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Introduction to Criminology All Notes for Final Exam including textbook
Introduction to Criminology (CRM1300)
University of Ottawa
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The Defamed Deranged of Gotham
The Social Construction of Mental Illness as Criminality in Batman Comics
Introduction - American mental health asylums were emptied with the objective to replace the inhuman sanitariums of the day with outpatient mental health facilities ◦ Backlash from conservatives blocked the widespread development of this ◦ These changes lead to criminal justice becoming the de facto mental health institution in the US, with the mentally ill becoming fodder for mass incarceration - Mental health is a sorely neglected issue ◦ This is not a new issue - Comic books are one of many forms of mass media that create and recreate images of the archetypal “mentally ill criminal” - Comic books comprise a battleground where social structure contradictions and everyday struggles meet in a battleground of contested meaning ◦ Studying comic books thus allows us to glean how social conflicts are reenacted, challenged, and mythologized
Comic Book Reflections of Social Problems - Comic books have always embodied the social concerns of their times ◦ The production of comic books is part of the organized and routinized culture at large - As society changed, so too did comic books - The decades of the 1950s and 60s were marred by Cold War anxieties over the risk of a nuclear holocaust as well as the potential promises of space travel - The 1960s were a period marked by antiauthoritarianism, particularly among youths ◦ Countercultural elements bled into comic book stories, with young college students listing characters like the Hulk and Spider Man as antiauthority heroes - In the 1970s, comic books began to tackle political turbulence of the civil rights and antiwar movements - As the 1980s progressed and Baby Boomers settled into more conservative lifestyles, comic books stepped away from progressive social issues ◦ Superhero narratives reflected the broader social swing toward political conservatism that embraced “tough on crime” rhetoric and the oncoming War on Drugs - At the turn of the century, comic books mirrored social changed and anxieties after the events of September 11, 2001 ◦ Many superhero battles during this time became much more militaristic - War on Terror is shown on comic book stories of the new millennium ◦ American anxiety of terrorism and unilateral military action are some of the more widespread social problems of the past several years, lending themselves to comic book stories Psychotic Sexual Obsession
- The villains of the Batman universe are frequently perverse caricatures of mental instability
- exhibiting multiple traits of psychological abnormality as an attempt to convey their villainy to the reader ◦ This is a common character trait of obsession ◦ This obsession can drive the protagonists to strive for their interpretation of justice and it can also serve as a key motivator for the antagonists ◦ The obsession itself, however, is not necessarily the personal characteristic that marks a character as fundamentally flawed ◦ Fixation to sexual desire is used as a mechanism to convey the underlying dangerousness of the characters ▪ Ex: the Joker has been frequently portrayed as someone who is obsessed with Batman ▪ Batman professes a desire to be rid of his nemesis ▪ The Joker delights in arguing that the two exist in a tandem with one another, treating their relationship as one between two quarrelling lovers
- In Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on a Serious Earth , the Joker plays with Batman’s mind, again rekindling the narrative of them being lovers ◦ This then leads to him continuing his violent crimes ▪ The Joker would later then escape confinement, and after doing so would sexually assault Catwoman, leaving her behind for Batman to find
- Harley Quinn is another example ◦ Her drive to be a criminal is based on an unhealthy psychotic obsession with the Joker ▪ She commits crimes to satisfy him
- While mental instability can take on other forms in these stories, one of the telltale signs of criminal madness is a form of sexual deviance and obsession with object of desire
- The particular obsessions demonstrated by these villains are thus constructed as an indicator of something fundamentally “broken” with these characters
- Batman dispenses his particular brand of violent justice, and without it, readers are left to presume that the villains are not being stopped
Escalation of Pathological Criminality - The idea that criminal behaviour has become more extreme over time in Gotham City through a rise in psychopathic crimes - Batman’s extreme methods of dispensing vigilante justice encouraged the development of more psychotic criminals ◦ Others argue these criminals emerged independent of the actions of Batman and justify his harsh tactics - Batman: Year One , Gotham City is initially full of “normal” criminals embedded with large mafia families ◦ The oldest villains of Gotham City are the wealthy families that make up the Court of Owls ◦ These people commit crime as a means to have power over the city
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The Futility of Treatment - Another theme; the seeming futility of treatment and rehabilitation of mentally unstable criminals in the Batman universe ◦ Social scientists will appear in these stories to discuss how Batman is harmful and mental illness needs to be treated rather than condemned ◦ The liberal social scientist is inevitably proven wrong by the end of the story through the catastrophic behaviours of the villains ◦ The Arkham inmates prove to be too innately criminally evil to be cured - In Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on a Serious Earth , the criminally insane are treated by individuals who believe psychiatry and psychology are the answers to helping society ◦ Yet the criminals that Dr. Arkham treats continue to demonstrate erratic and violent tendencies - In The Dark Knight Returns , the Joker’s psychiatrist insists that Batman created the villains ◦ In the years since Batman’s retirement, the Joker has been undergoing rehabilitation ▪ His madness has seemingly subsided ◦ When Batman comes out of retirement, the Joker immediately regresses to his insane persona ◦ These villains are normal people who need medical treatment, not incapacitation ▪ Batman is the cause of the killings and other crimes ◦ The Joker kills himself in front of a television audience ◦ Rehabilitating people like the joker is shown as futile in Gotham - In The Black Mirror , a key plot element involves the return of Commissioner Gordon’s son James, who is a self-admitted psychopath ◦ Medication has seemed to have normalized James ▪ However, it is later revealed that James still tortures people out out a perverse enjoyment, and is also killing people ▪ The medication has not helped him become a functioning member of society ◦ For mentally unstable criminals, there is seemingly no effective means of rehabilitation - According to the narratives provided in the Batman comics, there is seemingly no cure or even treatment for mentally ill criminals - These stories reflect broader social trends over the past four decades ◦ During this time, there was a sharp shift away from prisoner rehabilitation toward more punitive approaches ◦ One factor in bringing this change was a decrease in public support for prisoner treatment programs ◦ Politicians and the public at large were increasingly convinced that there was no treating the criminal ◦ Criminals were framed as unreasoning and morally bankrupt
Institutional Failures to Control
- Arkham Asylum was designed as a harsh prison environment to warehouse Batman’s various enemies ◦ As argued, criminality is directly linked to mental illness in the city of Gotham ▪ Treatment is also not an option ◦ Arkham is the institutional arm of Batman’s brand of vigilante justice ◦ This institutional setting is frequently portrayed as wholly inadequate to control the multitude of mentally unstable prisoners housed within its walls
- In The Killing Joke , because of a failure to heed a warning from Batman about security, the Joker escapes from Arkham by killing Batman’s guards ◦ Batman is against killing his foes, yet there is the possibility that death is the only option to end dangerous deranged villains ▪ This is because even Arkham is failing to be the resolution to these criminals ◦ Ultimately the Joker kills himself, sealing the idea that the only way to truly stop the psychotic killing of people like the Joker is through death
- In The Dark Knight Strikes Again , the individuals within the asylum are not seen as patients to save, but as prisoners locked away ◦ Arkham has been abandoned ◦ The government and society decide it is not worth taking back the asylum, as they will die out eventually when food supplies deplete ◦ The inmates were prisoners and therefore viewed as not worth saving ▪ Only the hostages unaffected by criminal insanity were worth rescuing ◦ Not only has Arkham failed to treat these criminals, but the facility cannot even control them, and Batman is forced to confront each of them ◦ In Arkham, they are not treated like patients, but rather hidden away from society as criminals ◦ Mentally ill individuals commit crimes, and criminals deserve to be put into the penal system ◦ The suggestion offered in these narratives is that punishment should be harsher and, at least in some circumstances, more permanent ▪ Therefore reinforcing an ideology that supports the expansion of measures like life imprisonment and even the death penalty
Conclusion - The Batman stories illustrate the ways that American culture connects criminality to individual pathologies rather than to sociological causes and that these criminal tendencies are innate and incurable ◦ These stories matter because they construct and reconstruct our social reality regarding crime, criminality, and crime control in the American society
Critique ◦ A means to a transformative/just end
Etymology ◦ The origin of words
The broad meaning of the word critical has been reduced to a degree where it is almost exclusively associated with the act of judging
Judgemental critique derives from its critical ammunition from the veracity of the criterion/critical standard
Critique typically implies that we are judging some “thing” against a normative standard ◦ Review on page 326
Critique is typically judgemental and reactive in criminology
Forms of critique that seek to challenge the status quo of criminal justice are not always appreciated
The reason why critical voices beyond the language of pragmatic technology are muted is because critics failed to address what distinguishes their racial precepts from proponents of administrative criminology
In recent years, critical criminologists have called for an approach that goes beyond judgement ◦ They would employ an art of critique that involves destabilizing seemingly well- anchored relations in an effort to form new patterns of being that do not pander to established social logics or rely on reactive judgements ▪ This would suggest other just ways of being in the world
Critical criminology critique attempts to move beyond complicity in government intrusion into the lives of the least powerful ◦ It does not seek ways to better manage the poor and dangerous classes ◦ It promises to bring justice to those are marginalized and discriminated against Critical Criminology in English Canada
Invigorated in 1973 with the publication of “The New Criminology” by Ian Taylor, Paul Walton, and Jock Young ◦ Identified the starting points for new criminology and criticized conventional criminology for supporting the political and economic status quo for ignoring the structural causes of crime and focusing on biological and psychological factors
They were recommended in contrast, a fully social criminology that... ◦ Review more in depth on page 328 ◦ Understands crime within its wider socio-cultural context ◦ Examines the structural and political-economic dimensions that produce criminal behaviour ◦ Probes the relationship between crime and the prevailing mode of production ◦ Questions the role of power and conflict in shaping crime and criminal justice ◦ Engages in a materialist analysis of the development of law in capitalist societies ◦ Takes a dialectical approach to analyzing how individuals both influence and are influenced by dominant social structures
This approach inspired many Canadian criminologists to critically assess the liberal foundations of Canadian criminology
Scholars desired a criminology that was more sensitive to the criminogenic impacts of capitalism, patriarchy, racism, and other social structures ◦ Review on page 329
The growing eclecticism of critical criminology has produced a group of scholars who are difficult to unify under a single label ◦ Two groups were initially defined; the “left realists” and the “left idealists” ▪ Left idealists were said to begin their inquiry into crime from abstract premises rather than empirical work ▪ Criticized by realists for minimizing the harm that crime causes to the working class and for romanticizing criminals as a potentially revolutionary force ▪ Left realists worked through local surveys of crime and victimization to try to move beyond partial criminological understandings, which focused on either the offender, state, public, or victim ▪ The objective was to take fear of a crime among the working classes seriously and to oppose the work of “right realists” ▪ They did not achieve a sustained following
The diversity of critical criminology in Canada would later expand with the popularity of neo-Marxist and post-structuralist theories imported from Continental Europe
Governmentality and Powers: Foucault and Criminology - Governmentality ◦ The art of governing ◦ Transcends and is broader than the traditional understanding of government as a state-directed activity ◦ Encompasses a wide array of techniques, within and outside of the state, intended to (re)shape and (re)direct human actions - Foucault complained that criminology and its “garrulous discourse” and “endless repetitions” only served to relieve judges, police, and magistrates of their guilt for delivering pain and suffering on the guilty - Many scholars have applied his work towards understanding crime and its control - Foucault was born in France in 1926 and died in 1984 due to HIV/AIDS - He is hailed for his unique work on power - Power ◦ For Foucault, extends beyond the state ◦ It is relational, such that power is only evident in its exercise ▪ It is not solely negative or regressive ▪ Embraces a positive theory of power as something creative - Focault places emphasis on micro-powers - Micro-powers
- The needs principle implies that recidivism will be reduced through select targeting of criminogenic need through appropriate treatment programs
- Actuarial strategies have raised questions about such assessments ◦ It has been found that correctional officials and practitioners fail to conceptualize the problems intrinsic to this kind of needs assessment and how a failure to distinguish between risk and need can result in increased surveillance of youth
- These Foucauldian notions of risk and actual arianism are occasionally combined with Beck’s concept of risk society
- Risk society ◦ An emerging societal form characterized by the production and increased awareness of human-made risks such as nuclear destruction and environmental destruction ◦ The risk society is organized around the management of such risks ▪ Beck states that we have come to organize our societies around the fact of risk
- This theoretical perspective comes to bear on critical criminology in at least two ways: ◦ Social problems have increasingly come to be understood as risks to be managed rather than social problems to be solved ◦ Risk thinking transforms criminal justice practices
- The risk society thesis serves a critical criminological function by demonstrating the effect that broad societal shifts towards increased insecurity have on the ways we think about and react to matters of criminal justice ◦ Crime and the response to it are not taken as givens but rather as socially constituted phenomena that can be better understood by locating them in their wider social contexts
Cultural Criminology - The social reaction perspective brings attention to crime as a process of social interaction involving victim, offender, bystanders, and criminal justice agencies in the construction of deviant meanings and identities ◦ This has been absorbed by the world of criminologists - 5 motifs of cultural criminology: ◦ Cultural criminologists alert us to the importance of “adrenaline” in the commission of crime ◦ Cultural criminologists draw our attention to the “soft city”, referring to the “underlife” of the city that hides beneath structured and rationally planned urban space ◦ Cultural criminologists are interested in acts of “transgression” and rule breaking that challenges the justness of laws ◦ Cultural criminologists propose a methodology founded on a attentive gaze ◦ The knowledge produced by cultural criminologists is argues to be dangerous knowledge because its purpose is to question all knowledge, including the status of criminology as an objective of science
- Attentive gaze ◦ A methodological requirement that researchers immerse themselves where crime occurs in the everyday world in order to be better understand the ways in which crime is experienced and interpreted by individuals
- Dangerous knowledge ◦ A form of knowledge that leaves no notion, concept, or idea untouched by criticism ◦ Cultural criminologists often turn to diverse sources of information as a means to reveal alternative perspectives that might shake the foundations of our taken-for- granted assumptions about crime to achieve dangerous knowledge
“ Field Theory” of Criminology - Field ◦ A basic unit of social activity ◦ The social world is divided into many fields ▪ Each field of activity is defined by its own market through which certain practices or dispositions are valued more than others - Habitus ◦ A set of durable dispositions acquired through experience that allow one to achieve a “feel for the game” within a specific field of activity ▪ These are internalized practices/dispositions that are valued more - Capital ◦ The primary field of activity for state or government actors, as well as those who are funded by the government, and where these actors compete to define and shape government resources and responsibilities
- The sociology of Pierre Bourdieu provides insight into the cultural and economic conditions in which crime and understanding of crime are produced on a much broader scale
- Within a field of social activity, a market defined by its own measures of value is established; and in accordance with a field, actors seek the “profit of distinction”, the awards associated with a display of competence
- An actor’s ability to display competence within a particular fields depends in part on their habitus
- The actor’s “field for the game” within the market relations of a specific field will vary ◦ Those endowed with greater quantities of the forms of capital value within the field will be more capable of transmitting an aura of competence ◦ Actors come pre-equipped with differing amounts of capital and are predisposed towards certain behaviour/practices
- In criminological analysis, Bordieu’s theory of field has been most influentially used by Wacquant, who has expanded Bordieu’s notion of the bureaucratic field to foster better understanding of the space in which state-sponsored crime control and welfare policy are performed and intersect
- According to Bordieu, the bureaucratic field is characterized by two intersecting axes
◦ Tends to extract the most useful conclusions from the prominent and influential scholars and assemble them in a meaningful ◦ Much of his work is grounded in his concerns about the modern conditions of sovereignty
- Sovereign ◦ The one who holds supreme power in a territory or space
- State of exception ◦ A period of time when the sovereign declares civil liberties suspended, typically in a time of national crisis
- Under Canada’s National Emergency Act (1988), any national, provincial, or municipal government can declare a state of emergency ◦ An emergency is defined as an urgent and critical situation that threatens Canadian citizens and the government’s capacity to preserve Canada’s sovereignty, security, and territorial integrity
- The nation’s citizens are subordinate to the sovereign, who can decide at any time to suspend their rights ◦ That is, human rights are afforded by specific geopolitical orders and can only be suspended by the de facto sovereign
- Naked life ◦ An individual who is excluded from possessing human rights and can be killed by anyone but cannot be sacrificed for religious ceremony
Jacques Derrida: Deconstruction is Justice - For Agamben and others, sovereignty refers to a single entity ◦ A head of state or some familiar figure who can decide on the state of exception - Derrida argued for a more open and wide-ranging definition ◦ He attempted to open the concept of sovereignty to other ways of thinking and relating ◦ To him, sovereignty was intrinsic to all of us, insofar as the sovereign function is “anchored in a certain ability to do something” ▪ We always say more than the surface of our language reveals - Deconstruction ◦ An opening up of seemingly closed “things” ◦ It intends to encounter the hidden and excluded elements of language, meaning, and experience ◦ Defined by Derrida (negatively) as to what it is not rather than what it is ▪ Example on page 346 - When we hear language, we do not attempt to read its hidden meaning, but instead we relate to what is laid out before us
◦ Deconstruction then attends closely to the unspoken elements that enable the central, or privileged, structure of a given meaning formation
- Underlying language is a trace
- Trace ◦ The mark of absence in words that is the necessary condition of thought and experience
- Traces can be linked to a footprint or comet ◦ When we observe a comet, we are struck by the presence of it ◦ What is absent, however, is the comet’s nucleus and essence, which is composed of rock and ice ◦ When we observe it we are not privy to its essence because the nucleus remains hidden ▪ The same thing can be said about language ▪ No idiom or element can function as a sign without at the same moment referring to another that is simply not present but gives meaning to it
- Without the insights of deconstruction, we are apt to quickly read over the term community and be off to the next of the act’s many sections
- Broken windows policing ◦ Proponents of this policing style feel that tolerating minor misbehaviour will mean that residents will be afraid to use their streets ▪ Critics feel that this policing style potentially discriminates against the poor
- Justice ◦ Cannot be defined (for Derrida) adequately ◦ It is not contained in or constrained by law, it is infinite ◦ It is “to come”
- Derrida seeks a different kind of justice, one that goes beyond
Criticisms of Critical Criminology
- One criticism is its sometimes obscure and abstract nature of critical criminological theorizing
Chapter 1
Crime, Criminals, and Criminology
A Violent Crime: The Sand Brothers - Robert and Danny sand grew up in Alberta ◦ Their father spent time in jail in his youth ◦ Their mother ran a business where both parents were now respected community members ◦ Both boys were constantly in trouble
◦ He attended Toronto’s Upper Canada College, an elite private school ▪ He would break into school offices to steal and alter school records, and stole final exam papers ▪ He sold the exam papers to other students ▪ He was caught eventually and was expelled from the school
- After graduating from law school, he entered the newspaper business
- Several times throughout his career, he attempted to transfer money from corporations he ran (but were owned by public shareholders) to his personal accounts
- He would eventually launch Canada’s National Post
- His corporation (Hollinger International) controlled the world’s third-largest newspaper chain
- He would move to England in 2001 and gave up his Canadian citizenship so he could accept admission to the British House of Lords and the title of Lord Black of Crossharbour ◦ Soon after he took his seat in the House of Lords, his financial empire began to unravel ▪ He was challenged by investors at Hollinger’s shareholders ’meeting ▪ He was forced to step down from his role of CEO of Hollinger ◦ The board of directors soon accused Black and other executives of running a “corporate kleptocracy” ◦ While he was under investigation, Black continued to demonstrate the imperious attitude that had characterized his career
- In 2005, criminal fraud charges were filed in the US against Black ◦ He was also charged with misusing corporate money for personal expenses
- In July of 2007, Black was convicted on four charges and acquitted on 9 others ◦ He was convicted of obstruction of justice because he removed documents from his office and for several fraud offences ◦ He was sentenced to 6 ½ years in prison and ordered to make a restitution of $6. million ◦ After he served two years, the US Supreme Court set aside his fraud convictions and sent the case back to the lower courts for reconsideration and he was released from prison ▪ His sentence was then reduced to 42 months and was ordered back to prison to finish the remainder of his term
- In 2012, Black returned to Canada
- In contrast to the Sand brothers, the law and legal system did very little to try to deter Black
Terrorism: The Life and Death of Aaron Driver - Came from a strong Christian family ◦ His parents served in the Canadian military ◦ He changed dramatically after the death of his mother when he was 7 years old ◦ He had a troubled childhood - Aaron would settle down in his late teens when his girlfriend became pregnant
◦ However, the relationship fell apart in 2012 when their baby was stillborn
- He then moved from Ontario to Winnipeg with his father and step-mother ◦ Here, he began to find comfort through religion
- Christianity did not provide the answers that he wanted ◦ He began reading Muslim websites and attending mosques ▪ Still, he decided they were not conservative enough ◦ He began his religious search back through the internet ▪ This is when he became attracted to the radical ISIS
- Aaron began publicly praise terrorist attacks, including the one in 2014 where two members of the military were killed ◦ He said these acts were justified because Canada had deployed CF-18 fighter jets to attack ISIS targets in Iraq
- His family tried to be supportive, but they were unable to change his newly found ideals
- He continued to be in contact with an online network of ISIS supporters
- In 2015, he was arrested in Winnipeg and put on a peace bond that restricted his movements and his computer use ◦ While still under this bond, he moved to Strathroy, Ontario, to live with his sister’s family ▪ Still continued his communications online with ISIS supporters
- On August 10, 2016, the FBI reported to the RCMP that they had seen a martyrdom video that indicated someone was planning an imminent suicide attack in Canada ◦ The would-be bomber was wearing a balaclava over his face, but the RCMP identified him as Aaron right away and sent officers to his residence ◦ When the police arrived, Aaron detonated a bomb in the taxi, but it did not fully detonate ▪ He would then be fatally shot by police
- Terrorism raises some interesting issues for criminologists ◦ Do theories we have developed to explain other types of crime also help us understand recruitment to terrorist organizations? ◦ Why do only some people attracted to terrorist ideologies commit violent acts?
What is Criminology? - Criminology ◦ The body of knowledge regarding crime as a social phenomenon ◦ It includes the process of making laws, breaking laws, and reacting to the breaking of laws ◦ Its objective is the development of a body of general and verified principles and of other types of knowledge regarding this process of law, crime, and treatment - Most commonly, the term is applied to academics who study crime and the criminal justice system - Why should we study crime?
▪ Under what social circumstances are offences most likely to occur? ▪ What are the consequences for crime victims? ▪ How can particular types of crime be prevented? ◦ 6) Societal reactions to crime ▪ Historically, societies have responded to crime in many different ways ▪ In Canada, we normally process law violators through a criminal justice system that includes the police, courts, and the corrections system ▪ Criminologists have studied these institutions extensively
- The federal government has exclusive jurisdiction over criminal law and procedure ◦ This means the provinces and territories cannot pass or amend the criminal law ◦ For example, there are many different levels of responsibility for policing ▪ The RCMP enforces some federal laws, acts as a provincial police force in all jurisdictions (minus Ontario, Quebec, and parts of Newfoundland), and also acts as a municipal police force in some communities ▪ The provinces pay the RCMP for these services under provincial policing contracts
- The courts as well come under both federal and provincial jurisdiction ◦ The provinces are responsible for appointing some judges and for administering the “lower” courts which deal with most criminal cases ◦ Higher level courts that try serious criminal cases are the responsibility of the federal government as are the provincial appeal courts
- Responsibility for corrections is also split ◦ The provinces are also responsible for offenders who receive community dispositions, such as probation or restitution ◦ This services also supervises offenders who are released into the community prior to the expiration of their sentence
Rules and Laws: The Regulation of Behaviour - Norms ◦ Established rules of behaviour or standards of conduct - All groups have rules and society cannot function without them - Most of the time, most of us conform to the norms our group prescribes, however the same cannot be said for everyone within that society
We follow rules without consciously thinking about them ◦ Often we cannot even specify all the rules that govern our particular behaviour
We have many informal rules (folkways) that we have used growing up to govern our conduct ◦ These solutions avert potential chaos, and following them enhances our sense of belonging ◦ The penalties for not following these rules are also usually informal
However, not all actions are governed solely by these informal means of social control
The law deals with behaviour that is too serious to be left to informal mechanisms
What is a Crime - The concept of a crime has been developed relatively recently ◦ Prior to this development, crime was handled very differently ▪ In the 18th century, in most societies, offences were handled privately by the wronged individual and their family - Legal definition of crime ◦ A crime is an act or omission that violates the criminal law and is punishable with a jail term, fine, and/or some other sanction - The most common definition of crime is a legalistic one - Criminologists have argued for a social definition of crime that encompasses a broader range of harmful behaviour - White-collar crime ◦ Crime that is committed by people in the course of their legitimate business activities - Is white-collar crime really a crime? ◦ Edwin Sutherland was one of the most important figures in the development of criminology ▪ He argues that focusing only on violations of the criminal law presented a misleading picture of crime because it limited criminological research ▪ This led to the unwanted conclusion that crime was primarily a lower-class phenomenon ▪ He pointed out that many white collar crimes were being committed by the middle and upper classes ▪ Criminologists neglected these crimes because they were not usually dealt with by the criminal courts - Human rights ◦ The minimum conditions required for a person to live a dignified life ◦ Among the rights set out by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are the right to live, liberty, and security of the person; the right to be free of torture and other forms of cruel and degrading punishment; the right to equality before the law; and the right to the basic necessities of life
- Human rights violations as a crime: ◦ Another attempt to expand the definition of crime was made by Herman and Julia Schwendinger ▪ They advocate a definition of crime based on human rights rather than on legal statuses
Introduction to Criminology All Notes for Final Exam including textbook
Course: Introduction to Criminology (CRM1300)
University: University of Ottawa
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