CJ 302

• Very high crime rates
• Highest incarceration rates in the world
• High Crime and Harsh Punishment is a burden on the state

is pre-trial or short sentences

is state or federal long term incarceration

is a low-level sanction or supervision that precedes jail or prison incarceration

is post-incarceration supervision

• Prohibited, prosecuted, and punished by criminal law
• Enforced by a staff with the legitimate power to enforce
• Lanier & Henry propose expanded definitions including 'harm'

• Legislation (penal codes)
• Case Law

Requires prosecutors to turn over evidence

Forbids laws outlawing abortion

Requires the government to provide counsel to the indigent

• Actus reus (a 'bad act')
• Mens rea (a 'guilty mind' or intent)

• Durkheim
• Assumes that most people share values
• Problem with this approach is ovbious enough with issues like sexuality or drugs
• Homicide is not always illegal

• Marx
• Assumes that people do not share values but are in competition for dominance
• Problem is that it borders on moral relativism and functions as an apologist for bad behavior
• It also criticizes capitalism

That law should not define what is criminal, but that any harmful behavior should be deemed criminal, such as selling cigarettes

It is true, though, that at the height of the crack panic, many more black people were convicted of crack crimes and sentenced very harshly, but the evidence that rates of crack use was higher among Blacks is not clear.

• Entraps men by tempting them with actors pretending to be 13 or 14 year old girls/boys
• This show does nothing to explain this criminal behavior
• The bottom line is that 'criminal behavior' is usually complex - not easily explained

• Harm (murder v. marijuana)
• Visibility (bank robbery v. counterfeiting)
• Consensus (rape v. gay marriage)

• The individual (Rafael Perez)
• The organization (The LAPD)
• The institution (The CJS)
• The Society (Hyper-Capitalism)

• The Uniform Crime Reports (UCR)
• The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS)
• Academic investigations into crime

Measures Index crimes (the crimes used to calculate 'the crime rate')

• only crimes reported to police
• different law enforcement agencies have different definitions of crimes
• data collection issues
• police departments might be temted to under report or 'spin' crimes to bolster clearance rates
• UCR only counts the index crimes

• Surveys of households about crime victimization
• This augments the UCR

It relies on subjective respondents

professional criminologists conduct all kinds of studies of various aspects of crime, including self-report studies, cohort studies, and ethnographies

• The systematic study of the nature, extent, cause, and control of law-breaking behavior
• Law making
• Law breaking
• Law enforcing
• Criminology tries to understand why people do crime in relation to social structure

• Rational choice theory
• Biological theories
• Social learning theories
• Control theory
• Structural theories
• Conflict or critical theories

• emphasizes the role of the victim in criminal proceedings
• controversial because formal law is supposed to prevent the chaos of revenge

• Originated during The Enlightenment
• Crime is freely chosen and rewarding and must be punished
• basis for the 'law and order' or crime control model of criminal justice sometimes advocated in the USA

• innocent until proven guilty
• equality before law (egalitarianism)
• due process (government respects all rights)
• rules of evidence (e.g., no hearsay)
• juries

• Proposed a rational theory of individual sovereignty
• The rights of the individual prevail over the rights of the state
• Proportionality (punishments should fit the crime)
• Punishment should be swift and certain

• Utilitarianism
• This underlies 'rational choice theory'
• Individualism

• Determinate Sentencing (mandatory minimums)
• Three-Strikes laws
• Incapacitation
• Capital Punishment

• More nuanced than classical theory and argues that a variety of factors play into criminals' to offend
• applies well to corporate crime
• Assumes that all people are rational individuals all the time

• Some human being have inherent, biological characteristics or traits that lead to criminal acts:
• Genetic inheritance
• Tumors
• Changes in body chemistry

• Attributes cause to correlation
• Only focuses on 'street crimes' rather than white-collar crimes
• Latinos are biologically identical to whites, but are over-represented (by five times) in street crimes arrests
• Race is socially constructed and not biological (but is experienced as real)

• Something traumatic took place developmentally that caused psychological disturbances leading to criminal behavior
• try to bridge the gap between rational choice and biological determinism

• did not understand the 'nature and quality' of what he was doing
• did not know that his actions were wrong

• Psychoanalytical
• Trait based theories

• Theoretical move away from the level of the individual to the level of the group
• One just learns different things through associations with others who have deviant norms

• Criminal behavior is learned
• These are testable propositions
• Problem: where does criminal behavior start? From whom did the first criminal learn?

• People 'drift' in and out of criminality based on their internal 'techniques of neutralization'
• Doesn't really explain criminality's origin
• Also, neglects structural factor

All people are naturally inclined toward misbehavior but that social control over them contains them, to varying degrees

• Attachment
• Commitment
• Involvement
• Belief

Low self-control leads to crime

• Ignores basic differences between people
• Circular Logic

• Persons labeled 'criminal' ultimately identify and adopt and internalize the role
• Powerless groups have less control over what is labeled criminal and have little power to resist the labels

• 'primary' deviance (spantaneous minor rule violations)
• 'secondary' deviance (rule breaking that emerges from the person's identity)

• 1. poerful social groups make rules
• 2. apply the rules to particular people
• 3. label the rule breakers outsiders

While expressing social disapproval, society also provides the social process mechanisms to bring those censured back into the community, reaffirming that they are morally good-only a part of their total behavior is unacceptable

• Doesn't explain primary deviance
• Doesn't explain crime by those not labeled

• Decriminalization
• Diversion
• Decarceration
• Restitution

• The basic idea is that physical location itself is criminogenic:
• Neighborhoods
• Landscapes

'Zone II' - the 'transition zone' was full of transients living in crowded slums that factory owners were letting rot, who worked in nearby factories

• The ecological fallacy: attributing characteristics to individuals based on aggregate statistics
• Doesn't account for white collar crimes

Crime results when cultures clash

• Anomie: normlessness or norms confusion
• The person does not have legitimate means to reach goals
• everybody thinks they deserve to reach goals, but the processes of capitalism dictate that not everyone can

• Capitalist society can creat profound disjunctions between goals and means
• Individual persons sometimes 'adapt' to this 'strain' (or stress)

• Conformity (adopt goals and means)
• Innovation (adopt goals but not means)
• Ritualism (Adopt means but not goals)
• Retreatism (Abandon goals and means)
• Rebellion (Abandon goals and means and replace them with new ones)

• Bastard offsprings of civil rights movement
• What was left after the movement died out

• Marxist
• inequality totally based on economic conditions
• believe consensus is a myth

group in power using tools available only to them to maintain power

• society will keep those in power in power
• To Big To Fail
• No back room of Fat Cats creating and keeping themselves in power
• Society itself creates Fat Cats