the science of crime has gone beyond the centuries-old notion that crime can be conceived as a function of the properties of atomistic individuals alone . . . the social conditions must become the object of social policy . . . it is not an individual or a loose collection of atomistic individuals which is to be controlled, but rather the social relationships between individuals which give rise to criminal behaviour’. • They conclude with an impassioned comment on the criminality of nations, suggesting that the people we normally consider criminals are in fact victims of injustice and oppression: ‘. . . hundreds of thousands of Indo-Chinese persons are being denied their right to live; millions of black people are subjected to inhuman conditions which, on the average, deny them ten years of life . . . Is there any wonder why we have raised questions about the legalistic definitions of crime when the magnitude of ‘social injury’ caused by imperialism, racism, sexism and poverty is compared to that wrought by individual acts which the State legally defines as crimes?’
Well, what do you think? Do you find this kind of impassioned argument convincing? Do you believe they are right to equate one kind of political behaviour criminal? Though their attack is on social conditions in the US, you can assume that if they were writing about Hong Kong today they would make some rather similar comments. Do you think that would be justified? Is the Hong Kong Government criminal? The choice is yours! This dispute is important enough for you to express a view. There is no ‘right answer’ though, so think hard and decide on how to answer the following question — and remember, you will get no extra marks for agreeing with me! In fact, the arguments on the other side are so strong that sometimes I don’t even agree with myself.
Activity 1.3 Criminology and politics
Spend 15 minutes summarizing the arguments for and against the position that criminologists should be actively politically engaged in studying crime. Please add any thoughts you have had that have not been included in the unit. Which of the arguments do you agree with so far? Why?
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Conclusion
My own argument in this first part of Section 1 goes as follows: • We began with a simple definition of crime: It is an act which was deliberately committed and which was at the time contrary to the law. The first limb of this definition is that it was deliberate. This presented us with our first problem, because we discovered that ‘deliberation’ is a relative not an absolute concept: Often we are not either wholly rational or wholly irrational but somewhere between the two. As a result, many people exercise human judgement about specific acts. These judgements may not always be rational, but they are important because they help determine whether an ‘act’ (including both acting out behaviour and omission of the performance of a behaviour) is classified as a ‘crime’. Hence it is wrong to regard such a classification as purely objective. The necessity of discretion often leads to suggestions of systematic discrimination against certain categories of offender, in respect of whom, it is claimed, decision-makers are consistently tougher (or more lenient) than they are to others. The second limb of our definition is that a crime must be against the law. This also proved more contentious than we might have expected; many criminologists point out that the law may be unfair, corrupt, non-existent or oppressive. So if we follow a legally based definition of ‘crime’, we may have to call someone a ‘criminal’ when in fact he or she simply has powerful enemies and has not committed any ‘crime’ at all. In such a situation, the law itself may be ‘criminal’ in the sense that it has been created to protect powerful vested interests. It may be unjust in its construction (the ‘crimes’ of the powerful are not against the law) or in its execution (the law is not enforced against the powerful). Powerful people may range from politicians to major corporations guilty of social irresponsibility in environmental or health and safety matters.
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•
The line of argument that crimes are not against the law can only be coherent if there is assumed to exist some natural law overriding state law. So we may believe that human beings have certain inalienable rights, even if those rights are not really enforced. Radical criminologists often believe that because law and crime are political, they, too, have a responsibility to be political, standing up for the interests of the poor. Schwendinger and Schwendinger were given as an example of this approach. Others (and I am one) think this confuses two issues, the analytic and the political, and that though, as private citizens, criminologists can lobby all they like for what they believe in, as professional criminologists they should do their best to be dispassionate and fair.
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Some measurement problems with crimes
A crucial part of understanding crime is knowing how it is measured and the problems that arise in trying to measure it. You will already have learned that this is not as simple a process as you might think. I have broken the news to you that if you have accidentally killed someone by driving your car dangerously, you will be very likely to be taken to court and convicted. But I have also said that if you have removed an inexpensive item of clothing from a shop in a fit of absent-mindedness, you might just get away with it (though please do not try!). Of course there are many reasons why what I call probably criminal acts do not end up as convictions. Here are the main ones and some of the reasons why such a passage of an act through the criminal justice process stops at a particular point. If you think carefully, you will probably be able to identify many more. No one knows the act happened Many crimes remain entirely secret. Shops do not know of every incident of shoplifting, nor do employers know if their employees have been stealing from work. In many minor assaults, the victim is unaware that he or she is, technically, possibly a crime victim. Insurance frauds, pickpocketing, many motoring offences and so on are entirely unknown to anyone except the criminal. Sometimes, the victim may be a young child; sometimes even the criminal doesn’t know he or she has committed a crime. No one reports it to the police I wonder if you have ever been a victim of a crime and decided not to tell the police? Many people have, and for minor crimes this is often perfectly sensible (if not very public-spirited). The police lack the human resources to hunt down every petty thief, the act of reporting a crime and having to make a statement is inconvenient, and if you are not covered by
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insurance (and do not have a monetary motive) you may simply decide not to bother. But there are other more serious reasons why victims might not report a crime. These range from blackmail to fear of reprisals, from trauma to fear of arrest or mistrust of the police. As you will see in Unit 9, a surprisingly high proportion of victims are themselves offenders; and contrary to popular belief, unprovoked attacks on old ladies are the exception not the rule. Nonetheless, this is not to be critical of most victims. For example, it has been estimated that in the United Kingdom less than 1% of all rape leads to a conviction (though we should, for reasons that will become clear in Unit 6 and which you may anyway be able to guess, be cautious about this figure). Rape that is not reported to the police is frequently what is called ‘intimate rape’ rather than ‘stranger rape’ — the victim and the offender know each other (either socially or through work) and may have been dating or cohabiting. The police decide not to take any further action There are many reasons why the police might decide not to record a crime that has been reported to them. Sometimes (in English slang) they ‘cuff’ it (meaning write it on the cuff of their sleeve but not in the official record). They might think the complainant is lying or exaggerating. They might know from past experience that the person is likely to retract his or her statement or refuse to attend court. They might be too busy to take action. They might be under political pressure to show reduced crime figures. They might be lazy or corrupt (though syndicate corruption is, fortunately, now rare among police in Hong Kong and the United Kingdom). The police record the incident but no prosecution follows The most obvious reason for this is that the police don’t catch the criminal, but there are other factors too. For example, the police may know very well who committed the crime, but witnesses have been bribed or are too scared to testify (recently it has become clear that intimidation of witnesses is a very serious problem in the UK). Or they [or the organization that decides whether to charge someone when it is not the police — in the UK it is a separate Crown Prosecution Service (CPS)] may simply rate the chances of a conviction as too low. Occasionally (and sometimes mysteriously) it is announced that to prosecute someone would not be ‘in the public interest’. The defendant is acquitted This is fairly self-explanatory.
Unit 1
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Official Statistics
Reading 1.1
Coleman and Moynihan’s Understanding Crime Data is a very clear introductory book which sets out in greater detail some of the important things you need to know about crime measurement. Originally, you are required to read the section entitled ‘The social construction of crime statistics’, from pp. 32–39. However, because of copyright restriction, we are not able to print all the above pages for you. Instead, we make pp. 34–39 as Reading 1.1 for you. A copy of the full article from pp. 32–39 is placed in the Reserve Section of the Library. Anyway, this section begins by covering some of the same materials we have discussed above, though in a slightly different way. Let me briefly summarize the ‘missing’ pages’ for you here. What the authors mean by the social construction of official statistics is that: the ‘very definitions of crime are themselves the result of wider social processes, sometimes ancient, sometimes recent, which reflect religious, political and other considerations, and which provide the framework in which the statistics of crime are created’. Therefore, the production of official statistics shall be examined as a social process. They then divide the compilation of official statistics into 4 stages: discovery, reporting, recording and ‘clearing up’. With regard to the stage of ‘discovery’, the authors thought that it is misleading to think that ‘all crimes are ‘out there’ and easily recognizable to anyone.’ There are occasions when there are no victims or the victims are unaware that crimes have been committed. Studies from Britain reveal that about 77% to 96% of official statistics were discovered by the public in various guises such as victims, witnesses, representatives of victimized organizations and the police. The police role in discovery is much more prominent in many ‘non-notifiable’ victimless offences relating to drugs, prostitution, drunkenness and public order. With regard to reporting, those who initially discover crimes are likely also the ones who report them to the police, Therefore, we have to take into account the role played by such agents as victims, witnesses, store detectives, caretakers, security staff………in the production of crime statistics. It should be noticed that the proportion of different offences reported varied widely. For example, vandalism is far less likely to be reported than motor vehicle theft. There are different reasons: the offence was too trivial, the police could not do anything, or that it was dealt with privately. However, the authors remind us that crime is such a varied category with a range of reasons for reporting or not. We have to seek to understand the particular circumstances (social context), sets of relationships (nature of relationship between the offenders, victims or the ‘discoverers’),
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associated experiences of harm and assessments of what can be done about the crime (expectations of police reaction or performance, insurance policies held), embarrassment or fear about any possible consequences of reporting (such as reprisal ………..). Now, I shall leave you to go through the remaining part of the reading from pp. 34–39 starting with the ‘recording’ stage. Before you start reading, I would like to mention that the authors keep referring to ‘BCS’. This is short for the British Crime Survey, a very big survey of victims of crime held periodically. As you read, please pay particular attention to pp. 35–36, where the authors discuss three reasons why crimes that have been reported might not be recorded. This is much more detailed than the account I gave, but is there anything in my account that they do not mention?
Crime data generated from situations like this are called official statistics. In other words, the figures come from official sources and reflect the crimes that the criminal justice agencies know (or are told) about. But criminologists have long been aware that the gap between crimes committed and data of this kind is immense. In particular, the random and patterned irregularities that occur, combined with changes over time in agency recording and public reporting, render many of these data of very limited use. Accordingly, for many years, criminologists have experimented with ways of collecting information about crimes that have been committed, not about those that have been reported or recorded. This is not easy to do. How would you go about it?
Self-report studies
One idea has been to ask criminals what crimes they have committed but ‘got away with’. Of course there is an obvious problem with this: You are asking dishonest people to be honest! Criminals who don’t trust researchers (I expect many of them fall into this category) would say they hadn’t committed offences that they had. Conversely, those who did trust the researcher and wanted to show off (especially likely if the offender is a young man and the researcher an attractive girl!) might say they had committed offences that they hadn’t. Researchers are, however, aware of this kind of methodological problem and have tried lots of ways of making responses anonymous, for example by having subjects drop their answers into a box. Tactics like this do not, however, solve the third problem: Many offenders, who almost certainly do not keep a diary, will simply have forgotten. This makes the self-help method very tricky, because we know (though the figures vary) that a very small number of repeat offenders commit a very high proportion of crimes. Some youngsters have committed hundreds of them! So the most prolific offenders, because they have the most to forget, will be the least reliable.
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Reading 1.2
Coleman and Moynihan also discuss self-report studies in their book. They first make it clear that self report studies involve asking people directly about their involvement in criminal and other forms of rulebreaking behaviour by means of a self-completed questionnaire or an interview. They then maintain that different objectives have different implication for the design of self-report studies, the instruments employed and the use of the findings. They then go ahead to give three examples of objectives. Now, you shall read pp. 47–48. After the examples of objectives, you shall read pp. 60–68 on methodological problems followed by the conclusion. For this part, they first define the two issues for consideration: ‘validity’ and ‘reliability’. For validity, they use the definition by Huizinga and Elliot (1986: 308): ‘the evidence that the test measures what it was intended to measure or that it represents what it appears to represents’. From p. 60 onwards, you will find further elaboration on ‘validity’ and the definition for ‘reliability’ and you shall just go ahead to read for yourself. As you read, make a careful note of why you think self-report studies can be useful and what you think their main limitations are. Notice also that in the Conclusion the authors refer to Steven Box. Box is another radical criminologist and you will see that he is arguing, just as Schwendinger and Schwendinger did in the last section, to get away from a legal definition of crime. I don’t think, though, that his views as reported here add anything to those we have already discussed. Do you?
Victimization surveys
Because of the problems with self-report studies, they have declined in popularity in the United Kingdom (though they continue to be quite popular in the United States) and have been mainly replaced by victim studies. You are far more likely to remember (and to be honest about it) if you have been a crime victim than if you have been a multiple offender, whether or not you reported your victimization. Accordingly, both in the UK and (rather earlier) in the US, governments commissioned large household surveys of victims. The data from these studies [especially the British Crime Survey (BCS), which has been repeated regularly and has, since 2001, been an annual event] have been very helpful to criminologists as well as absolutely fascinating. BCS, now based on a huge ‘sweep’ of some 40,000 respondents, does not just ‘count’ crimes, enabling statisticians to work out with greater reliability than before the proportion of probably criminal acts reported to the police (which varies both by crime and by victim type) but offers an indepth picture of victimization and victim behaviour.
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Reading 1.3
Once again, Coleman and Moynihan provide more detailed information than I can here. If you can read all of Chapter 4, you will be the better for it. If you would like to concentrate on the most important parts of the chapter, though, please read at least pp. 74–82 (‘Methodological issues’) and pp. 86–88 (‘Local surveys’). These can be very valuable means of gaining good information about criminal patterns in unusual areas that might be lost by the huge sweeps of national surveys such as BCS. Local surveys answer quite different questions from national surveys. Can you think of a situation in which using a local survey would be a good idea? Do please pay particular attention to the danger of these surveys being misused by local activists who prepare bad questions designed to produce the answers they want! Note: Due to copyright restriction, we are not able to give you the proposed reading. A copy of it is kept in the Library (Reserve Section) for your reference. A substitute article by Williams is given. Now read pp. 84–91 of Williams’ book entitled Textbook on Criminology. Though the discussion in the substitute article is not as thorough and sophisticated, it includes most of the points made by Coleman and Moynihan.
You have come to know something about the BCS, which is a model of official statistics with a lot of international recognition. Now it is time for your last activity in this section. You have to look a little more closely at how official statistics are being recorded in Hong Kong.
Activity 1.4 How the ‘addict population’ is measured in Hong Kong
Find a copy of the half-yearly report published by the Central Registry of Drug Abuse, Narcotics Division, Government Secretariat, HKSAR. Find out how the addict population is being counted. Do you think it really records the number of drug abusers?
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Conclusion
In this second part of Section 1, I hope you have learned the following main points: • From the moment a crime is committed, the criminal justice process filters it in such a way that only a tiny proportion of crimes committed ever come to official notice. Some crimes are completely unknown to everyone — sometimes even to the criminal. Some are known about but not reported to the police. Some are reported but not recorded by the police. Some are recorded by the police but do not proceed to trial. Some proceed to trial but result in an acquittal. This shows us that the system is not a very effective way of dealing with crime: In some offences, an absolutely tiny proportion lead to a conviction. In rape, for example, it has been estimated that less than one in 100 results in a conviction — and although this figure should not be regarded as reliable, it certainly indicates that a problem exists. It also shows us that a problem exists with official statistics too: They only reveal the ‘tip of the iceberg’. As a result of this, criminologists have developed two main tools of measurement: self-report studies and victimization studies. These methods of measurement have different advantages and limitations; today, most experts in the UK prefer victimization studies. The BCS provides a fascinating and important insight into people’s experiences of crime across the nation as a whole, and its results are available for criminologists to analyse further. In fact, BCS is probably one of the major achievements in crime measurement of the last 20 years. There is always a danger, though, that national surveys will lead to local differences being submerged — lost. Because of this danger, the use of local crime surveys has increased. These can provide very sensitive localized data in specific areas, but because many of them are run on an amateur basis and with very low budgets, we have to look at them with great care, as some may not be either valid or reliable.
•
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LESM A305 Major Issues in Criminology and Penology
Criminology as theory: identifying the ‘causes’ of crime
Ever since criminology became established as an area of study, criminologists have tried to find the ‘causes of crime’ as a step along the road to reducing it, or even getting rid of it entirely. After all, if crime has an identifiable cause — or even a cluster of related causes — then by attacking those causes we attack crime. It’s really very simple isn’t it? Well, actually — no it isn’t! But before I tell you why, I thought we would try a little experiment together. Everyone has his or her own ideas about what causes crime, so I am going to ask you to write down what you think causes crime. Then, when you have finished the unit, you can do the exercise again and see whether your new knowledge will cause you to write something different. That way, you will be able to identify what you have learned! Are you ready? Here we go!
Activity 1.5 The ‘causes’ of crime
This activity is to help you develop a critical awareness of specified themes and controversies within criminology and from an initial view on your own position in relation to them. I should like you, please, to complete the following two sentences completely honestly, remembering that no one else is going to see them: 1 I think that when we catch a teenage car thief we should
2
I think the main causes of crime are
I have not provided an answer for this exercise, but instead I should like you, please, to do two things. First, look at the relationship between these two answers and identify whether your answer to the second is in any way related to your answer to the first. Second, put this activity away in a safe place and don’t look at it again until you have completed the unit. When you have, I should like you to do the exercise again and then compare your two sets of answers. The difference between them will give you a snapshot of what you have learned. Good luck!
In this section and the next you, learn a bit more about what criminologists over the years have thought might have been the causes of crime and how far it is wise to believe them.
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The nature of causation
Before we do this we need a little bit of theory — this time from both philosophy and sociology. I have used the word ‘cause(s)’ several times as a kind of shorthand, because you know roughly what I mean if I say ‘poverty causes crime’ or ‘family breakdown causes crime’. But if you think for a moment, you will notice that the word ‘cause’ is borrowed from the ‘hard sciences’ like physics and chemistry. I could as well have said that ‘dipping a piece of litmus paper in an alkaline solution causes it to turn blue’. Now obviously there are a number of differences between saying ‘alkaline causes litmus paper to turn blue’ and ‘poverty causes crime’. The main one is that (a) every time we dip a piece of litmus paper in an alkaline solution it will turn blue and (b) every time we dip it in a nonalkaline solution it will not turn blue. Logicians express this in the form ‘if x then y’ — where x is the act of dipping and y is turning blue. If one day we dipped our litmus paper into an alkaline solution and it turned red, it would be just as surprising as if we threw a ball into the air and it didn’t come down again! It just couldn’t happen. But if we apply this formula to poverty and crime, so that x becomes a poor person and y a criminal, if we followed the logic of ‘if x then y’ we should have to conclude that (a) every poor person is a criminal, and (b) no rich person is a criminal. The ‘answer’ to crime would therefore be to abolish poverty, because if we did that there would be no poor people left and, therefore, no crime (and, we might add, no further need for criminologists!). This is obviously absurd, and sometimes criminologists call this kind of approach the ‘hunt for the magic bullet’ — that there is, somewhere, an ‘answer’ and that it is the job of criminologists to find it, just like it is the job of oncologists to find the cure for cancer. This teaches us two things: • The scientific method does not translate simply from the laboratory to the social world. The hunt for the causes of crime is unlikely to follow the same methodology as the hunt for the causes of cancer. We cannot look at social causation from an individual perspective. This means that because everyone is different and has what we normally term ‘human agency’ (freedom to act as he or she will), two people may respond quite differently to the same stimulus. So, one poor person may become a thief; a second may become an alcoholic vagrant (who does not commit crimes but relies on begging). A third may become a respectable worker, and a fourth may go on to become a billionaire entrepreneur — think how little money Li Ka Shing had when he arrived here from mainland China in 1939!
•
So, you see, using the word ‘cause’ in respect of crime is a bit tricky. For that reason, when I use it in future, I put it in inverted commas (‘cause’) to remind you that I am not entirely happy with the word but that sometimes I am going to use it anyway.
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The next point is an important one, because it is about research in criminology. I am going over it to help you understand the uses and limitations of this kind of criminological research. Although it is not my aim to turn you into a researcher, it is important for you to be able to look critically at other people’s research and to draw sensible conclusions from it. So take the next example carefully, and keep studying it until you understand it properly. We have seen that the word ‘cause’ is a problem in criminology because the formula ‘if x then y’ does not work. But we can use the word (in inverted commas!) in a softer sense that is usually called associational. ‘Associational’ means that poverty may be linked to crime but may not directly cause it. The following example explains what I mean: Imagine we have (sitting in one big auditorium) 1,000 randomly chosen poor people (defined as, say, those with no savings and an income of no more than HK$2,000 per month). And (in another auditorium) we have 1,000 rich people (defined as, say, having a minimum of HK$200,000 savings and an income of not less than HK$75,000 a month), also randomly chosen. We can be almost certain of three things: 1 2 Some people in each sample will be criminals. More people among the poor people will be criminals than in the rich sample. The kinds of offence committed by members of the two samples will be very different.
3
This finding would allow us to conclude that poverty is associated with higher than average levels of crime in a general sense. It would not, though, justify the conclusion that poverty caused any one individual in the poor sample to be a criminal. The reason is that this approach is a sociological observation of a particular kind, and we could only say (sociologically) that poverty caused crime if everyone in the poor sample was a criminal (so ‘if x then y’ would apply). This kind of sociological observation lets us draw fairly general conclusions only. A psychological or a micro-sociological observation, however, would be more interested in finding out why the man three seats from the aisle in the front row was a criminal but the man on his right was not. This would be a different way of trying to check out whether ‘if x then y’ applied in specific instances: • A psychological criminologist might create a subsample of the criminal members of the poor sample and another subsample of non-criminals from the same sample. (There are various methods the psychologist could use to try to ensure the two subsamples were matched, or comparable, in key
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respects. There are also research conventions, or rules of enquiry which he would follow, but I am not going to go into these here, as this is not a methodology course.) He or she might, then, look at whether the poor criminals had anything in common — neurologically, educationally, in family, personality and so on — in order to isolate the variable which caused crime. • A micro-sociologist might study friendship patterns, educational achievement, employment patterns and so on for the same reason. In neither instance would the criminologist find anything justifying an ‘if x then y’ conclusion, but he or she would be able to narrow the odds, thus increasing the probability of an association between specific factors and crime. Perhaps he or she would find lower educational attainment among the criminals, or that more came from a broken home, or were unemployed, or only children, or left-handed . . . The list of possibilities is endless. But none of them (I assure you!) would be 100% accurate as a predictor. Human behaviour just doesn’t work that way.
•
Another possibility is that although I have been describing the samples as ‘poor’ and ‘rich’, that difference isn’t especially relevant. For example: • If the poor group contained more women and the rich group contained more alcoholics than the other group, the differences in criminal behaviour between the two groups might be reduced considerably. Men commit many more offences than women (although the gap is closing nowadays, it’s still usually 6–7 times as many), and a high proportion of crimes are committed under the influence of alcohol. So it is by no means certain that 1,000 poor women would, between them, commit more offences than 1,000 alcoholic rich men. This would reduce the strength of the association between poverty and crime, and we should have to do some ‘mixing and matching’ among men, women, rich, poor, alcoholics and non-alcoholics to find out what the facts were. Again because this is not a research methods course, you do not need to learn how to go about that! If, however, this experiment told us that there was (say) a greater offending gap between the alcoholic poor and the non-alcoholic poor than between the (whole) poor sample and the (whole) rich sample, we might want to test whether alcoholism was more criminogenic (‘causing’ crime) than poverty. If we found a higher proportion of the poor sample than the rich sample were alcoholics, we might want to investigate
•
•
•
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whether poverty ‘caused’ alcoholism and alcoholism ‘caused’ crime, or whether, conversely, alcoholism ‘caused’ poverty, which means that poverty might be a symptom of alcoholism. In short, if we did not do this experiment thoroughly, we should be getting it completely wrong; and if we were simply reading the research report and misunderstood it, we should be making an equally big mistake. Studying the ‘causes’ of crime is quite complicated, but it is really important that you understand everything in the box. If you do not, you could easily misunderstand the implications of any research you read. You might even walk into the famous trap that caught one 19th-century researcher when he was studying a sample of imprisoned male murderers. He concluded that the murderer sample contained a disproportionate number of widowers. Can you work out why that might have been? In a nutshell: • • Association is a much safer concept than causation. Poverty does not cause crime in the sense that alkaline causes litmus paper to turn blue, but if more poor people than the average are criminals, then it is probably associated with it. But before we decide why that is so, we have to look in great depth at research studies to understand properly what the research tells us.
If we find, having done that, that poverty is indeed associated with crime, it is still useful to know if we are planning crime prevention policies of the kind you learn about in Unit 9. The reason is that such knowledge helps us target resources in areas where crime is (for whatever reason) high — we can do that without being too concerned about what causes crime: We just need to know where it happens. This in turn gives us what Americans call ‘more bang for our buck’ — or better value for money. So: • for many policymakers, probability is a more valuable concept than causation, because what ‘causes’ crime may be largely irrelevant to preventing it.
Certainly you should now begin to understand some of the problems of the criminological method, or social enquiry. I have a bit more to say about this kind of problem in Units 3 and 4, when we look at positivism and sociological approaches. But there is one further point I want you to think about here, because you should already be able to work out the answer from something I told you in Section 1. This means that it is now time for another activity. My aim in asking you to try the following activity is twofold. I want you to check both that you: • have remembered some of the key learning in Section 1 and
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•
have developed the skill of applying it to the research methods teaching in Section 2.
It is always an important part of learning to be able to transfer knowledge from one situation, but it is especially important for a professional person like you to be able to do so. We should be very unhappy, for example, if a graduate of this university wasn’t able to apply his or her learning about being a critical reader of research to other pieces of research he or she might come across in the future. In this exercise, I am not asking you to comment directly on a piece of research; that would mean you had to spend longer reading the research than I want you to do for this exercise. So we are going to take a shortcut. I am asking you instead to do two things: • • to ‘role-play’ Schwendinger and Schwendinger and to comment from your own perspective on what you think they would have said.
Activity 1.6 Radical criminologists and crime causation
Looking over Section 1 as necessary, write down briefly the reasons that you think Schwendinger and Schwendinger might give by way of explanation if they found more criminals among the poor than among the rich sample. How comfortable are you with this explanation. What (if any) better explanations do you think there might be?
Conclusion
Here are the main points we have covered in Section 2. Do please go back over the text if there are any points there you do not quite remember or understand. • • Criminologists often talk about the ‘causes’ of crime. The word ‘cause’ is borrowed from the laboratory sciences and is better suited to a situation in which one variable — or a combination of them — can be said to lead directly to a consequence that can be repeated experimentally with the same results. We expressed this in the form ‘if x then y’. Crime does not work like that, and if there is any interaction of variables that really does cause crime, we are a very long way indeed from finding out what it is.
• •
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•
A more optimistic line of research is to identify factors associated with crime. The difference between cause and association is that association is not expressed in the form ‘if x then y’ but as a probability. We examined the idea of association in an imaginary experiment that compared 1,000 poor people with 1,000 rich people. We concluded that it was almost certain that poverty would be associated with crime, because there would be more convicted criminals in the poor sample than in the rich sample. When, however, we began to ask more questions about the samples, we made the picture more complicated. For example, we know from research that two other factors associated with crime are high levels of alcohol consumption and the male gender. So, we examined how we might experimentally try to isolate these variables and decide whether (say) a poor non-alcoholic woman was more or less likely to be a criminal than a rich alcoholic man. This led us into a discussion about how complicated it was to analyse other people’s research professionally and well but how important it was to try. You then did an activity designed to test your skills at developing the ‘radical’ approach to crime we discussed in the previous section and at developing an alternative perspective yourself. We also need to remember that the kind of research we have been looking at deals only with probabilities of crime being committed within large samples (or cohorts) of people. If we want to learn why it is that some particular members of that sample are criminals and others are not, we need to undertake a very different kind of study. We should do this by identifying a subsample of both criminal and non-criminal members of the same sample in order to study them in much greater detail. This might involve looking at a range of psychological characteristics (personality type, hobbies, interests, fears etc.) or sociological ones (educational level, friendship networks, parental criminality and so on). We learned from this that it is very important indeed not to make claims for any piece of research that the methodology of the research cannot justify. Last, we learned that for some purposes we do not need to know why crimes happen — we just need the basic facts on where they happen (a geography of crime), when they happen and what kinds of crime they are, and then we can take preventive measures.
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Criminology as hard science
Now we turn to criminologists of a very different kind. Having just (I hope) persuaded you that the word ‘cause’ is not a very good one to use in relation to crime (although I also told you I was going to continue to use it in inverted commas!) I am now going to go back on myself and tell you about some criminologists who think the word ‘cause’ isn’t problematic at all. Just suppose for a moment that everything I have said so far about the sociology and philosophy of crime is wrong. And by ‘wrong’ I really mean wrong: not just contentious and controversial, not just disputed by criminologists with different political views, but actually and demonstrably wrong. For this to be possible, it follows that some other approach must be ‘right’; otherwise, how could we know that what we have been talking about is wrong? This is quite a disturbing thought, because it implies that someone, somewhere, may have the key to this aspect of human behaviour — has ‘cracked the code’ of crime, if you like. That person can very reasonably laugh at our opinions because he or she has knowledge of a different and superior order, and only by following knowledge and rejecting opinion can we access the truth. In the West (and I see signs of the same thing in Hong Kong), we have become very cautious about accepting ‘truth claims’ of this kind. But just imagine for a moment that it is actually possible to make a clear and objective distinction between knowledge and opinion. This would mean that our ‘opinions’ about crime send us off on what in England we call a wild goose chase — or a hopeless quest — because they are simply wrong. It would be like maintaining the opinion that the earth is flat (or the moon is made of green cheese) when scientists actually know otherwise. Such opinions would make us (at best) silly and (at worst) dangerous — because we might try and spread false ideas as though they were fact. • In criminology, if knowledge of this kind did in fact exist, the discipline would become a hard science. This would mean that criminologists would have to tackle their subject much as public health scientists have had to tackle diphtheria and typhoid.
•
Ideas along these lines, based on research into whether criminals have different shaped brains or particular physiques, a tendency to be tattooed, extravert personalities, poor ego control, a faulty chromosome make-up or some other genetic deficiency go back to the 19th century. Earlier explanations tended to be theological, and criminals — who may have been implanted with a ‘bad seed’ — were generally thought to be carrying out the work of the Devil.
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So whereas public health and other scientists undertake their research on the basis of a broadly shared set of beliefs about the nature of science, in criminology, as we have seen, this is not really so. This difference is important to understand: • All professionals argue among themselves about particular techniques, the implications of research, or diagnoses and so on. Public health scientists are no exception to this rule. Criminologists, however, argue about the very basis of their knowledge in a way that public health scientists and most other professionals do not. These arguments among criminologists of different schools are a little bit like a disagreement between a Western doctor and a Chinese herbalist about whether a cancerous growth is better treated by surgery or herbal remedies. The reason is that a disagreement of this kind is not about what surgical technique to use or what medicine to prescribe but reflects a fundamental dispute about the nature of the complaint itself and, as a result, the proper approach to it (that is, understanding precedes intervention!). When one professional thinks you should cut out a cancerous growth and another thinks it should be treated with herbs as a part of one’s entire mental and physical functioning, this is a very basic disagreement. This is where criminology is today (different understanding of the ‘causes’ of crime).
•
Jock Young, a well-known criminologist who has moved from the radical left to the more pragmatic central left, has described this argument among criminologists as ‘incessant chatter’ of criminologists’ ‘recent paradigms’ (Young 1994). A paradigm, by the way, is a framework within which we collect our ideas. The Western doctor in the example above has a surgical paradigm because he believes a damaged part of the body should be cut out. The herbalist, on the other hand, has a holistic paradigm because she believes the diseased part of the body should be treated in the context of the patient’s whole bodily, mental and spiritual health. In this section, I introduce you very briefly to the ideas of some people who believe criminology is a ‘hard science’. By this I mean: a form of behaviour which can be tested by scientific method in a laboratory. You will see later that this approach is called positivism. I am not saying very much about these scientists here, because we meet them again in Unit 3, when we come to understand much more about where they came from and why they thought what they did. But I would like you to know something about them at this stage and that other criminologists believe passionately that their whole approach to crime is wrong. Just imagine, for example, what the Schwendingers would say to someone who argued that crime could be understood by dissecting criminals in a laboratory or by analysing their personalities or body shapes or family background!
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Criminology as science: the origins of the approach
The great social, demographic, political and economic changes that began in Europe about 300 years ago led to the development of the science of statistics. Without this development there could have been no criminology as we know it today. If you are interested in learning more about this you should have a look at Beirne 1993 (especially Chapter 3). It is a very interesting book but quite difficult, and though it would be useful for you to read it you do not need to do so for this course. I say a lot more about it in Unit 3, when I will help you through some of the most important bits of it. The scientist whom most people think was the founder of the hard scientific approach to crime (usually, for reasons explained in Unit 3, referred to as biological positivism) is a 19th-century Italian physician and psychiatrist called Cesare Lombroso. Lombroso’s book L’Uomo Delinquente (The Criminal Man), published in 1876, applied Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, which had become very popular since the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859, to the study of criminal behaviour. Lombroso believed: • Criminals were measurably different from non-criminals because they existed at an earlier stage of development than the rest of humanity: Physically they were more like apes, and their behaviour reflected this.
This is called a theory of atavism (atavism means reverting to a primitive state) — so criminals were a kind of throwback to an earlier stage of human evolution; as such they were, to be honest, pretty freakish. Lombroso reached these views by studying prisoners’ skulls. He describes in the book a moment when the truth (as he saw it) suddenly hit him in a blinding flash: At the sight of that skull, I seemed to see . . . the problem of the nature of the criminal — an atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animals. Thus were explained anatomically the enormous jaws, high cheek bones, prominent superciliary arches, solitary lines in the palms, extreme size of the orbits, handle-shaped or sensile ears found in criminals, savages and apes, insensibility to pain, extremely acute sight, tattooing, excessive idleness, love of orgies, and the irresistible craving for evil for its own sake . . . Lombroso also believed that: • In any population there would be a small number of evolutionary throwbacks of this kind, with attributes which would have fitted them for survival in primitive society. But as society advanced, attributes like a strong hunting instinct would be criminogenic.
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•
Such people would not die out through natural selection but would be very fertile in urban slums, producing large numbers of children who would also be likely to become criminals.
In fact, Lombroso modified his views after further thought and much theoretical debate. He came to believe: • Other biological factors, including epilepsy and insanity, would also be present in some criminals. Many occasional criminals were only slightly atavistic, and for them, social factors also had a part to play. Only about 40% of criminals were prisoners of their biological inheritance.
•
•
This is another example of the relativization of an absolute concept of the kind we saw earlier when we discussed deliberation. Do you remember what relativization means? If you are not sure, please look at pages 9–11 to remind yourself. In this context, however, it means that whereas Lombroso initially believed that all crime was caused by atavism (i.e. biology), he later came to believe that only some of it was and that other, social ‘causes’ were also relevant. You do not need to know much more about Lombroso than this. In fact, it would be a waste of time to discuss his ideas in detail, because: • • the statistical basis of his work has been shown to be faulty, and subsequent genetic research has proved that his theory of atavism is wrong.
As a result, his importance to us is purely historical. So although it is true that not all criminals are very pretty, nor are all non-criminals; and there is no reason to believe that either group is more ape-like than the other. But to learn more anyway, have a look at . Nonetheless, Lombroso was not alone in his interest in phrenology (the study of the skull). Quite a number of other scientists, many of them in the US, conducted related studies on the skulls of living and dead prisoners. If you are interested in this topic, Fink (1938) gives a fascinating account of this kind of hard science. In fact, as Fink shows, and as we shall see in Unit 7, prisoners generally at this time were fair game for researchers, because scientific study was not restricted to the ‘causes’ of crime but extended to the comparative effectiveness of different kinds of prison regime. Again, however, I am not going into detail about the findings of these studies because they have all been, to a greater or lesser degree, discredited. But if you would like to know more, look at Fink. What looked like a more promising line of enquiry pursued was the relationship between criminality and body type. According to classifications constructed by early 20th-century scientists (the key
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names are Kretschmer and Sheldon, though you do not need to look them up unless you want to) all of us are one of three body types: • • Endomorphs are soft and round (in other words a bit fat, or ‘tubby’). Mesomorphs are hard and round (in other words of sturdy, muscular build). Ectomorphs are thin and angular (this is obvious!).
•
Before you read on, two questions: • People with one of these three body types are more likely to be criminal than the other two. Which do you guess it is? Which body type are you?!
•
In fact, a famous husband and wife team of criminologists in the US, Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck, produced elaborate data which showed that criminals are most likely to be mesomorphs and least likely to be ectomorphs. Endomorphs were somewhere in the middle. Of course this doesn’t mean that if you are a mesomorph you need to start feeling guilty or that you need to start being suspicious of any mesomorphs among your family or workmates. The statistical differences are not sufficient to be a very useful predictive tool: After all, although mesomorphs are much more likely to be criminals than are ectomorphs, most mesomorphs are not criminals! As a result, any attempt to target crime prevention or detection resources at them would be expensive and inefficient. Many sociologists have ridiculed these findings (or at least the biologically deterministic explanations of them), but my own view is they should certainly not be dismissed. They do, however, require much more analysis, in particular around the relationship between body type and personality and whether these findings apply to women as well as to men and across cultures. After all, it is possible that mesomorphs are more common in cultures where street crime in particular is more common (in the West and among Afro-Caribbeans) than where it is less common (among Chinese and Indians). And I suppose there is also the very obvious thought that mesomorphs are built to fight harder and run faster than ectomorphs and endomorphs: Does that make them more bold, do you think? More likely to take the risks that are associated with any form of crime? We do not know the answer to this kind of question, but it would be interesting to explore it further one day (from biological determinism to social determinism!). If you are interested in evaluating the work of the Gluecks for yourself, have a look at their most famous books Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1950), Physique and Delinquency (New York: Harper and Row 1956). They are not on your reading list, however, and I give you the details only if you are interested in pursuing this line of enquiry further. There is no need to do so for this course.
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More recently — around the 1960s and 1970s — another line of enquiry among hard scientists was chromosome abnormality. This began when disproportionately high levels of delinquency were noted among male mental patients who, instead of exhibiting the normal male chromosome pattern of XY had an additional Y chromosome, making them exceptionally tall and a little odd looking. This finding, though, is of fairly limited interest to us for two main reasons: • True or not, it can explain the delinquency of only a tiny proportion of offenders. The theory has been to a very large extent discredited anyway.
•
As I mentioned earlier, we return to look at approaches of this kind more broadly and in greater detail in Unit 3. My aim in introducing you to the idea of criminology as hard science early has simply been to demonstrate that: • Biology and genetics are among the disciplines that have a contribution to make to the study of crime. Their contribution is unlikely to be a determining one.
•
If you read some older books about criminology — for example those written in the 1960s and 1970s — you will learn that in those days the battle lines were drawn up between the biological and social theorists. Today that is no longer the situation. Most criminologists today think that the most likely ‘explanation’ of crime lies in a series of interactions among biological, environmental, psychological and sociological variables contributing to creating a criminogenic type. But though this may shorten the odds in helping us identify who is likely to be a criminal, we still await the breakthrough research that will transform our understanding in this way. I have a slight suspicion that it will be a long time coming. Unfortunately, criminology has yet to produce its Newton, Darwin, Einstein or Hawking. And, a final thought for you to ponder: If we did find the magic bullet so that we could spot a ‘criminal type’ with a high degree of certainty, what do you think we should do with this information?
Conclusion
I hope that in Section 3 you have learned the following: • In at least one criminological tradition, the ‘science’ of crime is rather like a laboratory science. This approach (called positivism — studied further in Unit 3) — takes different forms and goes back to the 19th century. It is based on the assumption that there is hard knowledge about crime that we can gain and that, when it has been
•
•
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gained, we shall know everything about it, including possibly to predict or control it! • Other criminologists dispute that this is ever going to be possible and so deny that there is any point in studying crime in this way. The result is a paradigmatic conflict between criminologists that does not exist in many other professions. We compared it to an argument between Western surgeons and Chinese herbalists about the best way to treat a cancerous growth. A paradigm is a framework within which we collect our ideas and make them consistent and coherent: The conflict might be between a scientific and a sociological (or psychological) paradigm. We saw some examples of different kinds of hard scientist, none of whose work we need to study in detail, because their findings have all been challenged, either wholly or partly: Lombroso (who was influenced by Darwin, believed criminals were atavists, that their numbers would increase in city slums, but who afterwards softened his approach). The science of phrenology (studying skull shapes) was immensely popular in the US in particular, where many studies were made of the skull shapes of prisoners, particularly murderers. This study followed, but was distinct from, the work of Lombroso. Chromosome abnormality (XYY) — popular in the mid-20th century, but relevant only in a minute proportion of cases and now found to be statistically unreliable. Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck, whose meticulous studies of body shapes from the mid-20th century still justify close analysis. • Few people today believe that hard science can on its own be helpful in the study of crime. Nonetheless, there is today a much greater willingness among criminologists than there was in the 1960s–70s (when radical sociologists were centre stage) to accept that some form of biological (possibly genetic) predisposition may interact with particular social or environmental circumstances (including opportunity) to increase significantly the likelihood of someone committing a crime. If, however, there is a single formula that will unlock the mysteries of criminal behaviour in the way that natural scientists have unlocked the mysteries of the universe, it is yet to be found.
•
•
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LESM A305 Major Issues in Criminology and Penology
The politics of crime and punishment: meeting public demands
Jock Young, in the Paradigms paper mentioned earlier (Young 1994), believes criminology must be understood not mainly scientifically, that is to say in the way we were looking at it in the last section, but within a political, economic and social context. Look carefully at the following quotation: Social theory does not emerge out of the blue: it develops in distinct social and economic situations and is influenced by specific material problems, in the context of a particular array of ideas and socially defined problems . . . Exterior problems of crime, of law making, of political options and current ideas, all profoundly shape the theories emanating from the interior world of academic criminology and legal scholarship (Young 1994, 71). Among the things Young is saying or implying in this quotation are: • It is not a matter of chance that at some periods ‘hard’ scientific theories of crime are influential and that at other times there is more support for, say, sociological explanations. There is a political dimension to all science not funded by the market in the way that Bayer and Roche, for example, fund pharmaceutical research. Today at least, criminologists rely on governments for much of their funding, and governments make political decisions about what kind of research to fund. So, we must look to politics to understand why one set of ideas in criminology is dominant at any moment in history.
•
•
•
Young believes politics and economics stand above all the ‘incessant chatter’ he writes about in his long paper. Funding preferences and job opportunities in criminology reflect political decisions. So, ‘what kind of science’ is dominant in criminology is a secondary question to what questions politicians and other opinion formers (such as the media) want answered by it. This is a very sobering thought, because criminologists like to think that policy is research-led. Young’s argument suggests that it would be more accurate to say that research is policy-led. Do you think this is true? Probably very few professions, certainly those attracting public funding, can claim to have a purely scientific base, since they have also to address public concerns and wishes. As such, they are also political. This applies nowhere more than in relation to crime and punishment, particularly in countries where crime rates or the public fear of crime are high. Probably this is still more so in the UK than in Hong Kong, though my impression
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is that the Hong Kong situation is changing for the worse. Is that your view too, or have I got it wrong? Try to look around: Who funds crimerelated research in Hong Kong? As far as crime and punishment are concerned, this means that criminology’s scientific discourse (in which experts argue about the best theories of crime and punishment) takes place only in the context of a political discourse (in which elected politicians decide what is acceptable and will win them popularity). These two discourses by no means always coincide. Criminal policy is not in fact research-led — or at least not purely research-led — but a part of the world of politics, in which policies can gain or lose political popularity for governments. Accordingly, often to the frustration of the experts, focus groups can have more influence on policy than the best research efforts of criminologists. Those of us whose research has occasionally led to changes in legislation know well that it is more that our findings have (by chance) been what government wanted than because they changed government minds. Hence any study of crime and punishment must look not only at criminology and penology but also, if only briefly and at an introductory level, at politics. In England and Wales (Scotland and Northern Ireland have slightly different legal systems and political arrangements) there are several main players in the politics of crime and punishment. These are: • Central government (both politicians, especially in the Home Office, and civil servants) Local government (responsible for dealing with much youth crime and crime prevention and very involved in influencing local policing priorities) Criminal justice professionals (particularly police, prison and probation staff, as well as many private sector employees in the security industry) Trade unions (these are much more powerful in UK than in Hong Kong: the Prison Officers’ Association and the Police Federation often embarrass the Home Secretary, the senior Government Minister responsible for law and order) Pressure groups of different kinds (some advocating more liberal treatment, others wanting tougher penalties, some concentrating on victim rights or community safety, or on a specific kind of offence) Mass media (increasing people’s fear of crime and expressing disgust with some kinds of criminal sell many newspapers!).
•
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•
•
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LESM A305 Major Issues in Criminology and Penology
Activity 1.7 The politics of crime and punishment in Hong Kong
In every country there is a politics of crime and punishment, though it takes different forms. For this activity I should like you, please, to pretend you are writing this unit about Hong Kong for an English audience. Your task is to rewrite the above paragraph, beginning ‘In Hong Kong the main players in the politics of crime and punishment are…’. Write it at slightly greater length, explaining in more detail what the functions of the different players are, giving examples of who the professionals are, of the names of the pressure groups (if any exist), and a little bit more about the mass media — newspapers and TV mainly. Include those you think are the most important, and say why. Try to write 80–100 words total. Allow yourself 30 minutes for the exercise, plus time spent researching the answer. The aim of the exercise is to invite you to be sure you have an overall grasp of the political context of crime and punishment in Hong Kong.
In England and Wales, these ‘actors’ behave in different ways and attract different levels of support over time, based probably, on a range of factors. These include: • the economic climate (it has been suggested, though not proved, that during economic downturns, public attitudes towards criminals tend to harden) a forthcoming general election (when politicians aim to demonstrate they are ‘tough’ on crime) a recent dramatic (and thus atypical) criminal incident a media campaign.
•
• •
What do we know about public attitudes to crime and punishment?
According to opinion polls, public attitudes to crime and punishment are inconsistent in two ways: • • the importance people give them in relation to other topics of concern opinions on what the policy response to crime should be.
For example, monthly MORI Polls on political attitudes in the UK conducted between January and September 2002 (the most recent ones available as I write) asked respondents to identify: • • what they considered the most important issue facing Britain today and other important issues.
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When people were asked to rank-order several topics in order of the seriousness with which they viewed it, the relevant category (‘crime/law & order/violence/vandalism’) always came second, third or fourth out of a long list. It was consistently rated less important than health/hospitals but scored consistently higher than any other single category, falling behind a range of different categories in different months. Between 6% and 18% of respondents identified it as their most important concern, and 23–34% listed it as an ‘other’ important issue. This suggests that though crime is second only to health in the consistency of public concern (so is bound to be a sensitive subject with politicians), the extent of that concern is variable. This poll, however, is very interesting but of limited use for our purposes, because it does not let us probe the answers further. And you have learned already that this kind of research often raises more questions than it answers. For example, it is possible to conclude from these data that: • Most people’s concerns about crime are ‘soft’ (that is, although many people are quite concerned about it, their concern shifts quickly to another topic that happens to be in the news at the time). Hence it would be a rational political response to give criminal policy fairly low priority, concentrating resources instead on health (which scores consistently highly) or even possibly education (which sometimes attracts high levels of support, overtaking crime as a cause for concern). Or, Crime is a major and consistent preoccupation of almost one in ten electors — more than enough to be critical to election victory — plus an unknown but variable level of ‘softer’ support. This would suggest that crime policy should be given high priority. But if this is so, we do not know who these hard-core people are or what the nature of their concern is. Perhaps many have been crime victims and fear repetition. Perhaps they are old and vulnerable. Perhaps their views about crime are actually second-order concerns to worries about (say) race relations or drugs or about sex and violence on television or the breakdown of family life. Perhaps they are clustered in a small number of locations where specific criminal incidents have occurred and received widespread local publicity. In Hong Kong, concerns may not go to race relations, drugs, or about sex and violence, but perhaps economy, estate market, domestic violence, change of political leaders in China, etc. (You may find it difficult to identify any opinion survey about public attitudes on crime and punishment in Hong Kong! Why?)
•
•
So again, whether we are scholars or politicians, we need to understand the reasons for these responses in order to know what (if anything) can be done about them: • If the preoccupation is experience-based with a high statistical correlation between a preoccupation with crime and the experience of
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LESM A305 Major Issues in Criminology and Penology
victimization, a rational policy response might be to invest further in victim support, Neighbourhood Watch schemes and so on. • If the preoccupation is vulnerability-based, involving, say, elderly people and those with disabilities, whose risk of victimization is actually very low, a rational response might be to invest in practical information-giving and to probe more precisely why they feel unsafe when in fact they are not. People vote on the basis not of the latest research findings but on what they believe; so even erroneous beliefs, when they cannot be corrected, have to be responded to by politicians.
The limitations of general polls lead concerned groups and organizations to commission specialized polls (and political parties to conduct their own secret ones). The findings of such polls seldom paint a consistent picture, since because different customers commission the polls for different purposes, different questions are asked and hence strict comparisons are impossible. Public views on the death penalty are especially interesting. In the summer of 2002, there was extensive UK media coverage of the abduction and murder of two schoolgirls, Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman. One would anticipate that such crimes would lead to renewed pressure for the return of capital punishment. MORI had at the time conducted four polls about attitudes to capital punishment in the previous 24 years. Fairly consistently, around 75% of respondents said the death penalty was sometimes justified (though there was one exception in 1990, when the figure fell to 63%). If, however, the question is rephrased so that respondents are asked to choose among life in prison, a long prison sentence and the death penalty, less than half the public favour execution. Immediately following another very high profile and distressing child murder in 2000, that of Sarah Payne, 58% of respondents expressed the view that death was the most appropriate punishment for child killers, and 33% favoured life imprisonment. By December 2001, however, following the sentencing of Sarah’s killer, Roy Whiting, to life in prison with no prospect of release — the toughest available sentence — the view that the death penalty was sometimes justified had fallen from 58% to 49%. MORI asks: Had the British public's views shifted? Or simply, is the immediate aftermath of a terrible murder like this a time when feelings will be running high? Perhaps when the public take a more considered view, their feelings are more equivocal, and less markedly detached from those of MPs who have consistently voted against reintroducing the death penalty repeatedly over the last 30 years. You need to draw your own conclusions from this kind of data. My own are that it is reasonable to detect an overall softening of public opinion towards the death penalty. Like MORI, I can only speculate on the reasons for this, but the strongest evidence in support of this view is that support for the death penalty declines with age. In 1995, 80% of respondents aged over 55 thought the death penalty was sometimes
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justified, but this figure fell to 68% among the 18–24 age range. The 2000 finding that even in the wake of a particularly shocking murder only 58% thought death the most appropriate sentence for child killers when other options were floated suggests a further shift in opinion between 1995 and 2000. It is possible that the 2001 finding (following the guaranteed removal for life of the murderer, Whiting) may indicate that about half the public are satisfied with permanent protection. It may also indicate that execution in the abstract is more acceptable to people than the execution of a named individual, irrespective of the nature of his crime. Such interpretations would suggest that at least part of public support for execution is extrinsic (that it achieves the goal of incapacitation) rather than intrinsic (that execution is desirable in itself). As the more hard-line older generation dies out we should, subject to one key condition, expect this trend to continue. This expectation would not, however, be correct if the pro-capital punishment view were a general product of attitudes hardening with age and not symptomatic of a specific generation. In this instance, support for the death penalty would continue to exist, because as later generations approached old age and experienced an increasing sense of personal vulnerability, their attitudes towards punishment in general (and the death penalty in particular) would begin to harden. It is now time for the final activity of this unit. Its aim is to invite you to examine critically the results of an opinion poll. Some clues exist in what I have said already; others you may be able to work out for yourself. Please look critically at this report, trying to read it not as a layperson but as the scholar and expert you are becoming.
Activity 1.8 Drawing conclusions from poll data
Please read the following summary account of an opinion poll. When you have done so, write down three main thoughts arising from it. You should spend about 20 minutes on this activity. A poll conducted for the Mail on Sunday newspaper in 2000 revealed that 71% of respondents thought crime had increased ‘in the past few years’ but that only 30% had themselves been a victim of crime over the previous year. Of those 30%, 73% had been a victim of either theft (including of a car) or threatening and abusive behaviour; only a minute proportion had been victims of violence. Sixty-eight percent had reported the crime to the police, but in 79% of those cases the police had not, as far as they knew, caught the criminal. The whole sample was asked whether, if they were victims of a violent crime, they were very or fairly confident that the police would/would not catch the criminal. Thirty-two percent were very/fairly confident that they would, and 68% were very/fairly confident that they would not. When we examine the confident/not confident groups further, we find that only 3% of respondents were very confident that the criminal would be caught, and
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LESM A305 Major Issues in Criminology and Penology
20% were very confident that he would not. When asked about the best solutions, there was overwhelming support for the view that more police foot patrols (‘bobbies on the beat’) would reduce crime. Asked in particular if muggings, criminal damage and car thefts would decrease if the police had a stronger presence on the streets, 93% agreed and only 2% disagreed. There was no consensus on who was to blame for apparent increases in crime (though the highest scores — 15% each — went to the government and parents).
It is hard for politicians to benefit from policy changes in criminal policy. They can, though, be punished if voters believe they have responded inadequately to a perceived major crime problem. This is so, even if the ‘problem’ is not a serious one at all but a ‘moral panic’ fanned by the media and which everyone gets out of proportion. The characteristic political response to such a ‘moral panic’ is to take hasty and ill-thoughtout remedial action, not because they believe such action will be helpful but because they simply have to be seen to be doing something. When governments start panicking, the best that can be hoped for is that anything they do will not make things worse: Such an expectation seems a reasonable ‘bottom line’ position for the expert to take. In this regard, it is notable that pressure to put ‘bobbies back on the beat’ has been generally resisted, except in particular areas and for particular reasons. But knee-jerk reactions are common in politics. In Scotland in 1996, in a terrible incident in a primary school in a small town in Scotland, Dunblane, Thomas Hamilton, a 43-year-old loner armed with a handgun (which he owned legally) bizarrely shot dead 16 children and their teacher before turning the gun on himself. Hamilton was one of 32,000 people in Scotland permitted to own a firearm, most of which were used for sporting (shooting is a very popular sport there). It became clear at the later public inquiry that Hamilton, who was known to be a very odd chap (he had been rejected for membership by a local shooting club) had ‘slipped through the net’ in being issued a gun permit. Basically, someone made a bad decision, an unstable individual was permitted to own a gun and this had tragic consequences. It was also obvious, however, that such an extraordinary event was highly unlikely to be repeated. The outgoing Conservative government made a reasonably measured response to the tragedy, enacting legislation that restricted the ownership of large handguns. But a year later, the incoming Labour government passed legislation banning small-bore pistols and rifles used by target shooters as well. In doing so, it did nothing to reduce the likelihood of a repetition (if a maniac decides to massacre little children, he does not need a handgun to do so). But the prohibition did achieve four political objectives: • It gave the government ‘cover’ in the event, however unlikely, of a copycat attack — without such cover it would have faced a major political crisis. It enabled the government to respond to strong pressure from an articulate victim lobby in Dunblane itself, one that had shown skilful
•
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media management, and at least one of whose members had described the previous government’s refusal to legislate comprehensively as ‘an insult to the victims’. • It enabled the government to be seen to have responded to the widespread shock and distress felt throughout the country at such a senseless and evil act, feelings that had led to overwhelming opinion poll support for a ban on all handguns It enabled the government to achieve all these goals while doing minimal damage to its own supporters, because most of the sporting activities prohibited by the new legislation were strongly associated with the Conservative Party. Accordingly, decisive action enabled it to achieve favourable comparison with the outgoing government among the non-shooting majority, at the small cost of causing irritation to a minority of handgun owners, most of whom would anyway be Conservative voters.
•
Intellectual (or scientific) logic and political logic are often divergent, but they have to co-exist. In this instance, political logic prevailed. This is reasonable in a democratic society where opportunities exist to protest against legislation and lobby for change; but we should not make the mistake of assuming that the legislation has any serious foundation in science or research. The issue, therefore, as so often in democratic politics, has less to do with developing and maintaining a coherent philosophy than with aiming to judge and then meet the demands of the voting public. To specialists in the field, the main problem faced by politicians is that, because the strategies they follow may bear little relation to research findings, it is unlikely that they will have more than a very marginal effect on the crime rate. A subsidiary problem is that even if they did have such an effect, it would probably be no greater than about 10%. (We return to this 10% figure in Unit 8, when we consider the effectiveness of rehabilitation.) And though a 10% reduction in crime is better than nothing, it is insufficient to make people feel safer or to have as big an effect on the crime statistics as much more important factors: • The most important of these factors is demography (the science of population study). The reason is that most crime is committed by males aged below 25, so the proportion of the population below the age of 25 at any time will have a greater effect on the crime rate than any policies or laws passed by government. It follows that the gap between what governments can actually do to reduce crime and make people feel safe and what they are virtually forced to claim they can do is considerable. That problem lies at the heart of the political problem all governments face.
•
Given politicians’ need to be seen to be solving problems that are in truth beyond them, the role of experts is always likely to be relatively modest. Nor is their political influence increased by the ‘incessant chatter’ of experts who cannot agree even on the scientific basis of their activity.
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LESM A305 Major Issues in Criminology and Penology
The subject you are studying in this course is a fairly young one, but I hope that by the time you have completed the course you will consider it valuable and important for all that.
Conclusion
The main learning points covered in this unit so far are: • Though criminology is a scientific activity, because its area of enquiry is politically sensitive, and because much of its work is government funded, what criminologists study is subject to strong political influence. This means that rather than (or as well as) policies being research-led, research is policy-led. This helps us understand why different criminological theories are dominant at different times: It is not simply a result of scientific progress but also of political preferences. The evidence of opinion polls is that crime seems to be of consistently high concern to UK voters — second only to health. But (as we saw in the last section) we have to examine the data carefully, because they are open to at least two interpretations. The first possible interpretation is that it is a ‘soft’ concern for a lot of people — something they mention but don’t in fact feel too strongly about. The second possible interpretation is that it is of very high concern to up to about 10% of voters. It is also possible that both are true. Because we do not know which of these possibilities is correct, we need more information. Political parties commission private studies to help them answer this kind of problem. These polls will tell them whether the concerns are hard or soft, experience-based or vulnerability-based. Information of this kind is vital when governments are formulating policy. As a concrete example of just how complicated it can be to assess public opinion, we considered public attitudes to the death penalty. It is possible that support for the death penalty is declining and will continue to decline as the (older) procapital punishment supporters die out, or that it is not declining but that attitudes to capital punishment will continue to harden with age. It is also possible that supporters of capital punishment are divided between those who support it for its own sake and those who simply want to be protected against murderers (and who would be satisfied by a promise that they will never be released from prison).
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•
Last, we looked at the ‘Dunblane Massacre’ as an example of a politically-inspired crime policy: The prohibition of hand guns did little or nothing to reduce the likelihood of the massacre being repeated, but it did meet a number of quite separate political objectives.
Thank you for the attention you have paid to this unit. I hope you have found it interesting. I look forward to working with you in Unit 2.
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LESM A305 Major Issues in Criminology and Penology
Feedback on activities
Activity 1.1
In your answer, you may have mentioned the disciplines of law, psychology and psychiatry as closely related to the study of criminology. If you did, well done! Other disciplines that you might have noted could include mathematics (or statistics), neurology and history. Some writers even relate the disciplines of geography and linguistics closely to the study of criminology. All of these disciplines might help in the study of criminology, because there are so many ways of understanding crime and criminals — and very little agreement on which is the most important, or the most useful, in a particular situation. Perhaps it depends on how you define crime, e.g. a matter of individual pathology, a symptom of social disorganization, an issue of the suppression of the weak by the powerful, etc. There is no absolute right or wrong answer. It matters more which explanation is more empirically based. I trust you, as an experienced practitioner in Hong Kong, have your own view on the major disciplines involved in defining what is a crime in your particular situation. For the most part we concentrate on the main disciplines — so don’t worry, you won’t have to be an expert in neurology or linguistics to follow the course!
Activity 1.2
Some possible answers are: 1 2 murder, assault occasioning actual bodily harm, robbery careless driving causing death of a pedestrian, fallen objects leading to injuries or damage of property criminal negligence, failing to produce proof of identity, leaving a child alone at place of residence failing to display warning notice against possible danger (breach of duty of care), failing to purchase third-party insurance for vehicle, failing to insure employees against accidents.
3
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The more you think of, the more you are aware of the complication of what a crime is. It is not only a deliberate act and one that was at the time contrary to the law; it may well be an intentional omission of the performance of an act. Moreover, what is called a crime depends in large part on the culture considered. A crime of failing to insure employees against accidents is a crime in Hong Kong but not in many Asian countries. It reflects the value we put on employees, and on people. Crime is related to morality and ethics.
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Activity 1.3
Once again there are no ‘right’ answers to this question, but some of the points you might have made are as follows: In favour of the radical approach: • It is impossible to measure crime as behaviour using a purely legalistic definition, because that stops us from doing proper comparisons among countries (where different laws may apply). It is wrong for scientists like criminologists to have their areas of enquiry decided for them by politicians and lawyers. No other scientist would tolerate that, so why should we? It is quite wrong to assume that the law is implemented fairly: In fact, it works heavily to the disadvantage of people who are already poor and powerless. So many acts committed by the poor are considered ‘crimes’, but bad acts committed by the rich are not. It is much fairer and more scientific, therefore, to agree on a universal definition of ‘crime’ for research purposes, just as we have universal declarations of human rights, rights of children and so on. And one thing on which nearly everyone agrees is that crimes are actions that do harm to other people. Criminologists should be able to agree on consistent definitions of harm and so move to a proper definition of ‘crime’ that frees it from the politics of different countries and prevents the powerful from concealing their crimes.
•
•
•
Against the radical approach: • A crime is, quite simply, an act that is against the criminal law. This is a matter of fact not opinion, and it is ridiculous to deny it. It is the fact of breaking the law that defines a criminal. This itself is a valuable insight, and something that makes all criminals worthy of study. It is also wrong to suggest that we can reach an agreed international definition of crime. First of all, criminologists would never agree on it in practice. Second, different cultures view the same act quite differently. For example, execution is very common in China and illegal in the UK, because different assessments are made of the value of human life and of human rights. The same applies to petty corruption, police violence and many other things. Trying to compare the same actions in different countries would be quite pointless.
•
If the law works unfairly, that is itself a very good topic for academic study; but such a statement should be the starting point of a research project, not the end point.
Activity 1.4
• The introductory chapters explain to you that only a known or suspected drug abuser who came into contact with a reporting agency
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LESM A305 Major Issues in Criminology and Penology
will be recorded. It is not possible to ascertain the exact size of the drug abuser population in Hong Kong. The statistics only serve as indicators of the trends in drug abuse over time rather than a finite definition of the situation. • You may imagine the vast numbers of unreported drug abusers, in particular occasional users who have never been arrested or contacted by any law enforcement agencies. These individuals have not been recorded in the database of the addict population.
Go back to the section on reasons why probably criminal acts do not end up as convictions, and see whether they are equally applicable to the measurement problems identified in defining the actual size of the addict population in Hong Kong.
Activity 1.6
From the summary of their article you have read, I think you could reasonably conclude that Schwendinger and Schwendinger might think: 1 that the poor people have been driven to crime by poverty, and that they are, therefore, victims of an unfair system first, and only incidentally criminals; that they have been subjected to unfair propaganda persuading them to want expensive goods they do not need; and, in the absence of the money to obtain them legitimately, they stole them (or, of course, robbed someone else, or sold drugs, in order to obtain the money to buy them); and that the law itself is more geared towards punishing the crimes of the poor than those of the rich: more concerned, for example, about petty theft than (say) medical negligence, architectural mistakes leading to building collapse or river pollution by petrochemical companies (differential scope of the law). This simply shows how biased the law is and how false it is to believe that the poor group is really more criminal than the rich group. As a result, there are actually no more criminals among the poor group than among the rich group, but the police have concentrated their efforts on them, ignoring the crimes of the rich such as contracting fraud, or professors who take bribes to pass their students. This differential enforcement means that the poor, in addition to the pain and distress they suffer daily have to cope with the stigma of being considered criminals. This is a classic case of ‘blaming the victim’.
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From a different perspective, among the comments you might make are: 1 It is wrong to argue that the poor have been ‘driven to’ anything: Only a small minority of poor people commit crimes, and they are not the poorest. They have chosen to offend and should be punished.
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2
The crimes committed by the poor have real victims and damage people’s lives and safety: Just look at how much more it costs to insure your house contents or your car in a poor area than in a wealthy one. The victims of the poor are often poor themselves, because people often commit offences very close to where they live. If it is true that the crimes of the rich are not taken to court, that certainly needs to be addressed by both politicians and lawyers. But the Schwendingers do not make any attempt to calculate what proportion of rich people are committing these serious crimes. Probably it is a tiny proportion, and for them to argue that the rich are generally criminal is just an unproven assertion and almost certainly wrong. In addition, we know from the official statistics that only a tiny proportion of the crimes of the poor ever result in a conviction, so if the crimes of the rich are under-reported so are those of the poor, and probably much more so. We should also ask why the poor are poor. The Schwendingers seem to think it’s not their fault. But perhaps they — or some of them — are people who have been lazy at school, or disobedient from an early age, or are simply not very clever. Why should we be surprised that such a group would be more likely to turn to crime than successful people with a stake in society? In addition, if a rich person turns to crime and is caught, he or she has much more to lose than a poor person: It could mean professional ruin! Thus, there is every reason for people who are successful not to gamble with their future when even a minor offence could mean dismissal. For the poor, the occasional conviction does not have such bad implications.
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I should stress that these possibilities are not ones I am necessarily supporting myself — so you do not have to believe any or all of them! Indeed I have no problem what you think: My only concern is that you have reached your own opinions by a process of very careful thought and are not just being emotional or angry.
Activity 1.7
As an experienced practitioner in the field of criminal justice in Hong Kong, you may well have come up with the following answers, in descending order of significance suggested: 1 Central government (policy bureaus, especially in the Security Bureau, and Judiciary, Department of Justice that set the parameters and direction) Influential figures and celebrities (think of Mr Martin Hong and Mr Stanley Ho on licensing of soccer betting)
2
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LESM A305 Major Issues in Criminology and Penology
3
Criminal justice system (law enforcement departments such as courts, police, customs & excise, immigration, correctional services, social welfare, etc.) Political structures (Executive and Legislative Councils, statutory boards) Political parties Academia and legal professions Pressure groups Mass media Non-governmental organizations (victims groups).
4 5 6 7 8 9
The order of significance is not ‘absolute’. It varies across policy areas, in particular whether interested groups are involved; say, Hong Kong Jockey Club and Football Association in the ‘decriminalization’ of soccer betting outlets. Victims of crimes are usually the least heard. The suggested answer only gives you an example of an analysis of the political context composing the major players. You will find different orders when you analyse different situations, for example, switching to cross-border crimes; then the China factor enters into the arena.
Activity 1.8
The following considerations, though they are not ‘answers’ are factors you might have considered in identifying and clarifying your thoughts: • What is the political stance of the customer newspaper? (Answer: it is a middle-of-the-road newspaper with a predominantly middle-aged to elderly readership, predominantly Conservative voting and probably with a more moralistic and punitive approach to crime than the average.) Though polls almost always show that people think crime is getting worse, this is not necessarily true. In 2000, crime had in fact reached a plateau and in some areas a decline was notable. Some scholars believe that in every generation people compare today unfavourably with a ‘golden age’ of the past (usually about 30 years earlier), which, in fact, never existed. That 79% of the minority who had been victimized did not know whether the criminal had been caught may have meant either that the criminal had not been caught or that he had, but the police had not told them. It would be helpful to know which is which. If the police do not routinely notify victims of the outcome of their cases, their confidence in the system is likely to be unjustifiably low. This appears to extend to the ‘prospective’ question that indicates that a large majority of respondents did not believe that if they became a victim of a violent crime the police would catch their assailant. The problem of low levels of confidence in the police was answered by the suggestion of putting more police ‘on the beat’. There is,
•
•
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unfortunately, no reason to believe that such a tactic would have any effect on the crime rate except, possibly, to make it worse by reducing the numbers of officers more effectively used. The likelihood of a walking police officer stopping crime is almost absurd, but the response, though completely wrong, was widespread and passionately felt. What should the police and political response to this problem of misperception be, do you think? That 15% of respondents blame the government for a (probably nonexistent) increase in crime and that over 90% propose a solution to the problem that will probably make the situation worse presents a serious political problem.
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Criminologists seek to understand the commission of crime in a given society, attempting to figure out why certain crimes occur, and then to study how these can be prevented, and deterred by individuals. The two key approaches I will examine in this assignment is that of the early 'Classicalist' approach, and the opposing 'Positivist' approach, each of which are crucial for understanding modern criminology today.…
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Young, J (1981) ‘Thinking seriously about crime: some models of criminology’. In Fitgeralg, M., McLennan, G. and Pawson, J. (eds) Crime and Society: Readings in History and Theory, London, Routledge.…
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When looking at crime, it is essential that we explore the definitions of crime and the theories that explain why crime happens and how this affects both individuals and communities. The study of crime is commonly known as “Criminology”. Criminology originated from many other disciplines such as sociology, psychology, biology, geography, law and anthropology. It is generally accepted that there are three main categories that are used to explain why crime happens.…
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1) What are the differences between quantitative and qualitative methods in the social sciences? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each method?…
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Carceral tours allow the public to walk through the halls of prison to obtain an understanding of incarceration. Carceral tours had numerous uses for architects, inspectors and officials throughout the nineteenth century, but recently the tours are used as an observational research opportunity for social science students who are interested in learning about the carceral institutions.i The articles, “Problematizing Carceral Tours,” by Justin Piche and Kevin Walby and “In Praise of the Carceral Tour: Learning from the Grendon Experience,” by David Wilson, Roy Spina and Joyce E. Canaan, had valid documentation for their arguments on opposing and supporting the effectiveness of carceral tours for research purposes.…
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-Differential Association: Criminal behavior results from having more contact w/ individuals holding aattitudes favorable to crime than w/ those holding attitudes discouraging it.…
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A critical issue facing criminologists involves recognizing political and social consequences. Often, criminologists forget the social responsibility they have as experts in areas such as crime and justice. The lives of millions of people can be influenced by criminological research data.…
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One of the most significant problems in the world now is that of economic inequality, and the social problems it produces. And the most damaging impact may be in developed nations such as the U.S. and Canada. The U.S. in particular has the greatest gap in wealth among all developed nations, and the problem it is causing is becoming more apparent with each passing day. During the recession in the U.S., at least 6 million people have lost their jobs; 25 million are underemployed. Eight trillion dollars of middle class wealth has been destroyed in the housing collapse. One out of eight mortgage holders owe more money on their home than it is worth. Fifty million people live at the poverty level. One of out of 8 people is on food stamps. One out of 2 children will be on food stamps at some point in their lives.…
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In routine activities theory, a large number of unemployed teenagers would be an example of:…
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1.-4. (4 pts. Possible) What is the basic decision rule of rational choice theory? What are utilities and disutilities?…
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Crime Is usually defined as whether the law has been broken which may lead to a punishment by the legal system however crime is hard to define because if the law or penal system did not exist than neither would the labelling of a behaviour or act as criminal or not.…
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Technically, I would define crime as a variety of human actions an individual chooses to commit, which are classed by the judicial system within the country’s legislation as illegal under Criminal Law. Not all crimes are the same, some are committed by individuals and others by groups, some involve a physical attack on a person and some involve the damage or misuse of a person’s property. Unfortunately, many crimes these days involve the use or supply of drugs and many others are designed to induce terror on its victims.…
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