Term 2, week 2: Culture

Not a post this week, just a few links and quotations.

This week's lecture included the first ten minutes of a documentary on 'mass culture' and some of its critics. Here's the link (only available on campus) to the full video:

The Intellectuals and the Masses

And a few quotes for you to think about:

this and that body of men, all over the country, are beginning to assert and put into practice an Englishman's right to do what he likes; his right to march where he likes, meet where he likes, enter where he likes, hoot as he likes, threaten as he likes, smash as he likes. All this, I say, tends to anarchy

Culture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has one great passion, the passion for sweetness and light. ... It seeks to do away with classes; to make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere; to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light
- Matthew Arnold (1869), Culture and Anarchy

[culture] ... includes all the characteristic activities and interests of a people: Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the 12th of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, 19th-century Gothic churches and the music of Elgar. The reader can make his own list.
- T. S. Eliot (1948), Notes towards a definition of culture

This pleasant miscellany is evidently narrower in kind than the general description which precedes it. The ‘characteristic activities and interests’ would also include steelmaking, touring in motor-cars, mixed farming, the Stock Exchange, coal mining and London Transport. Any list would be incomplete, but Eliot’s categories are sport, food and a little art – a characteristic observation of English leisure.
- Raymond Williams (1961), The Long Revolution

Why must the list stop here? Why not also include, as “characteristic activities”, strikes, Gallipoli, the bombing of Hiroshima, corrupt trade union elections, crime, the massive distortion of news, and Aldermaston marches? ... The “whole way of life” of European culture in this century (as the Eichmann trial reminds us) has included many things which may make future generations surprised at our “characteristics”. But not one example is included in Eliot’s nor in Mr. Williams’ list which forces to the front the problems of power and of conflict.
- E. P. Thompson (1961), review of The Long Revolution, New Left Review 1(9)

"When I hear the word 'culture' I reach for my revolver" - Hermann Göring (attributed)

Week 11: Victims of crime

There is quite a lot to say about victims of crime - there is an entire third-year unit devoted to victims and restorative justice - and in this week's teaching we could only really touch on a few important points.

Perhaps the most important point is about definitions. Victims of crime are people we sympathise with, people who we feel deserve something: what happens if we restrict that mental category to people who have been directly affected by an illegal action? It turns out that what happens is quite unsatisfactory: there are lots of cases where we want to think of somebody as a victim of crime, even if they haven't been directly affected (relatives of murder victims), even if no law has been broken (white-collar crime), even if years have passed between the action and its effects (work-related injury).

In other words, there's a constant pressure to expand the category of "victim of crime" to include people who haven't been directly victimised, or people whose victimisation wasn't actually a crime. There is no correct answer to the question of how far the category should be expanded: if a murder victim's partner is also a victim, what about her close friends? work colleagues? old schoolfriends? But the literal approach - narrowing down the category to actual victims of actual crimes - is clearly unsatisfactory.

At the same time, of course, our ideas and assumptions about what makes a victim deserve our sympathy tend to push the other way. This is where the 'ideal victim' comes in. We have a lot of preconceptions about what a victim ought to be like. The result is that how much recognition we give to actual victims of crime depends on how closely they fit the model of the 'ideal victim'. The more vulnerable and innocent the victim is, essentially, the easier it is to see them as a victim. Consequently, if we want people to take somebody seriously as a victim, we will tend to emphasise how weak they are and how virtuously they were acting at the time of the crime. This makes it possible to draw a nice clear line between the victim (weak, innocent and one of us) and the offender ("a dangerous man coming from far away" in Nils Christie's formulation).

Thinking about some (real and fictional) examples of crime and victims of crime, I hope you'll agree that the "weak innocent victim"/"big bad stranger" model is very far from being typical. Most victims aren't totally innocent and virtuous in their conduct (why should they be?), and most offenders aren't predatory strangers. So the more we think in terms of the 'ideal victim', the harder it is to see actual victims of crime, and actual offenders, for what they are.

Two points. Firstly, Nils Christie wrote "The Ideal Victim", but he didn't make up the 'ideal victim' model: there's a lot of pressure in society to concentrate on people who live up to the model of the 'ideal victim' (from the government, from the media, from our own prejudices). Secondly, there are lots of victims of crime who don't live up to that model, and consequently don't get much sympathy or support.

Thirdly (OK, three points), the 'Ideal Victim' is not an ideal. It's a standard that some victims meet, but many don't; in fact, probably most victims don't meet it. And they shouldn't be asked to.

With that, the Criminology section of this unit draws to an end and I take my leave of you, at least in the role of lecturer. (For those of you who are looking ahead to doing Sociology or Criminology degrees, I'm still the overall Foundation Year tutor for the Department of Sociology; if you've got any queries about the Foundation Year or about how it's going for you, bring them to me.) I hope you've found it interesting and not excessively challenging, and that it will be good preparation for your degree course. Get that essay finished (if you haven't already), have a good break, and all the best for the rest of the year!
- Phil

Week 9: Going to prison and going straight

"The mood and temper of the public in regard to the treatment of crime and criminals is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilization of any country." - Winston Churchill

We know what the prison system is supposed to do. Prison is a more severe punishment than a community sentence or a fine; a prison sentence is how you punish a relatively serious crime. Sentencing is supposed to punish criminals (retribution and denunciation) and reduce crime (deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation, restoration). Locking criminals up works as a form of

• retribution: you're punished by being locked up, and the length of the sentence sends you the message of how much society thinks you need to be punished
• denunciation: you're humilitated by being removed from society and put in prison clothes; again, the length of the sentence tells you how much denunciation you're getting
• incapacitation: you're locked up to keep the rest of us safe
• rehabilitation: you're locked up until you've become a reformed character
• deterrence: we lock you up to scare other criminals, or else to scare you into not re-offending when you're released

The fact that imprisonment can, in theory, serve so many different purposes is a worry. If the appropriate level of retribution for your crime is twelve months, but at the end of that time the authorities think you're too dangerous to release, what happens to the retributive 'message'? If you're detained for another year, does that mean that your crime has suddenly become worse than the offence committed by another prisoner who got an eighteen-month sentence? Deterrent sentencing - "making an example" of somebody, "sending a message" to other offenders - makes things even more complicated. (Remember the Facebook Two?)

So sentencing doesn't work perfectly (shock news!) and there's a definite potential for some people to be treated worse than they perhaps deserve. Which people in particular?

One way of looking at crime and criminal justice is to ask what they tell us about society more generally. Crime surveys enable us to identify who suffers the most from crime - and it turns out that in many cases the people hit worst by crime are already having a pretty hard time of it. (People living on run-down and disordered estates are more vulnerable than average to burglary; members of ethnic minorities are vulnerable to racist crime, as well as being statistically more likely to live in high-crime areas; and so on.) In a divided and unjust society (it can be argued), crime makes the effects of division and injustice even worse.

But what about the criminal justice system? Does the prison population - which probably represents the people who are most severely affected by the system - have any particular characteristics, or is it a representative cross-section of society? The answer is quite definitely (a). Celebrity criminals like the ex-MP Chris Huhne make the news when they go to prison, but the great majority of prison inmates are as far removed from them as you could imagine. Prisoners are far more likely than the general population to be unmarried, unqualified, illiterate, out of work or homeless, or to have drug, alcohol or mental health problems. In a divided and unjust society, the prison population is right at the bottom of the heap.

Which is why the treatment of people in prison - and after they leave prison - is so important. Do you focus on their needs and 'deficits' (the skills and abilities they lack), or on their actual and potential strengths? Do you tell them to dwell remorsefully on their past or look ahead hopefully? Do you tell them they're a menace to the public or an asset to the community? What message is most likely to help an ex-offender go straight, bearing in mind that ex-offenders mostly start out with severe disadvantages (a criminal record not least)?

Homework: read the Maruna paper (on Moodle) and have a think about it.

Week 8: The courts and sentencing

This post is in two parts: a quick run-down of the key points of the lecture and some guidance on the essay. First, some thoughts on the courts and sentencing.

The courts

Crown Courts are the ones with judges and juries. About one in eight of all criminal offences are serious enough to be dealt with in the Crown Court. 72% of Crown Court cases are resolved by the defendant choosing to plead Guilty.

Magistrates' courts are presided over by a magistrate rather than a judge. Magistrates are members of the public who have had relatively brief and un-rigorous training; the main qualification for being a magistrate is being able to give up 26 days a year to the role. 82% of magistrates' court cases are resolved with a Guilty plea.

Why so many Guilty pleas?

We don't know what proportion of the people charged by the police are in fact guilty, but presumably it's a fairly high proportion. All the same, you would think that quite a lot of the people who are guilty (and everyone who isn't) would want to take their chances in court. In practice, only about one in five suspects do. The truth is, if you're guilty and the evidence is against you, it makes sense to plead Guilty: you'll get off much lighter that way. And if you're not guilty, but the evidence is or appears to be against you - or you think the court is likely to be against you - it may make sense to plead Guilty for the same reason. The police, the judge and your own defence lawyer will all make sure you're aware of the advantages of pleading Guilty, and may positively encourage you to do so.

What's the purpose of sentencing?

Sentencing has two sets of purposes, which in practice judges and magistrates can pick and choose from:

Retributive purposes, which focus on the crime and use punishment as an end in itself:
Retribution: making the punishment fit the crime
Denunciation: making sure the offender knows he/she is being punished

Utilitarian purposes, which focus on the end result and use punishment as a means to an end:
Deterrence: using punishment to scare potential offenders
Incapacitation: using punishment to make society safer, e.g. through imprisonment
Rehabilitation: using punishment to reduce the number of offenders by reforming them
Reparation: using punishment to help victims of crime

The retributive purposes seems harsher - more vindictive - than the utilitarian ones, but in practice the reverse may be true. It may be easier to justify harsh sentences on deterrent grounds - 'making an example' of one offender as a lesson to the others - than as retribution.

Essay guidance

Firstly, in the immortal words of Douglas Adams, Don't Panic!. All you need to worry about at this stage of your studies is staying on the course, and all you need to do in order to do that is write an essay that's good enough to get a Pass mark. (I hope and trust that your essays will be a lot better than that, but that's the only target you absolutely have to beat.)

Secondly, some guidance on quoting. You should be quoting published sources to support your argument. Do use quotes from books, academic journal articles etc. Don't quote me (lectures or this blog). Don't quote Wikipedia. I believe there are disreputable Web sites out there which provide pre-written essays; it would be a very, very bad idea to use them. (If you do, I guarantee that it will be spotted; at best, the parts of the essay which you have borrowed will be ignored when it comes to marking. Don't risk it.)

Thirdly, some positive recommendations. A good essay will have:

an introduction and a conclusion (but do keep them short)

a definite point of view (but don't say “I think”/"it seems to me" etc; the entire essay is what you think, so it’s a waste of words)

an argument: you should be able to explain the essay to somebody else in a couple of sentences, without using the phrase “and then there’s a bit about...”

Fourthly, how to get started. Here's what I'd suggest. Study the question, do some reading to make sure you understand what it's asking, then (very important) work out what you think about it. Once you've started to plan out an answer, see if there are any gaps in the reading you've done. When you know your argument, you've got a plan and you're confident you can back it up with quotes, put all your notes on one side, open a new document (or take a blank sheet of paper if you want to be old skool) and just write. That blank-sheet moment is the hardest part of the whole process; once you're through that it should be easier, particularly if you're well prepared. Good luck!

Week 7: The police and policing

"We are accountable, I suppose, essentially to ourselves as a responsible body."
- James Anderton, Chief Constable of Greater Manchester (May 1987)

"Accountable: liable to be called to account or to answer for responsibilities and conduct; required or expected to justify one's actions, decisions, etc.; answerable, responsible"
- Oxford English Dictionary

In this week's lecture we looked at the work of the police. What are the police responsible for? How important is crime in defining the police's various responsibilities (crime prevention, crime reduction, crime investigation)? We looked at some figures on how the police actually spend their time, and considered a different way of looking at police work: perhaps (as Egon Bittner argued) the key factor which makes something a job for the police isn't crime, but the use of force. In other words, perhaps the kind of problem which the police deal with is the kind of problem that may need to be solved using force. The reason why the police attend football matches, for instance, isn't that crimes may be committed but that physical force may be needed to calm things down - or, at least, the threat of physical force may be needed to stop things getting too lively.

This definition still leaves a very wide field of activity: the police could spend their time dealing with anything from domestic violence to terrorism, from Saturday night disorder to organised crime, from anti-social behaviour to drug smuggling. If we start asking who decides what they actually do - and who judges how well they do it - we're asking about police accountability.

Borrowing from the dictionary definition above: to say that a person or an institution is accountable is to say that they're required to justify their actions and decisions. These are two very different things. If you're required to justify your decisions, that means that you have to explain what you've chosen to focus on - and the person asking you to explain can tell you that you've focused on the wrong things. (You may have thought that shoplifting and truancy were the two key problems facing your area, but you were wrong.) If you're required to justify your actions, on the other hand, that means that you have to explain what you've done - and at the end of it you can be told that you've done the wrong thing or you haven't done enough. (You may have thought that an extra CCTV camera would turn the shoplifting situation around, but it hasn't.)

(Before reading any further, cast your eye up the page and re-read that quotation from James Anderton. If the police in general took this approach, would they be accountable?)

Accountability can be tough, and imposing accountability on powerful people (like senior police officers) can be a very good way of keeping them on the straight and narrow. But there's a problem: who sets the standards that are used to keep the police accountable? And how do we decide who those people are?

The current answer to these two questions takes the form of Police and Crime Commissioners. Each police force area (outside Greater London) has a Police and Crime Commissioner. The police forces are each accountable to their Police and Crime Commissioner, who can judge whether their decisions are correct and whether their actions are adequate. The Police and Crime Commissioners in turn are accountable to the voters: if we think they're holding the police to account in the wrong way, we can vote them out of office.
 One issue with this kind of two-tier accountability (voters/PCC, PCC/police) is that it's a bit asymmetrical: the PCC has a lot more influence over the police than the voters can possibly have over the PCC. But there's a bigger problem, which is that the ways in which the police need to be held accountable may not be the ways in which the public want them to be held accountable. A particular police force might be doing well at reducing anti-social behaviour but have a massive problem with racism and sexism. In this situation, should the PCC concentrate on holding the police to account on dealing with racism and sexism? What if the public who elected the PCC didn't care about these issues, and wanted the police to concentrate on anti-social behaviour?

Here are some useful links on Police and Crime Commissioners, one year in.

BBC News (2013), "'One in three unaware' of police and crime commissioner", BBC News Web site, 14th November

Jon Collins (2013), "Elected police commissioners still have much to prove", Guardian, 12th November

ITV News (2013), "PCCs do 'three times as much work' as police authority", ITV NewsWeb site, 14th November.

Nick Tarver (2013), "Six fresh policing ideas from past 12 months", BBC News Web site, 14th November

Antony Wells, (2013), "Police and Crime Commissioners a year on", UK Polling Report blog, 14th November

Read (or watch) these Web pages and then think about these questions (you can write down your answers for future reference if you want to).

Who is your Police and Crime Commissioner?

Was your PCC elected as a party candidate or an Independent?

Does your PCC's political affiliation (or lack of one) affect your view of him or her? If so, why?

What do you think a PCC's main priority should be: telling the police what they're doing wrong or telling the police what the public want?

Do you think your PCC is doing a good job?

If you answered the last question No (or Don't Know), what do you think your PCC should do?

Week 5: Crime and the media

Some brief thoughts about crime and the media, following on from Tuesday's lecture and seminar.

First thought: the news media like some kinds of story more than others. Sometimes an event is so big that the media have to cover it - the phone hacking scandal, the riots - but from day to day the media have a lot of choice in what stories they do and don't cover. They particularly like simple, dramatic, immediate stories, where it's easy to see who's in the wrong. This means that some kinds of crime are more likely to be covered than others - as we saw in the seminar, murder and violent crime is much more 'newsworthy' than property crime.

A question to think about: apart from criteria of "newsworthiness", are there other reasons for selecting particular crimes to feature in the news?

Second thought: measuring how media coverage of crime affects people is very, very hard to do. We can reasonably assume that the media affect people's behaviour, but to actually measure the effect you would need to have two groups of people and isolate one of them from the media - which would obviously be rather hard to arrange.

Question: is it worth asking "how people's behaviour is affected by the media", or are the media so omnipresent that the question makes no sense - would it be like asking "how people's behaviour is affected by other people" or "how people's behaviour is affected by the English language"?

Third thought: if media coverage of crime does affect people's behaviour, presumably it affects different people in different ways. A pensioner might react to news of rioting by becoming more fearful and refusing to go out; an unemployed teenager might react by going out and joining in. The news has apparently caused an increase in fear of crime and an increase in crime.

Question: would this news have the same effect on any teenager - even one who has never been in trouble before - or on any pensioner - even one who has an active social life?

Final thought: the concept of a 'moral panic', developed by the late Stan Cohen, explained how public concern about unusual or 'deviant' behaviour could blow up very quickly, in a process of 'deviancy amplification'. In a moral panic, a novel form of deviancy - unruly or disturbing behaviour - is publicised, leading it to be 'amplified' in two ways: it makes more noise and causes more concern; and it attracts people to try it out, becoming a bigger social phenomenon. Punk, the rave culture, knife crime and rioting have all been the triggers for moral panic at different times. Moral panics take hold because a new form of deviancy arouses strong feelings - for as well as against - and seems to encapsulate people's feelings about how society is and how it ought to be.

Question: is the same true of crime stories in general? Is a moral panic just a heightened and accelerated version of people's normal reactions to reading about crime? Turning it round, is there a connection between the crimes that get covered in the news and contemporary anxieties about the state of society?

Week 4: Who are the criminals and why do they do it?

In this lecture I introduced one of the key questions for criminology, and three ways of thinking about an answer. (If you haven't heard this enough already, there really are no 'right answers' in criminology. Except to questions like "in what year was the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 passed?" or "how do you spell 'criminology'?", of course.)

The question is deceptively simple: who commits crimes? To put it another way, can we know who is likely to commit crimes? By the end of the day, a certain number of crimes will have been committed that hadn't been committed when we all got up this morning. If, this morning, you'd had a complete profile of every individual in the country, would you have been able to predict who would commit a crime today?

The two oldest and best-established ways of thinking about criminology are Classicism and Positivism (I'll get to the third approach I mentioned later). One of the key differences between Classicism and Positivism is how they answer that question - can we know who is likely to commit crimes?

Classicism says: No, we can't. According to the classicist view, anyone could commit a crime at any time. Everyone is more or less the same: we're all rational beings, we're all motivated by pleasure and pain, and we all calculate rationally what we can do to maximise pleasure and minimise pain. Laws are rules that societies put in place to make them run better; crimes are committed when people rationally calculate that they can get more pleasure than pain by breaking those rules. It follows that the way to deal with criminals, and the way to deter potential criminals, is to raise the cost of crime. People steal handbags, on the classicist view, because their desire for the pleasure of acquiring money outweighs their fear of the pain of getting caught and going to prison. Sending a bag-snatcher to prison will make that person more afraid of prison in future and make the less likely to do it again.

In short: the classicist view focuses on crimes rather than criminals; it sees everyone as equally rational, equally driven by pleasure and pain, and equally likely to break the law; it regards laws as arbitrary rules, which should be enforced for the sake of social order; it sees the job of punishment as enforcing the law by increasing the cost of crime; and its ideal is a law-abiding society in which everyone can participate freely.

Positivism, by contrast, says: Yes, we can predict who is likely to commit crimes. According to the positivist view, some people are much more likely to commit crimes than others. Some people are more rational than others; more importantly, some people are less attached to society's values than others. Laws are based on society's values; crimes are actions that violate those values, and which most of us find repugnant. Crimes are committed (mostly) by people who don't share those values and don't care about violating them. The way to deal with criminals is to educate the ones who can be reformed (rehabilitation) and lock up the ones who can't (incapacitation). Positivism can be either personal/biological or social: biological positivism says that offenders are just wired differently, social positivism says that offenders have been brought up with anti-social value systems. People steal handbags, on the positivist view, because they haven't adopted society's norm against stealing.

In short: the positivist view focuses on criminals; it sees values as fundamental, and sees some people as less committed to society's values than others; it regards laws as expressions of society's values, which should be enforced so as to uphold them; it sees the job of punishment as reforming or confining anti-social people; and its ideal is a safe society for the law-abiding majority.

Social positivism is related to a third and very different group of explanations, which can be grouped together as social explanations of crime. According to these perspectives, some people are less attached to society's values than others, and they may have good reasons for this: society's values may reflect injustices which run through society (class divisions, extremes of wealth and poverty, sexism, racism, etc). Crimes are actions which violate society's values, but they may not be particularly repugnant; society's values may be wrong, or the offender may have values which outweigh them. A social explanation of bag-snatching would be that people steal handbags because an unjust society has deprived them of the money they need to live - and not starving is a higher value than not breaking the law.

In short: the social view focuses on crimes, and questions whether they should be crimes. Like the positivist view, it recognises that some people are less committed to society's values than others; however, it regards society's values as arbitrary, and questions whether its laws need to be enforced. It sees material factors as fundamental in deciding whether someone who breaks a law should be seen as a criminal. Its ideal is a just society, in terms of wealth and power as well as crime and punishment.

Suppose that burglars rob a jewellers' shop, taking the diamond-encrusted Rolexes which had been on display in the window. A classicist would say, "Something like that was bound to happen sooner or later - anyone would be tempted." A positivist would say, "People like that want locking up." Someone taking the social view would say, "It's a shame for the shopkeeper, but it's disgusting that they were asking people to spend that kind of money."

Hope that helps. Good luck with the essay - the questions are on Moodle, in case you haven't spotted them.