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CRM 1300 - CRM 1300 - Final Exam Notes
Introduction to Criminology (CRM1300)
University of Ottawa
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CRM 1300
Counting Crime - Lecture 3
Three sources of crime data
Official stats
Victimisation surveys
Self-report surveys
Data collected by LEAs
Typically collected by local police departments, compiled and aggregated at the federal level, a and made available to the public
In canada, the canadian centre for justice statistics has the mandate to collect national data on crime and criminal justice
Publishes Uniform Crime Reports
Police-recorded crime statistics in Canada, 2021
Over 2 million police-reported Criminal Code incidents in 2021, representing a 1% increase over 2020
Nationally, there were 788 homicides, 29 more than the previous year, representing 3% increase
Violent crime rate increased 27% over 2020, or 72% over 2019
Property crime rate decreased 1% compared to 2020
Limitations
Only captures a fraction of the so-called ‘dark figure’ of crime: crime that remains unreported, unrecorded, and largely unknown
Sexual assault: The most underreported crime
Johnson (2012); 8% of victimes of sexual assault in Canada report the crime to the police
Common reasons cited by victims of sexual violence:
Out in the open for friends and family
Feelings of shame and embarrassment
Scepticism, doubt. And blame for provoking/not resisting the attack
Lack of evidence; he said/she said case; perpetrator unknown
Police won't take her complaint seriously
Felling of life on hold until trial
Perpetrator is powerful and high status, low likelihood of succeeding
Pay legal fees if lose
Crime Funnel
Definition: A model indicating that the actual total quantity of crime is much higher than the decreasing proportion that detected, reported, prosecuted, and punished
The CJS operates as a funnel:
Only a portion of incidents result in a police report of a criminal incident
Only a portion of suspect are arrested are changed
Only a portions of charges result in conviction
Only a portion of convictions result in incarceration
Limitations continued
Are generally offence- rather than offender- or victim-focused
Only convers a limited range of crimes
Not all LEAs participate; its voluntary
Variations between police departments in recording and enforcement practices
Police departments manipulating and falsifying data
Interview a sample of a population and ask them questions about their experiences of criminal victimisation
Strengths
Largely overcomes teh ;non-reporting’ and ‘non-recorded’ problems associated with official statistics
Federal police: RCMP
- Largest single police force in the country
- In 2021, 30,558 employees (19000 police officers)
- Enforces federal laws, investigates crimes, protects national security and ensures the safety of state officials and foreign dignitaries
- Provides policing services to all territoires, most provinces (minus ON and QC), and more than 150 municipalities and 600 Indigenous communities
- Provides services to all Canadian public police forces
- Provincial police: General
Three provincial police forces:
- Ontario Provincial Police
- Surete du Quebec
- Royal Newfoundland Constabulary
In all other provinces and territories, the RCMP provides policing services
- Provincial police: OPP
- Second largest police force in Canada after RCMP
- 6,200 uniformed officers in 2020
- Patrols all provincial highways and most waterways
- Investigates province-wide and cross jurisdictional major crimes and cases
- Protects provincial government buildings and officials
- Provides front line municipal police services to hundreds of communities (327 in
- Municipal police
Provide law enforcement and policing services in municipal jurisdictions
Largest one is the Toronto Police Service:
5,400 uniformed officers in 2020
Enforces all applicable laws in Toronto
Maintains public order and community safety
Provides emergency response to major treats and public safety risks
First Nations police
The first nations policing program was created by the federal government in 1991
It allows first nations communities to negotiate with governments to establish policing agreements
The agreements can include self administered police services, or policing by the provincial or federal services
In 2018, there were 36 first nations independent police services
Courts
Canada’s provinces administer justice in their jurisdictions
Each province has three levels
Lower courts
Superior courts
Appeal courts
The supreme court of Canada is the highest court in the judicial system of Canada
One of its functions is to hear appeals from decisions of provincial appeal courts
Provincial courts hear all summary convictions offences:
- Least serious kinds of criminal offences
- Carry a maximum punishment of 500$ and two years less a day in jail
- Examples Include vagrancy , solicitation of prostitution, public nudity, trespassing at night, pretending to practise witchcraft
Superior courts are the courts of first instance from criminal prosecutions of some indictable offences:
Most serious kinds of criminal offences
Carry a maximum punishment of life in prison for some offences
Examples include theft over $5000, drug trafficking, break and enter, murder, acts of terrorism
The ultimate role that courts play relates to sentencing:
An alternative to the criminalization and punishment of drug use
Refers to a range of public health policies aimed at reducing the harms associated with addiction and drug use
Key principles
Pragmatism
Human rights
Focus on harms
Priority of immediate goals
Examples of Canadian initiatives include:
- Needle exchange programs
- Supervised injection sites
- Methadone maintenance
- Crack kits
- Supervised inhalation rooms
Benefits of harm reduction initiatives include
- Reduce blood borne illness like HIV/AIDS
- Reducing overdose deaths
- Reducing the number of used needles in public
- Reducing the sharing of needles and injecting frequency
- Educating users about safer injecting
- Reducing crime and increasing employment among users
- Increasing referrals to treatment programs and health social services
Lecture 5 - Classicism and Positivism
Classism
Key characteristics
Beccaria's Essay on Crimes and Punishment (1764)
Critiques
Impact Positivism
Key characteristics
Lomrbros Criminal Man (1876)
Critiques
Impact
Classicism
Key characteristics
- Emerged in response to arbitrary nd cruel systems of punishment
- Sought to move away from the dark age of superstitious and inhumane social control
- Strived for predictability and proportionality in the infliction of pain on offenders
- Was the product of the Enlightenment
Beccaria's Essay on Crimes and Punishment (1764)
Experience with “Academy of Fists” group led him to witness firsthand a penal system ridden with corruption and injustice
Fearful of condemnation, published his work anonymously
Initially banned at some countries
But quickly became a landmark text for criminal law reformers internationally
Key assumptions:
- The criminal someone exercising free will and rationality
- The problem of crime is one bad or inadequate laws
- The aim of punishment is deterrence
“The end of punishment is no other than to prevent the criminal from doing further injury to society, and to prevent others from committing the like offence”
Beccari’s approach summarised in three ideas:
- Certainty: How likely a punishment is to occur
- Celerity: How quickly punishment is inflicted
- Premise: Crime can best be reduced by managing, designing, or manipulation the immediate environment so as to reduce the opportunities for crime and increase its perceived risk
Positivism
Key Characteris
- Rose to prominence in the 19th century
- Applies the methods of the natural sciences to the social world
- Considers crime as caused, rather than chosen
- Posits that crime is the product of a disease infecting the body or mind
- Aims to discover the general principles or universal laws governing criminal behaviour
- Seeks to eliminate or at least reduce crime
Lombroso’s Criminal Man (1876)
While performing an autopsy on the body of a thief, Lombroso was true what he perceived as the apelike stricture of the criminals skull
He noted that many of the characteristic of the criminal’s skull were similar to those of lower animals
He hypothesised that the criminal awas na evolutionary throwback , an atavist, a born criminal
Sought to test his thesis by comparing the bodies of 400 Italian prisoners with the bodies of a group of soldiers
Each was measured for evidence of physical anomalies
Found that 43% of prisoners had five or more ‘atac=vistic; anomalies, and that none of the soldiers had five. Inferred from his findings that, for some criminals, biology is destiny
Criminals are born, not made
Notable physical anomalies:
“Ears of unusual size, or occasionally very small, or standing out from head as do those of the chimpanzee”
“Pouches in the cheeks like those of some animals“
“A series of cavities and protuberances such as are found in some reptiles”
“Chin receding, ot excessively long or short and flat, as in apes” The body is Lonroso’s object of analysis in three ways:
The Criminal Body
- Interested in corporeal signs of atavism, Criminality could be read off the body
- Used autopsies of criminal bodies to scientifically prove’ criminality and dangerousness
- Legitimise the idea that criminal bodes show the symptoms of past and present
The Punishment Body
- Punishments should be equal to the dangerousness of the offender
- Permanent incapacitation or death for born criminals
- “Born criminals are impervious to every social cure and must be eliminated for are own defence, sometimes by the death penalty”
- The Social Body
- Worried criminal bodies would infiltrate and infect social body
- The social body: The idea that there are moral boundaries that need to be protected from threats and strengthened to guarantee group integrity
- Concerned to protect the socal body by managing and eradicating criminal bodies
Critiques
- Methods: Imprecise definitions, poor sampling procedures, inadequate control-group comparisons
- Determinism: The assumption that there are factors beyond the individual that impel or constrain them in ways that lead to crime. This fails to take account of human decision-making, rationality and choice
- Individualism: Focus individual factors to the exclusion of everything else. Clture, socialisation, enforcement activities, and inequality are completely ignored
Impact
The project that Lombroso started - Identifying factors associated with criminality through the application of scientific methods - continues to this day
Biological positivism has been reinvigorated from the 1960’s onwards by the rise of neuroscience and genetics
Researchers have explored a range biochemical factors which may have some link with offending, including the CNS, neurotransmitters, nutrition, and hormones
Newer biological positivist work has tended to :
New Section / Content for Midterm #
Lecture 7 - Durkheim, anomie and strain theory
Durkheim and social change
- Durkheim's main intellectual concern was to analyse the possibilities of securing social solidarity in the face of rapid social and economic change
- Durkeim struggles to understand the nature of the shift from pre-modern to modern societies, and the implications of this shift for social relationships
- His major research question might be stated as: What will provide social solidarity in modernity?
Features of Modernity
Industrialization
Increase in production driven by the mechanisation of labour and the use of inanimate energy
Urbanisation
Increase in proportion of total human population living in major cities vs. rural areas
Secularization
The social, cultural and political significance of religion diminishes
Division of Labour
Increase in occupational differentiation
Forms of Social Solidarity
Durkheim theorised the differences between pre-modern and modern societies in terms of social solidarity
He identified two distinct forms, which we can think of as occupying two ends of a spectrum representing the degree of occupational differentiation in a society
Mechanical solidarity
Low degree of occupational differentiation
Solidarity based on homogeneity
- People are bound together by “commonalities, similitudes and likeness”
Identity of economic interests and pursuits
Identity of language, customs and beliefs
Organic solidarity
High degree of occupational differentiation
Solidarity based on heterogeneity
- People are bound together by functional complementarity and interdependence
Diversity of language, customs. And beliefs
Anonymity, superficiality, and segmentalization of social relations
Two meanings
In the Division of Labour Society (1893), anomie is a property of societies:
Temporary consequence of the division of labour
Historically specific problem of societies in transition to modernity
Contingent symptom of modernization
State of moral or normative deregulation
Social condition that produces high rates of suicide and crime
In Suicide (1897), anomie is a psychological state characterized by:
“The malady of infinite aspiration”
A troubling sense of limitless possibility
“disturbance , agitation and discontent”
for behaviour and attitudes which the second precludes, these is a strain toward the breakdown of norms, towards normlessness.
Anomie is:
- The result of a lack of symmetry between the cultural and structural components of a social system
- A strain between culturally prescribed aspirations and the socially structured avenues for realising them
- A contraction between normative aspirations and lack of access to legitimate means to achieve them
Innovation
- The Application of illegitimate means to the achievement of socially approved ends
- Relatively ineffectual legitimate means are rejected (e. dead end, low paying job)
- Promising illegitimate means are explored
- Many crimes against property are clear examples of innovation ex. Burglaries, robberies
Ritualism
The cultural goal are rejected but legitimate means are accepted
“The abandoning or scaling down and rapid social mobility to the point where one’s aspirations can be satisfied
Playing by the rules but no desire to get ahead
Eg. Low-level office workers who realise they never get a promotion but continue to work hard for one
Retreatism
The cultural goals and legitimate means are both rejected
Concerns people that are”in the society but not of it”
Merton’s examples include “psychotics, autists, pariahs, outcasts, vagrants, vagabonds, tramps, chronic drunkards, and drug addicts”
A private, rather than a public, adaptation
Became a subcultural style in the 1960’s with the advent of the hippie movement
- “Turn on, tune in, drop out”
Rebellion
Rejecting, and seeking to replace, dominate normative aspirations and opportunities structures
Concerns “political” deviants and criminals
A collective, public adaptation
For example:
The revolutionary who use illegitimate mans(ex. civil disobedience, sabotage, assassination, kidnapping, hijacking)
The terrorist that uses violence against, and intimidation of, civilians in the pursuit of political aims
Limitations
- Exaggerates level of consensus around “universal” normative aspirations
- Tendency to focus on lower-class crime
- Does not explore the structural causes of strain
- Over-predicts lower-class crime
- Atomistic and individualistic
CRM Lecture 8 - School disorganisation, and Social Chicago theory
School disorganisation, and Social Chicago theory
History context:
- Chicago School Established in 1892, it was the first major
Sociology department in the U.
From the end of wwi to the mid-1940's
was heavily influenced by the
pid a thought of scholars trained ath
"Wheat Kings is it in modern city life that produces delinquency? why do are recobrely hang numbers of boys from the inner urban appet mere i zone 2
< •Structural factors..
1 Low Sucreconomie Status
Presidential instability.
EthiNGa
- Social toh Ah low organisation: A property of neighbourhoods of 1) Solidarity (consensus cround norms. and Values) 2) Cohesion (strong bonds among residents) 3) Integration (organisational participation) outcomes Weak informal social control
•Informal Social controls Reactions of individuals and groups. bring about conformity to norms. that informal Sanctions: Shame, ridicule, Sarcasm, disapproval, exclusion - Informal rewards: praise, compliments. - Major agents; family, School, Church, work
- But now are high rates of delinquency sustained despite high population turnover? Through the cultural transmission of delinquency •Young boys in socially discord to Jalve delinquent lifestyles through route exposure to adult criminal roles organised orcas learn.
- Through his contacts Jane with [criminal gangs and virtue of his participation in they child learns the Prechniques of steely, becomes inuched in deliquheneyinding relationships with his comparsing to a and acquires the attines position of Such groups"
Limitations:
-Use of official data Ecological model Neglect of middle and upper-class crimes. -over-predicts crime in socially disorganised areas
-Inattention to power and Social Stratification
Lecture 9 - American Subcultural Theory
General Characteristics
- Emerges in the UNited States during the 1950’s and 1960’sin response to the weakness of Merton;s anomie thesis
- Three key weaknesses
- Did not offer any account of the determinants of specific adaptations to strain
- Depicted adaptations as individuals, isolates responses
- Neglected ‘expressive’ or ‘non utilitarian’ crimes
General characteristic
- Major research questions:
- Why are there delinquent gangs?
- How do young boys come to join them?
- Focused on the emphasis of the urban male, working class, late adolescent growing up in a class society
- Structural-functionalist theories: Subcultures are collective solutions to structurally imposed problems
Albert Cohen (1955) - Delinquent boys: The culture of a gang
- Combines Merton’s ideas on strain with the CHicago School idea that criminal behaviour is learned in interaction within one’s peer group
- Improved upon anime theory by showing how:
- The pressure of strain experienced in the institution of schooling; and
- Adaptations to strain are shaped by an actor’s immediate interactional context
Strain in schooling
In school, all youths are judged according to middle-class “measuring rods”
The socialisation of working-class boys poorly prepares them to succeed in the educational system
Universal cultural goal: Educational achievement
CRM 1300 - CRM 1300 - Final Exam Notes
Course: Introduction to Criminology (CRM1300)
University: University of Ottawa
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