Revision:AQA A Level Sociology - Crime and Deviance

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This page consists of tips for answers questions on particular topics within Crime and Deviance.

social distribution of crime

Can be applied to class, age, gender, ethnicity and region.

When planning your answer, think about these key categories and you should be able to say something about any of the above (even if you think you know absolutely nothing about, say, crime and ethnicity you will be able to draw on your general sociological learning to construct an answer…)

• Opportunities for criminal behaviour

• Opportunity Structures

• Primary / Secondary Socialisation

• Social Control Agencies

• Police:
  • Strategies
  • Labelling (Stereotypes and Scapegoats)

• Judicial behaviour:
  • Labelling
  • Stereotypes
  • Medical models

Ethnicity and crime

Here are some specific tips for ethnicity and crime to give you an idea of the sorts of things you can look at.

While it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that, in the UK, the “white majority” represent a significant ethnic group, the focus here is mainly on ethnic minority groups and crime (since previous sections have tended to focus on ethnic majority forms of criminality). In this respect, the Commission for Racial Equality (2004), suggests ethnic minorities are more likely to be:

• Victims of household, car and racially-motivated crimes.
• Arrested for notifiable offences (“Arrest levels from stop-and-searches were eight times higher for black and three times higher for Asian than for white groups”).
• Remanded in prison (refused bail).
• Represented disproportionately in the prison population.

Just as experiences of crime differ within majority ethnic groups (in terms of class, age and gender), the same is true of minority groups. We also need to recognise that different minorities have broadly different experiences; Asians, for example, have a higher risk of being victims of household crime whereas Black minorities are at greater risk of personal crimes such as assault. Although there is little significant difference in offending rates between ethnic minority groups, the past few years has seen an increase in gun crime and murder rates (as both victims and offenders) among young Afro-Caribbean males.

When thinking about explanations for ethnic minority crime we need to recognise two important demographic characteristics of the general minority population:

• Social class: Ethnic minority group members are more likely to be working class.
• Age: Black minority groups generally have a younger age profile than both the white majority and the UK population as a whole.

These characteristics are significant because of the relationship we’ve previously discussed between class, age and crime. If we control for social class, for example, all ethnicities show similar levels of “street crime” activity in their populations. Crime rates for ethnic minorities living in low crime “white majority” communities are not significantly different and the same is true of whites living in “black majority” areas. This suggests, perhaps, we should not overstate the relationship between ethnicity and offending. With this in mind, explanations for ethnic minority criminality can be constructed around concepts like:

Opportunity Structures: The class and age demographics for ethnic minority groups suggest that a general lack of involvement in “middle class” forms of offending can be explained in terms of such groups not generally being in a position to carry out this type of crime.

Social Control: The relatively low levels of female Asian offending can be partly explained by higher levels of surveillance and social control experienced within the family. Similarly, black minority youth are more likely to be raised in single-parent families than their white peers - and this type of family profile is statistically associated with higher rates of juvenile offending.

Over-representation: One set of explanations for black over-representation in prison, for example, focuses on the greater likelihood of black youth being:

• Targeted by the police as potential / actual offenders (an idea that relates to police stereotypes of class, age and ethnicity). Clancy et al (2001) note, when all demographic factors are controlled, "being young, male and black increased a person’s likelihood of being stopped and searched”.
• Prosecuted and convicted through the legal system. Home Office (2004) statistics show that although arrests for notifiable offences were predominantly white (85% as against 15% from non-white minority groups), Blacks overall were 3 times more likely to be arrested than Whites - although arrest-rates varied significantly by locality. Urban areas (such as London and Manchester) generally had a lower ratio of Black / White arrest rates than rural areas (such as Norfolk - where Blacks were 8 times more likely to be arrested than Whites). Significantly perhaps, Black suspects were also proportionately more likely to be acquitted in both Magistrate and Crown Courts.

One explanation for over-representation might be:

Institutional racism: The Macpherson Report (1999) into the murder of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence suggested police cultures and organisations were institutionally biased against Black offenders and suspects. Lower rates of offending and arrest for Asian minorities, however, suggests this may not paint a complete picture -Skidelsky (2000), for example argues social class also plays a significant part in any explanation since “Poor people, or neighbourhoods, get poor [police] service, whatever their race”. Mooney and Young (1999) argue that much the same is true for the general policing process in the UK - “If… institutionalised racism were removed the disproportionate class focus (of the police) would still result…but at a substantially reduced level”

Finally, in any explanation of ethnic minority criminality we need to note the role of the:

Judiciary, in terms of thinking about those who are actually found guilty and punished. Home Office (2004) statistics, for example, show around 25% of the male and 31% of the female prison population was from an ethnic minority group (ethnic minorities currently make up around 8% of the UK population). Either ethnic minority groups display far higher levels of offending or some other process is at work, distorting the relative figures. One such factor, for example, is that Black minority prisoners tend to serve longer prison sentences (for whatever reason) than other ethnic groups (something that might partly be explained in terms of their greater involvement in gun crime).

On the other hand, 37% of Black prisoners were serving sentences for drug offences (compared to 13% for White prisoners); although this may (or may not) reflect different levels of drug use, the fact this single form of criminality accounts for such a large proportion of Black inmates tells us something about the nature of Black criminality in the UK.

Postmodernism

Gives media analysis a central role:

Discourse: The role of the media here is two-fold. Firstly, media are important because they propagate and, in some senses control, organise, criticise, promote and demote (marginalise) a variety of competing narratives. Secondly, none of these are especially important in themselves (teachers and students, for example, probably do most of these things); they become, important, however, in the context of power and the ability to represent the interests of powerful voices in society.

In a situation where knowledge, as Sarup (1989) argues, is “fragmented, partial and contingent” (“relative” or dependent on your particular viewpoint) and Milovanovic (1997) contends: “There are many truths and no over-encompassing Truth is possible”, the role of the media assumes crucial significance in relation to perceptions of crime and deviance in contemporary societies.

Fascination: Crime and deviance represent “media staples” used to sell newspapers, encourage us to watch TV programmes (factual and fictional) and so forth. These two narratives (fear and fascination) come together when postmodernists such as Kidd-Hewitt and Osborne (1995) discuss deviance in terms of:

Spectacle - crime is interesting (and sells media products) because of the powerful combination of fear and fascination. An example of “postmodern spectacle” is the attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001, not only because of the “fear aspect” but also because of the way the attack seemed to key into - and mimic - a Hollywood disaster film.

Intertextuality: Both “reality” and “fiction” are interwoven to construct an almost seamless web of “fear and fascination”, where the viewer is no longer sure whether what they are seeing is real or reconstruction. Kooistra and Mahoney (1999), for example, argue that “tabloid journalism” is now the dominant force in the representation of crime and deviance - presentation techniques once the preserve of tabloid newspapers, for example, have been co-opted into the general mainstream of news production and presentation (where “entertainment and sensationalism” are essential components for any news organization trying to break into particular economic markets or preserve and enhance market share in those markets).

Example of a postmodern criminology

Constitutive criminology: The basic idea here is to adopt what Henry and Milovanovic (1999) call a:

Holistic approach, involving a “duality of blame” that moves the debate away from thinking about the “causes of crime” and the “obsession with a crime and punishment cycle” towards a “different criminology” theorized around what Muncie (2000) terms:

Social Harm: To understand crime we have to “move beyond” notions centred around “legalistic definitions” - we have to include a range of ideas (poverty, pollution, corporate corruption and the like) in any definition of both harm and, more importantly, crime (which, as Henry and Milovanovic put it, involves: “The exercise of the power to deny others their own humanity”).

In this respect, a constitutive criminology “redefines crime as the harm resulting from investing energy in relations of power that involves pain, conflict and injury”. In other words, some people (criminals) invest a great deal of their time and effort in activities (crime) that harm others physically, psychologically, economically and so forth. In this respect, Henry and Milovanovic characterise such people as:

Excessive investors in the power to harm others - and the way to diminish their excessive investment in such activities is to empower their victims. Thus, rather than seeing punishment in traditional terms (imprisonment, for example, that does little or nothing for the victim) we should see it in terms of:

Redistributive justice: - something that De Haan (1990) suggests involves redefining “punishment” - away from hurting the offender (which perpetuates the “cycle of harm”) to redressing the offence by “compensating the victim”. This form of peacemaking criminology focuses on reconnecting offenders and their victims in ways that actively seek to redress the balance of harm.

Constitutive criminology moves the focus onto an assessment of “harm” caused to the victims of crime and, by extension, the social relationship between offender and victim. It draws on a range of sociological ideas, both theoretical (holistic approaches to understanding deviance for example) - and practical (such as the concept of “redress”) to argue for a less punitive approach to deviance and a more consensual approach to understanding the complex relationship between crime, deviance, social control and punishment. There are, however, a couple of points we need to consider here:

Harm: As Henry and Milovanovic (1996) define it, “harm” results "from any attempt to reduce or suppress another's position or potential standing through the use of power". The danger here, however, is that it broadens the definition of crime and deviance in ways that redefine these concepts out of existence (which may, of course, be the intention). Such a definition, for example, could equally apply to a teacher in classroom or an employer in a workplace.

Criticisms

Crime: Extending the notion of crime to include, for example, “linguistic hate crimes” (such as racism and sexism) may not cause too much of a problem; however it does raise questions of where such a definition should begin and end (it may, for example, have the unintended consequence of criminalising large areas of social behaviour that are currently not criminalised).

Redress: Without a radical rethink / overhaul of the way we see and deal with crime and deviance as a society, “redistributive justice” may simply be incorporated into conventional forms of crime control. In this respect we might characterise this type of criminology as:

Idealistic, in the sense that, rather than providing an alternative to conventional forms of “crime and punishment”, ideas about redistributive justice simply provide another link in the chain of social control.

Comments

• Suitable for: A Level Sociology, AQA board
• Written by: Chris.Livesey
• From this thread.