sociology question
jennyswufe
Chapter_8_updated.pptCharacteristics of Non-Violent Criminals
Theories Applicable to Non-Violent Crime
Non-Violent Crime On Public Opinion
Chapter Eight:
Non-Violent Crimes
Introduction
- Non-violent (acquisitive) crime is crime that rarely, if ever, uses violence to bring about its goal.
- This includes organized crime, business crime, and street crime.
- This includes offences such as automobile theft, prostitution, book-making, and embezzlement.
- We include organized crime because it relies on the threat of violence, not its perpetration.
Introduction, cont’d
- Most people consider non-violent offences to be wrong, but few wish to increase the severity of punishments.
- People agree less about the social significance of non-violent crime than about violent crime.
- Non-violent crime is often committed by strangers or relative strangers.
- Non-violent crime can serve as an occupation or profession and can be learned through observation and apprenticeship.
Non-Violent Crime:
Its Types and Variety, cont’d
- Although large numbers of Canadians are victimized by non-violent crime they fear it far less than they do violent crime.
- In any given year, 5–10 per cent of Canadian households experience theft, vandalism, and breaking and entering.
- Canadian households are far more likely to experience these acts than a violent crime, fatal accident, severe illness, or divorce.
Non-Violent Crime:
Its Types and Variety, cont’d
- Rates of non-violent crime are far higher in urban than in rural areas.
- There is far more to steal in urban areas and more people to do the stealing.
- Wealthier people are more likely to be victimized than poorer people.
Non-Violent Crime:
Its Types and Variety, cont’d
Organized Crime
- Organized crime refers to professional crime that is well organized and sometimes violent.
- Most violence committed by these criminals is directed against other criminals.
- The most profitable business activities of organized crime are non-violent: prostitution, gambling, drugs, and pornography.
Non-Violent Crime: Its Types and Variety, cont’d
Organized Crime
- There has probably been organized crime in every country, and immigration has led to greater organized crime in North America.
- Organized crime is most common among first- and second-generation immigrants and other deprived organizations.
- Today, organized crime is of international concern, as criminals cross national boundaries, undermine democracies, threaten government stability, and aid in nuclear expansion, terrorism, and piracy.
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Non-Violent Crime: Its Types and Variety, cont’d
Business Crime
- There are two types of business crime (or suite crime):
- Crimes committed by corporations in their own business interest.
- White collar crimes committed by business people or professionals at the expense of the corporate body within which they work.
- Individuals often commit criminal acts that can be neither easily observed or prosecuted.
Non-Violent Crime: Its Types and Variety, cont’d
Business Crime
- Fraud is the perfect example of self-interested business crime.
- Commonly, frauds misrepresent a product or service, enabling a criminal to sell something of little or no value.
- Fraud relies on manipulating information, and leading.
- It often involves insider trading and falsifying account books.
Non-Violent Crime: Its Types and Variety, cont’d
Business Crime
- Governments around the world are vigorously fighting business crime, as it affects the economy, government, and public welfare.
- Some experts calculate as much as half the world’s capital flows are handled in offshore shell companies, used to launder money and hide profits from income taxes.
- The IMF estimates that $600 billion to $1.5 trillion is laundered in secret bank accounts.
- This blurs the line between corporate crime, organized crime, and political crime.
Non-Violent Crime: Its Types and Variety, cont’d
Business Crime
- Corporate and business crime is carried out inside large organizations by people with high social statuses.
- Wanting to keep crimes secret to protect public image, corporations will create a shroud of mystery around anything that can lead to public knowledge, and prosecution, of business crimes.
- This places a great importance on whistle-blowers, people within these organizations who will reveal corporate crimes to auditors, the media, and law-enforcement personnel.
Non-Violent Crime: Its Types and Variety, cont’d
Business Crime
- Such actions can result in significant legal actions and the recovery by the state of huge sums of money.
- Whistle-blowing carries a great risk, however, and potential whistle-blowers carefully assess personal risk before reporting criminal misdeeds.
- Organizations would normally prefer to ignore and hide misdeeds, so they punish people who bring them to light.
Non-Violent Crime: Its Types and Variety, cont’d
Street Crime
- Street crimes are common crimes that occur in public on, or around, city streets.
- Street crimes need little skill, experience, technology, organization, or capital.
- Occurring in public, they are more likely to result in arrests than organized or business crime.
- This results in prisons having many of these amateur, poorly-educated working-class criminals.
- Includes shoplifting, vandalism, break and enter, car theft, and robbery.
Non-Violent Crime: Its Types and Variety, cont’d
Street Crime
Most street crimes, leaving aside simple assaults, are property crimes.
- The rate of property crimes has been decreasing over the past two decades.
- 70 per cent of all Criminal Code offences in 2009 were property crimes.
- The majority of criminal incidents reported to the GSS in 2009 were non-violent.
Non-Violent Crime: Its Types and Variety, cont’d
- Ordinary street crime continues to be extremely common.
- E.g., In 2010, there were 1.3 million property crime violations, including 536,151 thefts under $5000 and 339,831 crimes of mischief.
- Crime in Canada is representative of most industrial societies.
- Although break-ins have continued to be common in Canada, the rate has steadily dropped since peaking in the early 1990s.
- Motor vehicle thefts have also dropped across the country.
The Demographic and Social Characteristics of Criminals
Racializing Crime, Criminalizing Poverty
- The likelihood of committing a crime, being arrested, tried, and convicted varies between men and women, young and old, married and single, rich and poor, etc.
- The rise of modern social science and vigorous anti-colonial and anti-racism campaigns promoted the crime-race link, as well as class, poverty, and socialization links.
The Demographic and Social Characteristics of Criminals, cont’d
Racializing Crime, Criminalizing Poverty
- Many people continue to hold beliefs that some groups are more predisposed to crime due to moral laxity.
- Most social-scientific understandings understand that crime reflects racism and disadvantage in society, not patterns of immorality.
- The observed correlation between race and crime is also due (in part) to unwarranted surveillance and control of minority groups.
The Demographic and Social Characteristics of Criminals, cont’d
Racializing Crime, Criminalizing Poverty
- The argument that Canada has racialized crime/criminalized race begins with the observation that visible minorities are more frequently arrested and jailed for crimes.
- This tendency may reflect the tendency of police to use patterns of social disadvantage as an excuse to disproportionately target visible minorities for arrest.
- This theory has necessitated a need for the systematic study of racialization of crime in Canada.
The Demographic and Social Characteristics of Criminals, cont’d
Racializing Crime, Criminalizing Poverty
- The strongest support for the racializing of crime argument is the use of racial profiling.
- This is the over-selection of certain types of people for police surveillance on the grounds of the statistic or demographic likelihood of committing a crime.
- Unfortunately, there is not enough evidence about the extent and motives behind such practices.
The Demographic and Social Characteristics of Criminals, cont’d
Racializing Crime, Criminalizing Poverty
- Police are likely to say that ‘racial profiling’ doesn’t exist, only that they are simply looking for any socio-demographic or behavioural signs of crime.
- Those subjected to such policing argue that they are victims of harassment.
- They may also point out that this practice of selective policing is bound to generate statistics for arrest and conviction that confirm racially prejudiced beliefs.
- E.g. If you only arrest Aboriginal men for public drunkenness, the statistics will show that only Aboriginal men are drunk in public.
The Demographic and Social Characteristics of Criminals, cont’d
Racializing Crime, Criminalizing Poverty
- The criminalization of poverty is the process of selective law-making, enforcement, and media coverage that highlights a link between crime and poverty that is promoted as ‘natural’.
- This belief upholds the idea that poor people are inherently more criminally inclined than rich people.
- This also generates statistics that justify law-making, enforcement, and public prejudices that support this view.
The Demographic and Social Characteristics of Criminals, cont’d
Organized Crime
- Organized crime, in recent years, has become globalized and nearly uncontrollable.
- People taking part in organized crime are typically professional, or career, criminals.
- Not all professional crimes are ‘organized’, however. Only some crimes require large-scale organization.
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The Demographic and Social Characteristics of Criminals, cont’d
Organized Crime
Organized crime is well known for its use of sophisticated technology to commit crimes, and also for its use of fraudulent marketing and telemarketing.
- Organized crime poses a serious threat to Canada’s institutions, economy, and quality of life—even more so than common street crimes.
- E.g., Drug traders and other organized criminals have made money laundering the second largest global industry, with the circulation of “dirty” money estimated at $3 trilion worldwide.
The Demographic and Social Characteristics of Criminals, cont’d
Business Crime
- Business crime occurs at many levels.
- Employees against companies (embezzlement)
- Companies against employees (violation of safety codes)
- Companies against customers (price fixing)
- Companies against the public (environmental abuse)
The Demographic and Social Characteristics of Criminals, cont’d
Business Crime
- White-collar crimes are committed by people in high-status occupations.
- They include insider trading, restraint of trade, price fixing, copyright infringement, and other elite crimes.
- Perpetrators of these crimes, who are usually wealthy and have above-average education, are rarely sent to prison.
- Punishments often include being disbarred from their profession or receiving fines.
The Demographic and Social Characteristics of Criminals, cont’d
Street Crime
- Most victims and perpetrators of street crime are men. In turn, areas with a high concentration of young men likely have a higher rate of street crime.
- These crimes often happen in densely-populated areas.
- Likely to occur in cities, vacation spots, college campuses, and other public gatherings.
The Demographic and Social Characteristics of Criminals, cont’d
Street Crime
- Career criminals learn their trade through street crime. Moreover, imprisonment increases the chance that street criminals will become career criminals.
- Entering a criminal career involves playing multiple social roles, identifying with crime, and making crime part of one’s everyday life.
- Career criminals develop attitudes about themselves and their crimes to help justify their lifestyles.
The Demographic and Social Characteristics of Criminals, cont’d
Organized Criminals
- Professional criminals are criminals who are closely associated with organized crime.
- Organized crime shows crime as a normal, well-organized subculture.
- It often draws on the talents of amateur criminals, showing that organized crime is a learned, social activity.
- It often has strong connections to white-collar crime and vice crimes (drugs, pornography, and prostitution).
The Demographic and Social Characteristics of Criminals, cont’d
Organized Criminals
- Sociology and journalism have helped disenchant thoughts on organized crime, which originally was seen as an individualistic response to poverty.
- Sociologistis originally believed organized crime resulted from social disorganization.
- Whyte (1943) showed that crime, especially in poor neighbourhoods, was highly organized.
- It is also connected with the social, political, and economic life of the community members.
The Demographic and Social Characteristics of Criminals, cont’d
Organized Criminals
- Organized crime, like other secret organizations, relies on friendship and kinship relations.
- Patronage (or clientelism) is at the base of these relationships.
- Patron-client networks are based on unwritten, particularistic rules.
- The conditions that support and spread clientelism in modern cities include high unemployment, low wages, low levels of education, and low levels of labour participation.
The Demographic and Social Characteristics of Criminals, cont’d
Organized Criminals
- Organized crime survives on ideas of trust, honour, respect, reciprocity, and threat of punishment.
- Organized crime flourishes in a community that meets four conditions:
- Scarcity and inequality
- Poverty and prejudice
- Lack of equal legal or human-rights protections
- Lack of human and cultural capital
The Demographic and Social Characteristics of Criminals, cont’d
Organized Criminals
- Organized crime is most common and most extensive in societies characterized as “failed states”, where the government does not enjoy the trust of its people and, partly for this reason, fails to govern.
- Every failed state has a recent history of internal or external war, just as every failed community has a recent history of crime and violence.
- E.g., the emergence of piracy off the east coast of Africa, particularly Somalia.
The Demographic and Social Characteristics of Criminals, cont’d
Corporate Crime
- Corporate crimes against consumers are common, and the most common known perpetrators of corporate crime are small-scale businesses.
- Organizations engaged in corporate crime lie on the border between legal and illegal activity, making this kind of crime hard to enforce.
- Corporate crimes involving food can have dramatic and sometimes fatal consequences for consumers.
The Demographic and Social Characteristics of Criminals, cont’d
Corporate Crime
- Food fraud often occurs when companies import cheap foods from poor countries and then resell these under their own brand label.
- Consumers are misled into buying foods that may not have been prepared under the same safety or health precautions as would be required in Canada.
- Counterfeit goods are another source of consumer risk, as are “knock off” versions of name-brand products.
The Demographic and Social Characteristics of Criminals, cont’d
Corporate Crime
- Goffman’s (1963) classic work Stigma addresses “impression management” which is a technique used by corporate offenders to control how other people see and react to them.
- Offending fraudsters are further able to influence perceptions in social interaction by controlling and regulating information in three ways:
- 1) Ingratiation (show happiness to elicit goodwill)
- 2) Intimidation (getting others to obey)
- 3) Supplication (getting others to be helpful)
The Demographic and Social Characteristics of Criminals, cont’d
Organizational Crimes Against Employees
- Organizations victimize their own employees—this occurs when people higher up in management positions decide to endanger their workers by failing to keep safe working conditions, neglect to upgrade the equipment, and fail to train the employees.
- Workplaces with higher-than-average risks of victimization include factories, oil rigs, and mines.
In principle, there are legal remedies and legal penalties in the event of injury or death in unsafe circumstances. In practice, the outcome often involves civil, not criminal, remedies.
The Demographic and Social Characteristics of Criminals, cont’d
Organizational Crimes Against Employees
- Arendt (2003 [1971]) and Cohen (2001) describe four types of official denial that corporations use:
- Literal denial (i.e., nothing is happening or has happened)
- Interpretive denial (i.e., what is happening or has happened is really something else)
- Implicatory denial (i.e., what is happening or has happened is justified as self-defence or some other necessity) and
- Passive denial (i.e., pay no attention to the situation at all)
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Media Depictions of Non-Violent Crime
- Non-violent crime is often a source of irony or comedy in movies and television shows.
- In comparison to violent crime, white-collar and corporate crime is “invisible,” meaning audiences may find it less threatening, or less interesting as dramatic fare.
- Like corporate crime, fraud (or “grifting”) is a long-time comedy staple, which in the process provides information to alert and protect people about those sorts of behaviour.
Theories about Non-Violent Crime
Functionalist Theories
- Social conditions are often structured in ways that unintentionally produce criminals.
- High crime rates may signal parts of society that are not working together.
- Merton (1938) explained that the highest crime rates are amongst the poor, who are least able to achieve societal goals through proscribed means.
- All criminal innovations help preserve the workings of unequal capitalist society by allowing the poor to imagine they will one day be wealthy.
Theories about Non-Violent Crime, cont’d
Functionalist Theories
- Cohen and Felson’s routine activities theory emphasizes the ‘normality’ of crime in everyday life.
- Routine activities of a population have an effect on the availability of possible victims and the likelihood of crime.
- Society creates opportunities for crime.
- Three components of the theory are: the presence of the offender, availability of the victim, and absence of a guardian.
Theories about Non-Violent Crime, cont’d
Functionalist Theories
- Broken windows theory states that, as signs of social disorganization become more visible, poor communities degenerate into more crime and disorganization is set in motion.
- If misconduct goes unaddressed, subsequent misconduct will follow.
- Some believe immediately fixing signs of disorganization merely gives the illusion of order.
Theories about Non-Violent Crime, cont’d
Symbolic Interactionist Theories
- Deviance and crime are not direct products of the social structure of face-to-face interactions and personal interpretations.
- Interactional factors (familial and neighbourhood, most importantly) are necessary to understanding criminal behaviour.
- This involves understanding two things, differential association (crime is learned and comes to be valued) and labelling.
Theories about Non-Violent Crime, cont’d
Critical Theories
- Laws are used by dominant social classes to control and punish those beneath them on the social hierarchy.
- Because of the way laws are enforced, some people are more likely than others to get caught and punished for rule-breaking.
- Other factors (such as offence seriousness) being equal, race—like class—has a strong effect on a person’s chance of incarceration.
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Theories about Non-Violent Crime, cont’d
Feminist Approaches
- Organized crime, street crime, and white collar or business crime has always been dominated by men.
- We are currently seeing a rapid increase in the number of women being arrested, tried, and imprisoned for non-violent crimes.
- With the increase of women entering professional and managerial roles, the possibility of female business crime has also increased.
Consequences of Non-Violent Crime
- The public cost associated with preventing crimes, apprehending and trying criminals, and imprisoning or otherwise punishing them is enormous.
- More than $1 billion was spent on the operation of Canadian courts in 2000-1, employing nearly 10,000 court staff and 2,000 judges.
- In 2008/2009, institutional expenditures amounted to almost $323 per day per federal inmate, compared to about $162 per day per provincial or territorial inmate.
Social Consequences: Organized Crime
- Organized Crime has increased in such volume and scope that it now threatens national and international security.
- The Organized Crime Impact Study was the first major attempt to examine key organized crime activities in Canada.
- According to this study, the illicit drug trade has the greatest impact on Canadian society, given its combined social, economic, and violence-generating effects.
Social Consequences: Organized Crime, cont’d
- Besides the enormous financial costs of white-collar crime, there are social costs as well.
- Revelations of business and political corruption breed distrust and cynicism and undermine public confidence in the integrity of social institutions.
- People who think that all members of Parliament are crooks may refrain from voting or avoid paying the taxes they owe.
- People who think that police officers take advantage of their positions to commit crimes cease to respect the law.
Health Consequences:
Fear of Crime
- The greatest cost to public health results from the fear of crime.
- This is because some aspects of the social and economic conditions of neighbourhoods directly affect people’s behaviours and perceptions, regardless of their own personal characteristics or experiences.
- People’s perceptions of the level of crime and “social disorder” in the neighbourhood may explain variations in levels of fear.
Health Consequences:
Fear of Crime, cont’d
- Fearfulness has a loose relationship with actual risk. Researchers suggest three characteristics of lower-income neighbourhoods that may explain why residents are more fearful of crime:
- 1) Lower-income residents are more likely to see areas outside of their immediate block as foreign—outside their experience and control—and therefore fear those areas.
- 2) Lower-income communities have more diverse populations than higher-income neighbourhoods.
- 3) Less educated and lower-income people are more vulnerable to the costs of victimization.
Health Consequences:
Fear of Crime, cont’d
- Social integration (social organization) reduces fear by reducing the proportion of strangers in an area, by making for a larger number of networks, and by making everyday routines and lifestyles of others in the neighbourhood seem less strange.
- Social integration means that people within a community have ties to one another.
- One result of fear about the risks of crime is that neighbourhoods do not want ex-convicts around. This can have a negative effect on programs that try to integrate people with criminal records into community life
Economic Consequences
- With the rise of online banking and purchasing, as well as the proliferation of debit and credit cards, identity theft and mass-marketing scams have increased dramatically throughout the country.
- Non-violent economic crime is not always the result of a malevolent outsider or group victimizing an innocent stranger, however.
- Illegal sharing of movie and music files has become a very common form of nonviolent crime.
Social Policy Implications
- Given the role of poverty and economic inequality in fostering crime, it seems likely that reducing poverty and the gap between rich and poor would help reduce some forms of crime and delinquency.
- Though difficult, it is easier to prevent crime by improving families and schools than by rehabilitating criminals with an ingrained criminal lifestyle.
- Technology has made a host of new crimes possible and has opened new avenues in which traditional crimes, such as fraud, can flourish.
Future Trends
- Crime is not increasing in Canada; if anything, it is decreasing. This decrease is not because Canadians are becoming more virtuous, self-controlled, or prosperous but because Canadians are getting older.
- As we increasingly become an “information society,” crime will raise the focus on the theft and abuse of information.
- Technology has made it possible to keep registries, reorganize law enforcement, and use high-tech gadgets that help keep unlawful acts under control.
Future Trends, cont’d
- Globalization, too, is affecting technology, commerce, communication, and crime.
- Already, crimes on the Internet, drug dealing, and smuggling show the attraction of global crime and the difficulty this poses for national law enforcement.
- As crime detection improves through advances in forensic science, criminals will find new ways of covering their tracks.
- The future of money, in its current physical (cash) form, will also have a major impact on crime.
Future Trends, cont’d
Corporate crime has serious economic, political, and even ideological effects, which is why the state has traditionally intervened in private business.
- As industries have been deregulated, risk management has taken the place of regulatory enforcement. Corporate crime has become normalized with the decline of the nation-state, an increase in failed and failing states, the growth of offshore banking centres, and the rise of global capitalism. This may continue.
- Today, the Internet shapes the relationship between consumers, producers, and knowledge, changing the way we view information and changing the relations of its production.
